What a Load Off

Well, I'm done with my midturms. Wow, that's a relief. Since I don't have to study, I can relax and spend some time celebrating the accomplishment of finishing exams. Now all I have to do before I leave for SVP on tuesday is: wash my laundry, get a hair cut, pack, analyze about 3 dozen bird skulls in scion image, write the introduction, procedure/methods and results of an ornithology paper, do 3 or 4 hours of solid bird watching (for which I must borrow some binoculars), but a GRE book, confirm my flight with the airline, finish my botony labs for next week, read up for what I'll be talking with people about at svp, analyze and plot my dinosaur data (and probably formalize a methods section for that too), arrange for a ride to the airport, print out pertinant application information for my prospective grad schools, arrange for someone in my lab to take pictures of the dead raptors that they're getting in on wednesday and arrange for my ornithology lab partners to not get totally lost on our project that is due that day after I get back. Well, is that all! I could probably get most of that done by tonight!

How to Annoy a Prospective Grad Advisor

Try this out: while sending out a mass e-mail to get a feel for who is accepting grad students and who isn't accidentally forget to change the name at the top of two going to the professor with rather famous research. If he has his own agent, is a national geographic explorer and his is a houshold name in your field, or if he has recently published a paper in Nature that you'd like to base much of your research on and you get it completely wrong, it tells him that you're clearly not paying attention when it comes to such important matters as Grad School Applications.
Dr. s Sereno and Erickson, if you read this; I'm sorry.

The Idiots Guide Reptilian Braincase Anatomy

Dispite the title, I have no intention of explaining the anatomy of the reptilian braincase here. Rather, I would like to call for an idiots guide to it. I've been reading and re-reading Rieppel & Zaher's (2000) paper as well as papers on amphisbaenids, and gekkonids and their respecive brain cases. So far I have this to say: It's a small wonder that when a person achieves the supreme enlightenment of being able to understand this stuff in detail, his or her grey matter doesn't liquify and shoot out their eyes like science fair volcanoes.
The one solace that I have found is that someone else understands that this stuff is really complicated and has attempted to dumb it down to the level of your average, soon to be graduating, university biology student. The site Palaeos has a section specially dedicated to the braincase.
I don't know who wrote it, but whoever he or she was, that person is a genius; not so much for their clear understanding of the braincase, but because of such great lines as:

Braincase terminology is somewhat fractal. Each level of obscure anatomical referents turns out to be made up of parts and variants with even more eldritch anatomical names. Just as the essentially Greek braincase regions are made up of little Latin structures, there is probably an entire vocabulary of component substructures which is represented in Babylonian pictograms, the true meaning of which is revealed only to a secret hereditary caste of anatomical hierophants.

It seems to be one of those unwritten rules of paleontology that no one illustrates a mammaliform in occipital view.

While Bob is not a creature of towering intellectual prowess, we nonetheless value his companionship because of his congenial disposition and straightforward anatomy.

More Dinosaur News

It seems that there has been alot coming out of Liaonang, China lately. Earlier this month was the anouncement of a tyrranosaur with feathers, and now a new troodontid with a birdlike resting pose and a fossil "bird embryo" (shell not actually found). The new troodontid is what especially interests me. I don't consider the birdlike pose to be anything particularly special. People have acceped for a while now that dinosaurs such as this one were warm blooded and feathered, so it is no surprise to me that it would have tucked its head under its "wing" to stay warm. It's long tail is also curled around its body. What interests me about it is, as usual its braincase. You should see this thing. From the dorsal surface, the dermatocranium (all you can see of the brain case) looks exactly like a blown up version of Archaeopteryx's. Also, the little guy has a very Archaeopteryx look in genral to the whole head. Very exciting. I bet that if someone were to do a CT scan of this sucker they'd find even more similarities.
The other group that this individual strongly reminded me of was the ornithomimosaurs. In fact, until I saw the teeth, my first reaction was to call it an ornithomimid. I've heard talk lately of placing the troodontids as a sister group to ornithomimids as opposed to the dromaeosaurs and the birds as a sister group to both of those. I have no problem with that. There seem to be alot more troodontids in the literature lately than dromaeosaurs, so I feel that this sort of response is expected. Everyone want's their specimen to be the closest to birds.
One thing I found currious about the article was that it described the dinosaur as having a proportionately small head. Ok, maybe short, but not small. Head is about half the length of the torso and most of that is brain case. They made a comment that the reduction in size was crucial for flight and is responsible for alot of the other features associated with early birds. Well Duh!!! I've been saying that for over three years now! From allometry we know that the brain has to become proportionately larger compared to the body size as the size of the animal decreases. Having a larger, heavier brain just means that you have to shorten and lighten the rest of your face so it doesn't make you front heavy!

