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camwynI signed up for text messaging on my celphone today. I'll be able to send and receive up to 100 text messages a month for $2.99 each month. Not that I plan on getting near that number, but it's the basic plan and I imagine it'll probably be helpful if I'm going to get into any kind of conversational pattern with Gang (the penpal who called last night). If only to arrange times and so on.
Had a bit of a heart attack when the celphone rang a few minutes ago and said Number Unavailable. All I could think to do was look at the clock and say, "But it's nearly 5 AM over there!". Turned out it was the Verizon guy calling back to tell me I couldn't get the unlimited text messaging plan he'd offered - he'd mistakenly read me the plan for new sign-ups and did I want to go with 100/month, etc. Called from a Caller-ID-blocked phone, I guess.
Weather outside is windy and cloudy and very, very variable. I don't think I'm going to try skating tonight as I'd rather not be caught by a gust through the trees just as I approach the stretch of paving I like to call 'the Teeth*'. I do need to go shopping, though. I think I need a new suit jacket for tomorrow, and I need black flats anyway - my $25 pair of flats from late 2000 / early 2001 blew out a heel last month. Pure age, I guess. Also I want to get some advice from the Wild Bird Center lady on what food to put out for Stupid the Robin. She still has her nest and spends most of the day sitting on it, but every so often - *thunk!* *thunk!* *thunk!*.
Doing better with the new knitting project. It's a little odd to think 'eww, it's all gappy and lace-looking' while I'm working the stitches, only to smooth out the piece at the end of a row and find that I have a marvellously even-looking fabric. Pima silk (85% pima cotton, 15% silk fiber) is funny that way, I guess. I'm only about 12 rows up from the bottom but it's coming along. I'm just getting used to knitting with such a slender, slippery yarn, so picking up any speed at all is a novelty.
Stephen Jay Gould said once that Charles Darwin became the scientist he did because he spent time every day thinking about things that no one else thought about, and that these seemingly strange thoughts allowed him enough leeway in his mindset - and enough stuff to correlate in his brain - that he was able to put together scientific evidence that had been around for many years in entirely new ways. Gould suggested that his readers try 'thinking about something no one else thinks about' for ten minutes a day. My latest effort at this: something like half an hour last night working out the body plan for a two-legged riding animal, and have been pondering this on and off this morning. I am reasonably sure the hip/leg arrangement is similar to that found in Tyrannosaurus rex, with a thick tail in the rear, but am not sure whether the tail is a counterbalance to the front part of the body in quite the same way or not. Almost certainly it is not the design of the Macropoda, as the kangaroo body plan is essentially that of a three-legged organism, #3 being the tail. The problem is what to do at the other end, as I am of the opinion that humans would not be likely to get very far with a two-legged carnivorous riding animal. A carnivore that big would have to be bred out of a smaller, more useful domestic carnivore, the way Irish wolfhounds were bred out of... well, ancestral wolves and dogs. No one's going to keep a carnivore big enough to carry a man on hand for very long if they have another option. Simpler to assume the beast is a plant-eater, probably a browser with a giraffid-like head and diet, possibly with a great many vertebrae in the neck along the line of certain waterfowl, definitely with prehensile lips. This would imply either a ruminant digestive system or innards evolved in an alien environment to handle cellulose rather more efficiently than we are familiar with. The only real remaining problem is what became of the forelimbs. Present and used for grasping? Present and vestigial? Almost entirely absent a la the pelvic bones of whales?
Side note: if the animal is a ruminant it is almost certainly kosher as I am reasonably sure the toes are arranged in a fashion like those of the camel. Not for running on sand, more for handling mucky ground in riverine areas, but still.
Bah. Got to get going. More rambling later.
*because it chews up your wheels- and if you fall on it, your knees
Had a bit of a heart attack when the celphone rang a few minutes ago and said Number Unavailable. All I could think to do was look at the clock and say, "But it's nearly 5 AM over there!". Turned out it was the Verizon guy calling back to tell me I couldn't get the unlimited text messaging plan he'd offered - he'd mistakenly read me the plan for new sign-ups and did I want to go with 100/month, etc. Called from a Caller-ID-blocked phone, I guess.
Weather outside is windy and cloudy and very, very variable. I don't think I'm going to try skating tonight as I'd rather not be caught by a gust through the trees just as I approach the stretch of paving I like to call 'the Teeth*'. I do need to go shopping, though. I think I need a new suit jacket for tomorrow, and I need black flats anyway - my $25 pair of flats from late 2000 / early 2001 blew out a heel last month. Pure age, I guess. Also I want to get some advice from the Wild Bird Center lady on what food to put out for Stupid the Robin. She still has her nest and spends most of the day sitting on it, but every so often - *thunk!* *thunk!* *thunk!*.
