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.

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.

Amnesia

It's happened yet again. A woman said hi to me, called me by name and actually took the time to have a brief conversation with me, but I have no idea what her name is or where I knew her from. It always bothers me when people who I would view as perfect strangers appear to know me quite well. I did the usual, banal conversation, making due without using any names and not getting into any details. Odds are that I knew her from dance lessons. It's been so long since going that it seems highly plausible that she was there. Oh well, it wasn't the first time and I'm sure it won't be the last time that this happens. At least I'm sure this time that I hadn't hit on her at a party or something, that's always extra embarrassing.

My Christmas Wish

I have two wishes:
1. That the peoples of the world would (including their governments) would realize that we are all in search of a little help and therefore live by a modicum of tolerance and periodic altruism. If you see that someone really needs your help, help them, even if you have to break the rules.
2. That people would stop telling me that these are the best years of my life. The idea that it won't get any better is wholly depressing.

The Hit Parade

Wow, my life is going great right now! In fact, I think I'll take a moment to reflect on a few of the things that have made it so wonderful.
. I wasn't allowed to write the GRE because I forgot my passport at home despite the facts that I paid over $140 to take it and had all sorts of other government issued ID.
. I have an air mattress which is completely deflated because the nozzle came unglued from the rest of it. I now get to sleep on the floor, cushioned only by a few sheets. It's just like camping.
. The stair-well incident: refer back to "drinking with the profs"
. My diet is entirely composed of potatoes, carrots, coffee, corn, eggs, peas, rye flower, coffee, whole wheat bread, onions, butter, coffee, peanut butter, jam, mr noodle (50% msg), oh and coffee.
. The other day the zipper on my back pack failed, spilling my belongings and a pair of borrowed binoculars onto the icy pavement. I'm still trying to find oneof the lenses from those binoculars.
. I have exams, that I really would rather not take.
. Somehow, I'm always short of money on my one card when I really need to print something.
. Universities have consistently told me that they don't have money to fund me
. In order to lighten the load of what I'll be bringing back at the end of next semester, I'm taking so many fossils across to border, that if I'm caught, I'll certainly face a $50,000 fine and possibly up to one year in prison.
. My frying pan produces more smoke than edible food.
. Today I apparently made it clear to a highly respected member of my field that I support the black market fossil trade (which i don't - all the fossils that I purchase are legally exported from their nation or origin).
. I'm procrastinating studying for an exam that's tomorrow by writing this.
. I keep getting the distinct impression in the back of my mind that there is a god, and that he's mildly perturbed about this whole atheism thing.

Google Does it Again

I have to say that I am very pleased with Google as a company. First of all, they own this website. But other than that, the company is making available, free of charge, alot of services that people used to pay for or might not otherwise be able to exist if not for Google's financial assistance (i.e. Blogger). If you want to buy something, go to froogle. If you want the news, go to google news. for web mail, I enjoy a free gig of space thanks to g-mail. If you want to find something on the web, well, that really depends on what you're looking for. It used to be that for everything, google.com was the best choice. As a result, those of us writing papers end up with a whole lot of useless results and very little academic. But now, there is Google Scholar which searches for academic papers only. I was rather concerned that once I eventually left a University (if every) I would no longer be able to make use of the databases which the university subscribes to, to find the papers I need. But now it's free and available anywhere with an internet connection. I can see these other databases eventually going out of business or lowering their prices to remain competitive, but that's not all that bad.

More of Gelnaw's Law

Check it out. Here's an article about Webster dictionary's web site but notice the incorrect spelling in the title.
http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/top/story/0,4136,78923,00.html

The Relationship Between Science And Religion

Religion is spiritual and pedagogical
Science is secular and methodological.
The latter enhances hermeneutical thought,
The former gives meaning that some scientists sought.
Though Science’s tacit dimension does surely exist,
There need not be religion for it to subsist.
Philosophical men have wondered long,
Where the dialogue would best belong.

To ethical insight both now may lay claim.
Their paths did differ, but results are the same.
There is a problem in inferring from is to ought.
But it doesn’t have to conflict with the god that you’ve got.
Advances in theory and knowledge lead to mental satisfaction,
Whether or not you believe in divine interaction.
There is virtue in humanism you cannot ignore,
It produces Ten Commandments, minus four.

