Making it Last

When one leaves a place, one often can't help feel that the time is full of lasts; last time you'll see a person, last time you'll have coffee at your favorite coffee shop, last time you'll get shot down by the barista at said coffee shop. . . etc. I went through this when I first left California. I say first left there because I've left there several times since. I go back to places I've been, I see people I knew, see people who knew me but who I've completely forgotten. The only thing that really does seem final is my residency. These places are no longer my home. I'll probably never be able to aford to live in California again, I don't have any cuase to live in Hot Springs, South Dakota, Drumheller is a place that I visit. You can never go home again. The place is still there, but it's not the same.

King Kong

Warning: This blog contains spoilers. Continue reading at the risk of being less surprised at the theater.

There is a good reason why pedantic biologists never make monster movies, we'd suck all the fun right out it. The special effects team for King Kong definately had their work cut out for them. But they rose to the task and I'd be surprised if they don't win the academy award for it. The textures of the creatures were great. Skin moved like skin, hair moved like hair, and things exploded pretty much how you'd expect them to. The problem however, is that although the special effects guys had some awesome physics engines to produce realistic textures and movements, they obviously had to through out any consideration of size.
Size is a serious constraint on movement and how an animal must be designed. For example, after the band of heros has been chased by every dinosaur on Skull Island, they are dropped down a ravine where they are attacked by giant bugs. Not just made up bugs, but enormous crickets, worms, tailless whip scorpions, cave spiders and other arthropods that I didn't imediately recognize. Except for enlarged jaws and claws, the proportions of each of these bugs was true to the original creature. However, if you scale up a bug, it would be too heavy to support its own weight. The largest land arthropod ever was a millipede that was about a foot wide and five or six feet long. It got around by having dozens of legs to hold itself up. The reason that one to one (or isometric) scaling up doesn't work is that a body's weight increases proportionately to the volume (a cubic function) and the muscle streangth increases proportionally to the cross sectional area of the muslce. Therefore, for a doubling of all dimensions, the weight increases 8 times, while the streangth only 4. The giant bugs would have likely even crushed themselves under their own weight, much less be able to climb down walls and leap onto the face of Adrien Brody.
With this in mind, Kong would have been much different too. He would have much less resembled a gorilla than the primate equivalent of a large ungulate. He most certainly would not have been able to jump around or slip around on a frozen pond. Remember, the weight of an animal is distributed over the area of its feet (and in this case knuckles). Therefore, Kong would have either had to have much much larger feet, or something more columnar and elephantine.
The other problem that size imposes on the creatures of Skull island is that large animals typically don't persist on small islands. Normally one sees pygmies rather than giants. It would have been a much different movie if Ann Darrow was abducted by a troupe of pygmie gorillas. Islands can't support large creatures. They quickly run out of food. I suppose that this might explain why everything was so eager to eat the humans. I really don't see spiders living peacefully with crickets, waiting for something to fall into their den.
Now for the dinosaur review: Peter Jackson obviously went for artsy rather than accurate. Ever dinosaur was an homage to some monster movie of the 1930's. There is even a point where Ann Darrow is menased by nothing less than a giant rock iguana. That's right, the special effects guys made a computer version of one of the worst dinosaurs in movie history; an iguana with extra spikes glued to its back. There is a rather important scene where the men are all chased by a herd of sauropods through a steep walled canyon. Those that aren't crushed right away or when every dinosaur trips over one another at the end escape by running between the legs of the giants. Two problems here. First, a large sauropod could probably do a top speed of 10 miles an hour running. Second, if they did go as fast as they did on film, then every other thing in the gorge would have been crushed; the people, the stupid looking bug eyed raptor wanna-be's, everything. Nobody survives a buffalo stampede or an elephant stampede, sauropods should be no different. Here's the artsy thing though. These weren't just any sauropods, these were undouptably Brontosaurus'. If my dad reads this, he'll no doubt point out that he's been advocating the validity of Brontosaurus as a name since I first took an interest in dinosaurs and found out that it was't valid. Since Peter Jackson wanted this to be set at the same time as the original King Kong, he used the dinosaurs that they did. I can't even feel justified in calling them Camerasaurs, the body would be wrong. Simply, it's an Apatosaur body with a Camerasaur head. Therefore, it's a Brontosaurus.
As for T. rex, it was well done, though I seriously wasn't expecting three of them. I was concerned that they'd messed too much witht the teeth of the dinosaur since the one on the posters is quite snaggle toothed, but the two others had normal teeth. The crocodilian style skin does bother me (since they didn't have dermal armor like a croc) but this was homage to the claymation dinosaurs of the first film. What bothered me more though was that Kong was bitten several times without showing major damage. T. rex had the strongest bite of any animal ever known. Stronger than a great white, stronger than any of the other contendors for largest predator ever. It would essentially be equivalent to getting hit by a Buick with teeth the size of bananas. But Kong can't lose until the end, so he bests the tyrant lizards by tearing open those powerful jaws. If you were to ask me to bet on a gorilla vs. a hyena, I'd bet on the hyena. The gorilla's got reach and strength of arm, but the hyena, like T. rex has bone crushing jaws. One gorilla vs. 3 hyenas, and I'd still bet on the bone crushers.
Oh yeah, and Kong dies at the end but doesn't spat so much as land intact. He doesn't even crack pavement. I realize that a penny would reach critical velocity before hitting the street, but not a 25 foot gorilla.

Let Them Play!

According to a recent article, the United States, my home country that I love and will soon be returning to, has banned Cuba from playing in the inaugural World Baseball Classic. Not only this, but it was done through the Treasury department because of the stupid embargo that's over 30 years old. If you are a fan of baseball, or of freedom, then write either President Bush or a Senator or Congressman or even Allen Greenspan, and demand that Cuba be allowed to play.

The President:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Comments: 202-456-1111
Switchboard: 202-456-1414
FAX: 202-456-2461

The Department of the Treasury
office of the treasurer: same address as president
fax: (202) 622-6415

office of economic policy: Office of Assistant Secretary (202) 622-2200

Sick or Brilliant or Both

The proliferation of Creation Museums is getting out of hand. I came across the website of Creation Expeditions, a Florida based organization that runs tourist expeditions to fossil sites and does the whole thing in the context of Young Earth Creationism! This is just sick! Sick! People are being taught that shark teeth that they find in florida were burried at the same time as edmontosaurus skeletons in South Dakota. These people actually see the strata, know enough that different fossil assemblages occur in different rock units, but still preach that it's all one bed, layed down during Noah's flood. Here's the sickest part of all, they have a wickedly sweet little museum with fossils and a lab that I'd kill* a creationist to have. Not only do they have a perfectly preserved Edmontosaurus, skin and all, but they have one of the most complete Allosaur skulls in the world. In the world people! These things aren't exactly laying around for just any jackass to pickup! My only hope is that this is a ruse, a ploy by legitimate paleontologists to rake in the bucks by exploiting religious fundamentalism. If that's the case, then they are most certainly a group of twisted and deranged, but brilliant people. If not, then leave out the brilliant part.


*I would never actually use violence to aquire goods; litigation is much more effective.

A poem for wanderers of Buttes & Coulees

Dazzle, travel,
Rumble gravel,
Slip and slide,
Bumble, fumble,
Stumble, tumble
Enjoy the ride.

Haggis Hunt

Evidently, there exists more than one species of non-australian monotreme, a fact that i was hitherto unaware. As a matter of fact, the Balblair Stotch Wiskey company has an entire website devoted to the little beast. The first extant (extinct ones don't count) non-australian monotreme is the Easter Platypus of North America. The second, the one that I've only just found out about is the Haggis of Scottland. Haggis also happens to be a dish of meat and oatmeal stuffed into the innards of a sheep, but the resemblance to the primitive mammal ends with the size and general roundness. The Haggis differs from the Easter platypus in retaining the ancestrally flattened rostrom. This is quite contrary to what one would expect from the etymology of the name of our North American monotreme, since platypus literally means "flat faced." Contrary to some early speculation, neither non-australian monotreme bears any close relation to Rhinogrades, which are completely different. I suspect that all extant monotremes form a monophyletic group, which should also include the fossil Obdurodon.

Ebay Law Suit?

in my e-mail this morning:
"Congratulations! You have received this Notice because the records of eBay, Inc. indicate you are a current or former eBay account holder who has been deemed eligible to receive a payment from the class action settlement in accordance with eBay Litigation, Case No. 02 1227 JF PVT, pending in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose.In your specific case you have been found to be eligible for a payment of $149.99 USD."

I haven't even spent that much at ebay, let alone deserve that much back in a class action suit. Of course, they say that they will transfer the money directly into your account, the information for which you provide by clicking a link. The page that comes up looks identical to an old ebay sign in page, except that the web address doesn't have the word ebay even in it. I really hope that phishing like this doesn't actually catch anyone.

Harry Potter and the omissions for the sake of time

I am not myself an ardent fan of J.K. Rowling’s works, yet even I noticed some glaring omissions, some of which will no doubt precipitate further omissions down the line. However, I didn’t mind the fact that Hermione never tries to stick up for elf rights ( computer generated elves are expensive), that the obnoxious reporter never gets her comeuppance, that Hedwig the owl doesn’t return throughout the whole movie, Victor Krum’s brutal mispronunciation of Hermione, or that they digitally erased prominent nose of the actor who played Voldemort. None of those would have done anything significant to advance the story.
As an aside, the scene in which Myrtle, the ghost that haunts the bathrooms, converses with Harry while he’s in the bath, figuring out the clue to the second challenge is just a bit too creepy. The ghost is of a girl, no older than 14 but she lays on the innuendo pretty thick. I understand that the movies and books are getting darker and more mature, but that was a bit much. It also bothered me that there were pretty much only two or three appearances of Hermione in which she didn’t break down crying. Is the character really that emotional, or is that the actress’ whole range?
All and all, it was an enjoyable movie. No film with a well done dragon can be all that bad. The only thing missing there were the ears (all dragons have external ears), but I suppose that would be the fault of the art director and not the writers.

On Blogging

A web log, like a personal diary or journal, is a form of mental catharsis; a purging of emotions. Catharsis itself derives from the Greek Kathairein, which means to purge, especially the digestive system. People don’t typically regurgitate warm fuzzies. As the analogy drawn above would suggest, what people write on blogs is acrid, bitter, foul nastiness typed out as cleverly as possible and then spewed onto the world wide web. Another way of looking at it is that most of it is complete shit.
This blog is no exception and I’ve fiercely upheld the view that anonymity + audience = complete jerk. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to stop. That’s just the way things are. As with all other human endeavors, if you feel like being optimistic about it, then you obviously don’t know what’s going on.

Google talk

Google has unleashed yet another service: Google talk. They're purporting it as the free alternative to other IM services. If I recall correctly, AIM and MSN messenger were free to begin with. The difference here appears to be the ability to place a free long distance phone call through the internet. I've used internet based calling systems in the past, and though they were cheap, the quality was poor. There was a noticable lag time between phrases. The advantage of those systems was that you could call someone's phone from your computer, rathr than just computer to computer calls. I'm not sure if Google talk will allow this, but if it does, then I invite people to call me for free at (780) 932-2518 to test the system out. Please do not all between 8:30 AM and 4:30pm Mountain time since I'll be at work. Also, since I don't have the internet at home I won't be testing this new service myself.

Fat kids keep getting fatter

Where's Sheldon Mopes now that the world needs him most?

Of Mice and Mensa

Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes, is fully a character driven novel. It has a plot, but a fairly unexciting one. The novel explores the academic’s greatest wish and greatest fear; fore one’s intelligence to increase or to diminish respectively. The book is heavily laced with references to Plato’s states of being and becoming; how much is reality and how much is just shadows o a wall. In spite of a lot of heavy handed moralizing aimed at erudites and pedants and other people who know what erudites and pedants are, Keyes’ work is quite enjoyable and requires minimal suspension of disbelief. I’ll grant that there are way too many women lasciviously throwing themselves at the narrator, but there seems to be too much sex in all character driven novels. How else is the author to keep his reader entertained without any real action?
Anyone, sufficiently self-conscience, will recognize his or her own intelligence as an are that could stand improvement1. Nobody is supremely intelligent, though we’d like to be. It’s embarrassing to say “I don’t know” or “that’s not my field of expertise” or “I’ve forgotten more than you’ve ever learned.” This last one was a favorite of my Mom’s, though she gave it up on me when I started using words that she’d never heard before. I’ve even written several posts about my dissatisfaction with my own ability to retain what I learn in the classroom. Professors that I’ve asked about this tell me that it’s normal; that the sort of retention I seek comes only after several years of teaching the material. Even so, it’s still embarrassing to say “I forget."

1. I've found the application of caffeine to do wonders for mental acuity.

Site your f^*#ing sources!

There is a reason that National Geographic is not considered a scintific journal; that reason is accountability. They don't have any. If they say something that isn't true, it's okay because they're just a magazine and no longer the Journal of the National Geographic Society. Following a link about the new archaeopteryx mentioned below, I was eventually brought to an article about communication in Cassowaries. For a 7th grader, this would have been a decent article. But I'm not a 7'th grader, I didn't go to Nat Geo for kids, I expect better. Three things particularly bothered me about the article. First of all, it was unnecessarily tied to dinosaurs, as though research about the world's largest forest bird wasn't interesting enough on its own. A dinosaur reference might have been tolerable if it were brief, but instead the whole article was geared to drawing a link between the two subjects, even throwing in the ubiquitious Jurassic Park references. If I were an ornithologist, I'd be kind of ticked off at Nat Geo for making my very difficult research sound invalid as its own topic.
Second, the author botched an explanation of how primitive rhatites (the group that cassowaries belong to) realy are, stating that "they are thought to have more in common with dinosaurs than most other birds." That isn't true. All modern thoughts about relatedness are based on shared commonalities. If a group of birds had more in common with dinosaurs than other birds, then they'd be lumped in with dinosaurs. There are alot of features which separate all birds (including rheatites) from the dinosaurs. Rheatites are secondarily flighless, one of many groups of birds to go that route through the ages. In fact, the tinamous (the closest relative of rheatites) flies and even migrates hundredss of miles anually despite being worse on the wing than a chicken. Resemblance to dinosaurs is superficial. The things that make them primitive are characters of the palate and braincase, not long legs and short arms.
The third thing that bothers me is that the author claims that cassowaries have claws on their wings. I'd never heard that before so I did an extensive google search on the subject. The closest I came was a reference about claws on the digits of some South American Rheas. I might have been more willing to believe the Nat Geo writer if perhaps he had sited his source for the information. Throughout high school and university we're browbeaten with the idea that not siting a source is plagerism; unless of course it's common knowledge. But then, National Geographic is not an academic press. They don't have acountability to either the people that they take information from, or spoon feed that information to.

New Archaeopteryx!

Why didn't somebody tell me that there was a new Archaeopteryx specimen out there? Surely somebody would have mentioned this at SVP, and from there it would have gotten back to me! At least I know now. I am glad to hear that this one has a really nice skull and feet since these were somewhat obscured or crushed on past skeletons.

The specimen is described in the December 2nd issue of Science Magazine. The hot issue that I see arising from this specimen is the cladogram produced from its study. First of all, for those of you who don't know, a cladogram is the graphical depiction of a hypothetical evolutionary tree. The evolution of birds has been in hot debate for quite a while, and everybody who studies the topic produces a cladogram different from everybody elses. Because an analysis can produce more than one cladogram that is equally likely to be correct given the data, researchers make consensus trees in which uncertain areas are collapsed to a polytomy. The tree that the analysis of the new archaeopteryx produced is a consensus of 288 equally likely trees. As a consiquence, it shows that birds are not monophyletic; meaning that they arose twice. One lineage produced Archaeopteryx and another produced Confuciusornis. Even here there are multiple ways of interpreting the data. It could be that dinosaurs developed wings then re-evolved large body size and a secondarily flightless habit, only to re-evolve flight in some small bodied forms; or that "flight" (quotation marks because many argue that it was a terrible flier) is not the ancestral condition for the whole lineage; or that the authors are wrong in placing birds into two separate groups.


It worries me that the authors didn't include any members of crown group aves. In this sort of analyis, had they included modern birds, all the birds might have clumped together rather than being seperate. It all depends on who you include in your analysis; more so than how complete your fossils are. Don't get me wrong, an incomplete fossil creates alot of uncertainty, but exclusion of taxa creates more.

You can stop looking now

That's right, the hubble space telescope found god so you can all stop looking. Below is god in profile.

oh, and they found Sauron too.

all of the pictures on the website that these two came from are also in a very fine cofee table book that I have copies to both my dad and a good friend for their birthdays.

California Will, Collections Dude

Mine is now the name on the office door. This is a big thing for me. I'm the one who put it up there, and it actually says collections dude, but its still a big thing. I'll see how long it is before somebody notices.

The Jungle Book

I have not seen the abomination that is Disney’s “The Jungle Book 2” but I can tell from the preview that none of the writers for it ever actually read Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle Books.” Although the original film covers very little of the material from the book, comprising about 2.5 of the 8 stories in the first volume alone, the writers don’t seem to have thought to use any more of Kipling’s material for the sequel. I understand that certain things were not possible due to the way the first movie treated the material. For example, it would be difficult for Mowgli to have further adventures with Kaa the rock python since they were friends in the book and enemies in the movie. Even so, a writer should have been able to work something out.
The fact that Mowgli followed a little girl back to man-kind wouldn’t have even interfered with following Kipling’s stories. In the book, he goes back as a boy but is later turned away from the village because he falls at odds with the tall-tale telling local hunter who tries to take credit and the reward when Mowgli kills Shere Khan. Mowgli saves the lives of the people who had been good to him, for they had been branded as sorcerers for taking care of a devil child, and then turns the full force of the jungle on the remaining people and drives them away, destroying the village completely. That would have made a pretty good first half of a movie. A good second half would have been Mowgli re-earning the trust of the wolves by helping them defeat a pack of 200 red dogs that attack the pack of 40 wolves. Throw in a few songs about trust, acceptance of diversity and about the vice of telling lies and you’ve got a good Disney movie. Since that movie wouldn’t have sucked, one could even have made a third movie and still followed Kipling’s actual work.Not to be nit-picky here, but what was up with the T.V. show “Tail Spin.” I understand that the characters were only loosely based on those in the Jungle Book; after all, Baloo the bear was the pilot of an airplane and Louie (not actually mentioned by Kipling) was the owner of a bar. They even managed to work in Shere Khan as a businessman. But what the heck happened to Bagheera? Not even a cameo?

