For my birthday, I finished the Dinosaur Book (DB). I don't happen to know what the title of the DB is, so I will use a nice acronym. I spend much of my time working on books that are seas of acronyms. Anyway, all done. Before that point, however, the familial units had to listen to me talk about the DB a lot. A whole lot. A lot of the time. Lots and lots and lots.
So, admittedly, I do tend to chat about the things I'm working on, perhaps even persistently. My mother has informed me that, when one is eating out in a restaurant, it is not an appropriate time to discuss the finer points of septic bacterial infections. And when I showed my brother the figure art for that chapter on infant autopsy procedures, he did not appear to find the photos and line art as fascinating as I did.
I conclude that others do not find my work interesting.
I'm afraid they are probably right. But, occasionally, the DB did make me laugh. Last month was, on the whole, fairly depressing, so I'm grateful for these rare, small favors.
For example, Dryosaurus skulls show that a typical juvenile trait is the correlation of small skulls with large orbits. The latter trait meant that the eyes were large relative to the rest of the face, a condition termed "cute" by some dinosaur paleontologists. (Martin, The DB, Chapter 13)
Recently two paleontologists calculated how many 68-kg lawyers (where 1.0 lawyer = 4.3 × 108 kJ) a 4.5-metric-ton Tyrannosaurus rex would have needed to eat in a year, depending on whether it was ectothermic or endothermic. Their calculations revealed that an endothermic Tyrannosaurus of this size would have required 292 lawyers/year, whereas an ectothermic one would have only needed 73 lawyers/year. In other words, an endothermic Tyrannosaurus would have been four times more effective at stemming frivolous litigation than an ectothermic one. (Martin, The DB, Chapter 16)
Well, perhaps "two paleontologists walk into a bar..." is not an act ready to go on the road, but I did smile at certain points. Science books in general are not funny. I should know.
Quick update: Woo hoo! Parts of this book are online now, and it's terribly pretty. Run over and check it out! Introduction to the Study of Dinosaurs
So, anyway, when I went out to check the mail a week or so back, I found a small Camarasaurus sitting on my porch. (Not life size.) It was left by my mother, who was getting a bit tired of listening to all of the aforementioned dinosaur talk but was trying to be a supportive person. I have no idea where she got it. It temporarily replaced Godzilla as my editing buddy.
More to the point, this explains why my birthday cake was decidedly Mesozoic.
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My mother said she'd spotted the candles during her fieldwork outing to Meijer in search of dinosaurs, and decided they looked unusual and interesting. So I lit the candles on the cake and it was rather pretty, if funky. (And, no, I am not 11 years old.) |
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Unknown to anyone, these were "sparkler" candles, and they began to spit sparks everywhere. Woo! Okay, startling, but awfully fun. I tried to take a picture of it—you can just barely see the sparkage here, but in Real Life it was fairly intense. And, of course, volcanism is perfectly appropriate given the context. The other wacky thing was that the candles refused to blow out. They'd play dead for a few microseconds, then promptly relight themselves. The Eeyore interpretation is that someone will not get that wish granted this year. Yeah, figures.
But it was a neat cake anyway. The lesson I have learned from the DB is that if you drive your family nuts, they will reward you with Cool Stuff. I will, therefore, continue to do so. |
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No one knows why the cake decided to split in two overnight.
It's a (very) minor mystery of physics, I suppose.
Sudden volcanism!