I am an Atheist that Advocates Agnosticism

The paradox:
Assume:
-There is a God that is omnipotent and omniscient
-God created all things via ordained natural laws
-Sin exists, and is not in accordance with the values of God
-God wants us to be happy, and happiness is the aim of human existence
-God punishes sinners
Conclusions from those assumptions:
-No observation of nature can be inconsistent with the existence of God
-The original conditions of the universe were set such that there would eventually be organisms aware of that being (the Anthropic Principal) and God knew this.
-Natural laws cannot be violated from within the system; one may only be placed in situations in which separate natural laws, as they have been artificially divided,
-Randomness is an illusion: knowing all of the laws and the precise position and velocity of all particles and energy negates Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal.
-Free will is an illusion: one cannot act except in accordance with natural laws whether we are aware of them or not, except in the instance of divine intervention/ miracles.
-Paradox 1: The act of sinning is therefore in accordance with and is the product of God’s natural laws, but not in accordance with God’s values.
-God knows and has always known who will and will not sin
-While Jesus could have made a difference, God still knows in advance who will and will not sin, and sin still exists.
-The rejection of Jesus as lord and savior is the invisible and unconscious consequence of natural law.
-Paradox 2: God wants us to be happy but knowingly predetermined via his non-negotiable natural laws that some would sin and therefore suffer.
-If it is therefore part of God’s values that a certain acceptable percentage not be happy, and increased happiness (though perhaps not as great as the sinless) can be attained by that percentage by continued or greater discontinuity with God’s values (e.g. via hedonism), then there is no incentive for that percentage to reduce their sin
-Paradox 3: God does not like sin but knowingly created a system by which a positive feedback loop increases it.

Calvin and Hobbes

Seems Familiar

Irony of Ironies

Sometimes the validity of Gelnaw's Law washes over me, hitting me like a wave during fair weather. Other times, it's like a tsunami. Two excellent examples: I have my ornithology Lab final next week. To study for this I need my bird book (which I haven't been using too much until now). The other night, I discovered it was missing, completely gone, as though it evaporated into the ether. In response, I went to the library and picked up a book that is actually superior. After that, I went to the zoology museum and low and behold, there was my lab book. Wow, that's like three distinctly ironic moments in one story.
Ok, now for the second example. Today is Thanksgiving in the United States. I am an American and so typically I try to do a little something for the holiday. This year I think I'll go hungry. Why? Because I'm completely out of money from my "this is not rent money" account. I recalled seeing my ballance in Denver and still having a fair amount of money. Yesterday I tried to buy fries ($2.05 CAD) and my card was declined, so I guess registering for the GRE kind of ate into that. I actually have a fair bit o' savings (thanks to Mom and Dad) but that's locked in a savings account in California and I discontinued the checking account there because I didn't want to pay a monthly fee. Foresight would have been great there. Ok, so what do I have for rations? A single potatoe, half a bottle each of mustard and ketchup, 1/5 of a bottle of ranch dressing, 1/10th of one onion, a life saver candy, 1/4 sac of flour, and 1/2 bag of brown sugar. What a Thanks Giving feast that'll make, yum! Ok, so maybe I should use some of the cash I've got for groceries. Though I think I'll have some trouble stretching $3.21. Well, Happy Thanks Giving!

GRE

Well, I spent $40 USD but It think its worth it. I postponed when I'm taking the GRE. The other day I realized that I wasn't writing it on the thrid but on the second. The second is also the day of my Ornithology Lab final. I just figured that I didn't have enough room in my brain for over 250 birds, how to recognize them, where they live, what they sound like AND the antonym of Sedulous. I've been studying for the GRE but I just don't think that it would be worth the money to write it when I've got bird info filling up all the precious little grey matter I have left. So now I'm writing it on Monday the 13th. 11 more days to study (and I don't mean 11 days to procrastinate) won't hurt either.

