SVP

Well, now that exams are over, I have time to update my site. Last week was the infamous meeting for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. In addition to much frivolity there were some very interesting talks and posters presented. Several come to mind right off the bat. One of the more interesting talks was given by Nick Longrich, a fellow that I was privilaged enough to discuss problems in paleontology with over the summer while both of us were at the Royal Tyrrell Museum. His talk "Archaeopteryx: two wings or four?" discussed his observations that archaeoptery posessed a set of flight aiding feathers on its hind limbs. Much of his observations came from the berlin specimen and its counterblock which also preserved many excellent feather impressions. While these leg feathers were not as extensive as those of the forelimb which have been classically recognised, it does show that the four wing design is basal to all birds, even if not as expressed as in microraptor. Other observations on hip structure have also shown that it was infact more possible for birds to glide with the limbs in a splayed position than previously thought.
Another excellent talk was on the changing views on evolution and paleontology in the works of Mark Twain. There were also several excellent talks on ceratosaurs, and on new species of Allosaurs, as well as a jouvenille allosaur specimen preserving most of the skull. An intreguing poster demonstrated that the gorgosaur skull at the Childrens Museum of Pitsburg shows what appears to be a tumor within its brain case.
The theme of this years dinosaur talks however seemed to be CT scanning. Nearly everybody is trying to CT scan all of their fossils. While this is very interesting technology, I question the necessity of such expensive techniques. dozens of people made references to how they used extremely expensive software, normally reserved for the movie industry, to make their 3-D models. The set up costs alone are astronomical. A couple of guys made 3-D models of a dynonychus arm so that they could demonstrate how it moved. The didn't however have time to measure the accuracy of their techniques by reproducing the methods with other extant animals. Therefore, their results may be accurate, but we can't be sure. Despite all of this, dozens of people flocked to ask them questions simply because of the cool factor inherent in their work. While I commend dinosaur science for being the first to use such techniques, I think that hte paleontologyical comunity should realize that computing power should not limit the quality of research being done, particularly if the computing is done at the expence of more inclusive research methods.

Kill Bill

Quintin Tarantino's 4th movie, "Kill Bill" is absolutely spectacular. The Village Voice called it the most violent american movie ever made, and while I don't necessarily agree with that distinction, it is at least one of the most violent. Limbs, heads, scalps, eyes and massive quantities of squirting blood were all removed from bodies. I find this somewhat amusing because it's a Miramax movie which means that it was in fact made by the Disney corporation. As if Disney didn't have enough problems as it is. Noticably lacking from the movie however were numerous drug references (disney influence, i don't know?). But even without the heroin flowing as freely as the blood, Kill Bill is an incredible black comedy. Where other movies would have some kind of sharp quib towards an offender of a main character, Kill Bill had a sharp blade in the process of dismemberment. I highly recomend this movie to anyone with a morbid sense of humour. If you think death is funny, go see Kill Bill. Then go out immediately afterwards and buy the sound track. Allan did, I copied it and we both think that the sound track is awesome.

SVP

Beginning wednesday morning the this year's meeting for the society of vertebrate paleontology. This will be my second such conference. This year's meeting is in St. Paul Minisota. Unfortunately I'm not quite ready to present a talk or even a poster at the conference, unlike several of my peers who are a year ahead of me. A group of five undergrad students from the U of A are going. We're all flying from Edmonton International to some airport in Winnepeg, Manitoba. If all goes correctly, there will be a car waiting for us there and we'll drive through the night and arive in St. Paul hopefully by 7:30 so that we can register and get a good seat for some of the first talks. My Advisor, Dr. Caldwell, who I have never had any intention of stabbing, should be giving a talk that morning.
In all honesty, a conference is just an excuse for over a thousand scientists to spend practically a whole week getting drunk in the eavening, then shmoozing and dropping names all day. At least that's the plan. Mostly I'll be trying to get my name out there and try to get some friendly contacts who wouldn't mind sending me some reprints of theirs. I am particularly interested in talking to Gregory S. Paul, who has yet to respond to the letter that I sent him.

