Winter Reading Program -- March 4, 2023

Nothing new here. This has all been previously posted. 

1. California: America's High-Stakes Experiment, Peter Schrag, c. 2006.

• California politics, late 1990s into the 21st century. 
• how the California public education system (kindergarten through university) collapsed. 
• what happens when 1% of the population accounts for 49% of the state's revenue.

2. Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and The Great Environmental Awakening, Douglas Brinkley, 2022.

• "EPA" politics
• incredibly good writing;
  

3. The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, From the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to US, Steve Brusatte, c. 2022.

• one of four books that should be read by every high school junior / senior who plans to major in the life sciences in college; the others:
  
• The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong, c. 2016 (revised and expanded from earlier edition) 
• The Mistaken Extinction: Dinosaur Evolution and the Origin of Birds, Lowell Dingus and Timothy Rowe, c. 1998
• How The Mountains Grew: A New Geological History of North America, John Dvorak, c. 2021.

4. The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Born, Louisa Gilder, c. 2008; and, Too Big for a Single Mind: How the Greatest Generation of Physicists Uncovered the Quantum World, Tobia Hürter, c. 2021.

• the two books that should be ready by every high school senior who plans to major in physics or chemistry in college

5. Mailer: The Naked and the Dead; Selected Letters 1945 - 1946. J. Michael Lennon, editor, c. 2023.

• "everybody" talks about reading "Mailer." And "no one" has read "Mailer." This is the only Mailer book worth reading.

6. Chip War: The Fight For the World's Most Critical Technology, Chris Miller, c. 2022. 

• every investor needs to read this book

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Winter Reading Program, 2022 - 2023

My 2022 - 2023 winter reading program -- ends May 31, 2023.

 The books

• Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and The Great Environmental Awakening, Douglas Brinkley, 2022.
  
• California: America's High-Stakes Experiment, Peter Schrag, c. 2006.
  
• The Book of Eels, Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World, Patrick Svensson, c. 2020.
• The Mind of a Bee, Lars Chittka, c. 2022. Princeton University Press. A scientific treatise.
  
• The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, From the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to US, Steve Brusatte, c. 2022.
• Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle, The Countess of Carnarvon, 2011.
• The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien, deluxe edition, 2004. Notes on the text: Douglas A. Anderson, May, 2004.
  
• Cinema Speculation, Quentin Tarantino, November 1, 2022.
  
• The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Born, Louisa Gilder, c. 2008.
  
• Chip War: The Fight For the World's Most Critical Technology, Chris Miller, c. 2022.
  
• Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, Pekka Hämäläinen, September, 2022. 
• Too Big for a Single Mind: How the Greatest Generation of Physicists Uncovered the Quantum World, Tobia Hürter, c. 2021.
• Mailer: The Naked and the Dead; Selected Letters 1945 - 1946. J. Michael Lennon, editor, c. 2023. See note here.

Well, Folks -- Time To Go Poolside -- Off The Grid --- February 22, 2023

Updates

February 23, 2023: to this book --

The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, From the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to US, Steve Brusatte, c. 2022.

add this link: 

Later, 4:11 p.m. CT: after a few hours poolside and an hour on the treadmill, after picking up Sophia at the bus stop, I came home to relax on the second balcony. One balcony over a pair of red-breasted finches are perched on the railing. It looks like it is time to buy some bird feed for finches.

From Texas A&M:

And from the internet in general:

 Original Post

Several books to keep reading. 

From my literature blog.

My "winter-reading" program. Thirteen books currently on the list, but I've completed several, and reading these right now:

• Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and The Great Environmental Awakening, Douglas Brinkley, 2022.
  
• California: America's High-Stakes Experiment, Peter Schrag, c. 2006.
  
• The Book of Eels, Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World, Patrick Svensson, c. 2020.
• The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, From the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to US, Steve Brusatte, c. 2022.

