The Known Unknowns (311)
Sunny today. I should have gone outside. Our high was 87F.
I was awake this morning at 4:30 a.m., and then up at 5. I finished reading The Year Without Summer. At 6 a.m., I began writing, and I did another 1,074 words on "The Moment Under the Moment." I expect I will finish it tomorrow. After the writing, I began reading paleontologist Donald R. Prothero's When Humans Nearly Vanished: The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano.
Later, Kathryn and I began discussing how to make to University of Kansas trip happen. Mike Polcyn called and, as I said on Twitter, "A long phone conversation about premaxillary dental irregularities in Platecarpus, anomalous squamate tooth counts, anguimorph deformities, and Hox genes. It's Thursday morning." It was a good talk. He came up with yet another very excellent project for me to work on, but I think there's no time to shoehorn it in. Do people still know what shoeshorns are? Anyway, then I talked with Jun, and I'm going into the Museum on Monday, as my reward for finsihing "The Moment Under the Moment." Also, I signed the contracts for Polish editions of the Tinfoil Dossier books.
I spent part of the afternoon working on Winifred the tylosaur.
Here's something you should take a few minutes to read, a new interview with Richard Dawkins by someone who was trying really hard to trap Dawkins into this, that, or the other corner, but failed miserably. To answer the article's title question, "Was New Atheism a Mistake?" The answer is no.
Substack is proving a wonderland of sanity. Today I discovered biologist Colin Wright's "Reality's Last Stand," and I cannot recommend it enough. There's a free subscription option, by the way. Lately, I feel as if I spend at least fifty percent of my time reading, divided between books, scientific papers, and Substack. With Colin Wright's site, I would like to point you, in particular, to this piece, "Six Books for Students of Evolutionary Biology: Books That Encapsulate the History, Marvel, and Debates Within the Field."
And here is a thought that came to me this afternoon, and I put down the fossil bone I was working on and scribbled it on a neon green post-it note: In most ways, as mammals, as vertebrates, humans are unremarkable. Except there's this one unbelievable thing that we do. We create culture. This makes culture the most important thing that humans do. Indeed, so far as I am concerned, it is not the individual human being that interests me. It's what we do as a species. Humans live short lives and die, but our culture persists, unless someone sets out to destroy it. And yeah, I know, we're talking lots of individuals acting in concert, but I know, too, what I mean. This makes culture as sacred as anything actually can be. That's about all that would fit on the post-it, even writing very tiny, and then I went back to work on the tylosaur.
Please visit the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. All sales are much appreciated. And I leave you with a photo of the best root beer on the planet.
Wait! Also! Spooky's birthday is in a mere sixteen days, and she has an Amazon wishlist. Please, please, please go have a look at it. Thank you.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast
1:46 p.m.
I was awake this morning at 4:30 a.m., and then up at 5. I finished reading The Year Without Summer. At 6 a.m., I began writing, and I did another 1,074 words on "The Moment Under the Moment." I expect I will finish it tomorrow. After the writing, I began reading paleontologist Donald R. Prothero's When Humans Nearly Vanished: The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano.
Later, Kathryn and I began discussing how to make to University of Kansas trip happen. Mike Polcyn called and, as I said on Twitter, "A long phone conversation about premaxillary dental irregularities in Platecarpus, anomalous squamate tooth counts, anguimorph deformities, and Hox genes. It's Thursday morning." It was a good talk. He came up with yet another very excellent project for me to work on, but I think there's no time to shoehorn it in. Do people still know what shoeshorns are? Anyway, then I talked with Jun, and I'm going into the Museum on Monday, as my reward for finsihing "The Moment Under the Moment." Also, I signed the contracts for Polish editions of the Tinfoil Dossier books.
I spent part of the afternoon working on Winifred the tylosaur.
Here's something you should take a few minutes to read, a new interview with Richard Dawkins by someone who was trying really hard to trap Dawkins into this, that, or the other corner, but failed miserably. To answer the article's title question, "Was New Atheism a Mistake?" The answer is no.
Substack is proving a wonderland of sanity. Today I discovered biologist Colin Wright's "Reality's Last Stand," and I cannot recommend it enough. There's a free subscription option, by the way. Lately, I feel as if I spend at least fifty percent of my time reading, divided between books, scientific papers, and Substack. With Colin Wright's site, I would like to point you, in particular, to this piece, "Six Books for Students of Evolutionary Biology: Books That Encapsulate the History, Marvel, and Debates Within the Field."
And here is a thought that came to me this afternoon, and I put down the fossil bone I was working on and scribbled it on a neon green post-it note: In most ways, as mammals, as vertebrates, humans are unremarkable. Except there's this one unbelievable thing that we do. We create culture. This makes culture the most important thing that humans do. Indeed, so far as I am concerned, it is not the individual human being that interests me. It's what we do as a species. Humans live short lives and die, but our culture persists, unless someone sets out to destroy it. And yeah, I know, we're talking lots of individuals acting in concert, but I know, too, what I mean. This makes culture as sacred as anything actually can be. That's about all that would fit on the post-it, even writing very tiny, and then I went back to work on the tylosaur.
Please visit the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. All sales are much appreciated. And I leave you with a photo of the best root beer on the planet.
Wait! Also! Spooky's birthday is in a mere sixteen days, and she has an Amazon wishlist. Please, please, please go have a look at it. Thank you.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast
1:46 p.m.