Administrative
laelaps | May 13, 2008As some of you may recall, about two months ago my apartment was robbed, my digital slr camera being one of the items that was stolen. Since then it has not been found by the police and I'm still struggling with my renter's insurance provider, but yesterday I got news of when my economic stimulus check was coming and this allowed me to purchase a brand new camera!
After looking over some reviews (and keeping in mind what I could actually afford), I decided to go with the Nikon D60, going all-out for a kit that included a 18-55mm lens, a 55-200mm lens, and some other good stuff. I really want…
laelaps | May 10, 2008I'll be away at the AMNH for most of the day today, but here are a few general "housekeeping" notes until I get back;
A very special edition of The Boneyard (#20) will be coming up next week. (See this post for the full details.) I haven't received any submissions yet, but just keep in mind that everything has to be in by 12 PM Eastern time on May 17 to be eligible.I'm very pleased to announce that Beatrice, a female cat my wife and I fostered on-and-off for about a year, has finally been adopted. We've still got Huxley right now, and even though he was sick for a few days he has fully…
evolvingthoughts | May 9, 2008
So much has been happening in the world while I was giving a talk on the adaptiveness of religion in Sydney. The Platypus thing was one item I'd have blogged on if the rest of the blogosphere hadn't beaten me to it. All I can say is that no matter how many bloggers write on the mosaic nature of the platypus genome, at least I got to hold one. And I would never have used the meaningless term "reptile".
And although I have only been to NYC twice, I can say I have a favourite store there, and I saw it on CSI: NY recently (although they obviously tidied up the counter for the shoot).
And…
evolvingthoughts | May 8, 2008
Sometime over tonight, this blog will pass the half a million visits mark. Say it out loud with me: half...a...million!
Now I know this is because the six regular readers routinely and obsessively visit me every fifteen seconds, and there are drugs being developed to cure that, but...
half... a... million! Visits!
I'm a friggin' philosopher, dudes. We're supposed to be obscure and irrelevant. Unless we're French, of course. Then it's double the obscurity but a million times the relevance, at least in coffee shops and fashionable magazines.
So, thank you all. I apologise for the…
laelaps | May 1, 2008I've been really down this week, biting my nails about finals and my academic future (or potential premature end of it). Walking on my way to give a presentation about Sterkfontein & Swartkrans caves ("killer man-apes," leopards, SK 53 and all that), I heard this Ben Folds song on my iShuffle and thought it most appropriate;
laelaps | April 29, 2008Today I've got a human osteology exam, so while I'm trying to make sure I know all my processes, foramina, and sutures things are going to be a bit light here. Still, I've got a few items of interest to unload here before trying to cram more of White's Human Osteology into my brain;
The next edition of the Boneyard is coming up this Saturday and will appear at Familiarity Breeds Content. Get your submissions in to me or Nick soon! Two weeks after that the carnival will be back here with a special edition where participants will have a chance to win some paleontology books from my own library…
evolvingthoughts | April 28, 2008
... Wilkins turns green with envy.
There's a special sort of immortality for those who work in paleontology which clearly outweighs the total lack of jobs and remuneration: having a species named after you. My friend and accredited geologist and paleontologist has now had a trilobite named after him. Ladies and gentlemen, below the fold, Chris Nedin's tribble, Megapharanaspis nedini!
Pretty little thing, isn't it? Of course, nobody would ever name a fossil after a philosopher, would they? You need to find something with no definite shape, for a start. [Hint!]
evolvingthoughts | April 25, 2008
Like Lynch, here is "the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users." So what I’ve read is in italics, what I never finished is struck through:
Jonathan Strange & Mr NorrellAnna KareninaCrime and PunishmentCatch-22One Hundred Years of SolitudeWuthering HeightsThe SilmarillionLife of Pi: a novelThe Name of the RoseDon QuixoteMoby DickUlyssesMadame BovaryThe OdysseyPride and PrejudiceJane EyreThe Tale of Two CitiesThe Brothers KaramazovGuns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societiesWar and PeaceVanity FairThe Time Traveler’s WifeThe IliadEmmaThe Blind…
laelaps | April 25, 2008I was able to get a few more pages out yesterday, although (say it with me now) not as many as I would have liked. I'm continuing to hammer away at the human evolution chapter as I feel that it's the most important, although if I'm not careful it could turn into a book by itself. I may hit a wall at some point, however, as I'm far more interested in early human evolution (i.e. australopithecines) than in recent prehistoric humans, and I don't want that bias to hinder the relevance of the chapter. (New sections are in bold).
