Why I Don't Dig Plants

Today was perhaps the most tedious one that I've ever had in the paleobotany lab. It turns out that I was audited by my supervisor over the weekend and she had a whole list of things that I'd done wrong since I started working in November. By the way, this is the first time that she's checked to make sure that I'm doing things right. As it turns out, I'd been mis-numbering specimens. Instead of starting on rock #13546 like I should have, I started on #14546, meaning that it looked in the books like I'd forgotten to enter 1000 rocks that I'd peeled. Not only that, but apparently I'd been entering data into the wrong book. I'd started a black book when I started working and had not seen the book that I was apparently supposed to be using until today. Oh, and two envelopes of peels had the label in the wrong place.
So what I had to do was re enter all of the data in the appropriate book, including redoing the rock outlines, then renumber all of the peels that I'd made (about 250) by scratching out the offending grease pencil 4 and replacing it with a 3. What comes next is possibly the most tedious part; I had to re-number the rocks themselves. For those of you who have never tried, it is just about impossible to erase grease pencil from rock. My supervisor recommended a solvent called zylene, but I wasn't too thrilled about that because its carcinogenic (mildly, but why take unnecessary risks). What I used instead was my favorite, tried and true degreacer: Pumice soap! It was actually working fine until one of my co-workers pointed out (about as forcefully as the fellow could) that I'd ruined the brush that I'd been using and really should have been using zylene. So I ended up using zylene for the last three rocks anyway.
I'd really be much happier if I could just work on macro-vertebrates or even small tetrapods, but no, only the paleobotany department was hiring. I hate Mondays.

A Smile is Just a Smile

You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss,
a sigh is just a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by
Never out of date
Hearts full of passion
Jealousy and hate
Woman needs man
And man must have his mate
That no one can deny
it's still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die
As time goes by
----Louis Armstrong

Revenge of the Snow Zombies

I am one of the many people who grew up loving the work of Bill Waterson, but growing up in sunny southern California meant that the wintry motif in about half of the installments of Calvin and Hobbes. However now that I live in the frozen north I've found that they've had more impact on me. In fact, I've been tempted to recreate some of Calvin's snow sculptures, particularly those in which he has snow men suffering terrible fates. But someone's beaten me to it! It was on Boing Boing and apparently someone has constructed a few of the more famous sculptures. I have to say that I don't really approve of the use of color or the embellishments that the sculptor made on the original designs, but I suppose that these may have been essential for making the snow men stand out a bit against the equally snowy background. Waterson had the advantage of being able to create distinct lines on a white background which aren't really possible in real life.

Summer Work

For the first time in my life it seems that I'm actually over qualified for the jobs that I want to get this summer. This is ironic since i applied for the same jobs last year and was underqualified. It turns out that the NSF grants to the Smithsonian Institute and the California Academy of Science prohibit the employment of seniors graduating from their undergraduate this year for the paid summer internships. This pretty much means that I'm SOL. Last year there was not this restriction and so they pretty much only hired people who were graduating and going on to careers in the natural sciences. I get the impression that I was born either too early or too late.

The Life Aquatic

I just watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and I really have to say that it wasn’t the comedy that I though it was going to be. In fact, it isn’t really a comedy at all, it’s an eclectic drama; a darn good one. You pretty much saw all of the funny parts in the trailers and just about all of the creature effects too (with a couple of important exceptions). Bill Murry’s is the only acting that is really believable as a real person, but everyone else’s is off in such a way as to set a very distinctive mood that permeates the whole movie. It’s the same with the various creatures that they encounter; they are intentionally fake looking, over the top and entirely too colorful to ever be real, but it still seems appropriate. I really didn’t pay that much attention to the credits, but it had much of the same feeling as The Royal Tenenbaums not to mention at least four of the same actors. I won’t give anything away just in case any of you haven’t seen it, but I highly recommend it if you liked The Royal Tenenbaums, just so long as you remember that it’s not really a comedy.
By the way; something that will be a point of interest for some of my readers is that David Bowie wrote most of the songs in the movie which were then translated into Portuguese.

