News out of France concerning Prehistoric cave drawings that were animated by torch-light is taking the art history world by storm, and has overwhelmed this artist to the point of awe.

The cave drawings were found by archaeologist Marc Azema and French artist Florent Rivere, who suggest that Paleolithic artists who lived as long as 30,000 years ago used animation effects on cave walls, which explains the multiple heads and limbs on animals in the drawings. The images look superimposed until flickering torch-light is passed over them, giving them movement and creating a brief animation.

"Lascaux is the cave with the greatest number of cases of split-action movement by superimposition of successive images. Some 20 animals, principally horses, have the head, legs or tail multiplied," Azéma said.

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman

I'm trying to read them but in terms of information, they're somewhat denser than anything I've read since university 30 years back. This is because I have no  background in the subject, even the various IT books I've read were building on established knowledge and thought processes. So I'm having to teach my brain how to process and understand these new sets of ideas, so it's slow going at the moment. I'm hoping I'll speed up in a fortnight or so, but I've got 15 weeks and 12 book

keep to the Fen Causeway

on Romney in his column today.

Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere

take it away chris!

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

Some implied that Fresh Start were labouring to produce yesterday's vision of tomorrow - a reform option which might have looked attractive five years ago, but which had now been overtaken by President of the EU Commission Jose Manuel Barroso's call for more federalism, at last week's sitting of the European Parliament.

Others, including the Maastricht veteran, Bill Cash, simply didn't believe that the EU would be prepared to give Britain what it wanted - to which the retort was that the current crisis gave Britain a lot of leverage, and that the EU needed Britain more than Britain needed the EU, so there was plenty of scope for negotiation. There was some interesting tactical advice from the Conservative former cabinet minister, Peter Lilley, who suggested Britain should approach rolling back EU powers in the same way as the Commission approached extending them - with salami tactics.

But he thought the key battle would be to overturn the acquis, the long-standing doctrine that once the EU acquired competence over a policy area, it was never relinquished. If Britain could establish a precedent for clawing back powers, that would enable more powers to be repatriated in future.

-Cambridge

+Oxford

Back to malaria. Going to assemble Anopheles gambiae genomes (the mosquito that is the most important vector for falciparum). Sort a...

Rebecca Fisher of the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Phoenix and her colleagues discovered key anatomical differences when they looked at original and fully regenerated tails in the green anole lizard (Anolis carolinensis), which can "drop" its tail when caught by a predator and later grow another. Running through the new tail, for example, was a single long tube of cartilage rather than the chain link of vertebrae found in the original.

The muscles were different too. In place of shorter, variegated muscle fibres were long muscles stretching from tip to stump (The Anatomical Record, doi.org/jbp).

Both differences suggest that the regenerated tail would be less flexible, says Fisher, because neither the cartilage tube nor the long muscle fibres are capable of the fine control that comes with shorter muscles and lots of small joints between bones. Further functional studies should show what changes these might make to the lizard's agility.

So, it wouldn't far fetched to say that when it comes to talking points on the Middle East, Romney gets his material straight from the top. From Bibi.

That's why I was so jealous of Americans yesterday. They finally heard what Bibi thinks, even if it wasn't exactly him speaking.

In my opinion, this was the money quote, when Romney explained his vision for the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem. We live with that in China and Taiwan. All right, we have a potentially volatile situation but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.

You Americans are lucky. First, you have Bibi just this Sunday talking to all the American morning news shows. I mean, when did the Israeli media ever get a chance to ask their prime minister the tough questions? You guys know more about him than we do!

Loved hearing Trittin call the environmental (excuse for a) Minister Altmeier an Air Bag.

Not much time to write. Net spotty. But it's still a wonder to see the industry in all its glory, and hundreds of friends and colleagues.

Onward.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin