Author: Christopher Merle (Page 16 of 53)
I made these boots to honor the memory of those who came before.
Is a time for reflection. It is a time to let go of the bad and embrace the good. The problem is knowing what is good and bad. Perhaps, harmful and beneficial.
Letting go of procrastination and embracing getting started would be a good first step.
This has not been a good year. Next year portends to be even worse. But there is much to look forward to, and some good things did happen this year. I’ve given a name for every year for the past few years. I have an idea what I’m going to call 2015. I’d have to go back through my old posts to see what I called them. I think I’ll call year 2015 Doubling Down on the Wrong Thing to Do.
Good is a relative term. We aren’t in North Korea or any ISIS occupied territory or in an Ebola infected country. And I don’t expect the US to collapse over the next two years, so there’s that. But I expect the infrastructure of this country will continue to deteriorate and we’ll lose two more years to deal with global warming. The longer the delay in dealing with these problems the less able we’ll be able to deal with them as the effects of them get worse.
Update 12/15/2014: In light of recent news events, I think that 2015 will subtitled:GOP, rectally force feeding America since 2000 (or 1980 or 1968).
The first book I read on paleontology was Stephen Jay Gould’s Ever Since Darwin, a collection of his essays from Natural History magazine, and over the years I’ve read all of them except for the last collection I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History. So I read popular books on evolution, paleontology, geology, and ancient history from time to time.
I am not here to recommend Gould’s books. I’m here to recommend one book I just read and one book I’m in the middle of. The first is My Beloved Brontosaurus by Brian Switek and the second is Neanderthal Man by Svante Pääbo. Of the second I’ll say that I’m learning how much DNA sequence has advanced since the early 1980’s and how very very hard it is to extract ancient DNA which makes it all the more impressive that they were able to sequence the Denisovan genome from one tiny finger bone and that we have been able to tell anything at all about this heretofore undiscovered human relative whose genes have been found in populations in Asia and may very well be responsible for Tibetans adaptation to high altitudes. Anyway it took a lot of effort and many years to sequence the Neanderthal genome.
Of the first book it’s a loving look at the dinosaurs we grew up with in the 1970’s and 80’s and how advances in our understanding of the fossil record have changed our perceptions of dinosaurs. The brontosaurus of the title never existed but it’s more of a nomenclature thing which name gets priority.
I should post here more often. It’s much quieter than my other social networks.
Right now I’m reading Five Billion Years of Solitude about the search for extraterrestrial life.
In other news, no Montana this summer nor Alaska. We were going to do an Alaska cruise to celebrate my 50th birthday. Couldn’t get the cruise we wanted, so it’ll have to be next summer. Probably won’t be going back to Montana anytime soon. Stuck in hot sunny Tucson for June. After having lived here five years, I now know why people go elsewhere for the summer. So far travel is much less than last year. I went to PyCon 2014 in Montreal in April. There was still snow on the ground, though for the most part it was warm enough.