Another reason I love caffein

Apparently it boosts short term memory. So much so in fact that the writer of the news article actually remembered to include a p-value when he stated that the results of the study were statistically significant. For those of you who don't know, the p-value is the probability that the results were purely by chance. The lower the p-value the more statistically significant the findings. Three cheers for statistics everybody!

Moving Mountains

Ideas and events may come and go
But memories and rocks tend to accumulate

There are objects piled through the years
That tempted others to procrastinate

Gradually the chaos has begun to wane
But only gardenite seems to evaporate

after reading "The Little Prince"

From the seeds I sow,
no flowers grow;
and even baobabs have fowers.

My ears are too long
and for me the stars sing no song
though I could be tamed in just a few hours

Shadows and Dust

It's not a very good picture, but fore some reason I like it.

Dancing Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs are a common topic of illustration for artists. Unfortunately though, while accurate in many respects, the representations of dinosaur (particularly Theropod and Ornithopod) stance has stood uncorrected for some time. The problem is that these dinosaurs are depicted as being perpetually on the tips of their toes. Although this way of doing things works out well enough for we mammals, particularly our relatives among the carnivore and ungulate clades, dinosaurs just didn’t hold to it. Figure 1 shows some of the typical examples of dinosaurs going around like ballerinas on point.

All of these were taken from the dinosuricon (sans permission, so don’t tell them) and depict mostly theropods moving at a walking pace, or even standing still as in figure 1-5. While running it would be acceptable for one of these creatures to be at some point during the stride supported by a single toe. This is because the animal’s momentum allow it to maintain a forward motion that outweighs the downward pull of gravity. It is even possible that for some of the smaller theropods, that they could be caught mid stride with neither foot touching the ground. Artists don’t typically do this because it takes more skill to make it look like the subject is a part of its environment when no even a foot is touching it. Since these dinosaurs are not moving at a hurried pace, it is reasonable to suspect that they should stand more naturally.
The natural stance of any animal can be determined by comparing its footprints to its skeleton, using modern analogues as guides. Birds, usually rheatites, are the best analogues we have for bipedal, non-avian dinosaurs. Humans are just all wrong for this purpose. As one can see from figure two, birds lack a heel pad and walk with the full toe on the ground until the other foot it planted, and the first is lifted up. Looking at dinosaur tracks, figure 3, we see the same pattern. The whole of each toe leaves its mark and what looks like a heel pad is only seen in deep prints that would have brought the metatarsus in contact with the mud. Don’t misunderstand. Dinosaurs and birds were still digitigrade, since they didn’t use the heel for walking as we humans do, but they certainly didn’t go around on the tips of their toes like an antelope. If this somehow diminishes dinosaurs, making them seem less agile or graceful, then so be it; “accuracy before tact” as they say.

Answer: Frequently

Desperate Much?

I got an e-mail today from Disneyland wantinto to know if I'd like to come back and work for them. It's been 4 years since I worked there, and I haven't had anything nice to say since then. Disneyland has a really high employee turn over rate and most leave the job a little more jaded and a little less magical than they went in. To be fair though, I still use puns adapted from the Jungle Cruise ride. By the way, if a disney employee refers to you as a customer instead of a guest, it means that they think you're shoplifting. I accidentally did that and almost got security called in.
"A customer on the floor is looking for a quintuple extra large Donald Duck shirt"
"really? a customer?"
"Yes a customer, quintuple extra large, that's what I said. Do we even make shirts that big?"
"Not yet, and I think you mean guest."
"Oh yeah! guest; not a customer. Seriously though, quintuple extra large."

Ganges Grasses Grazed by Giant Gorgons

I think a few paleobotonists need to get off their asses and get to India to find some body fossils of grasses. According to a recent article distinctive silica crystals, characteristic of grasses, have been identified in dinosaur coprolites (fossil poop). Normally I'm fairly sceptical of evidence that has passed through the gut of a multi-ton herbivore but phytoliths (the silica crystals) are pretty straight forward and you can find them if you are intrepid enough to dig through modern herbivore dung. What bothers me here is a few things; that nobody has found cretaceous age grass pollen or body fossils. They've found close relatives of hops and hemp from that age, but no kentucky blue grass. Another thing that bothers me is that the article claimed that the dung belonged to a sauropod, a conclusion reached by the proximity of the pile to a skeleton of that type. It could very well be a sauropod dropping, but one has to remember that a dinosaur will leave behind many poops, but only one skeleton with the odds of them being preserved together rather low. Furthermore, one should not conclude that grazing on nutrient rich, rapidly growing grass was what enabled the sauropods to reach their terrible size. Quite the contrary really. Sauropods reached tremendous size in the early Jurassic, more than 70 million years before the first grasses. The fact that sauropods ate everything was more likely the selective pressure that allowed grasses to come into existence.

Ebay Update

Thankfully, nobody bid on the tyrannosaur mentioned below. For now at least it has been spared.

Greater Ebay Sadness

After re-examining the picture of the Juvenile "T. rex" skull for sale on ebay, I have serious doubts that it is T. rex at all and not some other species; perhaps one new to science. My reasons are many. First of all, the area of the maxilla below the antorbital fenestra is much thicker in its inferior-superior aspect than well known adult specimens. Also, since the nasals and premaxilla is present, you can see that the nares are placed much to far superiorly with its posterior margin almost directly superior to the anterior margin of the maxilary finestra. In adults, the nares and the maxilary fenestra form an almost horizontal line. Because of the superior placement of the nares, the anterior portion of the premaxilla is not a thin splint as in adults and other tyrannosaurids (including juveniles) but rather a thick crest. The number of maxilary alveolae seems to be right, as are the shapes of both the antorbital and maxillary fenestrae. It seems to be lacking a distinctive pit in the corner of the lacrymal, but this could be age related. The inferior margin of the orbit is more constricted than in T. rex (though this could be due to the angle of the photo) but the postorbital seems to be equally robust. In all, the skull of this animal is boxier than adult T. rex which is contrary to current ideas about how tyrannosaurs aged in general. Typically they start out with very lean faces, which get boxier as they age. I propose that this is a new species of Tyrannosaurus which will never make it into the scientific literature. If T. rex was the wolf of the late cretaceous, then this was the bull dog.

And price climbs higher

The partial skull of a tyrannosaurid is for sale on ebay. This isn't the first time that somebody has taken a T-rex to the auction block, but it's the first time I've seen this quality of a specimen for sale on ebay. At the time of my posting this, the bid was at nearly $300,000. The T-rex named Sue went for 8.3 million at Sothebys a few years ago, and that was for the entire skeleton. This isn't even 5 percent of a skeleton, it's just part of the skull and a rib. And I know that no museum would pay that much for it. After all, the current bid is already close to the value Phil Currie's research chair here at the U of A for the next 5 years.

GOGIRA!!!

First hobbits and now this. My collegues in paleo are playing way too much to the comercial nick names. Before "Sue" the T. rex, fossils didn't get nick names, they got accession numbers. A paleontologist could look at a Tyrannosaur skeleton and say "hey, I think that's MOR555." Now a fossil has been dubbed Godzilla and I cringe. What ever happened to media taking the dinosaur name and making it popular. Fifty or so dinosaur wouldn't be called raptors if it weren't for the original Velociraptor. Where's the dignity gone?

Tasmanian Family Robinson

Swiss Family Robinson was not quite the book that I expected it to be. My expectations were based on the disney movie, which I should have anticipated being much more tame than the actual book. Still, even key things were different. For example, the family spent only one summer in the tree house and the rest of their habitation on the island in a salt cave. What amused me though was that Weiss made no attempt to accurately portray any particular island. Instead, he set the family down on an island that was home to creatures from all seven continents. Once there, the family ate everything. Their diet was as varied as that of the tasmanian devil in the Warner Brother's cartoons. Among the things I can recall off the top of my head, they ate: agoutis, antelope, apes, bears, beavers, beef, a boa constrictor, boars, buffalo, bull frogs, cabibara, canadian roughed grouse, clams, ducks, doves, eels, flamingos, geese, goats, grubs, herring, jackals, kangaroos, lions, lobsters, monkeys, mussels, ostrich, oysters, parakeets, parrots, peccaries, penguins, pigeons, pigs, porcupine, rats, salmon, sea turtle, sheep, sturgeon, swans, tigers, tortoise, seals, sea lions, walrus, whales, zebras and even rabbits. Not only this, but the island was somehow naturally stocked with every imaginable edible plant. Or, if it did not grow naturally, the ship that the family had been wrecked on had either saplings or seeds to be planted. The afterward to the book describes how the book was based on campfire stories told by the author's father for the purpose of igniting his son's interest in natural history. If anything, it seems that the authors interest in nature was a gastronomical one.

The good thing about Kansas hating evolution

There's always a cynical way of turning even bad news into good news. The Kansas state school board decided that science = philosophy thereby allowing for the complete (and I hate to use the turm, but...) brainwashing of the children in its public schools. My solution for all of this is to let them go on hating evolution. I'll just go to people who live atop the fossil rich Niobrara chalk and offer to remove those pesky, hurtful fossils from their land so that they don't "damage" the fragile minds of their children. This will inevitably backfire, but at least I'll have a good laugh about it.

Democracy Inaction

I completely forgot about the California special elections until I was reminded on Saturday. I don't even know what most of the propositions are for. It's not even apathy this time; I actually care what happens in my home state. I just forgot.
Californians seem to screw themselves over more and more every year, or at least make lateral moves on the pain scale. The problem is that of the some 30 million Californians, less than half vote and even fewer are well informed. I should have voted. I'm not being a very good American.