THE project

A 6 inch stack of photocopied or printed primary literature,
80 scanned and captured images,
34 usable taxa,
comprising 8 major groups
and 4 recognizable morphological groups,
measured for over 50 variables
to produce over 2000 pieces of raw data,
filtered to produce 38 informative variables,
then analyzed to produce 190 pieces of basic statistical information
and 703 pairwise plots as a preliminary test of correlation
from which at least 6 groups of complexly interrelated variables have been found
by 1 student
who is only 1/2 done
and receiving 0 university credit for it.

A belief System in Crisis

Atheists as a whole are in trouble. We're already the minority, but I've noticed something quite dramatic that I'd never quite noticed before: There is a major shortage of good looking female atheists. If you are an atheist and consider yourself decent in the looks department; then you are a rare exception my friend. Do not misconstrue my statement to mean that I think there are a bunch of good looking male atheists. I have no idea; I'm not looking for those. I appear to be one of two atheists in the evening section of my science and religion course. The other one is female, but as shallow as it sounds, I wouldn't want to date her. However, there are a few really good looking catholic girls in the class. What's kept me from asking them out? You can't start a relationship on the basis of a difference in fundamental beliefs; it just wouldn't work. Ok, maybe there is some girl out there who would think it cool to go out with an epistemological bad boy, but I've never met her. Unfortunately though, no matter who I'm talking to, religion always seems to come up early; perhaps I lead the conversation that way, but I can't help it; being an atheist is part of my identity. I've been defending it so long that I really can't imagine not getting into regular discussions on the topic.
Anyway; if you're a female atheist (or don't mind an atheist fellow), happen to read obscure blogs and are easy on the eyes: drop me a line.

Wanderlust

Far away places with strange-soundin' names
Far away over the sea
Those far away places with the strange-soundin' names
Are callin', callin' me
Goin' to China or maybe Siam
I want to see for myself
Those far away places
I've been readin' about
In a book that I took from the shelf
I start gettin' restless whenever I hear
The whistle of a train
I pray for the day I can get underway
And look for those castles in Spain

They call me a dreamer, well maybe I am
But I know that I'm burnin' to see
Those far away places with the strange-soundin' names
Callin', callin' me
(I pray for the day when I'll find a way
Those far away places to see)
Those far away places with the strange-soundin' names
Callin', callin' me

Early mid-life crisis

Twenty years from now

you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do

than by the ones you did do.

So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor.

Catch the trade winds in your sails.

Explore. Dream. Discover.

(Mark Twain)

The very knowledge of this is enough to give anyone an early mid-life crisis. Discovering it on your own is even worse.

Don't Fence Me In (Cole Porter)

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don't fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
Don't fence me in.
Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze,
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,
Send me off forever but I ask you please,
Don't fence me in.

Just turn me loose,
let me straddle my old saddle
Underneath the western skies.
On my Cayuse, let me wander over yonder
Till I see the mountains rise.
I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
And I can't look at hovels and I can't stand fences
Don't fence me in.

Experiment failed

My experiment in not having a tv has failed. I haven't had a tv for a month and I'm no better student now than when I had one. Instead of plopping myself down infront of the little glowing box I find other distractions; like reading books on how to be a hermit by people who've been dead for 50 years. I go dancing, check my e-mail about 50 times per day, go to bed early and generally procrastinate. Now Midterms are upon me and I'm completely skrewed once again. The moral of this story is, that while it may seem to the casual observer that I'm getting more done, what I'm really doing is finding different ways to procrastinate.