Doing better with the new knitting project. It's a little odd to think 'eww, it's all gappy and lace-looking' while I'm working the stitches, only to smooth out the piece at the end of a row and find that I have a marvellously even-looking fabric. Pima silk (85% pima cotton, 15% silk fiber) is funny that way, I guess. I'm only about 12 rows up from the bottom but it's coming along. I'm just getting used to knitting with such a slender, slippery yarn, so picking up any speed at all is a novelty.
Stephen Jay Gould said once that Charles Darwin became the scientist he did because he spent time every day thinking about things that no one else thought about, and that these seemingly strange thoughts allowed him enough leeway in his mindset - and enough stuff to correlate in his brain - that he was able to put together scientific evidence that had been around for many years in entirely new ways. Gould suggested that his readers try 'thinking about something no one else thinks about' for ten minutes a day. My latest effort at this: something like half an hour last night working out the body plan for a two-legged riding animal, and have been pondering this on and off this morning. I am reasonably sure the hip/leg arrangement is similar to that found in Tyrannosaurus rex, with a thick tail in the rear, but am not sure whether the tail is a counterbalance to the front part of the body in quite the same way or not. Almost certainly it is not the design of the Macropoda, as the kangaroo body plan is essentially that of a three-legged organism, #3 being the tail. The problem is what to do at the other end, as I am of the opinion that humans would not be likely to get very far with a two-legged carnivorous riding animal. A carnivore that big would have to be bred out of a smaller, more useful domestic carnivore, the way Irish wolfhounds were bred out of... well, ancestral wolves and dogs. No one's going to keep a carnivore big enough to carry a man on hand for very long if they have another option. Simpler to assume the beast is a plant-eater, probably a browser with a giraffid-like head and diet, possibly with a great many vertebrae in the neck along the line of certain waterfowl, definitely with prehensile lips. This would imply either a ruminant digestive system or innards evolved in an alien environment to handle cellulose rather more efficiently than we are familiar with. The only real remaining problem is what became of the forelimbs. Present and used for grasping? Present and vestigial? Almost entirely absent a la the pelvic bones of whales?
Side note: if the animal is a ruminant it is almost certainly kosher as I am reasonably sure the toes are arranged in a fashion like those of the camel. Not for running on sand, more for handling mucky ground in riverine areas, but still.
Bah. Got to get going. More rambling later.
*because it chews up your wheels- and if you fall on it, your knees
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no subject
Date: 2003-05-13 01:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-05-14 07:10 am (UTC)Frankly, all of this stems back to the fact that I cannot go into a museum with any kind of decent palaeontological selection and not think 'hmm, I wonder how one would go about breaking that to the saddle'. Mind, that occasionally begins with 'well, first you'd have to slaughter and skin a Mamenchisaurus, because you're not going to get a long enough strip of leather from anywhere except a Mamenchisaurus' neck', but.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-14 06:27 am (UTC)Also, the laws of kashrut don't adress animals that have one set of feet that are cloven, and one set that aren't, and it might well be an interesting question if you come up with a animal that only has two legs, but which is otherwise kosher -- it might be possible to argue that the definition of animal implies four legs. (Humans are, halachically speaking, not considered animals).
Another possible route towards getting a two legged transport animal might be to go up from ostriches, elephant birds, or moa. The whatchamacalits, phororhacids? and dyatrima probably wouldn't work due to the carnivore problem, but they'd be a stylin' sort of ride, if you bulked them up a bit.
Re:
Date: 2003-05-14 06:53 am (UTC)I'd been considering the larger birds, since it's only logical to go from the possibilities of the T-rex hip arrangement to those of dinosaurian descendants, but when you're dealing with flightless birds the problem of steering comes in. There's nowhere to put the bit, there's no nasal septum to pierce, and a hackamore isn't going to exert pressure over a beak in the way it would over a nose - plus the nares on a bird are right where a hackamore's band would go anyway. And of course there is the question of arranging the cinch on the saddle, or even just the legs, so as not to interfere unduly with the vestigial wings.
Hadn't thought about the kashrut issues with regards to multiple toe arrangements. I imagine it would be even harder if the forepaws had grasping capability, as that begins to imply hand and that's got to be a problem.
And yeah, I knew about the not-considered-animals thing - ask