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!