Forgot I Changed My Username and Password

I haven’t been able to get into my blog for months. Tried forgot my username, forgot my password with no result. I finally stumbled across a page in a notebook with my old username and my new username and new password. Apparently, I had changed both after my last post. D’oh!

The Death of Arecibo

Apparently, the radio telescope at Arecibo is no more. According to This item on Phys.org the radio telescope has completely collapsed.

“The telescope’s 900-ton receiver platform and the Gregorian dome—a structure as tall as a four-story building that houses secondary reflectors—fell onto the northern portion of the vast reflector dish more than 400 feet below.

The U.S. National Science Foundation had earlier announced that it would close the radio telescope. An auxiliary cable snapped in August, causing a 100-foot gash on the 1,000-foot-wide (305-meter-wide) dish and damaged the receiver platform that hung above it. Then a main cable broke in early November.

The collapse stunned many scientists who had relied on what was until recently the largest radio telescope in the world.”

This has been a long time coming according to this story from 2017 . Nonetheless, I still find it incredibly sad.

What You Can Learn From Bone Fragments: Porotic Hyperostosis And Meat Eating

I meant to write about this article back when it first came out in 2012. As you can see from the title, I was going to use it as part of my “What You Can Learn From Bone Fragments” series. In rereading the article and doing a little research to refresh my memory I have changed my mind about its usefulness in learning things from bone fragments.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more

So, it has been about six years since I have done any blogging and I have decided it is time to start writing again. A lot has changed since I blogged on a regular basis. A lot of the blogs on my blogroll are defunct. Academia.edu and Research Gate have made finding papers much easier. Homo naledi was discovered, ancient DNA research has uncovered more ancient lineages of humans (sending the out of Africa vs. multiregional continuity debate in a completely different direction), ID seems dead, who knows what all has happened in other fields of anthropology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology.

I have already edited my blog roll and will be adding some new blogs in the next few days. I plan on continuing some of the series I had started previously such as: Know Your Primate, Know Your Hominin, Science Paper of the Week, among others. I will probably start slow with a couple of posts a week until I can get back in the swing of things.

Also, if you like fly fishing and fly tying check out my other blog Going Fly Fishing

Laetoli Museum Closer To Reality

Laetoli, for those who don’t know, is the home of hominin footprints that are around 3.6 million years old. The footprints have posed a preservation problem to the paleoanthropology community – something I have written about here and here. Phys.Org has a press release on the subject:

In many ways the museum is the brainchild of Musiba, a Tanzanian-born anthropologist who has been studying the footprints since 1996 and has long championed protecting them while making the collection available to the public. Currently, the footprints are preserved by keeping them buried.
“Right now the footprints are covered up and the only way to study them is to re-excavate them, which could be damaging,” he said. “We would like to excavate half of the site and build the museum over it. We can then control the ambient air, the moisture and pH levels inside to protect the prints.”
Musiba and Lockley will advise Tanzania’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism on how best to protect the Laetoli Conservation Project. The $35 million project will develop the Laetoli World Heritage Site into a state-of-the-art complex that will include a museum, research facility with labs and accommodation for 35 scientists and an education center that can host 50 students and six teachers.

The new facility is expected to be completed in about five years and will have a laboratory dedicated specifically for students and researchers from CU Denver, the premier public research university in Denver.

Project Nim

I first wrote about Nim back in June of 2008 when I reviewed the book Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human by Elizabeth Hess. In September of 2011 I mentioned that a documentary had been made based on the book by Hess. HBO aired the documentary last night and is airing it again on 10/19/14 (check your listings). I highly recommend it, but be warned it will make you sad and cause you to question the collective sanity of humans…

Whale Watching

I am still busy researching the promised post on whales, in the meantime, this is pretty entertaining – and creepy

The Future Of This Blog

After being on hiatus for quite awhile I have been feeling the urge to write again. A large part of the reason for the hiatus was frustration at obtaining the science articles on the subjects I wanted to write about. Since I’m not in Academia I am dependent on an article being open access or on the kindness of readers. This created a lot of frustration and eventual burnout. This time around I plan on changing things a little. Rather than focus on the current breaking news in anthropology and science I will be focusing on what I have the resources to write about. That said, if I can come up with the science article behind the “new” story so much the better. I also don’t plan on blogging at the same pace as before. Look for 2-3 posts a week, more or less.

I have always loved to fish (even though I don’t eat fish – other than walleye) and this spring I decided to take up fly fishing and have learned how to tie flies as well, so I will be adding a page on my adventures with fly fishing. I’ll call the page Trout Madness in tribute to Robert Traver (pen name of John Voelker).

I am working on my first science post – on whales – which should be up sometime in the next day or two.

Update: I also have some administrative things to do, such as cleaning up the blog roll and writing a new “About” page…

Thinking About Restarting Blog

Feedback would be appreciated.

Know Your Hominin: A.L. 666-1

A.L. 666-1 was discovered in 1994 in Hadar, Ethiopia. It dates to ~2·33 MYA and has been attributed to Homo habilis. A number of Oldowan flakes and choppers were found as well.

(From Kimbel et al 1996)

Literature

Kimbel et al 1996 Late Pliocene Homo and Oldowan Tools from the Hadar Formation (Kada Hadar Member), Ethiopia. Journal of Human Evolution 31: 549–561

Kimbel et al 1997 Systematic Assessment of a Maxilla of Homo From Hadar, Ethiopia. AJPA 103:235–262