Today’s word of the day is:
Dovetail
As in the Beatles song Glass Onion:
“Fixing a hole in the ocean
Trying to make a dovetail joint-yeah
Looking through a glass onion.”
Friday, September 29, 2006
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Fear is not the Answer
Today I talked with someone about going to Graduate school, which is not really anything new for me these days. I did most of the talking so I cant say that some kind of wisdom was given to me today.
I talked about how for years now I have considered Grad school the answer for me, but really it is just a very long and difficult question. But I listened to myself talk and I listened to myself line up a bunch of reasons why I cant do this and why I wont be successful.
And upon revisiting my Why-I-Cant-Do-This list, I realized that yes the points are clear and valid but since I know the person who wrote that list, I can safely say that the source of all of those well thought out reasons is a deep and limitless ocean of fear and I cannot see the bottom.
So I came upon a resolution tonight-Fear is not a good enough reason not to go to Graduate School. And fear is not a good enough reason to not do anything that you really want to for that matter.
I talked about how for years now I have considered Grad school the answer for me, but really it is just a very long and difficult question. But I listened to myself talk and I listened to myself line up a bunch of reasons why I cant do this and why I wont be successful.
And upon revisiting my Why-I-Cant-Do-This list, I realized that yes the points are clear and valid but since I know the person who wrote that list, I can safely say that the source of all of those well thought out reasons is a deep and limitless ocean of fear and I cannot see the bottom.
So I came upon a resolution tonight-Fear is not a good enough reason not to go to Graduate School. And fear is not a good enough reason to not do anything that you really want to for that matter.
The Perfect Question
I have been thinking lately about asking questions in class. And in my thinking about it way too much I have come to the conclusion that asking a question is an art. Which makes it all the more difficult for me to relax and just casually speak in class.
When asking the perfect question, we dont want to sound ignorant of the facts, but want to collect them into a bundle and wrap them in a cloth of the perfect level of understanding and inquiry. As if to say, I know what I am talking about I just want some clarification for the connections I am making in my head, which are new and exciting.
And connections are key. Connect your knowledge of one thing to something else that is known and then ask.
Maybe I will muster up the gusto for this soon.
When asking the perfect question, we dont want to sound ignorant of the facts, but want to collect them into a bundle and wrap them in a cloth of the perfect level of understanding and inquiry. As if to say, I know what I am talking about I just want some clarification for the connections I am making in my head, which are new and exciting.
And connections are key. Connect your knowledge of one thing to something else that is known and then ask.
Maybe I will muster up the gusto for this soon.
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Black Eye, Black Belt and a Smile
Joe returned from Venezuela with a black eye and his black belt and I dont think I have seen him so moved by an experience in my life. He was given his black belt unexpectedly (and presumably the black eye was unexpected too) in a ceremony with 150 people present. He did not know a word of Spanish going down, but managed to charm the Venezuelan people with his intercontinental charisma.
We stumbled upon a Venezuelan restaurant where we ate together tonight and caught up on the time that passed.
It was completely perfect and spontaneous... just like Joe.
We stumbled upon a Venezuelan restaurant where we ate together tonight and caught up on the time that passed.
It was completely perfect and spontaneous... just like Joe.
Monday, September 25, 2006
Speech! Speech!
I went to a lovely wedding last night and the Bride’s father read a quote by Leo Tolstoy that I thought was very worth mentioning again:
“What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility”
“What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility”
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Clarity and Confusion
Interesting things I am learning about in class, which are confusing me and making me think:
1) A fossil hominin is found and dated to, let say 3 million years old, then one is found and dated to 6 million. The date alone is only a very minor part of how its relationship to other extinct species is inferred. The 3 million year old specimen can have features that are more ancestral than the 6 million year old one. Morphological features do not change uniformly over time or through lineages, and human evolution is far from linear. Interesting and confounding.
2) A novel feature in a fossil may enable it to be grouped with other fossils that share the same new feature, and differentiate it from an older more ancestral group that does not show this structure. But then, that same new feature is ancestral relative to an even more contemporary form. There is much discussion in Paleoanthrology about shared novel, or as they say “derived” features, being the crux of inferring species relationships of extinct hominins. And I just wanted to put it in words that, like most things, it is all relative.
3) After reading the material it is clear that scientists are splitting hairs to determine the best species category for these extinct ancestors. But I was thinking the other day that grouping living organisms into species is possible and obviously practical, but what of these extinct species relationships? Time is a factor that throws some current species concepts on its head and might it suffice to say that these were all human ancestors, one way or another, and to form one species distiction for all extinct hominins, like “Homo extinctus” and end it there. But I suppose that would be maximally uninteresting and would put a lot of hard working people out of work.
1) A fossil hominin is found and dated to, let say 3 million years old, then one is found and dated to 6 million. The date alone is only a very minor part of how its relationship to other extinct species is inferred. The 3 million year old specimen can have features that are more ancestral than the 6 million year old one. Morphological features do not change uniformly over time or through lineages, and human evolution is far from linear. Interesting and confounding.
2) A novel feature in a fossil may enable it to be grouped with other fossils that share the same new feature, and differentiate it from an older more ancestral group that does not show this structure. But then, that same new feature is ancestral relative to an even more contemporary form. There is much discussion in Paleoanthrology about shared novel, or as they say “derived” features, being the crux of inferring species relationships of extinct hominins. And I just wanted to put it in words that, like most things, it is all relative.
3) After reading the material it is clear that scientists are splitting hairs to determine the best species category for these extinct ancestors. But I was thinking the other day that grouping living organisms into species is possible and obviously practical, but what of these extinct species relationships? Time is a factor that throws some current species concepts on its head and might it suffice to say that these were all human ancestors, one way or another, and to form one species distiction for all extinct hominins, like “Homo extinctus” and end it there. But I suppose that would be maximally uninteresting and would put a lot of hard working people out of work.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Dazzled by Mystery
There is a certain kind of respect and awe that can only exist when something or someone is unknown to us. The mind can craft and assign an enchanted forest of qualities to something that is not fully explored. It is both wonderful and terrible to find out what something or someone really is.
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