Purple Nurple

The more I learn, the more I realize just how immature professional scientists are. Ok, so I had my update meeting with Caldwell and he tells me about this time that he was in Argentina. He was there to study (and look for) fossil snakes that could potentially also have legs. The main guy down in Argentina (in paleo) is Jose Bonaparte, who everybody hates and thinks is the biggest asshole in South America. Ok, every one hates him except for Luis Chiappe, but I guess you can't piss everyone off. Anyway, Caldwell had to tell Bonaparte that two of the key team members didn't want him to go into the field with them, so he had to stay behind. The province had recently revoked Bonaparte's collecting permit, so there really wasn't anything he could do about it. So how did Bonaparte, an accomplished scientist, deal with this? He tried to give Caldwell a titty twister and told Caldwell that he wasn't allowed to study the six specimens of Dynalisia that he had come all the way from Canada to examine! When I heard this, I just stared in shocked horror. But then, I can't wait for the day when i can tell someone that a collegue tried to do that to me. Of course, they end of my story will be that I beat his argentinian ass in to the bedrock for wasting my time and money, but that's just me.

Mosasaur

Dr. Caldwell just let me start studying a mosasaur braincase that's on loan from the Royal Tyrrell. It's gorgeous! Whoever did the prep work did an awesome job. I'm not too pleased about the copious amounts of glue that obviously had to be used, but it's still an awesome specimen. The only down side is that the exists for the cranial nerves don't seem to have scaled up proportionately with skull so it won't be easy to assess the characters. Also, there are couple things I didn't realize about mosasaurs: first of all, the teeth that they have on their pterygoid extend all the way back to the contact with basipterygoid process on the basisphenoid. Second, they had piddlingly small brains. We're talking about a 25 foot long, multi-ton carnivorous reptile with a brain that, if you were to bend the olfactory lobe/nerve around, would have fit very comfortably in the palm of my hand. These things were dumber than mud! I thought that iguanas had small brains, but compared to mosasaurs, it's huge! Ok, I should probably consider that if I were to compare brain size to body size on the log scale that I'm supposed to, it would come out more equitably, but justlooking at it, one gets a really bad impression of mosasaur brain power.

Paleontology at its finest

Since this blog is supposed to be largely about paleontology, I think it only fair that I dispell one of the long standing myths about my profession of choise; that is, that paleontology is done in the field where we dig up the dinosaurs (or whatever). Wrong; paleontology is done for the most part in the library, with occasional trips to the lab. Indiana Jones made a similar comment in the third movie, but then he went on a wild adventure on the other side of the globe. Then again, years of library work would have had to gone into the notebook that his father found. If Indy had to do it himself, it would have been a much less interesting movie. To give you folks out there a taste of the sort of stuff that I read, here's an excerpt from a scathing rubuttle from one collegue to another:
"The smooth dorsolateral surface of the parietal is slightly constricted just posterior to its mid-length, as well as behind the posorbital process, thus defininga cerebellar swelling (more distinct than in Dinilysia but less than in booids); cerebral and cerebellar lobes are also marked by smooth ridges on the internal surface. Most distinctively, in both Wonambi and Dinilysia there is a prominent, shelf-like lateral crest (latteral wing; Barrie 1990), rounded laterally in dorsal view and angled somewhat below horizonal, at a level below the postorbital process and extending almost half the total length of the parietal."
Count 'em that's just two sentences. There's 30 pages of material, most of which referring to things that most people have never even heard of; like the crista circumfenestralis, or the basal tuber or even the basisphenoid (one of the major bones in the braincase). Really, it took 30 pages for the author to just say "I'm smarter than you, so just fuck off and leave the rest of us 'real' scientists to do our job." In the paleontological community, a paper like this is equivalent to getting dick slapped.

brought to you by the letter B and the number 50

I will never again doubt the power of the B vitamin. Yesterday I started taking the disgusting little yellow pills of a vitamin B-50 complex, and I can't believe how it's impoved my mood. Case in point; I asked a girl that I had some history with and that I generally felt really good around, if at this late date I had any chance with her. It's a strait forward question and was mostly to determine if I should put any more effort into it. I got totally shut down. But somehow I feel great! I can't explain it. Given how I've felt for the last several weeks I should have logically been depressed enough to follow Hunter S. Thompson's example. But somehow, I feel better than I have in a long time. To give a good contrast; when a girl that I had a huge crush on told me this summer that she was a lesbian, I was heart broken, such that I even had shooting pains up my left side. Now, I could practically dance a fucking jig. Fuck Prozac, Zyprexa, heroine, Zoloph, cocaine, Lithium and any of the other things on the market; people just need an insane dosage of vitamin B.