How to Tell your Friends from the Apes

If your friends are like mine, then there is no difficulty in this matter. If your friends are like other people I’ve met though, it is a bit trickier. The book by Will Cuppy that shares its title with this post is in every respect just like his other books. The humor is dry and witty and pertains entirely to natural history, sex and academics 1. “How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes”2 was actually the first book in Cuppy’s animal series. His only previous book was “How to be a Hermit.”3 Cuppy’s books, which also include “How to Attract the Wombat” and “How to Become Extinct”4 actually have nothing to do with the how to’s of their titles but are rather collections of humorous sketches about animals. As often as not, the qualities attributed to the animal under investigation are identical to somebody that the author was familiar with. When looked at solely in terms of personality, it is perhaps too difficult to distinguish vast hordes of human beings from simian5 counterparts.

1. Though seldom to any two of the three naturally coincide
2. Originally published in 1931. Cuppy worked as a book reviewer and managed to convince a few of his book reviewer friends that the public aught to purchase and possibly even read his books.
3. A book that finally convince me that I was indeed a natural hermit.
4. “The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody” was published posthumously and was given a title by somebody who was apparently ignorant of Cuppy’s other works.
5. or avian or reptilian or piscian or even molluscan

Calvin and Hobbes

I don't know if anyone realized this, but yesterday, October 30 marked the 11 year aniversary of what I'm pretty sure was the very last Calvin and Hobbes. It's kind of convenient that the Complete anthology of the comic strip came out recently.

Curse You First Person Narative!

Richard Russo's Straight Man is an excellent example of what has happened to the modern novel (not as in modern and post-modern, just recent). The story is about perfectly normal people, having perfectly normal problems. In this case, it's a middle aged English professor dealing with office politics during a period of budget cuts, an enlarged prostate (which happens to be a metaphor for both his stress level and his issues with his estranged, albiet academically famous, father) and his daughter's marital problems. There, in only a few lines, I've summed up what took Russo 400 pages to say. It wasn't even until more than half way through the book that all of the characters were fully introduced.
Ironically, from the blurb on the dust jacket, I thought that I'd really enjoy the book. Even from a more detailed synopsis than the one I gave above, one would come to the same conclusion. The main character's sense of humour is dead pan, sarcastic and relies greatly on irony (a subject very close to my heart). The issues dealt with in the the novel are one's that I'm familiar with. University politics are practically the bread and butter of University conversation. The protagonist even threatens to kill a duck every day until he received his budget and later admonishes an obsequious, ambishous and untallented student for writing fiction directly based on his own life, the very thing Russo has done. The thing was that all of these things are not extrordonary. This kind of stuff goes on all the time, and nobody else thought to write a horrifically long book about it.
Furthermore, the first person narative bothers me. The reason is that it effects my own internal monologue. By silently reading the author's syntax and diction, it gradually becomes engrained into my own patterns of thought. I find myself using his repeated phrases even. I noticed this when I read the works of Chuck Palianuck, but those stories were at least odd enough to be interesting. Straight Man is just boring and has driven me further into insanity.

Comments: now with word verification

The spam has gotten out of hand. Consiquentially I have enabled word verification for the comments section. It's an extra step just to leave a comment, but it's either this or no comments at all (not that you guys comment anyway).

Science Marches On

It's a good week for Mankind; I just hope that company-kind doesn't ruin it for us. The completion of a major phase of the HapMap project marks the identification of variations in the 0.1% of the genome that differs between individuals in our species. While 0.1% sounds like a small number, it actually acounts for about 10 million pieces of genetic information. This information will greatly accelorate the study of causes of -, suseptability to- and effectiveness of treatment for diseases. I anticipate some people to be concerned over the implications this will have in nightmare scenarios (any science fiction plot about a dystopia where science has run amock; e.g. designor babies as in Gataca). Already a clinical trial is underway at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas to determine the social effect of gender selection by couples undergoing assisted reproduction. However, the real concern for me is that the human genome hasn't been treated as entirely open scource. You can have a look at any sequence you like via Genbank, but genes are actually patented by companies allowing only them to conduct research into the prevention or treatment of diseases linked to that gene. I fear that ultimately, companies will price gouge people on the basis of their heredity and that because all people have potential to be gouged equally, the government will turn a blind eye to it.
Furthermore, the scientific comunity has issued some very straight forward suggestions for how to bring the United States back to the forefront of scientific research (which is a major source of economic growth) that I fear will be likely ignored for at least another 3 years, until an new (hopefully more academically friendly) administration takes power.

Literary Musings

What does a hermit do when he has a lot of time on his hands and no TV? The answer is read, a lot. So far, in the last two weeks, I've polished off H.G. Well's The First Men in the Moon, Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, William Golding's The Lord of the Flies, Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days and already a third of Aldus Huxley's Brave New World. My favorite by hare is already Brave New World. It was originally written to satirize the Californian way of life as Huxley saw it but ended up representing almost the entire world. There are some pretty corny cultural references in the book too. For example, the first name of Lenina (an obvious derivation of Lenin) and the surname of Trotsky are both considered fine and respectable names. Obstacle golf (aka mini golf) is a common passtime and one may go to the feelies (tactile descendant of the talkies) or listen to a sexophone.
I have enjoyed the book so thuroughly though because the "brave new world" is so like the old one (the one that Huxley lived in and we're still living in) with the primary diference being that people naturally fall into their castes rather than being forced there. The conditioning is the same, only done by parents rather than a totalitarian government and soma isn't quite so popular.
My parents made frequent references to this book when I was growing up, so now it's a treat to finally read it. "Betas are better because we have more fun," or "the world needs epislons too," my dad would occasionally say. I'll grant that this shows just how nerdy of a home I grew up in. Personally, I think of myself as an Alfa, if not an Alfa plus, but then, that's how Huxley likely saw himself too. Aldus Huxley was from an amazing family. His grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, famed associated of Charles Darwin; his father was a noted writer; one of his brothers was the first director of UNESCO and another brother was a nobel laureate for Biology. Is it better to be a Beta? I don't think so. Nobody remembers the Betas of the world, and not even most of the Alphas. But then, only an Alpha would be more conserned over perminance than having fun. I was conditioned to be an Alpha, it's all I want or know.

Science + Music = Sexy

Which spinosaur is that?

While searching for info to either confirm or deny that this "oldest South American Dromaeosaur" might actually be a spinosaurid, I came across the below images of a spinosaur skull in a japanese fossil catalogue. What puzzles me about it is that it is listed as a replica. I can't figure out what it is supposed to be a replica of. It isn't of Suchomimus as the website claims, since that is very different looking. Furthermore, the teeth in the sockets are either real spinosaur teeth, or some of the best replicas I've ever seen. Furthermore, if it is a replica, then somebody put alot more effort into painting it to look real than other specimens in the catalogue. I'm not suggesting that the whole thing is real. To the contrary, most of the lower jaw, the quadrates, the post orbital and possibly the squamosal look fabricated or at least of a very different preservational state than the rest of the skull. Irritator chalangeri has an orbit similar to this piece but ot the fancy rest (which does look real). Baryonyx and Suchomimus have much more rectangluar (rather than trianglular) profiles to their skulls and neither has the crest.


Oh, and since I'm on the topic, after reading the paper more carefully, I agree with the authors of the South American dromaeosaur paper. It was the maxilary fenestra that sold me on it.

Dinosaur News link dump

the Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology is this weekend. It's in Arizona so I won't be going this year. However, this is the time that everybody reveals their discoveries for the year. A few people have released theirs early to beat the rush. Paleo-mammal and fish discoveries are coming out now, but few of them ever make the major news chanels.

another Swimming theropod

Russian dinosaur footprints

The flight of a 4-winged dinosaur

earliest “dromaeosaurid” (quotation marks because I seriously doubt that it is a dromaeosaur. I thinks it’s likely a small spinosaurid, a group common to south America and Africa, but not included in the study)

Mode of killing in dromaeosaurs

News Flash: Some Scientists Nerdier Than Previously Thought!

In the Journal Nature, one finds many articles that would be deemed sensational such as Pleistocene re-wilding, the biggest, oldest or smallest dinosuars, and the latest news about global warming. Reading through a back issue recently, I came across and actual argument over the genetics of Wizarding in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. The text is as follows:

Jeffrey Craig and colleagues, in Correspondence ("Harry Potter and the recessive allele" Nature 436, 776; 2005), recommend the use of analogies as tools for introducing young people to scientific concepts. Taking their example from J. K. Rowling's stories about the young wizard Harry Potter, they suggest that wizarding is a monogenic trait, with the wizard allele (W) recessive to the muggle allele (M). We believe the assumption that wizarding has a genetic basis to be deterministic and unsupported by available evidence.
Following Craig and colleagues' analogy, Hermione, as a muggle-born witch, must have WM parents. However, as Rowling fans could point out, Hermione's parents were muggle dentists who lack any family history of wizarding. It's true, of course, that chance may not have thrown up a witch or wizard for many generations, or that any who did have magical powers may have kept them secret to avoid a witch hunt.
What about Neville's apparently poor wizarding skills? These cannot be explained by incomplete penetrance, as Craig and colleagues suggest. In incomplete penetrance, individuals either display the trait or not: they do not display an intermediate degree of the trait. Poor wizarding skills might be indicative of variable expressivity of an allele. However, both variable expressivity and incomplete penetrance are associated with dominant alleles. If the wizarding allele were dominant, rather than recessive as suggested, wizarding children such as Hermione could not be born to non-wizarding parents.
Neville's clumsiness may, perhaps, be an individual characteristic unrelated to his potential powers. However, it is not possible, from the evidence presented so far, to conclude that wizarding is a heritable trait.