The one in which I'm most interested but will take a lot of concentration, so will have to wait for the right "moment":

• The Mind of a Bee, Lars Chittka, c. 2022. Princeton University Press. A scientific treatise.
  

I completed "my new money" allotment / investing for the month of February. For the next round, I have to wait for the first week in March.

Trump: Making Connecticut Great Again -- Who Would Have Guessed -- September 10, 2018

Connecticut: budget and deficit crises for the past several years -- all of a sudden -- a one-billion-dollar surplus! What gives? From CTMirror.ort:

State finances, unless adjusted, were on pace to run an unprecedented $3.67 billion deficit in the 2011-12 fiscal year — a problem Malloy inherited during his first year in office from former Gov. M. Jodi Rell and from the 2010 General Assembly.

The nearly $780 million deposit Connecticut will make in September — when Lembo officially closes the books — is due largely to surging income tax receipts tied to investment earnings. 

Unfortunately, there's a lot more to the story. But for now ... CT has a funded rainy day fund.

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The Literature Page

Two books this week.

Shape Shifters: A Journey Through the Changing Human Body, Gavin Francis, c. 2018. Scottish physician, author, essayist.

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, Steve Brusatte, a Chicago-raised/schooled paleontologist who now teaches/researches at University of Edinburgh, and lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife, Anne.

What are the odds of picking two books, completely at random, on two completely different subjects, but written by two authors who both live in Scotland?

The first one, Shape Shifters, already appears perfect for a late wintery, rainy evening. It appears to be made for reading slowly, enjoying each essay.

The second one, the one on dinosaurs seems more likely a reference book, to read bits and pieces of the history of dinosaurs to fill in the gaps and to see what's new.

From wiki:

The evolution of birds began in the Jurassic Period, with the earliest birds derived from a clade of theropoda dinosaurs named Paraves.

Birds are categorized as a biological class, Aves. For more than a century, the small theropod dinosaur Archaeopteryx lithographica from the Late Jurassic period was considered to have been the earliest bird. Modern phylogenies place birds in the dinosaur clade Theropoda.

According to the current consensus, Aves and a sister group, the order Crocodilia, together are the sole living members of an unranked "reptile" clade, the Archosauria.

Four distinct lineages of bird survived the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 66 million years ago, giving rise to ostriches and relatives (Paleognathae), ducks and relatives (Anseriformes), ground-living fowl (Galliformes), and “modern birds” (Neoaves).

Phylogenetically, Aves is usually defined as all descendants of the most recent common ancestor of a specific modern bird species (such as the house sparrow, Passer domesticus), and either Archaeopteryx, or some prehistoric species closer to Neornithes (to avoid the problems caused by the unclear relationships of Archaeopteryx to other theropods).

If the latter classification is used then the larger group is termed Avialae. Currently, the relationship between dinosaurs, Archaeopteryx, and modern birds is still under debate.

So, I think I will begin with "birds" in the book by Brusatte.

A reminder: birds are dinosaurs.

Pterosaurs were not dinosaurs; they were gliding reptiles. Pterosaurs were the first group of vertebrates to evolve wings and fly. Dinosaurs -- in the guise of birds -- were the second.

From page 272: "The realization that birds are dinosaurs is probably the single most important fact ever discovered by dinosaur paleontologists.

Darwin. 1860s.

Thomas Henry Huxley: Darwin's most ardent supporter; self-described as "Darwin's Bulldog."  Huxley was the one who first proposed that birds descended from dinosaurs.

Debate favored the non-believers into the 1920's.

But then, everything changed in ... drum roll ... 1969. An unassuming Yale professor named John Ostrom and his rambunctious student Robert Bakker -- Bakker, not Bakken -- completely reimagined dinosaurs, even making the argument that dinosaurs lived in together in herds, had keen senses, cared for their young, and may have been warm-blooded like us.

The "renaissance" began in far southern Montana -- when Ostrom discovered a new species, Deinonychus, a raptor, a close relative of Velociraptor, which was discovered in Mongolia in the 1920s -- described by Henry Fairfield Osborn, the NY aristrocrat who named T rex).