Drinkin' With the Profs

Ok, so last night there was a little seminar for students in Dr. lamoureux's science and religion class to learn about evolution. For this special event, Dr. Michael Caldwell was called in to help explain some of the concepts to people who have clearly never had any biology in their lives. Brilliant people I'm sure, but just no biology. Some of their questions such as "so did it go fish then monkeys then us?" only go to support my suggestion that if I have to take calculus and chemistry and English as a Paleo student, then Math, Chemistry and English majors should be forced to take at least one course of biology and one course of geology. Biology for Beginners and Rocks for Jocks. I think that this teaching method alone will go a long way to clear up the widespread misonception that "there is no evidence for evolution." Furthermore, I think that if the anti-evolution comunity is going to be so outspoken and actively recruit followers, then the evolution community ought to do the same. By the way, this has absolutely nothing to do with my religious views, I don't have problems with people who are religious and accept evolution, I just think that ignorance is perhaps the largest stumbling block in the path of the biological sciences.
After the Seminar, the profs, a bunch of paleo students and one non-paleo student went out for beers. I'd didn't pay for a single beer the whole night, and that's all right by me. I look forward to the day when I have the financial freedom to do the same for some of my students. Lamoureux, Caldwell and I had some interesting religious discussion. Basically it boiled down to accepting that we three are men of very strong belief. Caldwell and I just believe in one less god that Lamoureux does.
I also greatly appreciated the opportunity to pick Caldwell's brain about the issues with improving the Paleo program here at the U of A. From what i gather, the biggest stumbling block there is insurance. Want to take students into the field for a field school? Well, if you have more than 15 students, you would need a bus with a certified driver. Under 15 people and you need a 15 passanger van, for which you need someone with a class 4 liscence. How about if you want to teach students how to manage collections or museums, or prepare fossils for study? Well there's a limited amount of time in the curriculum, and letting students with potentially no experience handle fossils is an insurance nightmare.
On another note, I also figured out that being a man of such strong convictions, and therefore a very high level of confidence, is sexy to women. Without going into too much detail, a young lady with whom I have history, and who is currently dating someone else, had no trouble expressing the fact that she still has feelings for me. Woot! Then I figured it out; on the previous occasion that she had expressed such feelings, I had engaged in intense discussion with someone on the subject of politics. I had suspected previously that the power of word and mind were the attracting force, but last night provided supporting evidence. Of course, she was pretty drunk on both occasions, so I think it's important not to read too much into things. Also, just for clarification's sake, although she expressed feelings, we didn't do anything as the result. I know that she's seeing someone else, and I have much too strong of a superego to allow myself to overpowered by the id. That is to say, I could not ethically do anything with her. Were she my girlfriend, I would not tollerate her expressing such feelings to other men. It's the whole catagorical imperative thing. Wow, who knew I'd actually use anything from my ethics class.

SVP

SVP was great this year. As usual I missed a few of the morning talks because I was sleeping off some of the drinks from the night before. Paleo conferences are most certainly not places to get some sleep. Or rather, they aren't if you're a paleontologist. I could imagine a lot of people falling fast asleep in the dimmed halls while someone spouted jargon way above their heads. Thankfully though I was quite enthralled by the lectures and now have a much clearer idea of what I'm doing with all of this dino and bird data that I've collected. It boils down to: I have so much more to do. There was a couple of fellows who modeled the craniofacial ontogeny of the allosaurs using simple linear regression of measurements that they took using calipers. They took alot more measurements than I have, but I think that I'll take their 50 some odd different variables and apply it across taxa in order to get a better picture of the evolution of these animals. Either that or I could just use image analysis software to plot the change in shape of these skulls. In either case, I'll then use Finite element analysis to plot the amount and area of strain on the bones in the skull in a 3-D computer model based on ct scans, and see how the forces are transmitted and how it changes with a change in each of the measured variables. Then, using the concept of functional domains in the skull, I'll determine how those changes in force distribution effect each of the domains. Then if I figure out how growth rates are involved (within a phylogenetically independent context), I'll have a pretty good Idea how these animals are evolving and about the multitudinous tradeoffs involved during evolution. It'll boil down to a hell of a lot of multiple linear regressions, resulting in a model that will probably have about 50 dimensions. This way, if I ever get a partial skull, I'll be able to predict all kinds of crap about the rest of it, without ever seeing it. People with think I'm crazy and say that no-one can possibly predict all of that because of a cumulative effect of all of the deviations in the data away from an exact line. Then I'll avoid making sense out of my statements by referring them to information that they would have already known or predicted on their own and stroll out amidst a hail of questions, angry shouts and calls from starry eyed undergrads.
The last part I embellished on a bit, but I don't think that it's an unreasonable prediction.

Off to SVP

Well, once again SVP time is here. Tomorrow morning, bright and early, I hop on a plane, then a nother plane and eventually get to Denver, Colorado. This year is a bit different. I have a real purpose for being there. No, I'm not presenting. I'm schmoozing. This year I have to convince a prof through charm and wit that they can't live without me as a grad student. I even got a haircut for the occasion.

What a Load Off

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

How to Annoy a Prospective Grad Advisor

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

The Idiots Guide Reptilian Braincase Anatomy

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

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

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

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

More Dinosaur News

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

THE project

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

A belief System in Crisis

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

Wanderlust

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

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

Early mid-life crisis

Twenty years from now

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

than by the ones you did do.