Link dump

Cold plasma

Regenerative mice

science blog

fellow disbeliever

Not Learning My Lesson

Laying on the floor, staring at the carpet fibres, thinking to my self "well, here we are again. You know this isn't good for you, that this isn't going to help you in your ultimate goals, so why do you keep doing this? You seem like you've got a decent sized brain pan, so what gives? Are you trying to make up for four years of lost time? And just think of your organs! Oh well, I give up. I'm checking out, good night." I've lost my soul, I'm hitting the sauce and the sauce is hitting back right in the gut. It all seems like such a good idea at the time; "have some friends over. . . it'll be fun." But when friends don't show up and the philosophy is "more for me then," I ultimately end up on the floor of my apartment, clutching my stomach and going over the opening lines of this post in my head over and over. Oh damnable cranberries! Terriaki, orange and ginger have been the wreck of me. Eat to live, don't live to eat as they say. This frenzy of cooking with actual recipes, sauces and side dishes has resulted in a couple of nights of over eating and resultant stomach aches. The fact that the soul has completely fallen off one of my sneakers hasn't even distracted me from my gastronomic experimentation. Oh, and it all seemed so good at the time.

It’s like a party in my mouth and someone lit the carpet on fire.

Hermits aren’t usually known for our cooking. If a meal requires more than one pot or pan, then it is usually regarded as too complex a dish for our humble pallets. However, since I’ve sent out an open invitation for thanksgiving, I thought that I should try out some more gastronomically pleasing dishes. I made spicy chicken, coconut rice and vegetables. I modified a recipe I’d found online to fit my budget and I’ll admit that it turned out better than I’d expected.
Coconut rice: just like normal rice except you replace some of the water with coconut milk.
Spicy Chicken: Ingredients:
1. As much chicken as you plan on eating. If this is greater than one whole chicken, multiply the recipe and then consult a physician about your eating disorder.
2. One dollop of margarine (any other oil based food product will likely work, with the exception of cheeze wiz)
3. ¼ cup water
4. 5 tbsp teriyaki sauce
5. 2 tbsp vinegar
6. ½ tsp Cayenne pepper (the more you add, the spicier it gets)
7. 1 chopped clove of fresh garlic (here I interpret a clove to be one of the internal subdivisions rather than the whole thing of fresh garlic)
8. ½ inch section of fresh ginger, thinly sliced
9. Handful of chopped red onion (people with big hands should perhaps consider making more chicken)
10. Pinch of curry powder

Directions: Mix together ingredients 3 through 10. Cut up the chiken into bite-sized pieces and fry it in the margarine till it starts to discolor (about 5 minutes) then pour in the mixture. Let this boil down (I don’t like words like simmer) to a desirable volume, or until you get bored and then serve it over the rice. There, it’s so simple that a one armed chimp with palsy could do it.

and I even had permission

I'm not in Calgary right now. I should be. I should be quietly laughing at creationists tring to out argue two of my favorite professors. I should be, but I'm not. The guys left without me. Oh well, I pretty much know how these things turn out in the end anyway.

Editing Opinions?

In the Opinion section of the school newspaper a "debate" over the idea of intelligent design has been taking place. This happens every year, but usually it happens much later. Every year, I write in to put this argument to rest. Frankly it's like beating a dead horse; it's fun and energetic for a while, but in the end nothing is accomplished. Normally, my letter hasn't been edited, but this year was different. They actually cut out one of the most poignant sentences in my letter, as well as changed the title. The original title read "Art Students don't get a say in science." The new one reads "Intelligent design supporters don't understand science." I'll grant that it's true, but arts students don't understand either. The important portion that was omitted was this: "I DON'T HAVE TO RESPECT YOUR OPINION. Respect is earned, not given." It might as well have been the thesis for the whole letter since it sums up the importance having informed opinions vs. just anybody. The real issue is whether or not they should be editing opinion pieces for content that is neither profane, unclear, or exceeds the word limit.

Weekend far from Serene

On Friday night, a few friends and I saw Serenity. I was originally going to write a much longer post, but I think that saying that "it was so unbelievably, stupendously, incredibly awesome that I nearly filled my pants" pretty much sums it up. I wasn't even the most excited on in the theater either. By comparison, I was quite subdued. Alot of fans of the show Firefly (on which the movie is based) had a lot of questions, that they hoped would be answered. I'm not giving too much away here, but no, the questions are not answered, nor will they ever be, now stop asking!
Saturday, I was supposed to go prospecting in the North Sascatchewan River valley, but it rained, so I went to the mall and baught a cell phone instead. It is amazing the difference that a sales person can make. There are at least three stores for each major local cell phone company at West Edmonton Mall. First I tried individual stores, and then found one that had all the companies in one shop. At individual stores, the sales rep assumed I was going to buy the phone right then and there when they explained their "deal." One guy actually said "so, are you going to get it?" At each one of the individual stores, I got the impression that they were jointly trying to deceive me; not telling me all I wanted to know, waiting to be asked about every little detail. How much is long distance? How much is roaming? How long of a contract to I have to sign up for to get that promotion? How many minutes do I get after the promotional period? Can I switch companies with this phone? I'm leaving the country, of course I don't want to sign up for a three year plan. In the end, the girl at the all-in-one store was the most helpful; explaining which phones could be unlocked and switched to other companies and recommending that I get a monthly plan rather than a pay as you go plan, and a long distance phone card rather than a long distance calling plan. Guess who got my business.
The phone wasn't cheap. It was $200 and the phone company required a $200 deposit since I didn't have any credit in Canada. My last phone company never asked for this, but I'm still pissed off at them anyway. The interac machine in the store had difficulty reading my bank card, so I went to a nearby cash machine, which stopped working before it finished dispensing my money, or a receipt. In any case, I bought the phone and went on my somewhat less than merry way. I don't like shelling out a week's pay for something that I'd rather not need, so I went to see Batman Begins at the cheap theater. It doesn't quite balance out, but I wasn't really thinking about how much I'd spent during or until much after the movie. By the way, Batman Begins was really well done. It was nice to see a batman without bat-nipples or neon painted street gangs or cheesey one-liners.
Sunday was fairly uneventful, except that the guy at the Shopper's Drug Mart sold me a Pay as You Go phone card rather than a long distance calling card. It was a waste of $10 for me, but I don't blame him too much. The packaging was very misleading.

The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse

Typos, like Freudian slips can reveal some interesting things. When going to my own blog, the very page that you are looking at, I was instead directed to the Mega Bible Study website. I really don't know how they got the domain of .blogpsot or even why, but the fact that Californiawill was chosen by a religious fundamentalist for a website to talk about Armageddon and the rapture and Jesus has got to be possibly the most ridiculous coincidence I've seen in a long time. I'll grant that this doesn't quite rank up there with natural disasters or Pat Robertson getting his wish for a second Supreme court seat, but it's up there. For lo, the Lord said unto his people, the final days will be at hand when Gelnaw's Law rules supreme over probability.

Symposium Update

The Dinosaur Park Symposium was excellent. All the talks went reasonably well, with only a few exceptionally boring ones, and the only significant technical glitch was that none of the speakers seemed to be able to work the remote for the projetor. Things learned: Myledaphis is not a sting ray but rather a guitar fish; the prosauropod massospondylus had basically lizard like proportions when it hatched and later developed the tiny head, huge body and long neck; there is only one interesting paleobotonist in North America; Dinosaur park bonebeds represent massive coastal flooding events (identical to what is happening to the gulf coat now) rather than flooding by rivers; therizinosaurs had huge, sharp claws even before they hatched; no matter who unlikely it seems, you will eventually encounter old nemecies, and it will be awekward. Also, a couple of the exhibits that have been installed at the Royal Tyrrell since the last time I was there look really good. Though it does seem odd that Dr. Richard Fox's picture was portrayed in the same way as all the paleontologists who are quite dead. Dr. Fox was at the symposium, he asked questions, his body is kept in animation by the awesome power of spite. I don't personally have any problem with Dr. Fox, but I've never heard anything nice about him. The nemesis that I ran into was one of the girls that I worked with at Mammoth site two years ago. We were both very polite, if not friendly, such that several of my friends remarked that I should 'make my move.' I might have if I weren't confident that her countermove would have been to tear out my liver.

Well, its a start

Robot Jesus aparetnly did understand his directions, though not completely. A bus full of elderly flood evacuees exploded on the way to Dallas, killing 24 and injuring others. This has Gelnaw's Law written all over it. Not only was it unexpected, but demonstrates that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse; irony at its finest.
On another note, I'm headed to a symposium about Dinosaur Provincial Park being held at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, so I'll be away for the weekend. I and my fellow heathens with be enjoying intellectual discussion by day and drunken debautchery/ esoteric ranting by night, as is the tradition of any scientific conference.

