Fred Lepore

1500 and counting
The Good (they eat up to 3000 insects/day), the Bad (vectors for ~130 viruses), & the Ugly (chiropteran visages are an acquired taste)
Pictured: pensive flittermouse I apprehended in the kitchen before release in NJ pines
Go sky puppies!

March of the Man-Apes www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/s...
Thomas Huxley-aka Darwin's bulldog- used Waterhouse Hawkins' marvelous drawing (Gibbon 2x) in 1863 to promote evolution
Alas Hawkins was anti-evolution but he was the first to mount and restore dinosaurs for the Crystal Palace exhibit 1852-54

Neanderthals had larger brains (1500 cc) than Homo sapiens (1350 cc).
If we de-extinct them, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't need ChatGPT.
If they don't come back, don't worry. Modern humans have 1-4% Neanderthal DNA in their genomes.

Mani pedi & more
It's not just their nails. Sloth nervous systems are "wired in reverse" for reflex hanging.
Antigravity muscles prevail w/midbrain lesions.Decerebrate cats "stand" erect w/rigid extensor muscles but in 1926 it was found that decerebrate sloths hang w/rigid flexor antigravity muscles

2/Agassiz & me
..he stuck with Creationism & wrote after exploring the Galapagos in 1872- "there is no evidence of a direct descent of later from earlier species in the geological succession of animals"
Darwin "added nothing new to our previous knowledge concerning the origin of man"
Even Homer nods

Bedrock outcropping with glacial striations along Route 1A in Ellsworth Falls ME on 8/28/2025

Detail in schist outcropping Ellsworth Falls ME

1/Agassiz & me
Drove 15 miles today to a schist outcrop along Rte 1A in Ellsworth ME where in 1864 Louis Agassiz found scratches/furrows pointing north in support of his theory of continental glaciation 13K-25K yrs ago.
Glacial scratches can be seen today!
He ruled out icebergs & Noah's Flood but ..

His "ask" w/4 refs was announced in non peer reviewed "TrialSite News." Peer reviewed Annals of Internal Medicine stood by the 1.2 million child Danish vaccine study w/39 refs.

The Dogs may Bark, the Caravan goes on"

Alice's Adventures Underground. Did Lewis Carroll draw his own migraine aura?
Carroll first mentions migraine "fortifications" in his 1885 diary but he consulted an oculist in 1852.
Did his 1862 drawing of mock turtle & gryphon anticipate H. Airy's iconic 1870 tracing of his own migraine teichopsia?

The MAGA-ized Smithsonian can revise American mores- just not on my dime. I'm not subscribing.
MAGA need not worry about my dime. Creationists aside, they're gonna love Ales Hrdlicka's (physical anthropologist/eugenicist emeritus) scavenged racial brain collection (WaPo 8/14/2023) & Wall of Skulls.

Losing my Accommodation
Mid-40s is a visually dangerous age as lens gets stiffer, diopters of accommodation <4, & arms are too short
If progressives don't cut it, consider tri-focals or monovision refraction making one eye near-sighted & the other far-sighted (not a fan)
Or just make the font bigger

Academic conflicts - "because the stakes are so low"
Easy. If a scientist read a typical IMRAD format paper, the audience would achieve REM sleep in seconds

Try JK Galbraith,econ prof:"There seems little question that in 1929,modifying a famous cliche,the economy was fundamentally unsound"
Bored?

What happened to the lion and the sleeping dog (Durer 1514)?

Ship of State

"You can't manage what you can't measure" (Variously attributed to Peter Drucker/ Lord Kelvin/VF Ridgeway)

I guess #47 is a proponent of the "Dead Reckoning" style of management (Left)

So was EJ Smith navigating the ice field off Newfoundland on April 15, 1912 (Right)

SOS

What we have here is a failure to communicate (to an on-line audience):
1.Rolling Stones:"to get my fair share of abuse"
2.Walt Whitman:"sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs"
3.Vance Packard: advertising's "Theory of the Marginally Committed"

Pick one... but we may be preaching to the choir

Nullius in Verba. As if!
Oh, just the usual ... toxic-metabolic encephalopathy, T2 hyperintensities on MRI, vestibular migraine, brain fog ... I fear the list of inchoate neurologic "clinical-ese" is endless

Waiting at a Light in NJ

New Tesla models?
1. Stealth Tesla/Toyota (L)
2. Tesla "Apologia pro Vita Sua" (R)

That certain glow..
Curie's thesis is scintillating... but is it radioactive?
After grinding tons of uranium ore to discover radium & polonium, Marie,her husband Pierre, and her 1900 lab notebook- w/ ~3.2 microCuries of radium 226 (1/2 life 1600 yrs)- were all radioactive.
Handle with care.