Stole My Idea

On boing boing, there is a link to a great site of sea-bird skulls. I myself have been accumulating photos of skulls of various birds, including sea-birds from the collections of the University of Alberta, and plan to evenually create an on-line searchable database of the photos that I have taken. This way, people will be able to do morphometric and comparative studies of specimens that are thousands of miles away or that their own collections don't have. I have two problems with the sea-bird skull gallery. First of all, you can't enlarge the photos, meaning no hope of doing any detailed anatomical work (though generally you need the real specimen for that anyway). Second, none of the photos appear to have a scale bar in them. When doing morphometrics, its important to know at least roughly how large the skull is. After all, if a goose had a head proportionately as large as that of a humming bird, they would fall over forward (the heads of most humming birds are longer than the rest of their bodies). The humming bird can manage such a large head because his whole body is so small, that his tiny little neck muscles have to do proportionately less work to keep up the head (it all works out logerithmically).

Ughh!

Went drinking friday, couldn't coax myself into having good time. Drank by myself alot Saturday, watched Fight Club. Bordering on clinical depression. Today: worst hang-over I've ever had, but getting better though. I need to make a change in my life.

Brick Wall Here I Come!

Life is hard, then you die. These are famous words that have on several occasions been re-worded as "life is hard, then you graduate." Well, Today, I was given a great big dose of beurocratic Bull Shit. I got my first rejection, from the grad school that i really wanted to go to. Why? not because I'm not qualified or because they don't have room for me. No, because I didn't meet a deadline that isn't posted anywhere. For those of you that aren't aware (most of you) the general deadline for applications to Florida State's Grad dept is July 1 for the fall semester. There is even a little warning telling you to check departmental websites for individual deadlines. I checked, the department's website, found there to be no indication of an earlier deadline, even in the section detailing what the admission requirements are and applied. I was notified today, that the deadline was fully a month ago; SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE GENERAL DEADLINE! What the hell! I wrote a polite but decidedly angry letter and the only responce I got back was that they'd take my suggestions into consideration for changing the website. Well, it looks like I'll be working on the integration of bite force modeling and brain-body allometry somewhere else. Or maybe I can just quit while I'm behind, open up a rock shop and be the bitterest man in the whole fucking world!

The State of the Internet

It's happened, it's finally happened, I'm bored with the internet. That technological revolution that spawned so many horrible companies, banal blogs, and enough porn to cover the globe three feet thick with pictures of girls getting paid to look like they enjoy pussy, is old. That's right, I said that the internet is old. I don't even surf anymore, I don't even have a connection at home. I thought that it was a waste of money (I use computers on campus instead). I don't have favorites, I have links. If I could, this blog would be my home page. I just log in, check out my friends' blogs, the few others that you see listed under 'other links,' check my e-mail, see if Jon Stuart has anything to say, add a post, which almost never has anything to do with paleontology anymore, and call it a day. I can accomplish all of this in 30 minutes when I write a long post. That's it, shut 'er down, declare google the winner and go back to your normal lives people. There's nothing to see here. Not a novel expression in sight.

The Soul Sustaining Power of Fiction

By comparison to the soul crushing power of academia, is pretty weak. I've been reading "The Life of Pi" and have found not a bit of spiritual elevation in it. Granted, I'm an atheist, and I haven't finished the book yet, but come on, I'm more than half way through and though an interesting read, it hasn't told me anything about the nature of the world or faith that I didn't already know. Ok, the kid loves God, he doesn't let denomination stand in the way of that. He had a really tough time at sea with a tiger. The problem isn't the suspension of disbelief in the events of the book, its the fact that I don't see the connection with spirituality. In the Author's note, he makes the claim that this story made him believe in God and that everyone who had heard the story before he terned it into a novel agreed. But its fiction, it's all fiction. It might have made him believe in God, but then a romp with a really hot french woman might have done the same for him. Some people, just believe too easily. Others of us will never believe.
One thing that pissed me off was the depiction of the only atheist in the book. The guy is an atheist because of great suffering in his life and it is so steryotypical that i almost want to puke.