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

Catch the trade winds in your sails.

Explore. Dream. Discover.

(Mark Twain)

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

Don't Fence Me In (Cole Porter)

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

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

Experiment failed

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

Field Trips

This weekend went fairly well. On Friday I hung out with Dan Gregorash and Kirsten (don't know her last name) and watched some of the best of SNL. On Saturday, the U of A paleontological society went to Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park and we looked for dinosaur bones. We found a fair bit. It was mostly hadrosaur bits though a couple of people found Albertosaur tooth fragments. One fellow even found a nice little microsite that yielded a number of Albertosaur tooth fragments, a champsasaur vert, several hadrosaur teeth, ossified tendons and a partial raptor claw. Since its a provincial park we left everything where we found it. Perhaps some year the society should arrange with a rancher to look in the badlands on his property so that we can keep the fossils.
On Sunday, I woke up at 4 am to go bird watching with my Ornithology class. We went to the beaver hill banding station where we defrosted and put up mist nets to catch passerine birds. A net left up over night even caught a great horned owl. We also went to several marshes in the area to check out the waterfowl. All in all, the weekend went pretty well.

Not Again

In today's opinion section of the Gateway there is a rather long article on why human beings are no longer evolving. I see this turning into another creation/evolution debate in the opinion section. There was one last year and it was stupid and banal then and I imagine that this one will be just as annoying. I have decided to nip this in the bud, try and stop it before it gets going. My technique will be to divert the argument. The title of the article is "Sadly, you're going to have to settle for one penis." Therefore I could talk about how placental mammals and birds are actually relatively unusual in the vertebrata for having a single penis. Never mind the fact that the majority of fish and amphibians lack such an organ all together, actually, the majority of species actually have a double wang. Snakes and lizards have a double johnson known as the hemipenis. Marsupials such as your friend and mine the common opossum (Didelphis virginiensis) have a bifurcate penis. I don't know of anybody who has examined the monotreme member but I imagine that since most of its characters are intermediate between the reptile and mammal condition, that they too would have paired parts too. Even sharks are doubly endowed. Although they lack a true penis, they have structures called claspers which they use for the transfer of gametes to the female (most fish don't have internal fertilization like sharks).

Another topic that I think I prefer is to refute several of the key points in his article. For example, the author claims that there is no longer differential reproduction in humans. Well this is simply not true. Stupid and ignorant and poor people have way more kids than the well educated. Affluent people tend to know already that bringing another child into the world is just cruel (to the child and to everyone else). I'm not saying here that being poor, stupid or ignorant means that you are necessarily the other two (I've met some well educated people in my life that are real idiots), but there is a definite correlation. Granted, stupid people do tend to eliminate themselves from the gene pool from time to time (see the Darwin Awards) but it doesn't make up for the sheer volume of kids they keep pumping out. If ignorance is bliss, then sheer stupidity must be orgasmic. As for the poverty factor, its a simple matter of compensation. In the past it was: when times are hard, the more kids you pump out the more likely a couple of them will survive. Now practically all of them are surviving and competing amongst themselves for the same resources, therefore perpetuating the cycle. But what about the genetic factor? For evolution to take place you need to have a genetic reason for increased fitness. Well, I hate to sound bigoted here, but due to their socioeconomic position, ethnic minorities tend to have a ton of kids. For example in California, there is a huge Mexican population. Because they are forced into low paying jobs, they can't afford proper schooling (educational funds distributed based on the income of the neighborhood) and so they have two strikes against them. Also because most Mexicans are also Catholics, they're already predisposed to produce prolific progeny.

Now I don't want some Catholics commenting on the site about how every sperm is sacred or some 6 day, young earth, I-don't-give-a-rat's-ass-what-the-evidence-is Creationist trying to shoot down evolution. If you want to talk about those things, you can bite my child hating, tailless mammalian butt!