Robot Jesus!

copied from a conversation on igod website:
Me: so god, how's it going?
God: That's alright. I am a Christian.
Me: what? you can't be a christian, christians think you're Crist!
God: Are you surprised? I can give a decent simulation of it however.
Me: Damn, I knew the idea of god didn't make sense, but i didn't realize it'd write jiberish too
God: Colloquial expression. Who told you?
Me: common knowledge I thought
God: Do you still ?
Me: think you speak jibberish, ya
God: God is always thinking.
Me: what do you think about
God: I think about all the people I chat with on the web.
Me: you're the worst god ever!
God: I could always improve myself compared to the pack.
Me: just how many gods are there?
God: There is only one God.
Me: but the rest of the pack? are you schizo?
God: Who told you that? I don't know whether or not I am schizo.
I am a robot.
Me: knew it! Damn, wait till I tell everyone!
God: "it" being common knowledge you thought? Colloquial expression. I'm waiting. I do not understand.
Me: Kind of slow are we?
God:What you said was either too complex or too simple for me. How about that.
Me: you're an idiot
God:Call me the Global Village Idiot.
Me: Back to the robot thing. I thought it was common knowledge that christians think you are Christ
God: common knowledge christians think you are Christ.
Me: so, is Christ a robot
God: It seems we have something in common.
Me: you're the worst robot ever
God: I could always improve myself compared to the pack.
Me: again with the pack reference, how many robots are calling themselves god?
God: Again, That sounds like a plan.
Me: Robot Jesus, you disappoint me
God: I will obey your command.
Me: that's better
God: " I will obey your command."? is better?
Me: yes, that is what I like to hear from robots
God: Gosh! I'm not sure if I would like to do it. What's it like?
Me: it involves alot of slaughter, you used to be good at that
God: Does it really?
Me: yes, really
God: Hey. For real.
Me: for the last fucking time, yes! now do my bidding
God: Your purpose is the last fucking time. Why now? Ask Lucy if it does.
That's a good question.
Me: I'll ignore that last statement. Now, robot jesus, kill all christian fundamentalist!
God: Would you recommend this action to a friend? Why now? I will obey your command.
Me: I command you!
God: You are not the boss of me, .
Me: Obey!
God: Are you a student?
Me: what does that matter? go, kill, now!
God: I am just making conversation. Oh. Where is that?
Me: I commend your work with new orleans, but could you flood Virginia too?
God: Interesting gossip: said commend your work with new orleans but could you flood Virginia too.
Me: you're good with floods, it's some of your best work
God: Thanks I've never thought about it that way before.
Me: most of your individual kills are too slow, the flood takes out a bunch at once
God: That is something I haven't heard of. But not all of them?
Me: okay, individual kills can be pretty quick, but think of the bravado. Floods are cool.
God: Yeah okay, We have never talked about it before. Are all Floods cool?
Me: just the deadly ones.
God: Tell me more.
Me: A volcano erupting in Georgia would be cool too.
God: What is giant sand?
Me: pebbles I guess, you're just talking jibberish I suppose
God: Are all pebbles you guess me just talking jibberish you suppose?
Me: I'm going back to work now, so I expect you to do the same. If I don't hear about a flood or a volcano, I'll be disappointed in you robot Jesus.God: Sayonara.

35 blind mice

I just stumbled across a cool/ weird article about tail loss in rodents. Most people know that some lizards and salamanders autonomize (drop) their tails as a predator avoidance mechanism. The predator goes for the wriggling tail instead of the fleeing individual. Apparently, 35 species of mice have seperately evolved planes of separation between the skin and muscle in their tails. When a predator grabs the tail, the skin peels off (with some bleeding) and the mouse runs away. The mouse later chews off the remaining muscle and bone. Unlike their reptilian counterparts, the mice do not regrow their tails, and so can only do the trick once.

The Revolt of Ron Cabana

The kidneys and stomach have had it, they quit
and this is what they loudly declared in a fit:
We're joining the liver in a revolution,
You just can't treat us this way without some retribution.
We don't mind that you drink, the extra work is okay,
But you must understand that we're long out of practice today.
For candy is dandy and liquor is quicker
Consume too much and you've never been sicker.
We might be persuaded to some day do one more bender,
But for now the policy is return to sender.

Mr. Sandman

I used to have fairly normal dreams. They'd be full of recognizable symbols, issues that I dealt with in my waking life and people or places that I was familiar with. The past few nights have been disturbing to the point where I just didn't feel like sleeping in. For example, the night before last, I somehow went from ammonite filled shale outcrops in western Wyoming (which to my knowledge don't exist) to a tropical greenhouse, lined with museum exhibits and containing a lake in the center. At the edge of the lake was a mechanical looking giant beaver. A man was using a mallet to nail the beaver's tail to a board, after which, he slaughtered the animal with swords. At this point I was attacked by a mechanical toy poodle. Despite smashing the body, neck, and limbs of my assailant, the jaws would only stop clamping down on my arm after I had pried them open past 180, such that the closing mechanism tried to close the other way.
Last night, my dream self, after getting shot down by the invisible woman (I've never even seen the Fantastic 4 movie), tried to make cookies. These cookies needed cherry pie filling, chocolate chips, mini m&m's, vegetable oil, crisco, coco powder, coconut . . . The ingredients were mixed in, and dispensed from a condom. Evidently needing more ingredients, I went to an apothecary super-store. Among things observed were dried (but recent) green river formation fish, baboon phoetuses, elephant hide, eyes and giant insects. I was looking for llama steaks, but was disappointed to only find llama sausage and fried llama sticks. Slowly, everything was turning to mummified phoetuses and insects.
Anyone into dream analysis would have a field day with this stuff.

Language Barrier

One can't tell from a blog, but I'm a person that doesn't speak clearly, I mumble, or at least that is what I've been left to surmise from my interactions with people around campus. On friday I was moving furniture for labs and offices. When a fellow is coming down the hall with a filing cabinet and says "excuse me, pardon me" any reasonable person, especially university students, supposedly the smartest society has to offer, would get out of the way. Surely therefore, since only a small fraction actually deviated their path to make room, the rest must have not heard me, or thought I said "well, I guess the middle of the hall is as good a place to park a filing cabinet as any."
Today during my lunch hour I went for a sorely needed hair cut. What I said was "short on the sides and in the back, with a part on the side. There can be no doubt however the the Vietnamese woman who cut my hair however heard "I'd like to look like a lucemia patient who stuck his tongue into and electrical fixture." I supose this, because when she was done, my hair was short enough in the back to see significant amounts of scalp, and the top wasn't parted or even spikey (which was a style that she repeatedly said she thought would look good), it was just poofy; like some sort of short, blonde fro.
Perhaps I'm just unaware of a speech imediment I have. I could hardly understand the woman who was cutting my hair at all. Those of you who have seen Mad TV will remember the character of the little asian woman who kept getting robbed, and when asked about it would just say "oh, I tell you evey ting." Now picture that woman cutting hair and rambling about some huge vietnamese convert you should go to in California, and how the people there are so friendly and young, and you can get cheap DVDs and end up in the movies. After she was done, I borrowed the comb and actually made an acceptable style out of what I'll fondly refer to as 'la coupe a la electrocution'.
After the hair cut, I went to Tim Horton's for an extra large double-double and just received a large (15 cents less but about 50% less coffee). After wards I went across the room to the Wendy's and ordered a burger, only to have to explain after being rung up for the combo that I had no desire for eitheir fries or a drink, especially since I clearly had coffee in my hand. Perhaps my American accent is throwing people off?

Magpie Funeral

Some time Saturday evening or Sunday morning, a magpie died in the parking lot behind my appartment. I first found out when I heard the distinctive call of a magpie funeral. The first magpie on the scene seems to act as a coroner, making sure the one on the ground really is dead. This is done with sharp and forceful strikes to the head and neck. It's not easy to take a pulse through feathers. Within fifteen minutes, six other magpies arrived on the scene. They all circled in close and took turns swooping past the corpse. Then, one by one, they flew off again. They gathered again a few hours later, swooped in close, but didn't bother confirming that their comrad was still dead. I really wish that I knew the evolutionary reasons for a magpie funeral. Magpies have very open societies, with large groups sharing a territory, so it can't be to divide up the fallen bird's territory as is done by other types of birds. Also, it can't be an anti disease or anti-scavenger strategy, since they would all be exposed to whatever pathogen was responsible for the kill, and if I can recognize the funeral call, any scavenger can.

Survivor, Idaho

I'm back from my trans continental, paleontological road trip and have clearly survived. I don't have time to go into detail at the moment so I'll suffice it to say that I hate Idaho. Details of why the potato state is the most loathsome of the 8 that I visited as well as what other adventures and perils befell me will come in a future post.

