Gostak distims the doshes. (287)
Sunny and very arm today. Our high was 88F, which is how May in Alabama ought to feel.
Everything else in my life is about to have to stop, so that I can catch up on Sirenia Digest, which is now three issues behind.
----
The Bugaboo of "Colonialism" Comes to Paleontology:
I'm going to talk about something paleontological. Not something I am working on, but something more ideological, political, related to a current controversy. Like most of the Western world, the science of paleontology is currently tripping all over itself in a frantic attempt to "decolonize." No surprise. We've already seen this in archaeology. A nation demands the return of an artifact collected two or three hundred years ago. Sometimes they're returned. But now it's fossils, and sometimes it happens even if aquisition of the fossil in question was not the result of colonialism (a word whose meaning has now been made to mean whatever is convenient to SJT). The idea seems to come down to: No fossils should ever be removed from the nation where it was found, ever, as that impedes the ability of the citizens of that country to study it (doesn't matter if the country has no paleontological community to speak of and no safe repositories for returned speciemns). I should note at the start that this phenomenon only seems to affect high-profile "sexy" or celebrity specimens and not the thousands upon thousands, probably millions upon millions, of invertebrate and plant fossils (including microfossils), collected by one nation and removed to another (the US, the UK, Germany, etc.).
A recent and very high profile case, a vertitable cause célèbre, involved a small feathered ornithopod dinosaur, Ubirajara jubatus, from the Early Cretaceous of Brazil. Never mind that there is no compelling evidence that the German scientists who inadvertently exported the specimen from Brazil have done anything wrong. They had a permit to export fossil fish, and the holotype of Ubirajara was embedded, unbeknownst to them, in one of the fish slabs. This happens. I may collect a mosasaur and discover many other fossils in the rock holding the bones, and sometimes those fossils can be important. Anyway, after the woke internet mob brought pressure to bear, the paper describing the specimen was withdrawn, and, in the ultimate act of paleontological lunacy, the name was summarily ruled invalid and unavailable to be used ever again (in contravention of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, which is now apparently rather fucking flexible). Ultimately, in 2022, the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe (SMNK) was pressured into returning the specimen to Brazil. Note, also, that Brazil was never a colony of Germany (that would be Portugal). The message: Only people who live in a country where a fossil happened to be preserved and found will be allowed to name and study it. And this whole sad, silly mess has had serious repercussions for a number of phylogenetic studies that included Ubirajara, now rendered...confused.
Now the "decolonizing" hue and cry on social media is trying to trigger a second incident, involving another "sexy" Brazilian fossil in a German museum, another dinosaur, this time the spinosaurid theropod Irritator challengeri. Even though this time there is no doubt the specimen was collected legally, as evidenced by the "Ethics Statement" at the end of a recent reappraisal of the taxon. It is not hard to see how quickly this sort of thing could devolve into complete chaos, destabilizing the science of paleontology. And never mind the utter impractibility. The two fossils mentioned above are relatively small. But consider the "repatriation" of a large collections of enormous vertebrates. The dozens and dozens of collections that might be involved worldwide. The cost involved, money that could actually go to research and the education and employment of paleontologists, into doing science. The possibility of these name changes. Uncertainty about the fate of the fossils in their new repositories. The titerature that becomes invalid. And, again, these attacks have generally only talen aim at the cool animals. I'm waiting for some nation to demands a few thousand sponge or brachiopod or pollen fossils be returned.
Only recently have most nations begun to enact laws protecting its fossils, laws that do need to exist to prevent poaching by fossil pmerchants who sell to private collectors. The US has precious few, with vertebrate fossils, like dinisaurs, generally only protected when preserved on public land, not private, as they are treated as mineral resources, not antiquarian objects. This is how we keep losing tyrannosaurs, which go on to be autioned off for millions of dollars. And I am fully on board with nations which have passed protection laws since a specimen was intentionally, illegally collected demanding its return. But this retroactive nonsense is injust and will only harm the science. Ubirajara jubatus currently exists in taxonomic limbo, as do all the studies that ever included it. Presumably, it will be given a second name at some point, in a second type description, adding to the confusion, confusion which will last for many decades confounding ornithopod studies.
