The Proliferation of Stuff

There is an old saying which dictates that "friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate." I believe that the same is true of personal belongings; it just piles up. As someone who is constantly moving from one region to another, this becomes a major annoyance. I have tried to be minimalist in my life, not buying much, not even owning more than the bare essentials of furniture (not even a kitchen table or a couch) this has alleviated much of the problem. When I move to a new area I have to store my belongings somewhere and decide what I will need for the rest of the season. The boy scout motto of "Be Prepared" usually flashes through my mind at this time. Anything that I don't bring, I will automatically need. Anything that I bring, I will largely not need; it is better to have it an not need it than need it an not have it. As a result, when I came out to south Dakota I packed up my enormous green bag, a smaller green suit case, my green back pack, another back pack and a poster tube full of stuff and hauled it 1260 miles from Edmonton, AB to Hot Springs, SD.
In short, I ended up not even using: half of my long sleeve shirts, my corduroy pants, swim trunks, good black shoes, hand lens, cellulose acetate strips, mancalla board (and marbles), half the books I brought, several cd's of software and data, leather jacket, touque, gloves, Tyrrell Staff hat, most photocopies from scientific journals and coloured pencils. There's more to that list but I can't remember off hand what. I also could have lived quite comfortably without my bath robe, dinosaur skull models, posters, hat rack, journal, drawing pencils, art paper, several t-shirts, jazz and swing cd's (I don't have a cd player and the others that do decided that they didn't like my music), rock hammer and dissection kit.
All of this stuff could have gone into storage but didn't. Now that I have to go back to Edmonton, I've accumulated even more stuff. Most of what I accumulate anywhere I go is books. Academia is heavy to lug around. The problem is that if I didn't buy a lot of the books that I wanted here at Mammoth site, then I would not have received my employee discount of 20% and thus would have paid considerably more online. Fight Club, Choke and Lulably I bought and read here because I finally made the time for it and am shipping those back to California (I can't imagine any problem from my siblings trying to read it; my family doesn't exactly read for fun). "Marsh's Dinosaurs" I bought because I found it for $30: much better than I've seen before. There's also the books that my parents and grand parents sent me, and the National Geographics from the 1920's and the copy of Darwin's "The Descent of Man" that I bought at the library book sale.
And then there's the fossils. I'm addicted to those. If I see a deal on an ammonite, or an oreodon skull, I can't pass it up. I bought something like 3 half complete skulls, one nearly complete one, 6 cranial endocasts, a 20 lb ammonite and found a neonate oreodon skull and a paleolagus skull. From a local rancher I bought close to a dozen mosasaur vertebrae, a plesiosaur vertebra, 3 partial didimoceras, a piece of petrified cycad and a dinosaur bone that I can't identify. Most of that I'm shipping to California at great expense. Because of Alberta's strict fossil protection laws, I'm a bit hesitant to take fossils into Canada for fear that I won't be able to take them back out.
I have way too much stuff!

Improved readership

I seem to have acumulated a few new readers lately. Last week I had the fortune of meeting a couple of people my own age here in Hot Springs. The reason that this is significant is that just about everybody my age here has left in order to "see the world." Growing up in a small town must be a bit trying on one's patients. In any case, when they hit 30, most have realized that they don't like the rest of the world and move back to their small home town to raise their new (often accidental) family. The two people that I met, by the names of Steph and Glen, were both interesting people from North Dakota and they were traveling around in a Suburban doing sidewalk sundayschool programs for kids. I told them about my blog and even inspired Steph to start her own. I think the thing that kind of knocked me off my feet was that they had both thought I was cute when they met me ( I was their tour guide at Mammoth Site). Being a self professed homophobe, I'm not sure to be flattered or just react auckwardly. As such, when I found out I did both.
Another new reader is my advisor Dr. Michael Caldwell. Apparently he found out about my blog and actually read a great deal of it. I had written him asking what he thought I should do for my 499 project and he recommended working on some aspect of braincases and the Rieppel-Caldwell debate. Realizing that he had read my confession to only understanding about half of Rieppel's paper and my extremely high goals that I had set in my entry about the archaeopteryx brain case I feel a bit sheepish. Oh well, them's the breaks. Either way, I've got more readers for my site and hopefully I'll actually be able to expand that further thr0ugh word of mouth.

tyrannosaur family values

The more that I've read about the tyrannosaur growth rates, the more problems I've seen. First of all, the paper places the age of senescence and death at about 30 years old. That is really young for a big animal. In mammals and reptiles, the larger and animal is, generally the longer that it lives. Also, the paper said that T. rex and other members of the group would have only spent about 30% of their lives at their adult size, which seems to me to be extraordonarily short. It does mean that more of their lives would have been spent being able to run very fast, thereby benefiting their hunting ability, but only having 10 years to reproduce and raise a family presents a problem. The biggest problem lies in when tyrannosaurs would have reached sexual maturity relative to somatic maturity. If they are both at the same time, then the females would be starting their own family group well after loosing the ability to run quickly. Does this mean that females did not leave the family group they started life in before starting their own family? For a youngster to be helpful in the hunt, it would have needed to be at least 2 years old (youngest tyrannosaur individual found in association with larger individuals) and would have only weighed about 50 kg. Would aunts and even uncles have helped to care for the young for 2 years or more? possibly sacrificing their own reproductive success?
This also means that the mother of the family group would have died well before any of her offspring would have started reproducing. Thus a family group would be siblings from possibly several broods (therefore half siblings- usually reducing it's willingness to help with sibling's young compared to starting its own family group). In the case of Sue, the most famous T. rex, Duffy, a jouvenille found in association might have actually been her sibling rather than her offspring.
Sue presents another problem. She is really, really battle worn. Evidence of broken bones, infections, torn ligaments etc. This degree of wear and tear initially lead Peter Larson to believe that she was about three times older than the newest age estamate of death. If even a few of those injuries were sustained during the period when she was experiencing exponential growth (up to about 2.8 kg per day) then she would have needed not only to be cared for by her siblings, but massive quantities of food would have had to been draged to her in order to sustain her increadable growth spirt. Also, that much injury in 30 years seems a bit excessive. Have young tyrannosaurs been found with proportionate amounts of battle damage? Would childhood injuries be as visible as those seen on Sue? And what about the Gorgosaurus at the Indianapolis childrens museum with what apears to be a tumor in its brain case? Could a cancer have sprouted up and grown that large in the last 10 years of its life between reaching maturity and death?
I'll include some other problems and implications that I've noticed in another blog, but i've notice that this one has dragged on a bit long.