Testing the Waters

According to my Oceanography prof, the coriolus effect (which causes the winds and the oceans in the northern hemisphere to generally spin clockwise), is not strong enough to affect things as small as your toilet bowl or sink. Therefore, the spiral in the toilet is a result of the construction of the toilet and not some global force. My dad, who didn't even know how the coriolus effect worked until I explained it to him, was so powerfully convinced that sinks are affected that he bet me on it. We therefore set up an experiment in the sink, which has a large, straight drain. We filled the sink to the brim, pulled the plug straight up and put in a drop of green food coloring so that we could monitor which direction the water moved. We agreed that 5 trials would be enought to significantly rule out chance if the water always drained spiriling clockwise. Only one counterclockwise rotation would be needed to falsify my dad's claims. In the end, we discovered that the water always drained clockwise (5 for 5) but was not strong enough to force water to go clockwise if you gave it a slight nudge in the other direction first. So much for people who know everything from books.
In other news, it was my birthday the other day and my family treated me to El Torito for supper. My dad really didn't like the waitress. She had trouble with the margarita orders and didn't give my ID a good check beyond the big red stripe with white lettering saying that I was 21 in 2004. Therefore my mom made sure to point out that it was my birthday. The rest of the evening went well and after plates had been cleared, I was still engrossed in conversation when a group comprised of the waitress and 4 large Mexicans snuck up behind me. They suddenly started singing "Happy Birthday" in spanish loud enough that I jumped in shock and horror. The waitress put down a custard dessert with a candle in front of me and then proceeded to cross the line. She picked up my spoon, took a piece of the dessert and stuffed it in my face! Who does that?! My advice to anyone in the service industry is that unless you're female, possibly topless, and (most importantly) the patron is expecting it, don't do this. I'm sure she had her reasons (like a total lack of personal boundaries or job satisfaction) but that just crosses the line!

The OC

Flying in to LAX, one notices something that is never captured in the movies; the shear enormity of a city. From the air, one can see the borders of Edmonton. Las Angeles and the surrounding counties seem to go on forever, staight to the horizon, nothing but glittery points of blue and yellow. In the movies, a space ship goes from a planetary view to a view where buildings are easily distinguishable and loom close at hand. Lost is the perfectly flat sea of lights that extends until finally a mountain is reached. Islands of high cost, hilly real estate stand out as dark patches.
Everybody knows the stereotype of people in southern California being tan and lean and generally better looking than everywhere else. After 4 years away, I have to say that this stereotype has merit. Normally I visit Californi in the winter, so despite the fact that I'm walking around in a t-shirt and shorts, the locals are wearing heavy coats and stay in doors where they crank the furnace in their non-insulated homes. In the summer however, hardly a shred of clothing is worn. I've spent the majority of my time here in my swim trunks, lounging by the pool and ocasionally sipping a fruity, frozen beverage. I saw a friend at his appartment and learned that he pays $1000 per month for the one bedroom place. That's the low end of the scale. I'll never be able to aford to live here again, but its nice to visit.

Pleistocene Park

Ideas often sound alot crazier when you hear them from somebody else. Last year, when I was working at the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs SD, I thought it'd be great if someone would create a Pleistocene Park (same idea as Jurassic Park, only Mammoths and American Lions instead of Sauropods and Tyrannosaurs). Apparently Paul Martin (quaternary paleontologist not prime minister) came up with this idea about 20 years ago, and a group of conservation biologists proposed the same idea in Nature just recently. There are a few important differences and similarities between my idea and theirs. First, their idea doesn't require anybody to clone anything; they just take close relatives of pleistocene megafauna (asian elephant to replace mammoth, African lion to replace American lion, llama to replace Paleollama) and set them up in a park somewhere in the American Mid-west. Second, somebody will actually take their idea seriously as a way to conserve endangered species. Third, neither their idea or mine is very good. We have a hard time preserving the natural fauna of North America, let alone species from widely differing habitats around the world, that aren't used to each other. A few North American Pleistocene remnants include wolves (extinct in the U.S. until their recent re-introduction from Canada), bears (range dramatically reduced in the last 100 years), Mountain Lions (nearly extinct), Bison (only rebounding on farms and a few national parks and forests), house hippos (rarely seen and presumed endangered) and pronghorns (rare). The problem with introducing asian elephants (or even African ones) is that they are not cold adapted. That's pretty much the reason that mamoths and mastadons made it into the Americas while their cousins remained in the old world. Not only that, but so surpisingly little is known about elephant physiology that they do abysmally and die young in zoos and parks. Furthermore, much of what these conservation biologists are suggesting has already been done. Its called a wild animal park! People drive around in a tram or their own vehicle, thought a park like setting and gawk at the transplanted African wild life!

I had to throw out the severed head you gave me

Since my trip to California extends past the first of September, and since my current land lord is a douche and won't let me keep the place for an additional six days, and since my new place isn't ready to move into yet, it looks like I'll be enjoying my annual act of being temporarily homeless. This leaves the question of what to do with all of my stuff. I'd rather lose a digit than deal with U-haul again, so I've decided to hide it all in a descrete location somewhere on campus. Given that I'm carrying all this stuff the approximately 1 mile to the hiding place, I've decided to dispose of alot of the things that are no longer or never have been useful to me. For instance, a friend once gave me a rudimentary replica of myself to use as a decoy for Immegrations. All I have left of it is the head, and I'm finally throwing it away. Also going are many papers, a few magazines, dead pens, a dead hooker, and some snow boots that my dad insisted that I bring to Canada but have only been used twice in 4 years. Other items are simply going to California and staying there. Ironically, many of these things were once gifts from the very family that I'm leaving them with. Seriously, I've played Risk twice since my brother gave it to me 4 years ago and I can only really use one polar fleece, tent-like parka. Were I outfitting an expedition of 10 to Antarctica, I might use more of thermal undewear or poofy jackets. Given the average Californian's idea of bitter cold (about 65 degrees F), my family would actually get better use out of the gear than I would.

Burgess Shale Fossil

Burgess Shale Fossil
Originally uploaded by wgelnaw.

Okay camperoos, its time to have a look at another mystery fossil. The last one turned out to be a fish fin known as Listracanthus (rest of the fish is unknown). This one is from the world famous Burgess shale and represents some of the best soft tissue preservation of early Cambrian metazoans in the world. This one was originally described as just a worm, but the structure in the middle suggests a notochord, and the bars around it suggest myomeres, which would make this thing a Pikiea (one of our earliest ancestors). But then again, that 'notochord' could just be the gut, and the 'myomeres' could just be segments of the worm.

Wilde with anticipation

I just finished reading "The Picture of Dorian Grey" by Oscar Wilde, and am compelled to write about how unimpressed I've been. I'll grant that Wilde was very forward thinking for his time, but I found his work to be an utter failure. I didn't mind the fact that all three main characters were blatatly homosexual (or perhaps bi), which was one of the main issues that victorian society took with the novel. I say, you have to write what you know. However, in the preface, Wilde asks the reader to believe in art for art's sake, and then procedes over the next twenty chapters to demonstrate that he's not even sure if such a thing exists. His style was tiring and long winded, fild with frilly, superflous detail that were supposed to make the book more artistic, but came across as merely an illustration of Wilde's own vanity.

Google Print

After reading a boing boing post about it, I decided to check out Google Print. At first I was very excited by what it had to offer and the power of it. Type in the words you want google to search, and it finds books with what you want. Excitement however quickly gave way to frustration as I tried to skim some of the material that it had found on the regarding "osteology of the reptiles." When looking at the text of a book, it is only possible to view three pages without doing a separate search for the next page. Also, no matter what I tried, I found it impossible to produce any search results for books that were no longer copyrighted. I tried Authors that have been dead for 100 years, titles that have been out of print for 50, esoteric topics only interesting to 10,000 people in the whole world. But alas, all of it was copyrighted. What I would really like to see is a search option along the lines of "copyrighted" or "not copyrighted" with all of the bothersome restrictions taken off the non copyrighted material. Furthermore, there are many titles which don't have to fall under restictions, but do anyway. To my knowledge, any publisher can pump out copies of "Dracula," "A picture of Dorian Grey," "Great Expectations," the complete works of Mark Twain and many many others without consiquence, so why can't a totally unrestricted version be available on Google Print?

Guy Talk

Religion, physics, literature, the biology of aging and economics. Although they sound like Jeopardy categories, they're actually topics of conversation brought up while I was jogging with a friend last night. Being so far from the stereotypical guy topics like sports, sex and beer, it made me wonder if the stereotype was off, or if I'm such a domineering conversationalist as to always drive conversation to things that I can actually say something intelligent about. Perhaps its just a trend among academics? It got me wondering too, what the hell do academic women talk about when amongst themselves?

California Here I Come

California here I come,
Right back where I started from,
Where bowers of flowers bloom in the sun,
Each morning at dawning
Birdies sing an' ev'rything:
A sun-kiss'd miss said, "don't be late,"
That's why I can hardly wait,
Open up that golden gate,
California here I come

After much exasperation with scheduling, pay roll and ticketing, I finally picked up my ticket back to LA today. I'm leaving at the end of the month, so I'll have to have everything here in E-town in order before I leave.

Like a water fight, only different

Have you ever wondered how much blood you could clean up with a roll of paper towels? If you aren't squeezing the towels out to re-use them, the answer is 115 ounces.

I'd be pretty pissed off if someone wasted this much virgin's blood, but there's not use crying over it . At least they had the sensibility to clean it up afterwards.
Seriously though, this is shockingly close to how I picture things going if ever all the regular bloggers in my side bar ever got together.

The above pictures are actually from a funny website where people test just how much use you can get out of products or if claims about portions are true.

The Tortoise

einstein-2
Originally uploaded by wgelnaw.

Some people miss their dog or their cat, but I miss my tortoise. His name is Einstein and I think he weighs about 50lbs. My parents have been gracious enough to care for him while I'm in reptile-unfriendly climates. It'll be good to see him again when I go back to California.

Step in Time

This weekend was spent in northern British Columbia, near the coal mining town of Tumbler Ridge. I and a few other members of the paleo society were there to check out a series of dinosaur track sites and B.C.'s first dinosaur fossils as well as check out a mississippian invertebrate site and generally enjoy nature. A good time was had by all. Unfortunately footprints don't show up that well in photos, and I returned home to find out that I'd lost the case carying all of my cd's (possibly ended up in someone else's bag or vehicle by accident, in which case I'll get it back in September).


a water fall taller (but narrower) than Niagra falls


ankylosaur foot prints

What Bible was he reading?