Some of my Favorite quotes for Today

"love, love is like oxygen . . . it promotes radical substitution" - Bent-o-box

"Emotion (n): A prostrating disease caused by a determination of the heart to the head. It is sometimes accompanied by a copious discharge of hydrated chloride of sodium from the eyes." -Ambrose Bierce

"Love (n): A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease, like caries and many other ailments, is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient. " Ambrose Bierce

Valentines Day

Well, it's V-day and since I'm once again dateless, I've decided to take something moderately romantic and analyze the fun out of it. This year, the Hickie; that mark that says that someone was sexually attracted to you enough to latch onto your neck like a lamprey. The hiky is a buise generated from the bursting of blood vesels in a localized area due to the suddently low blood pressure. With sufficient suction, you can actually get blood to pool on the surface of the skin. The neck, sholders and upper arms are particularly vulnerable to this damage due to a high degree of vascularization of those areas. Low pressure bruising was also demonstrated by the Nazis who placed jewish prisoners in chambers then sucked the air out just to see what would happen. The same sort of thing would likely happen to anyone who uses a penis-pump. A low pressure pocked localized over a region of high vascularity would likely result in extensive bruising and discolation of the phalus. So remember love birds, when you give your partner a hicky, you're doing the same exact thing as the Nazis and penile-pumpers.

Octogoogle

I noticed it before, and it's continued to worry me a bit; google is growing. With the advent of Google Maps, Google Scholar, Froogle and a whole bunch of other services provided to users, totally free of charge, it seem that this huge and growing corporation is doing good for the world. But then, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. I'm naturally suspicious of any major corporation and so I feel that there's going to be a price to pay for so much free information.
Google is all about connectivity, getting what you want faster, from a smaller number of sources and at low cost. Gee, where have I heard that business model before: WALMART! And we all know that a great company that is. It has single handedly destroyed small town business by undercutting and outcompeting smaller specialty shops. Google will inevitably to the same thing. The first thing that started to worry me was Scholar. For me as a private citizen, its great, because I don't have to subscribe to a database to get access to alot of my favorite research articles and see what research is being done out there. There are alot of research journals which you still have to subscribe to in order to see the archives of pdf files, but the number is shrinking. So who is this bad for? All of the database companies that used to have people systematically enter in and cross reference article titles. Next is Maps, which will likely take a significant market share away from other internet map companies and force small ones into extinction.
As a paleontologist/ biologist, I know that the fastest way for an ecosystem to experience a catastrophic breakdown is with the introduction of a new species which finds it's new home quite livable and forces the majority of other species into extinction. Right now, I'm seeing the internet's biodiversity dropping. Perhaps this is just the natural balance being reached after the internet boom of the 90's, but I see ill effects down the line.

Midterm madness

Yesterday was the midterm for my dinosaurs class. I finished the exam in 20 minutes out of the 80 aloted for it. I've been really disappointed by the quality of the class. I haven't learned anything new besides the fact that Nopsca, the guy who named the thyreophora, was gay and killed his lover in a murder-suicide. It wasn't on the exam. Oh well, it'll be as though I just paid the $1000 of tuition to give my GPA a little boost before I go on to grad school.

Interesting Trick

I'm in the knowledge commons at one of the "stand while you type" computers and I just saw an interesting thing. The computer next to me had been empty for a while, having been vacated by a skinny blonde girl, a few minutes ago. Another girl comes up and starts using the computer, but then, a few moments later, an east indian guy comes up to her and taps her on the sholder and informs her that he was using the computer. What?! Who the hell does that? Anyway, he checked his e-mail or something and left. The next person in line came up and started using the terminal and then about 4 minutes later the guy comes back again and does the same thing over. In both cases, the girl using the terminal just appologetically stepped aside and got back in line. It's pathetic.