Help TV

A couple of weeks ago, Allan, Joel and I were quite bored and happened to be watching a program called Help TV, in which people call or write in for advice. Every once in a while, an e-mail address would come up for people to write in to. Well, Allan thought it would be funny to write in something along the lines of "I'm a chronic masterbater, what should I do?" and sent it in. I jokingly remarked "I think that my prof is steeling my research, should I just stab him?" which Allan, unbeknownst to me, wrote in with my e-mail address for reply. The following is the reply that I received just the other day:

From: "Lindsay Elleker"
Subject: Help!TV Reply to your Question
Urgent New
Will, Please don't "stab him"!
Instead, set an appointment time with him (that's good for both of you
with no distractions or interruptions). Rather than "confronting" him
maybe just ask him his thoughts: re: your research project and how
credit for the project's results is to work in the future. Do this in a
non-threatening yet collaborative way (Read "Getting to Yes" by Ury &
Fischer). Be sure to remain open-hearted, non-defensive and curious. DO NOT ACCUSE HIM AND NO THREATS! Explore all options - his and
yours!!
From, Nancy Hack
Chartered Mediator
Help!TV

Since this reply was several weeks after it was initially sent in, I was very tempted to reply:
Sorry, too late.

P.S. Once more for clarification, I did not acutally write the original e-mail, not have I ever or will I ever commit or conspire to commit murder.

jokes

What do fat people do in the summer?

Stink


What is brown and white and has no mother?


Bambi!!!


Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things.
---
One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor.....
---
Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the
bad girls live.
---
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman,"Where's the
self-help section?" She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
---
What if there were no hypothetical questions?

Where do forest rangers go to "get away from it all?"
---
What do you do when you see an endangered animal eating an
endangered plant?
Why do they lock gas station bathrooms? Are they afraid someone
will clean them?

Why do they put Braille on the drive-through bank machines?
---
What was the best thing before sliced bread?

Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?
---
Whose cruel idea was it for the word "Lisp" to have "S" in it?
---
Why is it called tourist season if we can't shoot at them?

Movie Magic

So Craig Dylke came up to Edmonton from Calgary and he brought Trogador with him. As a result, he, Daniel and I spent the weekend getting footage for the Royal Tyrrell staff video (special edition) which will be coming out this chrismtas. Alot of it was inside joke stuff so not a whole lot of other people would get it, and we're not exactly great film makers, so I'm not sure anybody but the museum staff will think that it's that funny. It was fun to make, and gave me an excuse to go to west Ed. Mall, so I can't complain.

G Ring

last night at a keg party with White Mud Drive (a great local Edmonton Band) I was introduced to G ring. G ring is great, and R2-D2 thinks so too. Yeah, that's right I said R2-D2. G ring: spread the word.

war

The Galileo space craft has outlived expectations and has provided nasa scientists with visions from a time when there weren't problems converting metric and emperial measurements, and space probes didn't smash 8 feet into the planets surface. Galileo's only major problem was that it's main antenna didn't deploy and they had to use a secondary one which was much smaller. Yet sadly, the space craft is scheduled for termination. It has been told to crash into Jupiter and collect some data along the way as long as it can. Nasa engineers have carefully planned this controlled self distruction so that the pile of heavy metals and plutonium doesn't crash into Juropa, the one other heavenly body in this solar system likely to contain some form of life. Of course, this will probably get screwed up so instead of what was planned, some little alien fish is going to get squished with a piece of radioactive space junk. Hopefully it'll be an intelligent species and this attack will be taken as the first act of interstellar terrorism by the evil planet NASA. Before long, alian ships will begin knocking out our infrastructure and then declare themselves the winners but refuse to leave. Hey, at least it's more interesting sounding than just burning up in a poisonous atmosphere.

