Clams don't have family reunions!
And what, you may well ask, provoked that response? Your Humble Snarkatron, discovering that the National Science Foundation has provided over $1.8 MILLION dollars (pinky to mouth) for the sole purpose of illuminating the family tree of the clam. Oh, they dress it up better than that. The official title is "Phylogeny on the half-shell -- Assembling the bivalve tree of life". Link is to one of the three grants with that name, each to a different institution.
Proceeding further into the morass, we find the delightful "Kuril Biocomplexity Project: Human Vulnerability and Resilience to Subarctic Change" weighing in at a mere $2.9 million. This is an archaeological project to determine how humans in the Kuril Islands adapted (or didn't adapt) to changing environmental conditions. Yeah, that covers all the bases. I can state with some authority if you live on an island, tsunamis are bad for your health. Gimmee the money.
I understand scientific curiosity. I'm a scientist myself. I just don't see how, when the government is busily spending TRILLIONS of dollars we don't have, why we need to worry about molluscian family connections. I suppose the Kuril study will be useful, though. When it is plain we are in a global cooling disaster, they probably had some nifty survival techniques.
See the whole sad, sordid story for yourself. Searchable NSF grant database
Proceeding further into the morass, we find the delightful "Kuril Biocomplexity Project: Human Vulnerability and Resilience to Subarctic Change" weighing in at a mere $2.9 million. This is an archaeological project to determine how humans in the Kuril Islands adapted (or didn't adapt) to changing environmental conditions. Yeah, that covers all the bases. I can state with some authority if you live on an island, tsunamis are bad for your health. Gimmee the money.
I understand scientific curiosity. I'm a scientist myself. I just don't see how, when the government is busily spending TRILLIONS of dollars we don't have, why we need to worry about molluscian family connections. I suppose the Kuril study will be useful, though. When it is plain we are in a global cooling disaster, they probably had some nifty survival techniques.
See the whole sad, sordid story for yourself. Searchable NSF grant database
posted by Snarkatron at 8:14 AM
2 Comments:
This is an archaeological project to determine how humans in the Kuril Islands adapted (or didn't adapt) to changing environmental conditions.They used fire and built houses.
Pay up, NSF...
And, after four years of research and $2.9 million bucks pumped into the study, what learned papers appeared in which prestigious publications?
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
(Showing: 1 - 1 of 1).
Levin, B.V., Kaistrenko, B.M., Rybin, A.B., Nosov, M.A., Pinegina, T.K., Razhigaeva, N.G., Sassorova, E.V., Ganzei, K.S., Ivelskaya, T.N., Kravchenovskaya, E.A., Kolesov, C.V., Evdokimov, Y.V., Bourgeois, J., MacInnes, B., and Fitzhugh, B.. "Manifestations of the Tsunami on November 15, 2006, on the Central Kuril Islands: Results of the Modeling of Run-Up Heights," Doklady Earth Sciences, v.419, 2008, p. 335.
With a span of 5,000 years of diligent archaeological delving from which to chose, they *modeled* an event that occured less than three years ago...
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