laelaps | September 9, 2008In celebration of hitting 1,000,000 comments here on ScienceBlogs, various bloggers all over the world will be throwing parties to commemorate the occasion. To see if there's one in your area, check out the listing of events over on Page 3.14.
No one knows when we'll reach 1,000,000 comments or where the comment will be left, but the person who leaves that comment will get some special treatment. The lucky winner will receive a four night trip to NYC for two, including access to museums, labs, and dinner with their favorite ScienceBlogger. All you have to do is leave a comment with your e-…
laelaps | September 8, 2008For some damn-fool reason I decided to reorganize the living room the other day, a project that (two days later) is still not fully completed. Moving the furniture wasn't the problem; it was finding a home for the ever-growing library that threatens to overtake the entire apartment. I only have to clean up a little bit now, but it was the sort of project that needs to be done all the way or not at all.
On top of that, there are two new kittens that need some special attention. One foster kitten, Gia, I expected to have, but the other, Owen, I did not. (My wife named him after the anatomist…
laelaps | September 8, 2008
"Look! It's a double E! Pile in!"
It shouldn't be a hassle to get between classes, but somehow Rutgers has made it so. The university has again increased the number of students without enough changes to accommodate the swollen body of undergraduates. Some have to stay in hotels because the residence halls are full, and you get to know many of your classmates much more intimately than you'd like on the buses. (From what I can tell too many men at this college are unfamiliar with deodorant. Yech.)
This is particularly galling when I get out of my math class at 10:15 PM on Thursdays. I see…
laelaps | September 8, 2008
A ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), photographed at the Philadelphia Zoo.
laelaps | September 7, 2008I loved all the Gary Owens & Eric Boardman dinosaur documentaries (see here, here, and here) when I was a kid, but I think my most favorite was their special on prehistoric mammals. Called "Prehistoric World," the show took a look at the Page Museum in LA and even featured a bit on Dougal Dixon's After Man creatures (including everyone's favorite, the Nightstalker).
The stop-motion mammals seen at the beginning of the show brought back fond memories, as well. They were part of another documentary I saw as a child, although I can no longer remember what it was called. What I do remember,…
laelaps | September 7, 2008
A flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber) on a nest, photographed at the Philadelphia Zoo.
laelaps | September 6, 2008When we last left Gary Owens he had been turned into a mustachioed dinosaur. The good news is that he apparently found a cure and again teamed up with Eric Boardman for another dinosaur documentary. (It's not like being eaten by a dinosaur stopped them before or anything.) It's called "Son of Dinosaurs," and this time the duo get caught up with some Russians with a viable dinosaur embryo. I think they jumped the Tenontosaurus with this one, but it's still fun;
laelaps | September 6, 2008
An Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis), photographed at the Philadelphia Zoo.
laelaps | September 5, 2008Those of you who are regular readers know that I have been yammering about my book-in-progress for quite some time now (at least since March, if not before). I am pleased to say, though, that as the weeks and months have rolled by I have attracted some new readers, but some of them have expressed their frustration that they don't know what the hell I'm talking about in the "Book Progress" posts. This post should serve as a temporary conceptual anchor for the "Great Book Project," and I hope that this description will clear things up a bit.
Two years ago I took a course at Rutgers about…
laelaps | September 5, 2008According to the highly reputable and fact-oriented periodical The Onion, a stain resembling Charles Darwin has appeared on the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. You may recall that Dayton was the site of the famous 1925 "Scopes Monkey Trial" (no, it did not involve the evolution of mint-flavored primates), although I would say that St. Darwin has appeared to us over 75 years too late. Nevertheless, even the prophet Tim White has apparently visited the site;
Thousands of pilgrims from as far away as Berkeley's paleoanthropology department have flocked to the site to lay wreaths of…
laelaps | September 5, 2008Last week I wrote about Cobb & Coyne's assertion that "the only contribution that science can make to the ideas of religion is atheism," which appeared in the correspondence section of Nature. This week there is yet another letter on the science v. religion debate, this time by Jonathan Cowie. and it unfortunately manages to conflate "faith" and "science." Cowie writes;
Scientists' use of the scientific method pragmatically includes faith. A scientist must first conceive the idea for an experiment, and then -- on the basis merely of the hopeful presumption of its possible outcome --…
laelaps | September 5, 2008For those of you in the New York City area, paleo artist Ray Troll and paleobotanist Kirk Johnson will be presenting a lecture on their wonderful book Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway (see my review here, pick it up here) on October 21 at the AMNH. It looks like it will be a lot of fun, and I'm going to make sure that I catch this one.
laelaps | September 5, 2008By way of checking up on this blog's traffic the other day, I came across the "Dawn of Time" web comic, which features a cavewoman and a friendly Triceratops (the first strip is here). Some of the scenes seem a little Edenic and humans never lived alongside non-avian dinosaurs, of course, but it is still fun to read. With the introduction of two bickering Victorian scientists into the story line, things are just starting to get interesting..
laelaps | September 5, 2008
Two Amur tigers (Panthera tigris altaica), photographed at the Philadelphia Zoo.
laelaps | September 4, 2008It always amuses me how irritatingly dull school mascots often are. How many schools have the cougars, knights, bears, or some other cliched mascot? (A notable exception is the University of California Santa Cruz, home of the fighting Banana Slugs.) Given that, I was certainly glad to hear that paleontologist Jerry Harris is pushing to have his institution, Dixie State College, accept a dinosaur as the new school mascot.
Jerry needs your help, though. The college is accepting nominations for mascot suggestions and if you want to see the "Dixie Dinosaurs" come out on top go to the voting page…
laelaps | September 4, 2008
The John West mascot really gets into his work (featuring a guest appearance from one of the shark puppets from Deep Blue Sea).
laelaps | September 4, 2008
A Galapagos tortoise (Geochelone nigra), photographed at the Philadelphia Zoo.
laelaps | September 3, 2008It was slow going, but I was able to write the first three pages of the new iteration of the dinosaur/birds chapter. (It is called, for good reason, "Footprints (and Feathers) in the Sands of Time." At least for now, anyway.) Although it contains some of the same points as my previous attempt, I have added a lot of new material. The mythological introduction is a little circuitous, but I think it works.
I had planned on working on a number of other, smaller projects over the next few months, but I think I am going to primarily concentrate on getting my proposal for this book together. I'll…
laelaps | September 3, 2008
Fun with stock footage and a blue screen, from Shark Attack 3.
After watching the first episode of Jurassic Fight Club I felt that the show deserved some amount of praise, but I was utterly flabbergasted by the latest episode ("Deep Sea Killers"). (You can see the full episodes yourself, for a limited time, here.)
The new episode featured the famous "mega-tooth" shark, Carcharocles megalodon, popularly called "Megalodon." During the entirety of the episode I don't think the genus name of the shark is ever mentioned; it is always referred to as "Megalodon" (and once as "Meg"). As was…