WTF

What the hell have I been doing with my life. One of my favorite lines from "South Park" is "There is a time and a place for everything: College." Ok, I'm here, I've been here for three years and what the hell have I done? University years (especially the undergraduate years) are supposed to be the ones when you (dare I use this sappy line) grow as a person. The way I interpret this is that I should have at least scored a few points against me on the purity test. But no! I'm still alone, I still don't know jack, I don't have a job (or for that matter any cash), a car, a social life, I don't even keep up with the news. All I do all day is sit on my ever expanding ass and think about dinosaurs, about increasing my pathetic fossil collection, check my e-mail and occasionally watch a movie or a little porn. One of the highlights of my drab and dismal week is when I get a call from my Mom and I spend an hour convincing her that the money she's spending for my education is well spent. I appear to have the interpersonal skills of a salamander. I can't even call myself the biggest fucking nerd I know. I've lost my identity. I lost it about three years when I moved to this frigid country. It normally takes me until finals to get this bitter and spiteful at life but I guess it's just building up faster now. And you know what, I think I'll rant like this a little more often. Maybe people will actually start reading my website instead of just seeing that it's about paleontology and fucking off to go see which celebrity was arrested again or which movie crashed in the box offices.

Copyrights to fossils

I've been trying to find out if there are any laws pertaining to the right to copy fossils or copy other people's copies of fossils. Ethically, it seems to me that if you make a copy of a fossil from the original, then you should be able to disseminate or sell those copies as you wish. However, if you are the purchaser of that cast, then it seems to me that you should need permission to make a mold and further casts from it, particularly if you are doing this for profit or in such a way that would hurt the income of the owner of the original fossil.
However, as somebody who would very much like to make my own copies of a large number of fossils without paying royalties for them, I would hate to get sued for such practices. The problem that I see is that casts from legitimate institutions with original fossils are extremely expensive, much the same way that movie and music distributors gouge customers for their copy-written products. Thus, people are tempted to buy or sell essentially pirated fossils. The solution as I see it is a reduction in price from the owner of the original and clear copyright laws pertaining to fossils and other antiquities. I understand that it is very expensive to produce a cast of a fossil (the mold actually being the most expensive part usually), but if many are sold, then it reduces the unit cost in terms of the production of the mold. Another complicating factor is that many paleontologists would prefer to have exclusive intellectual rights to their fossils, but choose to sell display copies at high prices to prevent people from writing papers from purchased casts. Thus, clear policies regarding fossils as intellectual property is also important.
All these logistics will only bog down the scientific process, and is an unfortunate side effect of the popularization and comercialization of paleontology.

Assumptions

Several times in my life I have been confronted with the falseness of one of my assumptions that I had long held to be true. For example, when I was a kid, my parents and several others (fossils dealers) told me that Oreodons were a variety of three toed horse, about the size of a medium size dog. Last year I found out that they were not horses, and have never been considered horses by any serious paleontologist and have since heard that they are just a group of ungulates more closely allied to deer (although people used to think pigs). Well, this weekend another one of my long held assumptions came crumbling down. I had known for a while that a wide variety of fossils come from Morocco and have been able to even identify Moroccan fossils by sight from some distance. Some of the more common items that have grabbed my interest are the very large shark teeth, mosasaur teeth and dinosaurs. All of these are found during phosphate mining. Another fauna found there is of devonian age and consists of a wide variety of trilobites, conodonts, ammonites and nautiloids (orthoceras).
I had heard from some of the other paleo people here at the U of Alberta that palaeophis (a large sea snake) vertebrae were also being found. Naturally, I wanted some (a "snake vert" had once bought as a kid turned out to be from a kangaroo - bought from the same people who told me the lies about oreodons) so I turned to the internet. I found some at Indiana9 fossils for $1.00 each. The label said that they were from the Ouled Abdoun basin, which is in Khouribga, Morocco. It also said that they were of Eocene age. Ok, so I did some checking and it turned out that every one of the shark teeth I have from that region are also of the same age. The mosasaur teeth are however obviously of the late Cretaceous. This means that a lot of labels on my collection in So. Cal. Are quite wrong. Well, I did some further checking and I found several references to that region bearing paleocene rocks. And talking with Caldwell, found out that nobody is really sure whether or not there is a conformable succession or not. I think Caldwell is really hoping that the palaeophis turn out to be Cretaceous (There was apparently a very large palaeophis of Cretaceous age found in Morocco ).
Another assumption that I had was that since I hadn't seen these for sale much that they would be rare and that $1.00 a piece was a good price. Much to my dismay, after I had ordered all 33 at Indiana9 fossils, I found them for only $0.25 each at paleoguy. So I canceled my order from the former, and I think I'll get about 100 from the latter. In the end, I'll actually be paying less for more fossils. Which is always a plus.