Archi

The idea of cloning dinosaurs is a pretty old one. There are even kids nowadays who have only seen the third Jurassic Park movie. Unfortunately, the cloning of dinosaur from ancient DNA is complete science fiction. The half life of DNA is only a few thousand years and would degrade into complete junk before even a million years was up. Hense, there is no usable dinosaur DNA in the world. But wait, aren't birds the descendants of dinosaur, and aren't crocodilians similar to their ancestors? The Edmonton Journal reported today that a lab will be trying to genetically engineer a basal bird by essentially turning back the evolutionary timeline and reactivate the dormant dinosaur genes. The article made it sound like this lab will be mass producing Tyrranosaurus rex's for all to see, but the truth lies elsewhere. There is no way to recreate a dinosaur that existed millions of years ago. Even the most skilled genetic engineers wouldn't know what code they were working towards, and so could not create an exact duplicate. It would be possible to eventually make something that is indescernable from a dinosaur or basal bird, but it isn't the same as cloning.
I happen to know that this isn't a new idea at all. Developemental biologists have long been able to induce the produciton of distinctly ancestral characters in bird. There was an experiment in the 80's described in Stephen J. Gould's "Hen's teeth and Horse's toes," which illustrates that the tissue from the jaw of a chicken can be forced to grow teeth if the dernal layer from the jaw of a mouse was spliced ontop of it, and it's inserted into a growth medium (in this case the growth medium was the eyes of another mouse). The dentin producing genes in the mouse were still active and that was all that was needed to kick start the produciton of teeth in the bird jaw. It was shown that one could make the tibia and fibula the same length (a feature of dinosaurs and archaeopteryx) by inserting a mica plate in between them and not allowing the fibula from taking all of the nutrients from the tibia. Lots of experiments have been done with mice which increases the number of vertebrae in the tail, which could potentially be used to creat the long bony tail of archaeopteryx. As for the fused wing instead of the hand; there is a type of bird of currently unknown relation, called the Hoatzin or Guyanna fowl. This national bird of Guyanna hatches from its egg with unfused fingers and claws on the ends of its digits. Young hoatzin's use these claws to climb branches and escape predators until they start to develope primary flight feathers, at which time the fingers begin to fuse. if one were to keep the fingers from fusing, then you would have a clawed bird that's a weaker flier.

Gelnaw

My name is William Gelnaw. The last name is pretty rare so there is a good chance that if that's your last name too, then you are related to me. Anybody else who is reading this should know that the Gelnaw's aren't exactly a close knit clan. I have absolutely nothing to do with the Aimee Gelnaw that is an advocate for homosexual rights. My grandfather is Herald Gelnaw and his brother is Earl Gelnaw. Those are the only two who have ever done any meaningful research into the family history, or at least, that I know of. My Dad, Bill Gelnaw is a fencer, so if somebody has reached this site in error because you were searching for the scores of the West Coast division, the PCC's, or just about any open epee tournament in southern California, don't worry, it's an honest mistake.
If your last name happens to be Gelnaw or some close variation there of, leave a comment, I'd be happy to hear from you.

