Nothing About The Bakken -- Heading To Bed -- See Y'all In The A.M. -- September 8, 2016

From Humans in New York:

“The military is mostly filled with people who genuinely desire to do the right thing.

More Marines receive the Medal of Honor for jumping on grenades than any other action.

It’s a culture where officers eat last and everyone shares their water.

These people grew up as boy scouts and girl scouts. The whole reason they volunteered was because they wanted to do the right thing. But the right thing is never clear in war.

If you shoot too early, an innocent person gets killed. If you shoot too late, you lose a buddy. So a lot of our injuries are moral ones. Most of us come home feeling like we did something wrong. Or we didn’t give enough. Or that our friends gave too much.

My best friend in the Marines was a guy named Ronnie Winchester. He was the nicest guy you can imagine. My 22nd birthday was during our officer training course. None of us had slept. We were all starving. We were only getting one ration per day. But Ronnie wanted to give me a memorable birthday. So he put a candle in his brownie and gave it to me. That’s how nice of a guy he was.

Ronnie ended up getting killed in Iraq. And if a guy like Ronnie got killed, you can’t help but wonder why you deserve to be alive. Ronnie was 25 years old when he died. He is always going to be 25 years old. I have a wife and kids now. I get to grow old. But Ronnie Winchester is always going to be 25.” 

I think some folks forget that everyone serving in uniform in Afghanistan is a volunteer. A volunteer. 

And then there's Kaepernick et al.

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From Shrew To You

A Note For The Granddaughters

Scientific American

June, 2016

pages 32 -33

From wiki, we begin:

The therapsids included the cynodonts, the group that gave rise to mammals in the Late Triassic around 225 million years ago.

Of the non-mammalian therapsids, only cynodonts and dicynodonts survived the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event.

The last of the non-mammalian therapsids, the tritylodontid cynodonts, became extinct in the Early Cretaceous, approximately 100 million years ago.  

Late Triassic

Unknown cynodont to mammaliaforms. Cynodonts were not mammals.

The unknown ancestor gave rise to:

• Morganucodonts -- died out
• Another unknown ancestor that split into Kuehneotheriids (died out) and another unknown ancestor that gave rise to:

Hamamiyidans (died out) and another unknown ancestor that split into an unknown ancestor that later gave rise to Castoracuda, Agilodocodon, and Docofossor, which all died out; and, the unknown first mammal.

The unknown first mammal split into two groups: monotremes which still exist today, and a second group with an unknown ancestor that split into two groups, Fruitafossor, which died out early, and another unknown ancestor that split into two groups with many splittings to include:

• Volaticotherium: died out early
• Repenomamus: died out 
• Gondwanatherians: died out
• Multitubercltates: died out
• Symmetrodonts: died out
• and, the Therians, arising in mid-Jurassic - Late Jurassic.

The Therians immediately broke into two groups in early Late Jurassic: Metatherians and Eutherians.

The Metatherians ultimately gave rise to marsupials which still exist; and, Placentals (via Torrejoina). 

Now, a bit of narrative from the article.

The Late Triassic period was a heady time in evolution.

A few tens of millions of years earlier, nearly all life was extinguished in a volcano-triggered mass extinction that marked the end of the Permian period and ushered in the Triassic period. After most of the giant amphibians and reptiles that ruled the Permian died out, manyof today's ost important animal groups rose up in the postapocalyptic vacuum. Turtles, lizards, frogs, crocodiles, dinosaurs (which eventually became birds) and the mammaliaform forerunners of mammals all got their start during this time of radical change.

The Triassic-Jurassic defined based on another mass extinction due Pangaea breaking apart; again, volcanoes played a major role in that mass extinction. Many dinosaurs survived and they remained the dominant group in the Jurassic, but 30 million years into the Jurassic, the mammal lineage underwent another, far larger burst of evolution. [One has to ask the question, "why?"]

Castorocauda: earliest knownn swimming mammal. [Interestingly, according to the diagram, the Castorocauda is not a mammal; typo?]

Likewise, in the diagram Docofossor not labeled as a mammal but in the narrative, it is called a  mole-like mammal.

Agilodocodon, also according to the diagram, not a mammal, was an agile tree climber, much like a squirrel.

Volaticoterium, perhaps the strangest of all would have looked like a flying squirrel.

Fruitafossor, a mammal, was an ant-eating digger.

During the Middle Jurassic, the number of mammalian species skyrocketed. Two large groups diverged: the monotremes and the therians (the broader group that comprises the marsupials and the placentals).

Then, in the Cretaceous, the unexpected happened, an event that would reset the course of mammal history: a totally new type of plant evolved -- angiosperms.