Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran USAF medic and Army infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, long-ago kickboxer, oldbat goth, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
This is deeply wrong, but it's an interesting *kind* of wrong.
Our perception of the past telescopes: there's the recent past, what we remember; the middle past, what our parents and grandparents remember; the long past, out of living memory but still preserved in familiar stories; and everything else. As I've said before, a lot of Americans' idea of *human* #history seems to go roughly as follows:
1. #Cavemen.
2. #Pyramids.
3. #Jesus.
4. Robin Hood and King Arthur.
5. #Columbus and #pirates.
6. #Pilgrims and George Washington.
7. #Cowboys.
8. World War Two. (One must have happened somewhere?)
9. #Hippies and #Vietnam.
10. The real world begins with the momentous event of my birth.
Nor is this uniquely an American problem—some places have better educational systems than others, but I think people everywhere hold similar mythologized versions of world events leading uniquely and inevitably to their own central place in the world.
So here's an extreme version of the same phenomenon applied to natural history. Most reasonably educated people have some idea that not all prehistoric animals lived at the same time (although poor #Dimetrodon is forever going to be mixed in with #dinosaurs) but they do tend to lump enormous spans of time together: #mammoths and #sabertooths, before that all dinosaurs all at once, and before that ... I dunno ... jellyfish or something.
#Creationists, of course, turn it up to 11.
Perhaps a bit late to the party, but I couldn't resist. You know, Shrewsbury's been there a long time, no rush.
This turned up on my Facebook feed. My response: "Here's to all the #antivaxers who didn't make it to 2023, and best wishes to the others for 2024."
The Scientist is a well-known and respected biomedical research trade publication, and I guess they put on events now and then. The Scientistt must be even better: that extra 't' adds a certain zing, doncha think? So I'd better send them my response right away. I'd hate to miss out on this opportunity.
Nice of them to recognize me as "a leading researcher in the field." Most of my work is behind the scenes, partly by personal preference and partly because it just doesn't take much to get the villagers lighting the torches. But maybe it's time for me to put aside my instinctive humility and step into the limelight.
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran USAF medic and Army infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, long-ago kickboxer, oldbat goth, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