Ostrom used Deinonychus to resurrect Huxley's idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs, which he argued in a series of landmark scientific papers in the 1970s. His student, Bakker, went a different route, becoming an evangelist arguing the same thing, now known for his wildly successful book in the 1980s, The Dinosaur Heresies.

Feathered dinosaur. China. Sinosaurpteryx. 1996. Found in the Liaoning region of northeastern China. Now we have twenty species, and thousands of fossils of feathered dinosaurs from that region -- farmers knew such finds would bring financial wealth, and the farmers knew their land.

The author has named and described a feathered raptor: Zhenyuanlong: a mule size creature with wings.

The Liaoning dinosaurs.

The Liaoning fossils confirm where birds perch on the dinosaur family tree. Birds are a type of theropod; they are rooted in that group of ferocious meat-eaters that most famously includes T rex and Velociraptor and Serena Williams. Just joking on that last one.

The Liaoning fossils sealed the deal.

There are no other groups of animals -- living or extinct -- that share [feathers, wishbones, three-fingered hands that can fold against the body, and hundreds of other aspects of the skeleton] with birds or theropod: this must mean that birds came from theropods. Any other conclusion requires a whole lot of special pleading.

Among theropods, birds nest within an advanced group called the paravians.

And that's where I will stop taking notes. Now, just to read.

This book is a keeper; anyone with an interest in dinosaurs needs to have it on her bookshelf. 

Reading -- Nothing About The Bakken -- February 28, 2023

If you came here looking for the Bakken, scroll down or scroll to the sidebar at the right.

A little diversion today, while fact-checking something.

From bibleref.com:

Currently reading The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, From the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to US, Steve Brusatte, c. 2022. where I first came across the reference to hyraxes in the bible.

As mentioned earlier, for a high school junior or senior going on to college to major in one of the life sciences, the three books that should be summer reading:

• The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, From the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to US, Steve Brusatte, c. 2022.
• The Mistaken Extinction: Dinosaur Evolution And The Origin Of Birds, Lowell Dingus And Timothy Rowe. c. 1998
• The Mind of a Bee, Lars Chittka, c. 2022. Princeton University Press. A scientific treatise.

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Pop Quiz 

Fill in the blank: 

One out of every five mammal species alive right now is a ______________ -- some fourteen hundred total species -- a diversity exceeded only by rodents. 

Not only are there more ______________ species, but they are aces at coexisting: in the tropics, more than a hundred species are known to inhabit the same ecosystems.

Later, answer: bats. 

Link: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/78145-largest-group-of-mammals.

 

Presidential Politics -- The September 10 Debate At Risk? Multiple Sources Reporting -- August 26, 2024

Locator: 48456PP.

From Vanity Fair:

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The Book Page

Top shelf books on evolution.

• When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, Michael J. Benton, c. 2003. 
• Dinosaurs Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution in Paleontology, Michael J. Benton, c. 2019.
• Gorgon: Paleontology, Obsession, and the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth's History, Peter D. Ward, c. 2004.
  

The book that probably started it all -- for me -- was The Mistaken Extinction: Dinosaur Evolution and the Origin of Birds, Lowell Dingus and Timothy Rowe, c. 1997, perhaps one of the best books I've ever read on this subject, and, it introduced me to the whole subject of "clades." 

Others:

• The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, From the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to US, Steve Brusatte, c. 2022.

• The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs, Third Edition, Gregory S. Paul, c. April 16, 2024. [I have the second edition, 2016.]
  

Potpourri -- Portland, Oregon -- February 6, 2023

Updates

February 7, 2023: Mark Hulbert -- of course, it would -- 

February 7, 2023: back in 1982 --

Last year the Biden administration did the right thing by collecting 1% on stock buybacks -- charged to the company -- and ultimately paid for by the shareholders -- as far as I'm concerned the practice of stock buybacks should be illegal -- who was president in 1982?