The Coral Island

"The Coral Island" is an excellent example of a Victorian period adventure novel. R.M Ballantyne writes as though it is autobiographical, despite the fact that while his narrator is a 15 year old in the south Pacific, Ballantyne spent his teen years in Canada, working for the Hudson Bay Company. "The Coral Island" demonstrates the typical aristocratic view of naive, innocent Christian young men. Although stranded due to a ship wreck, the three boys of the coral island are ever optimists and feel that being ship wrecked was the best thing that could happen to them. Through the eldest boy's book knowledge of the south pacific, they are able to harvest edible plants, hunt pigs, build shelter, a boat and an aquarium (that's right, they had a coral reef to swim in but they build an aquarium to satisfy their curiosity of natural history). Among the narrators adventures included aiding a band of cannibals defeat their attackers, being abducted by pirates, observing many cannibalistic human sacrifices, thwarting those same pirates and stealing their schooner, and saving a lovely Samoan girl from the heathen cannibals that they had earlier helped so that she can marry her true love and follow Christianity. Throughout all of this, he reflects fondly and at considerable length on the benefits that the missionaries bestowed upon the islands as soon as the gospel was introduced. Of course, absolutely no mention was made to lust throughout the whole book, despite the fact that these were three teenage boys, and they encounter topless Polynesian young women.
By the way, the narrator also regrets having not thought to bring his bible with him while their ship was initially being smashed on the reef. Did I mention that the boys were saved from certain death by a hurricane that blew a white missionary to the island where they were being held captive by the cannibals. Naturally a pacific islander couldn't do the job in over a year, but a white guy lands on the island and converts everyone in a couple of weeks. Not only that, but the ending was quite abrupt, having been saved as I mentioned before and not mentioning anything past their taking leave of the newly CHRISTIAN natives. I would have liked some mention of how three kids with no money and a schooner that they piloted themselves picked up a crew and got back to England, but alas, the writer is long dead, and with Christ, so I can't exactly write him and ask for a second edition. Furthermore, like this blog, the start of the book was ok, but by the end, the constant praise of CHRISTIANITY became overwhelming and annoying. Christianity, Christianity, Christianity.

Help

if anyone can tell me why my text changed color, font and alignment to be the same as the headings of the side bar, I'd appreciate it. All I did was add some extra headings to the side bar and now I've got this. Help.

Another Case of Gelnaw's Law

The American dollar has been doing pretty crapily over the last 4 years. I've posed several other rants on this topic. I've always regretted leaving my cash in myAmerican acount but did so till now in the hope that there was no way that it could keep falling. So over the winter break, I withdrew all of my funds and deposited it into my account here in Alberta. Naturally, I got a crappy exchange rate and a 30 hold was placed on my check. I'd really only anticipated a 10-15 day hold, so I was in a bind with all my assets frozen. I finally broke down and asked my parents to wire me the money to pay my rent. They got an even worse exchange rate. In a complete turn from the expected, the American dollar has been doing great since then. It's gone from 83 cents being equivalent to 1 Canadian dollar to about 79. It may not seem like much, but when you're talking about the thousands of dollars I spend on tuition, it adds up.
On the bright side, apparently the advertizing folks haven't realized this, so if you click on the exchange rates link at the right, there's a good chance that you'll see an add for how to cope with the falling US dollar (ie, it's a good time to buy foreign currency; HAh!) Therefore, they're giving bad advice to people and that should hopefully push the dollar back down in value.

Thnik About It

If you could restart your life from any point and relive it the exact same way, what point would you pick?

Like the Comic Book Guy Says

Last night's weekly phone call home ranked among the top 5 of my worst, most awkward conversations ever. After a little while of me demonstrating how bitter I am via a rant about what's wrong with American business today, we got onto the subject of how bitter and cynical I am. Apparently, my mom has never met anyone worse. Both my parents are worried to an obscene degree about how unhappy I am. They probably also think that I'm chronically depressed or mentally ill. I'm not. Well, I defended my view of life, and as the conversation progressed, leading questions were asked by both sides. Really, a pessimist can't talk to an optimist, there's no point in it. Both sides think that the other is foolish and wrong, and needs to see the world the way it really is. Furthermore, as with blogging and the media, anytime you respond to a critic, you come off sounding like and ass.
Anyway, things escalated quickly and I said a lot of things that I really regret. After over an hour, I finally regained my head and started a little bit of damage control, but by then it was too late. I'm sure that I made my mom cry, and that, and my dad and many others would agree, was wrong of me. So now my dad has urged me to seek counseling (yeah, it went that bad) and load myself to the gills with 5000% the daily recommended dosage of B-vitamins. Things didn't used to be this tense.