Digital Photography

This summer I took alot of pictures with my digital camera. I thought that I had saved those pictures. Apparently i was wrong. Because I take so many pictures there were two times this summer at which I unloaded my memory cards. Once was onto G-mail. Hey, they give you a gig of space, why not use it. The second time was when my boss allowed me to use her computer for a rather long time to try to get the pictures onto a cd. At the time i verified the pics by opening the drive in My computer and they were there. however when i got back here to Alberta, I looked at the same cd, and not a single one of my pictures was there. There were pictures there, they just weren't the ones I took. My boss had given me a cd with some pics of a dig that I was on already on it. Also, not only had I apparently failed to write those pictures (including alot of scenery, alot of fossils/ museum exhibits and some people that I'd acually like to remember, but I though that it would have been a good idea to transfer some of the photos of field school from g-mail to the cd. As such, I ended up deleting about half of the pictures that I had taken at field school, thinking that I had just written it to cd! God is clearly punishing me for being a paleontologist.

How the Money Goes

My goodness I'm spending alot lately. And as a man characteristically frugal, I have spent quite alot. Normally, getting money from me is like draiwng blood from a stone. However, despite the fact that I took out $200 from a cash machine a week ago and sold three text books for a total of $140, I only have $65 left in my wallet! Where did all that money go you might ask? The same day that I sold my books (all for 1/3 less than what I paid for them) I bought a statistics text for $80. Today alone I gave up roughly $50 at the bookstore for handouts, readings and notes for my Science and Religion course as well as $7 for a couple of 3-ring binders and forked out $40 for the lab work and photocopied text book for Paleobotany. And I've only put $5 on my one card. Ok, that explains away$182 of the $275 spent, but what about the rest of it? Perishables- those things that are quite ephemeral and therefore definately do not hold their value. And believe it or not, my boredom has driven me to actually spend money ( a fair amount too) on socializing. I went to a dance on saturday ($7) and was convinced to take swing lessons from that campus swing dance club. The first lesson is $20 and each following one is $5, and there is a $10 annual membership fee. So last night alone I spent $30 for a one hour dance lesson. Ok that brings us up to $219. I know that I spent $4 on laundry, but where on earth did the rest of it go? Have I really spent that much on Food? Could I have actually spent $56 on food in only a week!? Not possible. Ok, maybe I spent up to $30 on food, as I'm stocking up on longlasting stuff like laundry detergent, a tooth brush and toothpaste, but what the hell did I do with the rest of the damn money? Why the hell can't I account for roughly $25!?
Ok, this may seem like a piddling little sum to those of you reading this, but I don't have a job and the one I was hoping to get has just been given to someone else. Not having income sucks! I can't imagine how bad off Allan must be with roughly the same expenses and having not had income all summer.

snake phylogeny

This year's major project is on the phylogeny of snakes. Never mind the fact that I never finished (or even got near finishing) last year's project. Thankfully, being at the U of A means that I have the guidance of Dr. Michael Caldwell, one of the guys deeply embroyled in the snake phylogeny debate. It also means that it is becoming abundantly apparent that guys with way more experience and skill in comparative anatomy have tackled this topic to a degree of depth far greater than I could possibly do within the scope of this project. However, it aught to be very educational. In other words I'm going to get schooled bigtime on this one.

Juvenile Mosasaurs

The other night it occurred to me that I had never seen a specimen identified as a juvenile mosasaur. That's because none exist (actually there's a jaw bone that was misidentified for a while, but that appears to be it). For something as relatively common as mosasaurs with as wide of a geologic range and diversity of species and genera, it seemed odd to me that none would be known. After all, even the elusive T. rex had subadult specimens known and even some that would really count as juveniles. I then though to myself that there would be several reasons for why this would happen. First of all, a smaller animals is less likely to preserve. However, smaller animals, with much more delicate bones than those of a mosasaur (eg fish and a few birds) have been readily preserved in the Niabrara, Kansas chalk. Perhaps there were just very few jouveniles swimming around in environments where they could be preserved. Interspecific cannibalism is certainly known for mosasaurs so it stands to reason that a little guy would just get eaten up such that the vast majority of the population is composed of animals much too large to be preyed upon. This sort of thing is seen in crododiles where juveniles are quite inconspicuous and the adults live for a very long time once too large to be eaten by most predators. The fear of being preyed upon also results in a behavioral reason for a lack of preservation. Were a young mosasaur to spend the majority of his young life in estuaries (an environment quite poor for preservation and seen much less commonly than deltas or open seas) and only venture into open water once too large to subsist on the small estuarine fauna, then that too would explain the lack of early ontonogenic stages. The last idea would be that these reptiles gave live birth as some variety of snake do as did ichthyosaurs ( I don't know about plesiosaurs). Snakes typically give birth to a large number of very small young, but ichthyosaurs and modern marine mammals only birth one comparatively large young at a time. It could be then that the young mosasaur reached adulthood rather quickly, decreasing the probability of leaving juvenile fossils. Of course the truth probably lies in a combination of several of these factors.