research proposal, part 1

In my analysis, I will measure size of the origin and insertion points in the skulls of theropods, compares those to skull strengths and positions of the jaw joint relative to the tooth row, then a phylogenetically independently analyze the results for statistically significant trends in theropods evolution. I intend to use the modern American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) and various non-migratory birds as morphological analogues. I also intend to identify similar patterns in crocodilian evolution and use them as a control group to test the validity of my results. To do this, I am compiling illustrated reconstructions of theropods skulls from the literature, then measuring the area of all of the fenestrae in the skulls and the total lateral and dorsal area of the skulls using Scion Image software. This will produce a spreadsheet with the absolute and relative areas of the infra and super temporal fenestae, as well as the orbits, anorbital fenestae and nares. I will also measure the area of the antorbital fossa and the narial fossa. Once I have this data, it is simple to find correlations between these areas, which can be fed into phylogenetically independent analysis in order to see if these are true evolutionary trends.
After that, assuming that a line of best fit can be applied to the tooth row, I will plot points on the tooth row in the x/y plane then find then use the arcsin of the slope of that line to find the angle of the tooth row relative to the horizontal axis. I can then use imaging software to rotate the image so that the tooth row is horizontal. From this I can then measure the distance vertically between the jaw joint and the tooth row as well as the inclinations of the major axis of each of the laterally facing fenestae, the angles between the nuchal crest, the squamosal and the jaw joint. In this position, I can also measure the eccentricity of the fenestrae in terms of ellipses with the same area and find the center of each fenesta. I can then find the angle of the inclination from the jaw joint to the center of each fenestra.
In the dorsal view, I can simply make the long axis of the skull horizontal to make these measurements.
following blogs will relay the imporance and the use of each of these measurements.

Beggars

I'm a sucker for charity, or for a good deal so when people come to my door I'm naturally inclined to listen to them. It's a good thing that Joel and Allan aren't so giving. For the first time in a month, somebody wrang our door bell. In fact two people wrang our door bell in the same day. The first guy was selling cards for Domino's Pizza. Essentially, buy tweny six dollars worth of pizza and get free break sticks. This is not such a hot deal, but there is a good chance that we would be ordering pizza sometime in the future, so it might have been a good deal. Hey, free bread sticks. Joels response: "I'm not giving you almost thirty bucks for a piece of paper and assume that you're not robbing me!" But, once an idea was planted in the heads of the masses, the craving for pizza set in. Not five minutes after the domino's guy left, Allan ordered a single extra large pizza for all of us from the "Funky Pickle" restaurant for a whopping total of $32.50. Even better, when he tipped the delivery lady a buck fifty, she gave him his change back. In other words, she chose not to get a tip.
The next person who came to our door was lucky enough to get me answering the door. It was a guy representing a battered women's shelter, asking for donations. He offered to sell me stuff that I didn't particularly need or want so I just offered to give him cash (essentially to go away). I though that I had a five in my wallet so I opened it up and saw that all I had was American money and twenties, and there was no way I was going to give him a twenty, so I told him that I only had Canadian tire money. The bastard had looked into my wallet and had the gall to say "You've got at least a twenty in there" so I explained that I'd only wanted to donate about $10 max. So the prick offered to give me change, except that it would be actual coinage. I declined and dug around in my pockets for whatever change I had; about $1.50, so asked Joel for some coin and ended giving the guy about $4.50 for his time. Buy the way, I owe Joel three bucks. God damn, I'm cheap.

Coelurus

Those of you who know me are familiar with my longstanding research project. This is the one that I've been working on for years and have yet to actually write up a single paper on. Mostly this is because the direction of the research project keeps expanding and changing direction. Right now, one of the primary directions that I'm following is to accumulate a mass of diagrams of the skulls of theropod dinosaurs and then use those to do a morphometric analysis of the temporal fenestrae and possibly also the attachment sites for the pterygoidius muscles. I will then use this data to do phylogenetically independent analysis of the trends in dinosaur evolution to see if there are any trends worth noting. I will hopefully be able to describe the mechanism by which the birds inherited a brain tremendously larger for their body size than their dinosaurian ancestors. Much of this has to do with rapid variation in body size. The smallest theropod dinosaurs known are at least ten times larger than the largest of the first birds. To do this analysis correctly, it is necessary to survey a wide variety of size ranges. In my searches, I happened to come upon reports of a dinosaur name coelurus and several other closely related coelurosaurians which appear to have very complete skulls. The problem with this is that there are no diagrams of these skulls in the literature. One would think that a diagram of a dinosaur skull would be a sure fire way to get one's article into a scientific journal, yet nobody seems to have jumped at this opportunity. Thus, unless I go to Yale and to Thanksgiving Point, Utah with my digital camera, it seems unlikely that I'm going to get the images that I need. This dilemma is particularly irksome because the coelurosaurs are some of the most birdlike of the Jurassic dinosaurs. Since the birds had already evolved in the mid Jurassic, as much as 120 million years ago, that's 50 million years before velociraptor and deinonychus, the dinosaurs popular culture labels as the ancestors of the birds. Unfortunately the selection of Triassic dinosaurs seems feebly limited, with only a few varieties of coelophysis, eoraptor, herrerosaurus and a few others (all of which display very few bird-like characteristics) to represent true bird ancestors.

