Word for the day: cremello

Discussed in the Reddit thread.

Its a Cremello; A coloration rather than a pigment disorder. Albinos would have pink eyes, whereas Cremellos have pale blue eyes...

A true "white" horse would already be dead as well - the genes associated for a pure white horse contain fatal flaws, known as Lethal White Syndrome, that cause white foals to either be born dead or die within the first day - usually much less time than that...

LWS can also be carried way back in the lineage of the horses, not strictly limited to the Frame Overo cross (they're just known carriers). As thirdpeppermint said, conscious breeders should test for the gene to make sure they're not accidentally breeding it into their lines. Also, the foals aren't really missing a large section of digestion tract. They do commonly have impaired colon development (so the colon may be severely narrowed or even closed off in places). The mark of this disease is the missing myenteric plexus from the ileum caudally. The myenteric plexus is part of the enteric nervous system in the GI responsible for peristalsis, meaning there's no movement of ingesta through the GI tract, resulting in colic-y clinical signs and eventual death

More at the thread.  You learn something every day.

And a hat tip to Dr. Mieke for offering a link to genetic information at the Cremello and Perlino Education Association.

The photo was taken at the 2012 Calgary Stampede by Stu Winston.  Via Soul Dipper, with a hat tip to Kelly Durette at Deformutilation.

If you're in the 1%, don't watch this animated short

YouTube link.

Created by Ed Asner.

15,000 antlers

In this case not the result of a sporting obsession, but a collector's enthusiasm.  Deformutilation explains:

Between Bozeman and Butte in the Big Sky country of Montana, lives a man with an obsession. His name is James Phillips, but most everybody in these parts knows him as Antler Man. Since he was a boy living in a homemade trailer in the Gallatin Canyon, Phillips has hiked the area’s big tracts of public land to hunt for antlers dropped by whitetails, mule deer, elk, and moose. In a half-century of scouring hillsides, washes, and ridgelines for a glint of bone, he has amassed more than 15,000 antlers, which he displays in a 30x64-foot building he calls The Horn Shed. Over the years he built freestanding archways of antler and progressively larger buildings to showcase his finds. When he began building his current shed from reclaimed lumber, he designed it to display the most horns in the best possible way: a cathedral of bone...

While a few have come as gifts, a handful in trade, all the others he packed out on his back, without the aid of ATVs or horses, on dawn-to-dusk hikes or multi-day trips that take him miles into steep back country.

Mr. Phillips' website has lots more information.

"Ice cylinder maker"

YouTube link.

He's lucky it's just the hose that froze.  He should have closed the internal shut-off valve inside the house to prevent damage proximal to the outside spigot.

The world's oldest carved human face

Twenty-six thousand years ago in the Czech Republic, one of our ice-age ancestors selected a hunk of mammoth ivory and carved this enigmatic portrait of a woman - the oldest ever found.

From New Scientist.  Photo: Moravian Museum, Anthropos Institute.

Who owns natural resources?

What rights do native people have in the control and/or harvesting/exploitation of them?  Here are some excerpts from a Salon article about a drama currently playing out in Ecuador.

“We have been coming to these sacred cascades since before the time of Christ,” said Ankuash, preparing a palm-leaf spread of melon and mango. “The government has given away land that is not theirs to give, and we have a duty to protect it. Where there is industrial mining, the rivers die and we lose our way of life. They want us to give up our traditions, work in the mines, and let them pollute our land. But we will give our lives to defend the land, because the end is the same for us either way.”..

To help him grab these shiny metals, [Ecuadorean president Rafael] Correa has invited foreign mining firms to deforest and drill much of the country’s remaining pristine forests. Not far from where Ankuash and I are sitting, a Chinese joint venture led by the China Railway Corp. is building infrastructure for an open-sky copper mine with the “Lord of the Rings”-sounding name of Mirador. To the north and east of the Chinese concession, the Canadian gold giant Kinross is prepping its 39 lots, including the envy of the industry, Fruta del Norte, believed to be Latin America’s largest deposit of high-grade gold. These projects are merely the first wave; others wait in the wings. Together they threaten more than the Shuar way of life and the sustainable agricultural and tourist economies of Ecuador’s southern provinces. The Condor is a hot spot of singular ecological wealth and a major source of water for the wider Amazon watershed to the east. What happens there is of global consequence...

“Unleashing industrial-scale mining in the region is a catastrophe equal to using the Galapagos Islands as a bombing range,” said the biologist. “Its flora has enormous potential to benefit man. So much of it, we’ve only seen from helicopters. Before we even know what’s there, they’re going to destroy it.”..

The Canadian firm announced it would build an open-pit copper mine dwarfing anything in Ecuador’s history. The mine required hollowing out one of the region’s largest mountains and clear-cutting several others. A massive tailing pond would hold the 200-plus million tons of toxic effluvia generated over the mine’s 18-year lifespan. The site designated for the waste sits half a mile from the Rio Quimi, a tributary of the Rio Zamora, whose waters support the local agricultural economy on their way into the Amazon basin. Roads and bridges are being built for 18-wheel truck traffic to carry hundreds of tons of copper concentrate on a daily nonstop loop between the mine and a port on Ecuador’s Pacific coast...

There's way lots more at the link.  See also Chief Raoni cries.

Weaver bird nests

I wonder if the lower one was started there, or whether it was originally a part of the upper one that then broke off and slid down the telephone pole's support wires.

From a gallery of 12 images by Dillon Marsh, via Neatorama.