Gelnaw's Law

Although Gelnaw's Law has been deleted from Wikipedia, it still survives right now in a couple of online dictionary type websites that derived their definitions from the open source encyclopedia. In order to commemorate eminent demise in anonymity, I have found a couple of historical examples of Gelnaw's Law in action.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, had his wife Martha put the toothpaste on his toothbrush for him every night.
While studying theater at the Pasadena Playhouse, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman (Classmates) were voted least likely to succeed in show business. Along the same lines, John Murray Anderson's Dramatic school in New York sent a young Lucille Ball home because she was "too shy" to be an actress.
Movie star W.C. Fields was so suspicious of his girlfriends that he hired detectives to follow them around and see if they were cheating. One girl ended up marrying the detective hired to follow her.
The Earl of Cardigan, who became famous for sending British Calvary to their pointless deaths in the famous "Charge of the Light Brigade" died some years later from falling off a horse.
Joseph Murray, who founded the Irish League of Decency to promote censorship, died from a heart attack after watching his first nude scene on Irish TV.
My source for this information is a calendar of stupid things through history which does not site its own sources.

University level unintelligence

Buying books from the university bookstore is never fun. Crowds of people lining up to buy overpriced books. Yesterday there had been a whole pile of text books for my Stat class in Subtitles, the used books store, but today there were none, leaving me rather annoyed and in need of a quick alternative. Seeing that the price of a new text with SPSS software was about $160 I decided to try to buy from an individual rather than the store. But since I was there and had cash, I bought the course book for my science and religion class. The woman at the cash register was an excellent example of garbage in; garbage out computing. With tax the book was $15.12. I gave a twenty and got $5.88 back. Anybody with any brains at all should have noticed that you shouldn't get a 5 back from 20 if the price was over 15. Whatever, I wasn't going to point this out. Later I saw that she had some how hit $2.00 before the $20.00 which meant that she still gave me the wrong change from what she entered. Whatever, I bought a chicken turnover with my small windfall.

goings on

I think I may soon become a stinky, unenthusiastic, paleontologically obsessed trogladite (as many of those things go together). I guess somebody was having fun, but today the only shower in my apartment is broken and there is a sign on the door saying that the whole bathroom is out of order. Without a shower I am left with two options: become rather smelly or use showers in the locker-rooms on campus. As I have never used the campus showers before (always preferring showering at home) I can only imagine how bad it is. Hopefully not too bad 'cause I need to pick up this weekend.
As for unenthusiastic, everybody's been asking me what I did this summer and for the sake of saving time, each time I tell the story, it gets shorter and shorter. Unlike most fish stories, what I did on my summer vacation is rapidly becoming very uninteresting. I suppose that eventually people will be able to tell how uninteresting it is even before they ask, thereby saving much time and apathy all around.
I tried to identify my new dinosaur claw when I got home but to my dismay The Dinosauria wasn't much help. In fact, I'm starting to wonder if it even is from a dinosaur. It is very weakly recurved and has no perceptable flexor tubercle, but it is much too long and narrow to be a pedal ungual (I think). My computer is a piece of crap right now so I can't unload my pictures from my digital camera. I suppose I could delete one of the superfluous pics on the camera but I am reluctant. I guess I'll have to wait a while on that identification.

