Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
Today's "I may be small, but my family will do great things!" not-quite-a-#dinosaur.
#Dromomeron wasn't as tiny as the pen implies (unless that's a really big pen!) but it wasn't large either: about a meter long, of which half was tail, and the whole thing lightly built. You could pick it up and cuddle it, and you know you'd want to.
Probably not on the dinosaurian lineage, but close—one of a number of #avemetatarsalians living in the mid-to-late #Triassic, 220-210 million years ago (mya). Biodiversity had barely recovered from the end-Permian "Great Dying" 250 mya when the climate threw another curveball in the form of the #Carnian #Pluvial Episode 234-232 mya, a Great Flood that makes "of Biblical proportions" seem kind of cute by comparison. The early Triassic biota had looked more like that of the late #Permian, only vastly sparser: it was later in the period, after the rains washed the remnants away, that dinosaurs and their close relatives began their rise.
Into this relatively empty world came Dromomeron and many other avemetatarsalians, all trying to fill open niches along with the crocodilians to round out the archosaur family tree. Only the dinosaurs and pterosaurs succeeded in the long term, but many others had a good run: the Dromomeron genus contains three named species and there were probably more.
Like all the rest, it wasn't a "failure" or a "dead end," except in the sense that everything is a dead end eventually. See it now not as bones frozen in rock, but a thriving animal, warm and active and alive. We can only hope to leave such a legacy.
(Art by Gabriel Ugueto. If you don’t know his work, you should.)
Not posted for agreement, if you share please leave my commentary intact, terms and conditions apply.
Like practically every other man, and every other human being regardless of gender, I'm strong in some ways, weak in others. Saying "strong men are ..." anything in particular is part of the problem: it carries with it the implication that men must be strong, in every way and all the time. Well, I feel good when I'm strong, but I'm trying really hard to learn not to beat myself up about weakness. That does nobody any good, not me and not the other people who want me in the world.
Same for other men: our ruthless enforcement of arbitrary rules of masculinity has a lot to do with why we have much higher rates of alcoholism and suicide. I went too far down that road once in my life. I'm not doing it again, and I'm not pushing anyone else down it either.
The older I get, the more I believe there's no real difference between "good man" and "good person who happens to be a man." Good *people* are protective and loving—when they need to be, and also capable of acknowledging when they themselves need protection and love. Good people also, of course, refrain from abuse and spite. When they feel themselves going in that direction, they try to understand what's driving their anger, and open up to the people who love them. The alternative is bottling it up until they lash out, at which point they're no longer good.
Mr. Aleczander's heart is in the right place, I'm sure. I don't criticize him or any man for struggling to reconcile ancient ideas of manhood with overall human decency. Let's all just try not to repeat the same mistakes.
I particularly love how they keep going with the theme in the fine print.
A friend got this as a #Springer #journal #editor. I expect it will work about as well as #plagiarism detection #software generally does. Maybe worse, since journal writing in particular is known for forcing human* authors into a very mechanical #writing #style. There may be nothing easier to mimic for #ChatGPT et al.
*Presumably.
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 medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
