What I am doing on my holidays…. 27 Sep 2009 Well, first I lost, or rather British Airways lost, my luggage, so I am living in the same clothes I spent 36 hours on planes in. Unpleasant. But, Jenny and I went to the Accademia Galeria and saw enormous numbers of Medieval and Renaissance paintings. Then to the Piazza San Marco, where I saw the famous “spandrels” in the Basilica San Marco, and then into the Doge’s palace, where we saw several Bosch paintings. Wonderful stuff. What most interested me was the extent to which the Basilica was decorated. While on their own, the pendentives do indeed look like they were decorated after the fact, and were not there in order to support pictures of the Evangelists (Mark, Matthew, Luke and John), when you look at the interior of the Basilica itself, it is clearly there for one major reason: to support the decoration in the domes, the pendentives, in the spandrels, walls and alcoves. The whole place is there for the task of supporting these extensive and costly status-declaring decorations. When I get home I will scan some of the images I acquired (you can’t take photos, or there’d be one of me pointing at the famous “spandrels”). This is interesting, I think, in the context of Gould’s and Lewontin’s paper. It shows that claims of things being adaptive or not depend crucially on what one counts as the “task” of a structure. Since I think that everything is subjected to selection pressure at all times (sometimes not enough to overcome the noise of statistical properties), counting what is, and what isn’t, adaptive is a bit of a personal call, in the absence of access to the historical processes of particular traits. I am becoming more of an adaptationist these days. A final note. Don’t use the waterbuses in Venice late on a Sunday. Everybody else wants to, as well. And I can strongly recommend Barababao B&B – really helpful guys in a lovely place. My luggage is supposedly on its way as I type. I hope so. It’s got my power supplies and meds. Administrative Evolution History Science
Cognition How not to give a keynote 6 Jul 201222 Jun 2018 So we finally managed to get things going for the Poland keynote. It took over half an hour to get the sound working, after a fashion, and the connection was blocky at best. The hardest part was that I kept trying to hear what people were saying at the other… Read More
Philosophy Burke on Definition 25 May 2009 I was discussing whether science or religion can be defined, when I was reminded of this: No lines can be laid down for civil or political wisdom. They are incapable of exact definition. But, though no man can draw a stroke between the confines of day and night, yet light… Read More
Evolution Evolution quotes 12 Jun 2010 Evolution and phylogeny.—Evolution is the process and phylogeny the record of descent. Phylogeny is thus the measure of relationship, and is to be expressed in terms of community of ancestry; hence, if relationship is to express evolution adequately, it must take account of each change, from the branch to the… Read More
I feel for you. And, having had this happen to me, I now always take a carry-on with at least one change of clothes. Worst-comes-to-worst, I can rotate and do laundry every day.
Sorry to hear about your luggage. One year I manged a 50% loss rate, but it was all eventually discovered. The worst was a trip to Hawaii where I lost the luggage both coming and going … and I was giving a talk the first day of the conference there, so I had to rush out in the morning and get something to wear for that… Anyway, hope the rest of the trip goes better 🙂
I hope you get it back quickly. My worst experience was when British Airways didn’t (re)load my luggage on the London-Amsterdam leg of a New York – London- Amsterdam flight. I knew I had to stay awake and fight jetlag for the 12 hours or so it might take for the missing luggage to catch up with me. [Needless to say, the luggage did not have one hundred small legs.] The only possible approach was to shower, then get back into the same clothes (as you say, yuk),wander outside and look around. So I walked around like a zombie, attended a cultural show in the afternoon, and returned to my lodgings only to find the luggage had still not turned up. It finally emerged the next morning. I admired the effortless way in which the baggage agents in Amsterdam conveyed no impression of apology whatever, and somehow managed to suggest that the whole problem was all our fault.
Don’t worry about the pants thing. According to this very scientific diagram you have just adapted ahead of the rest of the clade. http://www.ebaumsworld.com/pictures/view/456846/
I would n’t be so quick to blame BA. When I flew to Tokyo a few years ago I watched the check-in person tag my bag (you should always check the tag – a few seconds checking could save you days of pain)and saw the correct flight number on the tag, but the luggage never made it. The airlines are not responsible for the luggage until it hits the aircraft hold. Faults (as in this case) are usueally caused by the airport baggage system, not the airline. Than being said, I’m flying BA to London in a couple of mionths so I’ll be checking the tag closely.