Yeah, Ronald Reagan. The dots are starting to connect. 

From wiki:

In most countries, a corporation can repurchase its own stock by distributing cash to existing shareholders in exchange for a fraction of the company's outstanding equity [is that what "we" do now?].  Cash is exchanged for a reduction in the number of shares outstanding. The company either retires the repurchased shares or keeps them as treasury stock, available for re-issuance.

Biden will get a chance to see how much pain the market / Wall Street is willing to accept. I'll be disappointed in any politico protesting this initiative. 

Original Post

Investing. Link here. 

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Investing In Fossil Fuel Energy

Shares of oil companies will never do as well as they should simply because there's too much "negativity" and "baggage" associated with him. They will never benefit from MOJO or FOMO.

The only way these companies can reward their shareholders? Dividends. Even buybacks are worthless if shares don't appreciate. 

Link here.

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Shopping In Portland, OR Today

Sherpas on sale: BOGO free. Two for the price of one.

 

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Lunch

Helping support the Russian seafood economy.

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The Book Page

Three books bought at Powell's Bookstore:

• The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, From the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to US, Steve Brusatte, c. 2022.
• Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle, The Countess of Carnarvon, 2011.
• The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien, deluxe edition, 2004. Notes on the text: Douglas A. Anderson, May, 2004

Word ForThe Day: Ungual -- February 26, 2023

One can learn the meaning of a word many different ways. My problem: I often learn a new word but then forget the meaning sometime later. I have much more success if I learn the new word from a book.

From page 230, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, From the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to US, Steve Brusatte, c. 2022.

 "These mammals became known as Darwin's South American Ungulates, because many of them walked on hooves -- a hoof being the modified ungual, or last bone, on each finger or toe, Darwin's Ungulates were astoundingly diverse."

From wiki:

An ungual (from Latin unguis, i.e. nail) is a highly modified distal toe bone which ends in a hoof, claw, or nail. Elephants and ungulates have ungual phalanges, as did the sauropods and horned dinosaurs. A claw is a highly modified ungual phalanx.

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Global Warming Smacks New England

Link here.

Meanwhile, a historic winter storm hits southern California.

Efficiency -- Making America Great Again -- September 8, 2018

From the hayride: 600 days.

From gateway pundit. 600 days.

From the cheatsheet: vacation time. It appears Trump is taking twice the number of vacation days, playing twice as much golf as his predecessor and still accomplishing four times as much for the American people.

This is a most interesting graph. Look at the US debt to GDP ratio.

Unemployment at record lows or near record lows: the overall unemployment rate; African-American unemployment rate; Hispanic unemployment rate.

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Dinosaurs and Color

This may just be the coolest thing I learned all week: how scientists are figuring out how to determine the color of dinosaurs. This is absolutely fascinating. I first read about it in: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, Steve Brusatte, 2018.

A very, very clever young scientist figured it out.

I think it raises a lot of metaphysical questions. Seriously.

Here's how scientists are figuring out the colors of dinosaurs:

• from National Geographic, 2010
• from Popular Science, 2017

Oops, We Did It Again -- Energy Sector This Year -- You Never Expect To See This -- "Worst Results Ever" -- February 17, 2023

Link here.

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The Book Page
The Rise and Reign of the Mammals
Steve Brusatte
c. 2022

In round numbers:

• amphibians appear on land, 365 million years ago
• the "link" from amphibian to reptile/mammal ancestor appears: 300 million years ago
• mammal/reptile split --> direct mammalian ancestor (cynodont): 260 million years ago
• dinosaurs appear: 250 million years ago
• mammals flourish; non-dinosaur reptiles persist (birds, crocodile and their ancestors)