And, by the way, if we're going to play this game, when does the US get to demand the many fossils taken from within its borders be returned? The tyrannosaurs languishing unstudied in Saudi Arabia and Japan?
----
I was going to write about several other absurdities, but I'd not counted on that taking so goddamn long. It's something else people will hate me for saying, but it needs saying.
"There is nothing healthy about a society that no longer believes in redemption, in which a sunstantial portion of the population choose to silence themselves rather than risk facing reprisals for the crime of thinking freely." ~ Andrew Doyle, on cancel culture
I will also say, loudly, be smarter than me and NEVER drink a 5-Hour Energy Drink. As Chris said to me, it tastes like being embalmed. Yes, it does. And it worked no better than a far more palatable Red Bull.
And Jesus god, Styx was an awful band. That just needed saying.
Oh, there's this link, too. Mary Badham talking about the constant attempts to ban To Kill a Mockingbird, by both the Right and the Left, including attempts by people who admit they've never read the book. One of the greatest anti-racism books ever published. Oh, Mary Badham played Scout in the Oscar-winning 1962 film version, if you were wondering.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast
2:11 p.m. (good book, mostly)
Postscript: Someone's bound to ask about this entry's title, so, quoting from Wikipedia: "Gostak is a meaningless noun that is used in the phrase 'the gostak distims the doshes,' which is an example of how it is possible to derive meaning from the syntax of a sentence even if the referents of the terms are entirely unknown. It is an example of a nonce word.
The phrase was coined in 1903 by Andrew Ingraham, but is best known through its quotation in 1923 by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards in their book The Meaning of Meaning, and has been since referred to in a number of cultural contexts." And I use it as a comment on the absurdities of 2023. Also, in this quote I have corrected Wikipedia's suspect punctuation.
Everything else in my life is about to have to stop, so that I can catch up on Sirenia Digest, which is now three issues behind.
----
The Bugaboo of "Colonialism" Comes to Paleontology:
I'm going to talk about something paleontological. Not something I am working on, but something more ideological, political, related to a current controversy. Like most of the Western world, the science of paleontology is currently tripping all over itself in a frantic attempt to "decolonize." No surprise. We've already seen this in archaeology. A nation demands the return of an artifact collected two or three hundred years ago. Sometimes they're returned. But now it's fossils, and sometimes it happens even if aquisition of the fossil in question was not the result of colonialism (a word whose meaning has now been made to mean whatever is convenient to SJT). The idea seems to come down to: No fossils should ever be removed from the nation where it was found, ever, as that impedes the ability of the citizens of that country to study it (doesn't matter if the country has no paleontological community to speak of and no safe repositories for returned speciemns). I should note at the start that this phenomenon only seems to affect high-profile "sexy" or celebrity specimens and not the thousands upon thousands, probably millions upon millions, of invertebrate and plant fossils (including microfossils), collected by one nation and removed to another (the US, the UK, Germany, etc.).
A recent and very high profile case, a vertitable cause célèbre, involved a small feathered ornithopod dinosaur, Ubirajara jubatus, from the Early Cretaceous of Brazil. Never mind that there is no compelling evidence that the German scientists who inadvertently exported the specimen from Brazil have done anything wrong. They had a permit to export fossil fish, and the holotype of Ubirajara was embedded, unbeknownst to them, in one of the fish slabs. This happens. I may collect a mosasaur and discover many other fossils in the rock holding the bones, and sometimes those fossils can be important. Anyway, after the woke internet mob brought pressure to bear, the paper describing the specimen was withdrawn, and, in the ultimate act of paleontological lunacy, the name was summarily ruled invalid and unavailable to be used ever again (in contravention of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, which is now apparently rather fucking flexible). Ultimately, in 2022, the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe (SMNK) was pressured into returning the specimen to Brazil. Note, also, that Brazil was never a colony of Germany (that would be Portugal). The message: Only people who live in a country where a fossil happened to be preserved and found will be allowed to name and study it. And this whole sad, silly mess has had serious repercussions for a number of phylogenetic studies that included Ubirajara, now rendered...confused.
