In the opening theme for Strictly Come Dancing / Dancing With The Stars, you can hear someone call out “Hey!”
That is Matt Berry (of “What We Do In The Shadows” and various other things) shouting. He is also playing guitar.
He gets no royalties for this.
George Washington never knew dinosaurs existed.
Well, technically, there are creatures that are dinosaurs whose existence Washington was aware of. What he wasn’t aware of was the category of dinosaurs.
How do we know that George Washington knew about these creatures? Did he write about them somewhere, or are you assuming that someone of his class and with his educational background would know about them in the mid to late 1700s?
The people who paid attention to the discovery of dinosaur fossils before the 1820s thought they were from giants or dragons. I doubt Washington believed in either. I suspect @Chronos is talking about birds.
Have we done a Great Debate about whether birds should be considered dinosaurs? I mean, go back far enough and every vertebrate is a fish. To me this is as irksome as the constantly-repeated mantra that humans are not descended from apes, they’re both descended from a common ancestor.
A large majority of dinosaurs had teeth. A large majority of birds do not have teeth. Seems like birds are not dinosaurs.
It’s tiresome because humans are apes (and apes are monkeys), in exactly the same way that birds are dinosaurs.
Exactly. Therefore since in modern conversational/casual English humans are always distinguished from apes and monkeys, birds can be - even should be - distinguished from dinosaurs. If some dinosaurs continued to exist today, as apes and monkeys so, it would be inevitable that birds would be referred to separately.
I know that language, especially English, is not always logical. In this matter, we would simply be affirming a usage that goes back before any of us were born. It is as correct as saying that the United States is a democracy, even though some incorrect pedants refuse to acknowledge this.
I have no opinion on the matter, but these people do.
Of course birds can be distinguished from dinosaurs and referred to separately, just like squares can be distinguished from rectangles and rectangles can be distinguished from shapes.
Unless they’re rectangular shapes.
Just gonna leave this here…
Well, I’ll get us back to dinosaurs.
I bet you’re wondering who kicked off the scientific study of dinosaurs. Well…
Gideon Algernon Mantell MRCS FRS (3 February 1790 – 10 November 1852) was an English obstetrician, geologist and palaeontologist. His attempts to reconstruct the structure and life of Iguanodon began the scientific study of dinosaurs: in 1822 he was responsible for the discovery (and the eventual identification) of the first fossil teeth, and later much of the skeleton, of Iguanodon. Mantell’s work on the Cretaceous of southern England was also important.
Why, particularly, would I be interested? Well all this took place just down the road from us. And this year is a significant year:
…The unusual fossil (pictured) that Mantell was shown in around 1820 appeared to be a tooth - Mantell had instructed Leney, his quarryman, to concentrate on finding teeth and this was found with other teeth and large bones, all from the same creature. Mantell thought it was likely to have been a plant eater because of the heavy pattern of wear on the teeth. A visit to the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London convinced him that the animal was a reptile when he saw the teeth of an iguana that matched his fossil teeth.
He named his find Iguanodon or ‘iguana teeth’ in an academic paper ‘Notice on the Iguanodon, a newly discovered reptile, from the sandstone of Tilgate Forest in Sussex’ which was presented to the Royal Society on 10th February 1825. It was only the second dinosaur to be named. It is this 200th anniversary that is being celebrated in Sussex this year, centred in Lewes but with a talk by Lewes Town Guide Debby Matthews at The Old School in Cuckfield on Thursday 6th March at 2.30pm where she will look at the importance of Cuckfield, its quarries in Mantell’s career and of its place in the study of palaeontology.
How did I know about Gideon Mantell? Many years ago, when Trep jr played youth football, I parked up in Whitemans Green Recreation Ground car park (the site of the quarry where the tooth was dug up) and found myself staring at this plaque.
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Excuse me, but birds aren’t real.
And fish don’t exist, either. (Link to a very interesting book, which deals with much more, but whose title is explained by the fact that (IIRC) the word “fish” is used to describe so many things that are completely unrelated that it signifies little more than “things found in water,” and is therefore almost entirely meaningless.)
And yet we can point to a fish or bird and say fish or bird and everybody with a knowledge of English will know what it meant.
Scientists have good reason for trying to use more specific language in specialist communications. They have to deal with the outliers as well as the common species. Which leads them into pitched battles over what is which where and when.
Again, this is an issue of language, not science. You and I know what we mean what we say “chair.” Yet the boundaries of chair-like objects, as created by craftspeople and artists and provocateurs who want to undermine everyday language, are fuzzy to the point of nonexistence.
Kids know what birds and fish and chairs are from an early age. Common language usage helps them learn, rather than hinder their development. The gritty and grimy details can wait for later. Trying to teach AIs how to tell a bird from a fish from a chair has been a sticking point for training computes for a half century.
It’s true. The fact that it’s being portrayed as “hoax” is a conspiracy within a conspiracy - that’s just what they want you to think!
I knew that astronauts performing extravehicular activities (EVAs) have their spacesuits pressurized to very low pressure, a little over 4 PSI, with pure oxygen. Low pressure allows their suits to flex/bend more easily, making movements less strenuous for the astronaut. What I never understood is why EVAs were always so long, typically many hours. I mean I know it takes a bit of doing to get their spacesuits on, but really?
In this Smarter Every Day video, they explain the massive amount of overhead time associated with each EVA. The whole video is over an hour long, but I’ve cued it to the part where they explain the main issue. The short version is that the astronauts have to prebreathe pure O2 inside the space station for over three hours to get all of the nitrogen out of their system before suiting up. Since the ISS is pressurized to 14.7 PSI, they even do part of this in an airlock that’s been lowered to about 10 psi to help speed up the nitrogen purge from their bodies. With over three hours required just to begin an EVA, it makes sense now to gang your tasks into one EVA instead of just doing an hour of EVA stuff and then coming back in for a snack or something.
The rest of the video, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, is about the underwater training that astronauts do, and the current focus of testing to understand whether pressuring suits to 6+ PSI instead of 4+ PSI is feasible, as that would vastly reduce the EVA pre-breathe time.
On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson was aware of the existence of mammoths, although he imagined that they were not extinct. One of the motivations for the Lewis and Clark expedition was to find living American elephants.