Amphibians --> reptile/mammal ancestor

• skull difference
• one group develops two large skull openings behind each of their eyes -->disapsids --> reptiles
• the other group: the two large skull openings fuse into one --> synapsids --> mammals
• for test-taking, how does one remember which is which?
• these large openings -- windows -- fenestrae -- that's where muscles attach
• the stronger the muscles, the more windows needed
• which have stronger jaw muscles: crocodiles or humans?
• so, crocodiles are diapsids; mammals are synapsids
• note: the synapsides in humans have anatomically closed but one can feel "functional" "windows" - the synapsid -- when opening and closing jaws

This book is c. 2022 but it's already somewhat out of date, or perhaps in period of transition

• the ancestor -- amphibian -->reptile/mammal ancestor -- has most recently been "called" a pelycosaur
• but now, pelycosaur is already falling out of favor
• pelycosaur is still used informally, as in this book, but purists in formal settings use a new term
  
• now, the preferred term: Eupelycosauria (Eu = true; pelycosaur)
• the term Eupelycosauria includes most pelycosaurs, but also Therapsida and Mammalia

The Market, Energy, And Political Page, Part 3, T+46 -- September 28, 2018 -- WTI Over $73

WTI: up almost 2%; up over a dollar; should close solidly above $73.

The market: not going to go through them again; pretty much unchanged from earlier this morning. But that WTI of $73,49 going into the weekend is really, really bullish.

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The Dinosaur Page

By the time I reached adulthood I was pretty much convinced that dinosaurs had had their 15 minutes of fame. Like the amphibians (who truly had only 15 minutes of fame), it appeared the dinosaurs were a dead-end branch.

Wow, was I wrong (and almost everyone else).

The dinosaurs, of course, never died out. They live on today as birds.

Not only do dinosaurs live on, but we continue to learn much from them, and much of what we learn can be used elsewhere.

It seems every time I buy the newest book on dinosaurs, it's obsolete almost as soon as it arrives in the mail. This past week we have another example. I just finished reading Steve Brusatte's The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, c. 2018.

Now, this story: the largest dinosaur of the Jurassic period ever found. 

By the way, before going any further, it must be noted that the writer of this article made a huge mistake that was discovered only after the article was published. The writer originally said that the newly identified dinosaur was the largest dinosaur ever found. But then I read this from the article, a screenshot.

From the article:

A new study published Thursday in Current Biology reveals that Ledumahadi mafube, a Brontosaurus relative, could have weighed 12 metric tons. That's approximately 26,000 pounds. Its fossils were discovered in South Africa.

A different dinosaur called the Argentinosaurus huinculensis has been previously cited by other scientists as being the largest dinosaur at approximately 80 tons (160,000 pounds), and lived during the Late Cretaceous period around 99.6 million years ago.

So, how does that compute? How can the  Ledumahadi mafube be the biggest dinosaur of all time when it weighed only 26,000 pounds, compared to the Argentinosaurus huinculensis, at 160,000 pounds?

The Ledumahadi mafube was a dwarf compared to the A. huinculensis.

The scientists quickly notified the writer, Bonnie Burton, that the L. mafube was the largest dinosaur in the Jurassic period, but not the largest dinosaur ever.

Not by a long shot.

26,000 pounds vs 160,000 pounds.

This also explains why the link was taken down almost immediately by Matt Drudge when he saw the correction, and that this newly discovered dinosaur was a dwarf compared to its cousin.

By the way, "ledumahadi" translates to "a giant thunderclap at dawn" in the Sesotho language.

Mafube? Mafube Local Municipality is an administrative area in the Fezile Dabi District of the Free State in South Africa. The name is a Sesotho word meaning "dawning of the new day".

Trump's State Department Echoes Hillary's State Department -- Until Hillary Flipped -- September 21, 2018

Keystone XL will not have material adverse environmental impact.

TransCanada Corp plans to start construction in 2019, spokesman Matthew John said.
The company’s Chief Executive Russ Girling said last month that it could make a final investment decision on the project late this year or in early 2019, pending some regulatory approvals and court challenges.

My most recent "long" post on the Keystone XL was July 31, 2018.

Keystone XL milestones here.