Jurassic World saurian eye (likely made by Stan Winston)

Cassowary- Flightless bird, native to New Guinea, and females can weigh up to 85 kg

Cassowary retina (Casey Wood). Pecten is the elongated ovoid structure with unknown (nutritive/motion detection?) function.

Dinosaur eyes
Saw Jurassic World Rebirth last week. If birds, esp. cassowaries, are dino descendants, did dinos look out at the world with bird retinas- lots of cones for diurnal vision & a pecten (function unknown)?
Do paleontologists (or Spielberg) know?

London Bill of Mortality c 1664. 3880 cases of plague recorded.

xenopsylla cheopis/ oriental rat flea

2/ Flea
..Hooke himself survived until 1703.
The likeliest vector for the Great Plague was xenopsylla cheopis (oriental rat flea). The responsible gram-negative bacterium, Yersinia pestis, was not identified until 1894 during an outbreak in Hong Kong.

Mary Beale's conjectured portrait of Rober Hooke (c. 1680s). Note drapery (concealing Hooke's spinal deformity) on the left and orrery on the right

1/"Mark but this flea" John Donne
B. OTD 1635 Robert Hooke whose Micrographia displayed an iconographic flea in 1865- the year of the Great Plague of London. Did Hooke contract Bubonic Plague from the pulex irritans he drew? Hooke's "missing" portrait may have been purloined by Newton but ..

Was it designed by Antonio Gaudi in 1914 for the Park Guell in Barcelona?

MAGA NIH job ad or How to Spot a Crank
Are you?:
Isolated
Paranoid
Self-declared genius
Attacking science icons (duck Isaac!)
Rely on technobabble
Label critics "stupid"
Claim "airtight" unfalsifiable arguments
(credit: Martin Gardner 1952)

Where are Lysenko, Reich, Velikovsky when you need them?

Are the Two Cultures less valid?
The Humanities & Sciences are old hat. To wit #45/47 is ignorant of the cultural import/origins of Shylock & viruses are marginalized by HHS.
A Third Culture - business/ChatGPT/poli. sci. et anon- is staring us in the face. Coming soon to a campus near you.

Brodel 1914
While Brodel was drawing the "piled" wax plates of Weigert-Pal stained lower brainstem sections for Weed, he also drew how to get to the pituitary/brainstem by Harvey Cushing's surgical route.

The White Whale- then and now.
Slow start but a great choice; Melville sold 2300 copies in its first year and 1/2 (1851).
Personally, I would hold off on "reading" "Emoji Dick."

Bad News for Dinos
Great line-up ... but my "most exciting paper" nod goes to Alvarez pere et fils in Science 1980 208:1095 on the impact extinction theory. The implications of "fish clay" loaded with meteorite iridium at the KT boundary in the Appennines are riveting!

Almost Famous trainees
Who was Peter Putnam?
Wheeler advised his 1948 Princeton thesis, "Considerations Concerning Nature"& hired him as an assistant.Even JW couldn't get the hang of "Putnamese"
Putnam also devised a theory of mind, worked as a janitor, & gave Moore's "Oval with Points" to Princeton

It's all a matter of perspective.
While framing this striking image through your telephoto lens,the barn owl is returning the favor with its retina.
Fovea at 10 o'clock, optic nerve(white outline) and pecten (brown-black) extending to 5 o'clock, & choroidal blood vessels throughout (Casey Wood 1917)

Lost in Translation?
When we last checked, in 1947 Einstein's take-away on the slime mold films of my old bio prof JT Bonner was mostly in German. Not true!
E: "How was the life cycle controlled so that it was the same each generation?"
E "got it" & Bonner "cursed myself" for not taking notes!

Toltec cardiology
Eagle devouring human heart(s) -one for each set of talons? The 900-1200 CE Mesoamerican carving was ploughed up in a field in Northern Veracruz & given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by artist Frederic Church in 1893
Am I imagining 2 ventricular slits/atrial appendages/valve?