Introduction
Huxley's rejoinder to Wilberforce at Oxford - Darrow…
evolvingthoughts | April 23, 2008
Have a look at the title bar at the top of this page. If it doesn't say "Scienceblogs" or "Evolving Thoughts", then you are reading it via a leech site that does nothing but steal the words I and other carefully craft, like this one. Now in my case while my blog is Creative Commons licensed so others can reuse the material, they mustn't change it, or claim it as their own, or fail to give attribution to me. Leech sites give a strong impression they are the ones who produced the material, but really all they're doing is using the feeds and reformatting it. If you find them, let me know in the…
laelaps | April 23, 2008I have to admit I felt a bit foolish this evening. I went to see a lecture by Brian Richmond about hominid bipedalism, although the name didn't register with me. So I'm sitting there in front, watching him talk about Orrorin and how there haven't been any good studies about it, all the while thinking "How could he have missed that Science paper about the femur of Orrorin being most morphologically similar to those of australopithecines?" My own unfamiliarity with "who's who" in anthropology made me feel a bit sheepish when I realized that I was looking at the guy who did that study, d'oh!
I…
laelaps | April 23, 2008Yesterday I managed to tack a few paragraphs on to the end of the human evolution chapter, bringing the page count so far up to 10, although some of this will ultimately be cut. I wanted to write more last night, but by the time I walked home from class and ate dinner it was 9:30 and I was feeling a little sleepy-eyed. Adrian Desmond's book The Ape's Reflexion has given me a lot of food for thought, however, especially the absurdity of the question "What makes us human?" as if it were a plea to find something (anything) that would divide us from the rest of nature. (New concepts are in bold)…
laelaps | April 20, 2008I was able to get another five pages done today, although (as always) I'm not entirely satisfied with them. There are so many juicy details and excellent narratives that it's difficult to get them all in, and it is sometimes difficult to discuss a topic that I know something about but also will require the use of my library for. Rather than run to look up everything at once, I decided to just keep writing and put up the basic framework of what I want to say, and I'll go back to fill in the details a bit later (which will also give me an opportunity to trim the fat a bit). At the moment,…
laelaps | April 19, 2008No angry creationists gathered outside my door with torches & pitchforks last night, and I presume that the first-night impact of Expelled (at least in my area) was not as great as the producers of the film might have hoped. We won't know for sure, though, until the box office results are in on Monday.
The above was written in a tongue-in-cheek manner, of course, and I really don't care about Ben Stein's creationist diatribe today. This morning I stopped by the local library book sale where I picked up a copy of Richard Leakey's Origins, the pop-paleo junk food Tyrannosaur, and (a book…
pharyngula | April 19, 2008I'm a bad, bad man — I've been neglecting the Molly awards for too long. Let's fix that! For those who don't know, the Molly awards are how we acknowledge valued and insightful commenters here, by allowing readers to nominate the names of the people they enjoy seeing in the comment threads, and the prize is that those names get enshrined on a web page.
The last round of nominations was in February. There are two winners for February 2008: Truth Machine and Mrs Tilton. Say "Huzzah!" and break out the champagne!
Now we're a month behind, and we need nominations for both March and April. Maybe…
laelaps | April 18, 2008Even though I was busy yesterday (3-hour lab and 2 lab reports due), I got into the writing groove and was able to produce about five pages of new material. I've been jumping around from chapter to chapter a bit, writing on whatever I feel most interested in on any given day, and yesterday was all about human evolution.
Edward Tyson's 1699 dissection of a juvenile chimpanzee provided a natural jumping-off point, and Harriet Ritvo's excellent book The Platypus and the Mermaid has proved to be an excellent resource for issues dealing with finding "Man's Place in Nature" (with a little help from…
laelaps | April 17, 2008Today is going to be another day of putting work into my book. Last night I read The War of Art from cover to cover, and while it waded into some vague notions of spirituality here and there (angels, muses, and the like), it still was a worthwhile read. It's put together as a collection of little definitions or thoughts, each strung together by a common theme but also floating on its own (the book Monogamy was organized in a very similar fashion). This made it more digestible as I definitely couldn't take a "Here are the 12 steps to getting your book done" approach.
The main idea I got from…
laelaps | April 15, 2008True to my word, I worked for about 5 hours on my book today. As always, I didn't get as much done as I would have liked, but I figure another 2 and 1/2 pages in Word isn't too bad. The main difficulty with the writing I did today involved correcting some mistakes and incorrect interpretations in an earlier draft concerning T.H. Huxley and the origin of birds. Working from books like Taking Wing by Pat Shipman, I naively accepted a bit of textbook cardboard, which Adrian Desmond's Archetypes and Ancestors and some original source material helped set straight.
This slowed down the writing…
laelaps | April 15, 2008Things may be a little slow on the blog today. After lamenting my lack of progress writing my book, I've decided to take most of the day to do something about the situation. Hopefully I'll be able to update my progress sometime tonight.
laelaps | April 14, 2008Has it really been over a month since I last worked on my book? That's what the calendar tells me. Between the cat eviscerating the keyboard of my laptop, said laptop being stolen, midterms, and other activities, I haven't done much of anything since March 9. Last night, for example, I intended to sit down a write for a while, but the evening slipped away from me and I didn't write a word. This needs to change.
As I thought about why I haven't written anything in a month as I got dressed this morning, it became clear that I lost my focus. The main thread that I hope will connect the entire…