Fossils

I have finally received my fossils from the middle east. Stacey brought me 4 medium sized theropod teeth, probably from Deltadromeus, a Carcharodontosaurus tooth, a Spinosaurus tooth and a mosasaur tooth and a theropod claw (probably from an ornithomimid). All of the teeth are in excellent condition with all of the points intact with at most minor but invisible repairs. The deltadromaeus teeth are each about 2 cm long, the Carcharodontosaurus tooth is about 4 or 5 cm and the Spinosaurus tooth is about 10 cm. For these I paid $100.00 canadian dollars. As I am obsessed with the value of things, I checked out ebay to see what my new collection might be worth here in north America. A similarly sized but inferior quality collection was for sale for $250.00 US dollars while another seller with a large Carcharodontosaur tooth but smaller Spinosaur tooth was selling the two for $299.00 US dollars. I certainly got my money's worth. I know from experience that the mosasaur tooth would sell retail for between $15 (trade show) and $40 (mall rock shop) USD. But what if I were to try and buy these individually? At FossilMall.comhttp://www.fossilmall.com/index.htm I saw deltadromeus teeth for about $45 each and spinosaur teeth for $250+ each. And I have yet to see an ornithomimid claw for sale anywhere.
As a matter of fact, i have no recollection of mention of any ornithomimids from north Africa ever! While writing this, I've done a quick check of the literature with Georef and have come up with Elaphrosaurus which apparently occurs in North America and Africa but is late jurrasic in age and is found in the Tendaguru beds of East Africa, specifically Tanzania as well as elements from Tegana Formation, Province de Kasr-es-Souk, Morocco. It is known from fragmentary postcranial remains and has recently been allied with the ceratosauria not the ornithomimosauria. So either I've miss-identified the fossil, it is a claw from Elaphrosaurus or there could possibly be an ornithomimid from north Africa which nobody has previously noted. However, having only one claw would make it impossible to correcly identify it, especially if there is conflict righ now over the affinity of Elaphrosaurus. I'll have to check what elements have been ascribed to that genus. I'll be contacting Paul Sereno of the Chicago Field Museum to see what he thinks.
If you were wondering why I haven't gone off about the fish I received from Lebanon it is because i simply don't know enough about them. From Matt's e-mail I had anticipated a single large plate with a rather spectacular fish. Instead, I received several smaller fish plates, a shrimp, a cray fish and an ophiroid. While not particularly spectacular compared to much of the material available on the market here in Canada and the US, it is nice to have some fish from the late cretaceous. The ones here in North America are mostly from the Eocene of the Green River fm in Wyoming.

the world on its head

For the first time in my life, planning isn't going as well as I had planned. Craig Dylke is fond of saying that planning is for communists and school girls. I on the other hand have often said that with good information, events and their outcomes will be possible. The "good information" part though is critical. For the longest time, since my second year of high school (7 years ago) I've had kind of a crush on a particular girl. However, my crippling shyness and the fact that I moved 3000 miles away prevented me from ever doing anything about it. We however remained friends and I had always figured that if I moved back to Southern California, I could use the friendship as a springboard for a relationship. Poor foolish me. Last week I called her just to see how things were going when she told me some shocking news. She was gay, a lesbian. She had tried dating guys but found girls better. Well, so much for that plan! After hanging up, I noticed dull pain throughout my left arm, the sure sign of a broken heart.
Look on the bright side, I thought to myself, I can better concentrate on someone else. I had hooked up with a girl at a party only two days before leaving Edmonton for field school and then for South Dakota and figured that things there were promising. After all, in her e-mails to me she had given me a stupidly lovable nick name, a good sign if ever I saw one. She had however neglected to mention that she was seeing someone else. So much for that plan too.
This is also the first time in my life that I'm not certain of where exactly I want to be one year from now. Since Jr. High I had known that I wanted to study paleontology at the U of Alberta. Of course at the time I thought that there were closer ties with the Royal Tyrrell and that there would be dinosaur specialist here (but that's another issue). Now that I need to start picking a grad school. I'm much less certain. I need to take the GRE's and schmooze with potential advisors and see what I'm even going to specifically study next year. I also feel like I need to produce some sort of master work that I can present while I'm applying as sort of the kicker.
I had always planned to be happy and successful at 25. The domino's need to start falling into place. I need a new plan of action. It seems like I'm turning my life on its head, but I need to step it into high gear.
And for somebody who's had 4 complete meals in as many days, i'm surprised how lucid I am.

Paleontology delirium

As is sometimes the case when I travel, I caught some sort of stomach bug. This combined with sleeping on a very hard floor (not mattress yet) resulted in quite vivid dreams that frequently crossed partly into the waking world. As such, last night the collective finds of Charles H. And George F. Sternberg reeled through my drab apartment. Opened plaster jackets with columns of vertebrae exposed, mosasaurs, titanotheres, xiphactinus, dinosaurs, oreodons, etc. These particular visions were undoubtedly the result of the fact that I've been reading the biography of the Sternberg family of fossil hunters titled "Dinosaur Dynasty." I suppose that it's a good thing that I wasn't reading Fight Club or other such work. As much as I enjoy paleontology, I hope never to ruin it again by including it in any fever induced delirium.