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I am having some php problems which are affecting page layout. They should be fixed in the next few hours.

Everything should be working as normal, leave a comment if it isn’t!

Laurence

The long-standing entomology blog by Bug Girl has been closed, hopefully only temporarily, after her employers were notified that she was the author.

Bug Girl’s Blog was the first entomology blog that I regularly visited and I hope everything works out for her and she keeps her job. If you’re a reader of Bug Girl’s Blog go over there and give her some support!

We don’t have enough entomology bloggers.

I have taken a short break in Stockholm so my updates will be a little irregular, hence the lack of an update on Saturday. Today I have access to a more reasonably priced internet connection, ~£2/24 hours, instead of ~£15/24 hours!

I will be visiting the Naturhistoriska riksmuseet (Stockholm Natural History Museum) tomorrow and will try and write some insect-related goodness.

For now you will have to enjoy a view of the city.

View of Södermalm, Stockholm

Stats: I will be writing a post on statistics soon, but for the moment I though I’d share some of my visitor statistics with you, my visitors! We are halfway through January and I’ve already had over 800 unique visits and over 2,500 hits for the month. What I find more interesting (as a computer geek) are the browsers you are using and operating systems.

Browsers in order of popularity:

Firefox (Mozilla 5) was the most used browser with 224 users, followed by: Internet Explorer 6.0 (73 users), Internet Explorer 7.0 (55 users), Safari (8 users), and finally Internet Explorer 5.5 & 5.0 (8 users).

Operating systems in order of popularity:

Windows XP was the most used operating system with 260 users followed by: Windows Vista (15 users), MacOS (12 users) and Windows Server 2003 (3 users).

Windows XP 260 users
Windows Vista 15 users
MacOS 12 users
Windows Server 2003 3 users

I don’t know how representative of other blogs this is but I was a little suprised at how few people are using Vista. Unlike the internet average, more people are using Firefox here.

News: I’m planning to add some more sections to Sections soon, and possibly jazz up the appearance. I intend to write a couple of reviews on books and compile a recommended entomology book list.

I did intend to write a little about gaming on here, but I’ve decided that I will use this blog more for science-related things and put gaming on a separate page on my main site which is in need of more content!

Links: I’ve added quite a few more links recently including:
BioImages
Invertebrate Link
My Bit of the Planet
The Ranger’s Blog

Some of these were recommended to my by Stuart Hine – thanks Stuart!

Finally, a light entomophagy reading snack: have you ever thought about eating silkworms (Bombyx mori)? A Chinese research team has investigated silkworms as a potential food for astronauts.

I’ve just updated to the latest version of WordPress. I had one bug which I think I’ve fixed by editing and resaving a post which caused the sidebar to go to the bottom of the page and remove the posting background.

I’ve recently encountered the blog of Vince Smith, a cybertaxonomist who also works on parasitic lice (Phthiraptera) at The Natural History Museum (NHM), London . I came across his blog by accident whilst searching for articles on invasive invertebrates and ants. He has a number of posts about the NHM and a fusion of technology and biology.

Merging biology and programming can lead to some very interesting developments: today I read an article found on Slashdot about the use of genetic programming to produce an image of the Mona Lisa.

Using just 50 semi-transparent polygons a very good version of the painting was produced using a process of random alteration and comparison to the original image. If the new random polygon alterations were closer in similarity to the old alterations then the new set of alterations was saved.

The post on the author’s weblog goes into a little more detail and shows a selection of images to illustrate the process.

Today I added an events calendar and entered some of the Royal Entomological Society dates. I will add more dates over the weekend.

If I have missed any that you think should be on, or you notice an incorrect date, please let me know!

I’ve just updated the blogging software (this post is to check I’ve not broken anything) and should have the calendar plugin working over the weekend.