Fed up

FedEx feeds off of commerce like humanity is a parasite on god. Or perhapd, a better analogy, FedEx is like a phoetus. I don't mean that it will eventually grow into something productive, quite possibly it will grow into something horrendously evil which will eventually be remembered as a blight on human kind. But I digress. It is like a phoetus, conceived in a test tube, because it feeds on a host source and experiences nothing but steady sustained growth. The host, or parent, or modern instant commerce, continues to feed it at its own expense. People cough up over fifty dollars just to get a package of documents overnight, documents that will probably never get read. People send gifts the day before holidays and society suffers while fed ex grows. Commerce is under the impression that if it aborts its phoetus, then it's line will die with it. But just like organisms, perhaps, if the line will die without this one investment in its genetic code, then perhaps that line deserves to be annihilated. After all, that is the nature of evolution. Instead, those that hedge bets will be the survivors. Doing things most economically while remaining flexible is the key to surviving catastrophe. FedEx is like a thin wooden dowel in place of the spine of commerce. If it breaks, the host/ parent will live for a while, but it may not survive long enough to spawn off another messenger to fill the void.
Conserve Commerce diversity

for sociopathocracy

Autopsy
(see comments from blog dated Sept 10, 2003)

ebay

There are so many things that I could potentially buy from ebay that could potentially make my life easier or more fulfilling. But sadly, even with the modern miracle that is the internet, and its counter part FedEx, I am still incapable of reaping such benifits. No, you can't buy sex on ebay now. I'll give you a for instance. The other day Joel, Allan and I decided it would be pleasant to buy a half pound bag of unsearched, uncut emeralds on line. Not because we necessarily like them as gems but because they facinate us as two geology minded folk and a chemist. Instead of simply being able to have them shipped to our residence here in Canada, due to the complications of paypal, I instead had to send them to my parrents in California, and have them ship them to me at further expense. There have been other times where I have ordered books on half.com which were sent to my parents in California only to wait for my return during the summer. When it came time to go back to school, I found that the books were too numerous and too heavy to take on the plane, so I was forced to leave them at home, thereby depriving me of such titles as "predatory dinosaurs of the World" by Gregory S. Paul, among other great technical works. Recently I have been fortunate enough to find a copy of "Dinosaur Systematics" a book which I was prevented from buying from Dan Spivak at the Royal Tyrrell Museum by one of my coworkers who happened to start one hour before me. Yet, as I look at the astounding price of only $14, I am reminded of the additional costs associated with actually getting this book to me.
Another great example is climbing gear. I figured that if I bought climbing shoes online it would be alot cheaper than going to the store, particularly if I bought them used, which brings down the price by about $100. Trust me, I'm cheaper than Jack Benny, this sort of thing is important to me. I figured I'd go to the mall and try on a whole bunch of different pairs, even rent several from the university climbing center before actually buying some, just to make sure that I got a pair that I would like. After all, who wants to buy a product sight unseen. Yet once again, I am faced witht he dillema of how to actually get this money saving product to me.
In short: I hate PAYPAL and I loath Ebay