Tyrannosaur growth rates

Oh joyous day, somebody has actually published on Tyrannosaur growth rates! They included T. rex, Daspletosaurus, Albertosaurus and Gorgosaurus. I kind of wish that they had published on Nanotyrannus and Tarbosaurus as well, but them's the breaks. Much of the research was based on Tyrrell material and this gives me the ideal opportunety to springboard my research on brain body size relationships within that group. I think that the first thing I need to do is actually measure the size of the endocasts of the various specimens (I think that I'll use liquid latex). From there, I'll find out how much each weighed and calculate the strength of the skulls of each. I think that with their methods I could also do this for Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus, dromaeosaurs, oviraptorosaurs, ornithomimids and any other group of theropods. Using the fibula (one of the only non hollow bones in a theropod) is brilliant! However, I din't see them use any comparison to modern bird fibulas to test whether or not they were acurate. Oh, that'd make another really good project! I have way, way too many projects that I need to do. Hopefully without a TV this year, I'll be able to accomplish a few of them. That in itself would be a good experiment to see if its the bad influence of TV or my own lack of a strong work ethic (and funding and specimens) that has kept me from completing any projects.

Archaeopteryx

I read in science news today that in the Aug 5 edition of science, the CT scan team at U of Texas scanned the brain case of the london specimen of Archaeopteryx. There were a couple of things that struck me right away. I saw this presented on at SVP last year and I'm pretty sure that it wasn't the same people presenting as are now getting the paper in Nature. Also, then it was the Berlin Specimen, which actually has a brain case that is only half crushed. The London specimen is actually missing its head entirely. I don't know if this is an error on the part of Science news or what but I am definately glad to see that this particular team did the ct scan. They do good work and it means that they will eventually post it on http://www.digimorph.org . It also occured to me that in order to present at last years svp, they would have had to have had an abstract ready by April 2003. Is that how long it takes a paper to get into nature these days? I'm not sure if that's a long time or not, but I don't think that the science is moving fast enough (Nature needs to be weekly now instead of biweekly) The report went on to say that the digital endocast had enlarged regions for sight (optic lobes and optic tectum), muscle controle and had a very birdlike middle ear with an elongate hearing aparatus similar to modern birds.
Speaking of brain cases, I've decided that I'm going to compare the brain cases of helodermata, amphisbainids, snakes, dolichosaurs and mosasaurs to hopefully refute some of the groups as a sister group to snakes. Personally, I'd also like to find out where dolichosaurs are phylogenetically (descendants of basal mosasaurs or some other lizard group entirely?). Onfortunately though, when I tried to read Rieppel's paper comparing mosasaurs, snakes and varanids, I think I understood the abstract, the intro and the discussion but only about every third word in the actual body of the paper. It's going to be an interesting year. Hopefully since I won't have a tv I'll actually get alot done.

Stressed is desserts spelled backwards

Well, my stress level is quickly climbing back up to school year norms. So far I don't have a place to live, the classes that I want conflict, leaving me with nothing to do mondays and fridays after 10:00 am (and while it may seem very relaxing, I know it will kill any motivation I'll have to get out of bet at a reasonable time on those days), my insomnia is back (7 hrs sleep in the last 65) , I haven't accomplished anything that I wanted to this summer, I don't have a 499 research topic, the girls here still hate my guts, even if I do apply for canadian perminant residency, it will take at least a year to process which counts out my chances of affording any Canadian grad school and I've only saved about $2,000 USD this summer (well below even the cost of the fall semester). It's good to have things back to normal.

At the Movies

Spider-Man 2 finally came to Hot Springs, South Dakota. It was a decent movie but it could have been better. It seemed to me that Toby McGuire must have been stoned throughout the entire shooting of the movie. In just about every scene where we could see his eyes, they were blood shot and watery. Further proof is that there is a scene in the movie where Peter Parker is just eating chocolate cake with his land lords daughter. There was absolutely no reason for that scene to be in the movie. The whole point was that she eventually gives him a message from his aunt.
What was worse was that Doc. Oc. who could have been a really cool villain, was really shallow and one dimentional as a character. He doesn't even get that much screen time compared to how much time is spent on Peter Parker trying to ballance duty and booty. What really bothered me was that he quit being evil just as soon as Spider-Man tried reasoning with him. Shouldn't that be a hero's first response, especially if its one academic to another? And who gives machinary artificial inteligence complex enough and dangerous enough that it needs an inhibitor chip? If you know it's that dangerous, redesign the software with the inhibition built in!