Craig Dylke

This weekend Craig Dylke, a friend of mine from my days in Drumheller came up from Calgary to visit sick relatives, but also made a distinct point of visiting myself and several other of his friends while here. I have to say, it was good to see him. In fact, I really don't know anywone else like him. We nerds need to cavort with a geek from time to time and Craig is just nerdy enough to be tolerable. And while he seems to have no problem attracting the ladies, he really needs to work on his self esteem and self image. Granted, it's hard to feel good about yourself when one of the ladies is someone who ways two hundred pounds more than he does, but hey, quadrapeds or land cetaceans as Craig calls them can be easily dealt with in three ways. 1) Intentionally don't hang out with them or with people who are likely to feel sorry for them and bring them along to social gatherings. 2) Clearly state to the person that you want nothing to do with them, being as harsh as possible so that they will inevitably go on an eating binge and crush their organs more, or 3) Buy alot of groceries then force feed the person until their stomach tears or the person chokes like in the movie "Seven."

More of Gelnaw's Law

Here it is, a sticker proclaiming that the pan is non-stick. If I was a literalist, I'd expect the sticker to fall off.

mmm... luke warm coffee

So some bank is trying to get students to sign up for credit cards with a 16% interest rate by offering them either a free U of A t-shirt or U of A travel mug. This isn't the first time that they've done this. As such, I now have 3 of their mugs. I know that I'm pretty safe because it isn't legal for me to get a line of credit in Canada without a cosigner, and if I do end up with a card, well that's what scissors are for. Anyway, I was reading the warnings on the back of the box of my newest mug when I noticed that you're not supposed to but extremely hot liquids into it.

What do they consider extremely hot? I don't anticipate anybody scooping up white hot lava with their plastic coffee mug. Ok, how about normal H2O, water. You can't get much hotter than boiling, otherwise you cease to have a liquid anymore. I don't know about other places, but when somebody serves me my coffee or I make it at home, you have to boil the water, then you mix in the grounds, filter it and put it in the mug. All and all, by the time it gets to the mug it's not much cooler than boiling. Does some engineer in China where these classy mugs were no doubt made think its ok to design a coffee mug that you can't put coffee in?! Come on!

Peter Pan

I have just finished reading J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and I must say that it is a considerably darker story than I had imagined. It seems to me that it was not originally intended for a distinctly juvenile audience as it currently receives, but such is the case of excellent children’s stories like Peter Pan or The Little Prince. People are generally accustomed to the Disney version, to Spielberg’s Hook or to the stage production itself. Rather, I have just read the novel, which gives Peter much more depth than other mediums. For instance, Hook briefly examines the fact that Peter tried going back to his window, but found it shut to him, a symbol that his mother had forgotten him and did not have the unconditional, everlasting love which is generally attributed to mothers. In the novel however, this fact fills Peter with great bitterness each time that mothers are mentioned with the exception of Wendy being his make-believe mother, and actually more like his make-believe wife. In tern, his bitterness fills him with wrath and malign cunning. Granted, he is not without his nicer qualities which adequately counterbalance the bad ones, but Peter is much more the Pan in the novel than in the movies or the play.
Furthermore, no other telling of the story seems to include the fact that Peter regularly forgets Wendy, as he forgets many things owing to his own selfishness. What is more, and I hope that I haven’t spoiled too much for some people, at the end of the story Tinker Bell. Tinker Bell, who was described in her feminine qualities with the grace that Victorian literature gives, who loved Peter and was jealous of Wendy, is quite dead and no amount of clapping could bring her back. Furthermore, in keeping with his character, Peter had completely forgotten about her. To some this sounds horrible and shocking as she loved him so dearly. People expect some degree of reciprocity of feeling between two such characters when they go to the theater, but Peter is a boy, as naive and selfish as they come. Perhaps it is only in naïveté that happiness is found at the extremes. To stay young and happy forever, one must remain perpetually without thoughts that wrinkle the brow, and yet to become partially cynical, one automatically feels, by nature of cynicism itself, that it is loathsome to be naïve at all.