"Who's the Boss" is not a food

ESOTERIC (adj.) : Very particularly abstruse and consummately occult. The ancient philosophies were of two kinds, -- exoteric, those that the philosophers themselves could partly understand, and esoteric, those that nobody could understand. It is the latter that have most profoundly affected modern thought and found greatest acceptance in our time.

Definition of the Day:

Contempt (n): what one quietly has for his enemies whom it is not safe to thwart.

Philosophy of Science

The Philosophy of Science class should not be offered to arts students; that includes philosophy students. Sorry to all of you arts students out there with an interest in the sciences, but seriously, the class is not for you. We've had less than a dozen lectures and every one has moved at a snail's pace because the prof has to explain what should be well known to any science student; like how to make a statistical inference, or why you can't derive causation from statistical correlations. I can even tell that the prof is bitter about it, though perhaps more resigned to it than bitter. He just drones on in his thick german accent about causation pathways, waiting for the next art student to ask a dumb question. Today it was some girl who I recognized from my Science and Religion class as one of those people who try to learn about science so that she can someday tear it down for Jesus but has never spent ten seconds in a biology lab or even taken a geology course. We were using smoking and heart attacks as a situation that could have either a direct causal relation or a common cause (we could have been using ice cream and homicide, but we were using this instead) and this girl tried to say that smoking doesn't cause heart attacks because not all people who smoke have one. WHAT!? Is this girl just opposed to all things reasonable? Of course not everyone who smokes is going to have a heart attack, that doesn't mean that smoking doesn't increase your risk! Perhaps I should introduce her to a bar of Uranium. Hey, there's only a small probability that any one of the atoms therein would radoactively decay, and that would only result in a meaninglessly increased chance of death.

On he positive side of the class however, the prof did bring up and interesting question; can you demonstrate a causal relionship if you can't change he information that is being carried. For example, if you shine a light on a screen, and move he flash light, the dot of light will move. That the dot is on the screen is cause by the light passing from the bulb to the screen. You can put a color filter on the flashlight to change the color of the dot, thereby changing the information that you have sent. But there is no mark that you can put directly on the dot itself that will move with the dot, this is why the movement of the dot is not caused by some quality of the dot, but by the movement of the flashlight. The prof also made the argument that there cannot be a causal relation for the movement of the dot from the dot itself because it is possible to make the dot move faster than the speed of light, and information (according to relativity) is limited to that speed. According to him, you can make the dot of light travel faster than light speed by having a screen thousands of km away and rotating the flashlight quickly. This got me thinking; first of all, either the prof is not up on quantum physics (otherwise he would have said that when the dot reached light speed, the individual photons would sease to look like a coninuous beam of light and would fall at disjointed points along the screen) or he's dumbing things down for he arts students who would need 10 minutes just to wrap their heads around light as photons. Second, there is informaton that can travel faster than light. It's been shown that if you create a particle and its anti particle, then change the rotation of one, the other will always change its rotation at the same time simultaneously, no matter where it is in the universe. Hense, even if they are at oppsited ends of an infinite universe (impossible by definition, I know) then the information traveling between them would travel faster than light. So much for relativity. My questions are these: Is there a way to alter the information traveling between a particle and its antiparticle such that the mark will be carried along? Is the act of changing the spin of the particle the mark itself on information that's always traveling between them? If you tried to simultaneously accelerate the spin of a particle and decelerated the spin of its antiparticle equally and in opposite directions, what would happen? Come on you physics people, fill me in here.

Reservoir Dogs

This past weekend I bought the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack, and I'm fairly disappointed. There are 16 tracks, but half of them are just dialogue from the movie, and most of those are just the monotone radio announcer talking about the next song that's coming up. If I wanted that kind of stuff, I'd actually listen to the radio instead of paying for a cd. It actually says that these are tracks with dialogue on the back of the CD case, but I was hoping that it would be like the Pulp Fiction soundtrack where there is a piece of cool dialogue (compared to what I got) followed by music on the same track. Not the case. This leaves only 8 music tracks, and I'm compelled to say that two of them just suck. I'd completely forgotten that "Stuck on a Feeling" was one of the tracks in the movie. Also, "I Gotchoo" is just annoying to listen to. I expected better from QT. Then again, I only paid $10.32, so I suppose that I got what I paid for. Also, this isn't going to stop me from buying the Jacky Brown soundtrack and compiling a QT dance party cd. I sort of picture a QT dance party as one with a Mexican stand off in the middle of it.