search, i dare you

lesbian, tits, ass, beaver, pussy, vagina, kissing, bukkake, hentai, strait, bi, sex, sexual, sexy, boobs, porn, pornography, twins, s&m, porn star, first time, fuck, virgin, veteren, twat, coed, sorority, jugs, melons, latina, twink, asian, japanese, ebony, black, blond, school girl, dyke, bush, carpet muncher, ass, booty, buns, butt, shocker, hooker, hore, hottie, cunt, vulva, honey pot, anal, vaginal, oral, blow job, rim job, muff, muff diving, stinky bearded clam, pink taco, barely legal, bang bus, only 18, bare pussy, stripper, nude, nudity, nudist colony, exhibitionist, peep show, shower scene, lolita, masterbation, movies, video, amateur, interracial, golden shower, milf, pics, pix, xxx, cheerleader, bigtits, hardcore, young, toys, girl on girl, busty, lust, gangbang, groupsex, orgy, voyeur, teen, threesome, fetish etc.

This is to all of the by now disappointed and probably angry 15 year olds out there, happy hunting.
(I only wanted more searches for my sight =-)

I'm not sure

If it's sad or funny when the door to the cafiteria reads "no lab coats please"

Irritator

Irritator is one of the only theropod specimens from Brazil, a country which Joel and I believe to produce some descent gems, but no descent people. The scientists who named the darn dinosaur so named it because of the feeling experienced when they realized that the snout had been artificially lenthened by the person selling it in order to increase its selling value. The paper in which it is described was artificially lengthened to make it seem more readable. But in both cases, its just anoying. In all of the diagrams of irritator, not once is a scale bar used to indicate the actual size of the fossil. Instead, they say that the possible length of a complete skull is 84 cm. Also, their classification or irritator leaves much wanting. First of all, they classified it as a hitherto unknown branch of maniraptora, phylogenetically close to dromaeosaurus and archaeopteryx on the basis of the size of the supratemporal fenestrae. This was after they classified it among the theropods on the basis that it has 11 out of the 40 defining characterists of that group. Another problem that I have with it is that they called it the only nonavian theropod from south america: What about Carnotaurus, Herrerosaurus, Eoraptor, etc?! All of those were found before irritator.
My problem with their placement of irritator in the maniraptora stems from several things. First of all, they base much of their analysis on the size and position of the temporal fenestrae. The infratemportal fenestra is large an direcly beneath the dorsally placed eyes. the supratemporal fenestra is extremely small. They claim that the petite size of the supratemporal fenestra gives it an affinity to the primitive birds like avimimus. This is just a case where a limited data set has totally skewed the cladistic analysis. Instead, this is clearly convergent evolution. Just on the basis that they said that the teeth resemble those of spinosaurus they should have placed it in with the spinosauridae along with coelophysis, dilophosaurus, baryonyx and suchomimus. The spinosaurids seem to have been a major force in gondwanan theropod evolution, especially into the jurassic and cretaceous when they died out for the most part in laurasia. the size of the supratemporal fenestra is probably linked to the fact that the irritator has a very sharply downturned jaw line with the joint way below the tooth row. This was probably a fish eater with a very fast but relatively week bite. The position of the infratemporal fenestra directly below the orbit lends support to the idea that this animal had a very week skull.

Registration frustration

For a long time now I have tried to register for an arts option so that i won't be kicked out of the Paleontology program at the University of Alberta. The Paleo program is the only reason that I am even in this country and the only reason that I would put up with the damnable winters. At the end of the last semester I signed up for a religioun course : introduciton to Judeism. But this was cancled due to a lack of registrants. As Joel put it; How many jews are there in Edmonton who would want to take a course on being jewish, and how many Christians would sign up? So, when I got back to edmonton, i signed up for an art class. When I went to double check my registration, it turned out that Beartracks had failed to register me. So, I signed up again, double checked right away and went to the class. I just received two letters stating that I should have signed up for two semesters instead of just one (the only one needed to fill my arts requirement). And so, i must now register for both semesters, though there is a pretty good chance that I'll just drop it at the beginning of the second semester.