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
Brought out from a discussion elsenet: would Earth now be warm enough to support large, #nonavian #dinosaurs today? This is a fair question, because as bad as global warming is—and it's going to get worse—we're still nowhere near the hottest times of the #Mesozoic.
The answer is, it was *generally* warmer than the present day, but #global #temperatures went up and down considerably, as you'd expect over such a long stretch of time—about 175 million years from the first dinosaurs to the #Chicxulub impact. Dinosaurs as a #clade did fine the whole way through, although of course with plenty of various groups dying out in the meantime.
Also, the planet has always had warmer and cooler regions. Many large dinosaurs lived comfortably in polar regions that had #climates comparable to the cooler parts of the temperate zones today. The idea that non-avian dinosaurs exclusively inhabited steaming jungles or baking deserts has been embedded by generations of paleoart, but it's just wrong. If the impact hadn't happened, they'd still be thriving.
That being said, #sauropods in particular seemed to prefer warmer environments, so their range might be a lot more limited now than it was then, and it's possible the ice age(s) would have finished them off. Other famous giants like #tyrannosaurs, #ceratopsians, and #hadrosaurs would still be widespread, and smaller ones like #dromaeosaurs ("raptors") would be as numerous as coyotes and wildcats are in our world.
"Is it possible that #Sauropods are still living somewhere on the Earth we are not aware of?" The dream that never quite dies.
When I criticize #religious #fanaticism, I am not criticizing all #religion, or all #religious #believers. If this concept makes you uncomfortable, think really hard about why, and what you might be able to do about that. Protip: whining in the comments on #atheists' posts isn't it.
"Yeah but somehow we lost technology we had in the 70s to get past the Van Halen belt and haven't been back since... Give me a break"
"No no, Van Halen is a rock band. Van *Heusen* makes belts."
Best response to #MAGA lunacy ever: "When I want your opinion I'll ask Trump".
"[#NOAA's] mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable." — #Project2025, page 675.
This perfectly expresses what happens when you put government in the hands of people who think everything happens according to divine will.
The currently trendy obsession with being a "#king" is poison.
Buddy, the vast majority of #men throughout human #history—past, present, and future—are not kings. If you think you are, or can be, you don't understand how people function. We're not #knights either. We're #peasants. We're born, we live, we work, we die. Nobody but our friends and families will ever know we existed. When they die too, we will be completely and utterly forgotten.*
The ones who are kings? Or #dukes, or #barons, or knights? Shitheads, by and large. Even the "good ones" turn out to be pretty bad when you look closely. #Rulers need the #people, but people don't need rulers. This is a lesson the world learned through millennia of blood and pain. Those who want to discard that hard-won knowledge are scum.
If that's what you want to be ... okay, thanks for letting us know what you are. We won't forget it.
#Antivaxers love to talk about Protecting The Children, but also think hundreds of dead kids is a "modest number."
From "Crash Landing" (1979) a pleasant little science fiction movie about how the crew of a damaged space freighter work together to repair their ship and get home in time for the third officer's daughter's eleventh birthday.
I'm a #patriot, not a #nationalist, and often get into the weeds trying to explain the difference. This simplified version covers the most important parts, especially the first panel. "Patriotism is pride in who you are, nationalism is pride in who you aren't" deserves to be an internet law.
An addendum: at Staunton, a young woman was running back and forth along the stretch of trail we were on. She passed us a couple of times in each direction, giving us a cheerful smile each time. At a guess, she was timing herself, maybe race training. Good steady #5k or #10k pace.
Each time, we smiled and waved back, and I felt a ferocious envy. #Running is the only exercise I've ever enjoyed for its own sake. #Weights and #martialarts were means to an end—get stronger, fight better. #PT and #roadmarching were not to get yelled at. But running was a gateway to a better world.
Never again. My leg won't take it. These days, the only world to which it would be a gateway would be the emergency department, maybe followed by the operating suite. While I miss the #ER too, for quite different reasons, I'm not in a hurry to get back to it ... like that.