Now the "decolonizing" hue and cry on social media is trying to trigger a second incident, involving another "sexy" Brazilian fossil in a German museum, another dinosaur, this time the spinosaurid theropod Irritator challengeri. Even though this time there is no doubt the specimen was collected legally, as evidenced by the "Ethics Statement" at the end of a recent reappraisal of the taxon. It is not hard to see how quickly this sort of thing could devolve into complete chaos, destabilizing the science of paleontology. And never mind the utter impractibility. The two fossils mentioned above are relatively small. But consider the "repatriation" of a large collections of enormous vertebrates. The dozens and dozens of collections that might be involved worldwide. The cost involved, money that could actually go to research and the education and employment of paleontologists, into doing science. The possibility of these name changes. Uncertainty about the fate of the fossils in their new repositories. The titerature that becomes invalid. And, again, these attacks have generally only talen aim at the cool animals. I'm waiting for some nation to demands a few thousand sponge or brachiopod or pollen fossils be returned.
Only recently have most nations begun to enact laws protecting its fossils, laws that do need to exist to prevent poaching by fossil pmerchants who sell to private collectors. The US has precious few, with vertebrate fossils, like dinisaurs, generally only protected when preserved on public land, not private, as they are treated as mineral resources, not antiquarian objects. This is how we keep losing tyrannosaurs, which go on to be autioned off for millions of dollars. And I am fully on board with nations which have passed protection laws since a specimen was intentionally, illegally collected demanding its return. But this retroactive nonsense is injust and will only harm the science. Ubirajara jubatus currently exists in taxonomic limbo, as do all the studies that ever included it. Presumably, it will be given a second name at some point, in a second type description, adding to the confusion, confusion which will last for many decades confounding ornithopod studies.
And, by the way, if we're going to play this game, when does the US get to demand the many fossils taken from within its borders be returned? The tyrannosaurs languishing unstudied in Saudi Arabia and Japan?
----
I was going to write about several other absurdities, but I'd not counted on that taking so goddamn long. It's something else people will hate me for saying, but it needs saying.
"There is nothing healthy about a society that no longer believes in redemption, in which a sunstantial portion of the population choose to silence themselves rather than risk facing reprisals for the crime of thinking freely." ~ Andrew Doyle, on cancel culture
I will also say, loudly, be smarter than me and NEVER drink a 5-Hour Energy Drink. As Chris said to me, it tastes like being embalmed. Yes, it does. And it worked no better than a far more palatable Red Bull.
And Jesus god, Styx was an awful band. That just needed saying.
Oh, there's this link, too. Mary Badham talking about the constant attempts to ban To Kill a Mockingbird, by both the Right and the Left, including attempts by people who admit they've never read the book. One of the greatest anti-racism books ever published. Oh, Mary Badham played Scout in the Oscar-winning 1962 film version, if you were wondering.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast
2:11 p.m. (good book, mostly)
Postscript: Someone's bound to ask about this entry's title, so, quoting from Wikipedia: "Gostak is a meaningless noun that is used in the phrase 'the gostak distims the doshes,' which is an example of how it is possible to derive meaning from the syntax of a sentence even if the referents of the terms are entirely unknown. It is an example of a nonce word.
The phrase was coined in 1903 by Andrew Ingraham, but is best known through its quotation in 1923 by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards in their book The Meaning of Meaning, and has been since referred to in a number of cultural contexts." And I use it as a comment on the absurdities of 2023. Also, in this quote I have corrected Wikipedia's suspect punctuation.