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Friday Night At Barnes and Noble

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, Steve Brusatte, c. 2018.

First note here.

Geologic time: the Permian Period, Paleozoic Era, immediately preceding the Age of Dinosaurs

Mesozoic Era: the Age of Dinosaurs -- Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous

Final 30 million years of the Triassic (252 - 201 million years ago)

• early dinosaurs struggling; competing with giant salamanders
• one huge continent: Pangea -- started breaking apart; volcanic eruptions
• Pangea splits: water rushes in to the void, becomes the Atlantic Ocean
• the volcanic lava and noxious gases: biggest mass extinction in the history of life
• a mass die-off that claimed at least 30% of all species
• paradoxically, the mass extinction favored the small dinosaurs
• the Palisades, western cliffs of the Hudson River, on the New Jersey side; a sill; formed with Pangea split; formed at the end of the Triassic
• age of Nixon: Riker Hill Fossil Site, Livingston, NJ; the story of Paul Olsen 
• Newark Basin; a rift basin
• smaller rift basins all along the eastern seaboard; the tearing up caused by Pangea splitting; think of pizza being pulled apart
• the Newark Basin: Morocco; Brazil
• the footprints of dinosaurs along the eastern seaboard
• then the volcanic eruptions went into high gear
• counter-intuitively: the rise of the big dinosaurs: they became more diverse; more abundant, and larger
• volcanoes run out of lava and the 600,000-year reign of terror ends
• the world (early Jurassic) is now a very different place than it was in the Late Triassic
• almost every animal alive had now disappeared; one exception -- the only pseudosuchians that made it through the great Pangean breakup were a few types of primitive crocodiles, a handful of battle-worn stragglers that would eventually evolve into the modern alligators and crocodiles but would never enjoy the same success they had in the Late Triassic; pseudosuchians: false crocodiles)
• somehow dinosaurs were the victors
• no good answer why they survived the earthquakes, the noxious gases, the lava
• the Jurassic Period marks the beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs proper
• but remember, the first true dinosaurs entered 30 million years earlier, during the Late Triassic
• but with the break-up of Pangea, the dinosaurs pretty much had the world to themselves
• the evolution of the sauropods
• Ischigualasto (Argentina)
• sauropods: everywhere; but failed to achieve full potential because they could not survive the deserts
• roamed everywhere; now finding giant sauropods in Scotland, Isle of Skye
• Dugald Ross; Ellishadder; very Tokienesque; Gaelic; the Staffin Museum; Jurassic fossils
• p. 108; we'll stop there -- begins the story of the giant sauropods 

From wiki:

Pseudosuchia ("false crocodiles") is one of two major divisions of Archosauria and includes living crocodilians and all archosaurs more closely related to crocodilians than to birds (what are often called "crocodilian-line archosaurs"). Since 2011 it has replaced “Crurotarsi” when inconsistencies were found in the definition of the latter name.

The sister clade to the pseudosuchia: the Avemetatarsalia: bird-line archosaurs, including pterosaurs and dinosaurs (the latter including birds).

Archosaurs: ruling reptiles. Living representatives are crocodiles and birds. Archosaurs: diapsid amniotes.

From wiki:

The mammals represent the only living Synapsida, which together with the Sauropsida form the Amniota clade. 

The early synapsid mammalian ancestors were sphenacodont pelycosaurs, a group that produced the non-mammalian Dimetrodon.

At the end of the Carboniferous period, this group diverged from the sauropsid line that led to today's reptiles and birds.

The line following the stem group Sphenacodontia split-off several diverse groups of non-mammalian synapsids—sometimes referred to as mammal-like reptiles—before giving rise to the proto-mammals (Therapsida) in the early Mesozoic era.

The modern mammalian orders arose in the Paleogene and Neogene periods of the Cenozoic era, after the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs, and have been among the dominant terrestrial animal groups from 66 million years ago to the present.

Okay, enough of this.