Of course I enjoy #hiking for its own sake as well, but I don't think of it as exercise. It's the best kind of #medicine. Losing my gut would be a bonus, though.
@vivtek I hear you. Music seems like a personality indicator, even though in practice it really isn't.
Two #hikes this week: Wednesday was the Forest Loop at the #LookoutMountain Nature Center, and yesterday was about half of the Davis Ponds trail at #Staunton State Park.
Lookout's an old friend. Staunton was new to us, and we'll definitely be back—it's spectacular, and highly recommended. Also, Becca added a whole bunch of species to her #iNaturalist life list.
Neither was challenging by our old standards—particularly the Forest Loop, which is about the easiest #mountain #trail in the state—and both kicked our asses. It's impossible to overstate how sad and angry we are about losing our ability to look at any trail on any mountain and say, "Let's do that!"
We know how and why this happened, and we know what we need to do to get it back. Or some of it back, anyway: in our mid-fifties, with Becca's fibro, and my leg reminding me of the Big Snap, we're not going to turn the clock back to our early forties. Half would feel like a miracle.
Yeah, it's not our fault. But it's not okay.
Our goal is to enter our sixties limited by time rather than space. Let the main question about any trail be "do we have enough daylight left to finish this hike" rather than "will search and rescue have to pluck us off the mountain if we try this?" Which doesn't seem like too much to ask.
Say, Echo Lake to Lower Chicago Lake. That's a most-of-the-day hike: seven klicks out and 250 meters up, with a whole lot of up and down on the way, and you're *starting* at an altitude where most people can't live comfortably long-term. But lots of casual hikers make the trip just fine.
That used to be well within our capacity. Mountain gods willing, it will be again.
Recent conversations about #writing have reminded me that the #writers whose work I like the best, and the writers whose work *they* like the best, are often very disjoint sets.
Which seems kind of odd to me, really. If I like their writing, shouldn't I also expect to like the writers whose work influenced theirs? But it doesn't always or even usually work that way.
On #writers' problems: "Those ideas that rattle around in your head for years can be deeply frustrating. I think the Station was conceived ca. 2014, hatched in 2016, and didn't leave the nest until 2024. But oh, it's a wonderful feeling when you watch them make their first kill." ✍️ 🚀 🦖
Happy #Antifa Day to all who celebrate.
#Musk's cult may actually be larger than #Trump's, and more vocal thanks to #Xitter, but Trump has all the hard power. So I suspect Musk is on his way to a nasty case of #windowcancer or #teatoxicity. I won't be sorry if he does some damage on the way out, though.
https://dailygalaxy.com/2025/06/six-types-dinosaur-eggs-found-one-place/
The story is less dramatic than the headline (try to contain your shock) which makes it sound like multiple #species sharing a #nest. That would be tremendous news, implying amazing things about #interspecies behavior. But it's still a very nice find. And I love some of the site names on the map.
Also, the journal article is linked from the story, which IMO should be mandatory for all #popular #science #reporting. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0314689
What the find does seem to show is a diverse ecosystem with multiple species sharing nesting *grounds*. Some of them were related, like various kinds of the unfairly-named† #oviraptors, while others weren't even #dinosaurs at all! That's still pretty nifty.
I've said it before, but it bears repeating: no more than today, the #Mesozoic was never All Killing, All The Time. Dinosaurs did, of course, hunt and eat each other, and no doubt destroyed rivals' nests as well. But most of the time, they were living their lives in relative peace. Modern dinosaurian behavior is as good a guide as any here: even the meanest #birds tend their nests more than they fight.
†#Oviraptor was discovered on a nest, and the initial assumption was that it was stealing the eggs for food, thus the name "egg thief." Subsequent discoveries showed the eggs were its own—it was brooding, not raiding. But the species and all its kin have to bear the slander through their afterlife.
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
