The Great Book Project
laelaps | September 29, 2008
Two updates in one day? Well, I was productive enough for it. There are still a few more things I have to add, mainly fine details and a few more examples (i.e. pneumatization in dinosaur skeletons), but the meat of the chapter is now in place. Soon I'll have to undertake the more difficult task of editing it down to an acceptable length (presently it stands at 41 pages).
I am, as ever, somewhat behind my ideal schedule, but I think the extra effort is worth it. The easy thing for me to do would be to plainly and dryly present the arguments as I have found them. Such a book would merely be a…
laelaps | September 29, 2008
After a lot of work, I finally got to covering what happened during the 1960's and 1970's in the bird evolution chapter. There are basically three phases that dominate the section; 1860-1926, 1968-1980, and the explosion of research spurred by the discovery of feathered non-avian dinosaurs. The first two sucked up quite a bit of my time, and I spent most of the weekend digging for material to revise the notion that paleontologists thought dinosaurs were just "big lizards" prior to the discovery of Deinonychus.
Indeed, even in 1946 there were suggestions that dinosaurs were so successful…
laelaps | September 25, 2008I don't have very much to say tonight; the drizzly, cold weather and a late-night math class have put me in a bit of a foul mood. I added a few more pages to the birds chapter today, although this also means I will have to do some heavy editing given that I am 22 pages in and haven't even gotten to Beebe's "Tetrapteryx" or Heilmann's Origin of Birds yet (much less Deinonychus, Sinosauropteryx, etc.).
I will share one amusing quote that may or may not make the final cut, however. It is from an article in Gentleman's Magazine by W.T. Freeman, in which the author preferred a "second creation" to…
laelaps | September 24, 2008After brooding for an unnecessarily long time over a temporary title for the book project last week, I've decided to scrap The Pulse of Life as a contender. As my wife pointed out, it sounds like the title of a school filmstrip, and I wasn't very happy with all the vitalistic baggage that came along with it.
I have instead formulated a title that (I think) comes closer to the gestalt of the book I'm working on. Unless something better springs to mind, I am going to call it Life's Sublime Riddle.
If for no other reason to keep track of my own thoughts, I will briefly recount how I came up with…
laelaps | September 19, 2008The lack of a proper title for my book (latest update here) has continued to vex me, even as I have made quite a bit of progress in fleshing out the chapters. A title is not necessary to my work at this stage, of course, but I feel that having a title helps keeps the voice of the book coherent. I also know that when everything is finished the title is going to be important in generating interest in what I have written (for, contrary to the old admonition, people do judge books by their covers), and I did not want to pick something boring (i.e. Evolution) or especially cliched (i.e. anything…
laelaps | September 17, 2008
As ever, I didn't get as much done as I wanted to today, but I still added a few more pages. I would have accomplished more, but in my research I came across a few resources that had previously eluded me. A few (like a collection of papers by Lawrence Lambe, including his description of Gorgosaurus) were only tangentially related to the project, but others (like William Beebe's paper on the hypothetical bird ancestor "Tetrapteryx") are going to be essential to what I'm writing. I even found a bit of paleo-fiction relating to the urvogel, so I've got plenty of resources to mine.
Although I…
laelaps | September 16, 2008From Garfield Minus Garfield.I had planned to get at least 20 pages finished today, but I don't think I'm going to be able to make it. As it stands now I've got 15 pages, much of it brand new material, but after taking the bus home I have a splitting headache. Sitting on a bus during rush hour in New Brunswick means that you will be subjected to many short stops and starts (particularly since there's only a crowded, single-lane main road between campuses), and by the time I get home I usually want to sit down and not get up.
Still, I more than doubled my output from yesterday, and I have a…
laelaps | September 15, 2008From Garfield Minus Garfield.The beginning of classes has marked the start of a more chaotic daily schedule, one that often puts me in no mood to write. I want to work on the book when I have the time, but at the end of most days I feel like I've been trampled by a horde of freshmen (which isn't too far from the truth, as a matter of fact).
In any case, I more than doubled the material I had for the new version of my birds/dinosaurs chapter. This might not be especially impressive given that I had only three pages to start with, but I intend to keep up with the updates through the rest of the…
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 2, 2008It is amazing what a little perspective can do. For most of August I was hard at work on the chapter on whales, ignoring nearly every other section. This allowed me to focus on what I wanted for one of the most important chapters of the book, but now that I have gone back to some of my earlier writing I have to admit I am horrified. When I opened up the chapter on the evolution of birds I could not believe what I was reading. How could I have written such drivel?
I started to edit the first part of the bird chapter, but no matter what I did I could not see a way to turn what I had already…