For The Archives -- Nothing About The Bakken -- February 19, 2023

Wow, wow, wow ... we need more three-day weekends -- especially when Sophia is out of town ... and I have three days to myself. I'm getting caught up on my reading .... seven books from Powell Books, Portland, OR.

• Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and The Great Environmental Awakening, Douglas Brinkley, 2022.
  
• California: America's High-Stakes Experiment, Peter Schrag, c. 2006.
  
• The Book of Eels, Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World, Patrick Svensson, c. 2020.
• The Mind of a Bee, Lars Chittka, c. 2022. Princeton University Press. A scientific treatise.
  
• The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, From the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to US, Steve Brusatte, c. 2022.
• Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle, The Countess of Carnarvon, 2011.
• The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien, deluxe edition, 2004. Notes on the text: Douglas A. Anderson, May, 2004.

... plus a couple of earlier books from Amazon, yet to finish, including:

• Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, Pekka Hämäläinen, September, 2022. 
• Mailer: The Naked and the Dead; Selected Letters 1945 - 1946. J. Michael Lennon, editor, c. 2023. See note here.

I can hardly wait for summer ... to get back to swimming, but this weekend is going to be superb.

And the music on YouTube ... superb .. and NASCAR tomorrow. Not sure if I will watch the race. I didn't even watch the Super Bowl this year, and didn't even listen to "Get Up" or "First Take" the morning after.

And I've lost all interest in the PGA -- the tipping point -- the juvenile prank / joke by Tiger Woods. I can't even imagine Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus ... 

... so, lots of blogging, updating journals, reading, and more reading.

I still haven't had a haircut in a barbershop .... all haircuts by Sophia since March, 2020 --- that's hard to believe ... three years ... and Sophia was five years old when she gave me my first haircut. They used to be free; she charges me as much as $20 some days. I might give her $5 .... LOL. 

Chicago Update -- Doomsday Re-Visited -- August 29, 2019

It's been awhile since there were any updates regarding "cities in trouble."

The most recent update, dated July 2, 2019. The city: Chicago.

Today: "Chicago mayor faces huge budget shortfall." Data points:

• deficit / budget gap for 2020: $1 billion
• nation's third largest city: annual budget of $10 billion
• servicing debt costs: $2 billion
• Chicago: largest net pension liability of any major US city: $40 billion
• the estimate had been ... $30 billion
• complaint: "wealthiest residents, wealthiest corporations need to pay their fair share."

Tea leaves: they will vote with their feet.

By the way, that $40 billion pension liability. That's not the complete story. From the zerohedge link:

Chicago has four city-run pension funds that collectively face a $42 billion shortfall. The Chicago Public Schools’ pension fund is short another $24 billion.

In all, there’s a $70 billion shortfall in the city-based funds alone.

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Dinosaur Notes

(in progress)

The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, Steve Brusatte, c. 2018.

Permian-Triassic extinction: world's most severe known extinction event, 252 million years ago. A bit of irony:

• the frogs survived that extinction event, and are now facing another extinction event

Comment: reptiles and amphibians had fifteen minutes of fame. 

The therapsids.

From wiki:

The Gorgonopsia ("Gorgon faces") are an extinct suborder of theriodonts. Like other therapsids, gorgonopsians were at one time called "mammal-like reptiles" in classical systematics; the term stem mammals or proto-mammals is currently preferred.

End of the Permian: just before the age of dinosaurs -- 252 million years ago

• end of the Permian, top of the food chain:
• slimy salamanders bigger than dogs
• pareiasaurs: stocky beasts; four-feet; knobby skin, front-heavy build, generally brutish appearance; appearance of "mad reptilian offensive linemen
• dicynodonts: rummaged around in muck like pigs; sharp tusks to pry up roots
• gorgonopsians: bear-size monsters -- top of the food chain, eating pareiasaurs and dicynodonts
• just before the dinosaurs

Early Mesozoic (Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous): age of dinosaurs -- 252 million years ago