amphisbaenus no-complainus

Just this last week I was thinking to myself ‘gee, wouldn’t it be nice if I would look at a disarticulated amphisbaenid braincase’ and wouldn’t you know it, a paper came out this month on that very thing. Not only that, but there are movies of each of the elements at digimorph. Every once in a while the paleontology gods favor me I guess. Now if only I could find out why scolacophidians are considered basal beyond the absence of a crista circumfenestralis I’d be pretty set.
On a related note, I read an interesting paper about all of the various snakes with hind limbs and it got me to thinking. Why haven’t I ever heard of Eupodophis descouensi (Rage and Escuillie 2000) before? And why isn’t Pachyophis woodwardi (Nopcsa, 1923) x-rayed or ct scanned to find out if it had hind limbs? It seems like Pachyophis would be a pretty good candidate for that sort of thing. I know that there’s an articulated specimen of Palaeophis out there somewhere. Why hasn’t a museum or university snatched that up for study?
However, beyond frustrating me with what hasn’t been done, the paper brought up the issue of pachyostosis which is a character that I now find rather interesting. All of these snakes that certainly do or possibly have hind limbs show pachyostosis of the dorsal vertebrae and ribs, about where the lung would have been. Do modern sea snakes show a similar feature? How about snakes that go swimming regularly but are considered terrestrial? The two hypotheses for why this character existed were for either increased erythrocyte production (indicating greater lung capacity or oxygen requirements as for diving) or for ballast to compensate for the levity of the lung in water. Personally I think that it would be a combination of the two. As a snake lineage gets into the habit of diving or staying submerged for prolonged periods, it’d need greater lung capacity (and thicker blood to carry the oxygen) but it would also need to compensate for that increased buoyancy by adding weight to the ribs and vertebrae, which it was doing anyway.

the problem with being a hermit

I must say that I lead a fairly frustrating life. I am by nature, an extremely frugal man, inclined to parsimony, a miser at best. However, it has been the record of my recent life that my various money saving ventures have been entirely in vein, subject largely to Gelnaw’s Law of Maximum Irony. It all started months ago when I seemed to have a fair and decent amount of money. In fact, I had accounts in 3 different banks. What I decided to do was this. In order to maximize the amount of interest that I was earning from my account in California, I transferred the majority of the funds into my savings account. When I realized that I was also being charged a monthly fee on now dwindled checking account, I decided to close it. Little did I realize that doing so meant that I would have absolutely no access to those funds. Normally, I would indeed have access to it, in spite of the fact that the checking account was closed because I had the ability to withdraw cash from the savings account via an ATM. However, since the bank issued me a new card last summer, although the old one would not expire for another 3 years, and with it a new PIN number, I found myself with an utterly useless card when I couldn’t remember the new PIN.
Skip ahead to November. Somehow I’m completely out of money in my Wells Fargo account. If I had kept better track of my spending I might be able to tell you where all the money went, but frankly, I can’t. Near as I can figure, 4 months food and rent, a damage deposit and a trip to a conference in Denver pretty much did me in. For those of you who point out that I know own more than 100 Palaeophis vertebrae, I have only to say that they set me back less than $30 USD. At that time, I switched over to my BMO account. The entirety of the funds there however came from checks from my Wells Fargo account, so really I wasn’t out of money yet, it was just in a different bank. It seems fitting then that my Wells Fargo card was eaten by a BMO ATM.
Skip ahead now to December. At this time, I am completely out of money in my BMO account. And when I go broke, I really go broke. In order to pay for a shuttle ride to the airport to go home at the end of the semester, I had to withdraw my last $20. Going home it was my intention to transfer my funds from California to Edmonton. While in California, I found out that there was a $30 fee for the wire transfer. Going the cheap rout, I decided to close out my account and simply deposit it as a check in Edmonton. Silly me, I had no way of knowing that there was going to be a 30 day hold on that check when I deposited it.. When I found out that all my assets were as frozen as Edmonton itself, I started selling my books, asking my friends for help, and I even got turned down for a loan from the bank in less than 5 minutes.