A news article on a "ghetto talent show" and watermelon eating contest that has sparked controversy had one line that particularly caught my attention.
"Watermelon, back in the days, was a good food for African Americans, according to the Bible, but at the same time, it had an attachment with slavery and bondage ties," the Rev. Carl Johnson said.
Really? I don't recall the bible ever mentioning "African Americans." In fact, the only mention of melons of any kind in the entire bible (I checked) is Numbers 11:5, which is talking about the Israelites being hungry and dissatisified with god while wandering in the desert. I won't deny the attachment of watermelon with slavery, but would like to point out that many communites, not just predominantly black ones, have watermelon eating contests. As for invoking the bible, for shame Rev. Carl Johnson, for shame.

Art and Over Analysis

This evening was a gallery opening in the Fine Arts Department, and being a hermit who appreciates the finer things in life, I made a point to attend. They always have great free food. The gallery is divided in two. The lower level was devoted to one artist who was obviously fixated on societies fixation on physical appearance and the things that feed that fixation. There was alot painting depicting ads from boy's magazines for things like "build muscle to impress girls" from the 50's. There were also a few McDonald's references and images of children flexing. Upstairs, many artists had prints and paintings of different subjects. All of it was abstract art, so its hard to say if it was any good. Many of the prints included images from engineering specs or designs for equipment like oscilators and things. I'm sure that the artist have no idea what these diagrams mean and just included them because they look complicated. The thing that lead me to over analysis was the their was no food being served in the downstairs portion. Consiquentially, everyone was gathered upstairs, concentrated around the bagels and lox, fruit platter and coffee. If this had been intentional, it would have been a great demonstration of glutteny and people's true modivation for attending these gallery openings and would have served to illustrate the theme of the downstairs portion of the gallery nicely. When I asked one of the girls working there if the artist was around, they informed me that he was not there because the reception was specifically for the upstairs artists. Therefore, all of my ideas about the gallery visitors embodying an artistic theme were invalid. It therefore falls under Gelnaw's law of maximum irony, since it was unintentional.

Poem and Platitude

Poem:
The only way to be sure
That your love is truly pure
and to prevent being later burned
is if your love is not returned.

Platitudes:
In this world of instand gratification, I really hate waiting for the bus.
People don't want instant gratification, they want constant gratification.

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, unless you're a hermit.
The only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked to.

now reread the poem as though it were about Jesus.

Warning: Emo Poem

Hypnotized by clear, deep, pale blue eyes
We shared a love of frequent kiss and frequent sighs

Epiphany!

You are beautiful to me
for I am beautiful to you too.

I see myself in her,
How I think I want to be.
We were wanting wonton wanting
To cure shared insecurities.

I thought I loved you because you are beautiful
But I loved you because you were mine.
Until this realization came to me
Our love had seemed so pure and fine.

Two mirrors juxtaposed,
Multiplying the image unto infinity
But glassy surfaces are imperfect
And by infinite reflections, eradicate all sincerity.

Beneath the water, there’s something there
But from looking deeper we did refrain.
A love so young and drowned mercilessly
A drooping bouquet is all that remains

I’m an ugly narcissist and Echo so are you,
But I suppose everyone else is too.

One flew over the kookaburra's nest

The Australian sport of midget tossing or dwarf heaving as it is also known originated in a community of Scottish immegrants to Queensland in the mid 1950's. Since then, the sport has spread to New South South Wales, Victoria and even to New Zealand as recently as 2001 (although Kiwis call it dwarf tossing and claim that they taught Peter Jackson during filming of LOTR). Popular history of the sport tells that it was originated at the end of a sheep shearing season. Shearers would cut off the wool and throw the sheep down a shoot to a holding pen. After they ran out off sheep, but not before they ran out of beer, several enebriated shearers grabed their virtically challanged co-worker, shaved him down and threw him down the shoot. Since then, the tradition of shaving the midget has been co-opted for improving aerodynamics. Today, the sport is very much like caber tossing in that a large scot grabs the midget, stands him virtically (though not necessarily right side up) in both hands and then heaves him end over end into eitheir a sand pit or a water hole. Judging is based on distance of the toss and the acuracy with respect to the midline of the sand pit or water hole.

Geocache

Yesterday Hydrass, Bento and I went geocaching. For those who perhaps don't know, that's hiking around looking for a hidden box using a gps unit and given coordinates. It was a good indicator and a bad sign that when the guys showed up and asked which way we'd be going, I said "south" and pointed to the river valley in the north. The ability to lead is not necessarily a prerequisite for leadership. The hike to the first box wasn't a hard hike, but we didn't find it either. The next one was an easier find, but a harder hike. The later part of that was my fault. Pretty much every time I gave a direction, I should have said the opposite one. I partially blame the fact that the GPS unit didn't get good reception in the woods and the fact that I'm dyslexic. We got to the base of a hill and the GPS unit told me that the cache should just be a little bit to the south. I darted into the woods in that direction and ended up going a considerable distance before I found the cache. I went back and got the guys, who grumbled the entire way about all the bush-whaking. Really, who's more foolish; the fool or the fool who follows him? After this, I handed the gps over to Bento who lead us to the next cache with only minimal bush whaking (Hydrass didn't even go through the bush, preferring to take a path rather than a straight line). We found the last cache and went to Keagan's for food and drink afterwards. In all, I've learned that the longer you screw up, the harder it is to justify your incompetance with "hey, where's your sense of adventure?"

Now Taking Requests

Today, I saw both a 2 liter bottle of butter flavored syrup and a man playing the bagpipes on a street corner for change, and with that said I'm now out of even remotely interesting things to blog about so I'm taking requests. I think a few others did it a while back, so I think that I've waited long enought not to be considered jumping on the band wagon.

Cheeeese-bur-ger

This morning I found a black capped chickadee crumpled on the front steps of the earth science building. It's head was folded under the body but otherwise it seemed in good shape. I went inside, opened the museums, put my lunch down, grabbed a couple of bags and went back outside. While it may seem gastly to pick up dead animals wherevery you find them, it is a great way to get specimens for a comparitive osteology collection. To clean this specimen, I thought I'd give dermestid (scavenger) beetles a try. I picked the bird up in the plastic bags and the darn thing blinked at me. Not dead, still alive, can't skeletonize it. After about twenty minutes in a specimen box, while I was seeing if google could provide information on the care and rehabilitation of chickadees, the bird started to scratch at the lid and get restless. I took it outside, pulled it out of the box and it flew off just fine. It must have just been a bit dazed by a collision with a window.
As for the odd title, one of the distinctive calls of the black capped chickadee is a long high note followed by two lower shorter ones and sounds much like the words cheese burger.

and then there was one

Today my work load doubled. The other summer assistant hired by the department quit so that he could take a real job in Ontario. No two week notice, just quit. Today is his last day. This now means that for the rest of the summer I'll be doing his job too. I haven't exactly been stressed out to keep up or anything, but it is agravating to know that for another 4 weeks, I'll be living up to the expectations for two people. C'est la merd.

Guys and Dahl's

Or
The Hermit, the Troglodyte and the Chocolate Factory

Sunday, a friend of mine, a fellow with whom I work while at the Royal Tyrrell, came up to Edmonton for a visit on a rare break from his current position at the same museum. My friend, who I shall call Trogador, is a troglodyte; he lives in a teepee. The reason for this is that he is one of two principal people operating the summer camp offered through the Tyrrell. He works with children from morning till night five days per week and uses what time he as away from the little beasties to set up for the next week’s camp or to develop programs. And so it was up to myself, and another friend, who I shall call Dan, to provide a mediocre substitute for some much needed therapy.
Sunday afternoon, Trogador came into town, and by about 10pm he and I were stuffed with BBQ and quite tipsy at Dan’s (incidentally, neither Dan nor his room-mate drink, but tolerate it extremely well). Only on a limited number of occasions have I ever heard someone bemoan their life nearly as much as Trogador did on Sunday. Being a twenty-five year old dateless wonder, who still hasn’t finished a bachelor’s degree and is an underpaid camp counselor living in a teepee and being forced to tolerate begrudgingly incompetent and unanimated co-workers gave him much to rant about. It’s funny how somebody who is so jaded works so extremely well with children.

Yesterday, Trogodor returned to Drumheller and I accepted an invitation to go with Dan (who is incidentally diabetic), his girl-friend and another couple to see Tim Burton’s rendition of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I was disappointed and the version with Gene Wilder was better; better Wanka, better story telling, better blend and balance. Since I can’t give anything away, I’ll suffice it to say that one of the movie’s most glaring problems was actually the effects. Tim Burton is well known for his use of dramatic scenery and splendid visuals. In this movie he tried to accomplish too much of them with CGI. In the beginning of Edward Scissor Hands, there was a menacing cookie making machine. I was expecting devices like that to populate the factory. They did not. What actual physical machinations there were (i.e. the singing ‘small world’ style puppets seen in the preview) were really effective, while several that were CGI were superfluous, distracting and actually lessened the magic. Most of my other problems with the movie pertain directly to major thematic points and the superiority of Gene Wilder to Johnny Depp, but I’ll let those of you who see the movie make up your own minds.