"Since I wrote to you, we have had several bad days of wind and dust. On the worst one recently, old sheets stretched over door and window openings, and sprayed with kerosene, quickly became black and helped a little to keep down the irritating dust in our living rooms. Nothing that you see or hear or read will be likely to exaggerate the physical discomfort or material losses due to these storms. Less emphasis is usually given to the mental effect, the confusion of mind resulting from the overthrow of all plans for improvement or normal farm work, and the difficulty of making other plans, even in a tentative way. To give just one specific example: the paint has been literally scoured from our buildings by the storms of this and previous years; we should by all means try to 'save the surface'; but who knows when we might safely undertake such a project? The pleasantest morning may be a prelude to an afternoon when the 'dust devils' all unite in one hideous onslaught. The combination of fresh paint with a real dust storm is not pleasing to contemplate.Now I have a hankering to re-read The Worst Hard Time, which I cannot recommend highly enough.
The prospects for a wheat crop in 1936 still remain extremely doubtful. There has been no moisture of any kind since the light snow of early January..."
"I think it is the job of a professional instructor to remain up to date in their fields of endeavor. I won’t stop taking classes as long as I am teaching these skill sets. I vow to never become one of those instructors whose peak instructional training is a weekend NRA class.One of the meta-instructive things at a group event like TacCon or the old Paul-E-Palooza was you got to see which instructors were out there taking classes from other presenters in their free time. When someone decides they're too cool to learn anything new, it makes me question the value of their teaching.
I think I owe it to my students to show them that I am continuing to do the work."
It’s not unusual for paleontologists to disagree about ancient animal bodies — sometimes with a ferocious intensity. Gottfried recalled witnessing some scientists get into a heated disagreement over the angle of the thigh bone when assembling a triceratops specimen.The bit about shrink-wrapping the skin around the skeletons was interesting. I have a book on my Kindle shelf titled All Yesterdays that's a neat look at how illustrations of prehistoric animals have evolved over time, and also has some freaky-looking pictures of modern animals if they were reconstructed by yesterday's paleontologic illustrators from skeletal remains. You'll never look at cows... or your cat ...the same way.
John Hutchinson, a professor of evolutionary biomechanics at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London, is part of the team that put forward the controversial 3D model of the megalodon. He said that the stakes are always high in science, but particularly when working on species that attract both public and scientific fascination.
“The more celebrity an extinct animal has, and the rarer it is, the more competitive or heated the disagreements can be,” Hutchinson said. “I know this all too well. I worked on T. rex.”
Hutchinson said that, early in his career, people used 2D illustrations of fossilized skeletons and shrink-wrapped skin around them, making them quite skinny. Based on these models, people believed Tyrannosaurus rex was around 11,000 pounds. But now, using various methods, scientists mostly agree that an adult T. rex would have been somewhere around 17,000 pounds.
Kailee Blalock, an interior designer in San Diego, posted a video to TikTok last month that sought to define bookshelf wealth and school viewers in achieving the aesthetic in their own homes.I wonder if I can get a job working for an interior designer where I break the spines on books, dog-ear a few pages, scribble a random note or two in the margins, and maybe leave a yellowed old Fresh Market receipt in the pages like a bookmark.
“These aren’t display books,” Ms. Blalock, 26, cautions in the video, which has been viewed over 1.3 million times. “These are books that have actually been curated and read.”
"Perhaps you’ve run across the term “mondegreen”? I’ve long known it to mean a misheard lyric or bit of poetry, but its full meaning I learned only minutes ago — because I finally deigned to investigate. “Mondegreen” was coined in 1954 by writer Sylvia Wright to commemorate her having misapprehended the phrase “laid him on the green,” in this line from a Scottish ballad: “They have slain the Earl of Moray / An’ laid him on the green.” Wright heard wrong, thinking there were two slaying victims, the earl and “Lady Mondegreen.”"Bobbi's been pushing me to read Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, and I think the linked column has pushed it to the top of my to-read pile.
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