What's in Your Bookshelf?

So I was going about my business today when I realized how absuredly overstocked my tiny bedside bookshelf is. This isn't my only shelving but I put the important stuff here. Now, I'm fairly list-oriented as a person, so I figured I may as well share a list of what is in my bookshelf. It heavily leans towards non-fiction, and history. Here we go, in no particular order, author(s) in brackets:

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Krushchev's Cold War (Fursenko & Naftali)

Age of Turbulence (Alan Greenspan)

Fall of Berlin 1945 (Antony Beevor)

A Military History of Canada (Desmond Morton)

State of Denial (Bob Woodward)

In the Hot Zone (Kevin Sites)

Postwar (Tony Judt)

The Places in Between (Rory Stewart)

Fifteen Days (Christie Blatchford)

The Second World War Series (all six volumes, Winston Churchill)

A Man Called Intrepid (William Stevenson)

Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)

A Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking)

Chaos (James Gleik)

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Daniel Dennet)

Dune (Frank Herbert)

Lord of the Rings Trilogy (JRR Tolkien)

The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien)

Apollo 13 (Lovell & Kluger)

The Chrysalids (John Wyndam)

The London Hanged (Peter Linebaugh)

Up From Dragons (Skoyles & Sagan)

Paris 1919 (Margaret Macmillan)

Kennedy and Diefenbaker (Knowlton Nash)

Shake Hands with the Devil (Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire)

The Ultimate Dinosaur (Compilation)

Long Shadows (Erna Paris)

The Ancestor's Tale (Richard Dawkins)

900 Days (Harrison Salisbury)

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So there you have it. If you happen to want to gain great insight into the readings that form the basis of my outlook on life, you'd have a decent start here!

Trilobite Blog: The Final Style

I've finally finished a template that I feel is "good enough" for the blog! It's a modified harbour design. Notice the tiny trilobite icon by every post!

The Verdict is In...

"ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2008) — Geologists at the University of Leicester have solved a puzzle found in rocks half a billion years old."

The puzzle they have solved is how soft-tissue organisms were preserved so beautifully in the burgess shale formation, on of the richest Cambrian fossil beds in the word (for the sake of full disclosure, it should be noted that I live a scant few hours drive away from the formation and am heavily biased toward it).

Turns out that, as had been suspected, it was a mudslide. We all owe a big thanks to Sarah Gabbot and Jan Zalasiewicz of the U of Leicester, as well as Desmond Collins of the Royal Canadian Museum for, and I quote, "[analysing] the shales millimetre by millimetre" to confirm that the formation was not built up of layers of sediment, but by a large amount of material pouring into the area at once.

Read the whole story at Science Daily: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080219095801.htm

And perhaps it is fitting, then, having solved the issue of how the great diversity of the Cambrian period was preserved, that I should unveil the latest design available in my store, Trilobite Clothing:

It's called "Support Trilobite Diversity," and for the most part it speaks for itself. This design is filed under Fossil Humor, at this link:

http://www.cafepress.com/trilobite/3678496

And here's a teaser pic:

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes...

Me and my blog template are officially over, and minima is my new friend. Actually, minima lefty stretch is my new friend, but only until I can work out a better design on my own.

And the Trilobite Created Man in His Image, with a Few Changes Here and There...

I have to thank PZ Meyers over at Pharyngula for digging this video up, which I missed at youtube. Pretty inspiring stuff!

And another thing. I commented that maybe my cafepress store should "cloth the priests" of Trilobite. From the number of hit's I've gotten from that comment so far, I see that spamming PZ's blog should have been my main marketing strategy!

Soft-Cell Coolness...

Unless you've been totally ignoring the world of paleotology, you've probably already heard about Dakota the Dinosaur Mummy, a discovery so neato, it has been called the "holy grail" of paleontology.

Dakota was found in 1999, by a teenager in North Dakota, complete with fossilized skin, tendons, and in general, everything that paleontologists want to see but usually can't. Preliminary studies have already yielded interesting results.

I would love to go on and on about it, but other people have reported it, and reported it better, so check out these articles:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/12/dino_mummy

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/071203-dino-mummy.html

Pictures Hot off the Cambrian Press!

I figure it's probably a good idea to own at least one "first edition" product from your own store. I really like how my Canadaspis Perfecta design turned out, so not too long ago I decided to snap the first one up, before someone else decided to. So I put in my order, along with some other stuff as gifts for my family

I have to say that all in all, I couldn't be much more pleased with the result! Not only is the sweatshirt high-quality, but the design in sharp, and the colour is vibrant. It's been through the wash, to no ill effect, as well.














Anyways, I figured that some of you might be interested to see evidence of the physical products, so, through the miracle of "teh interwebs," there it is to the left! Very cool, very cool indeed!

In other fossil news, Discover Magazine published it's 100 top science stories of 2007 issue, and bagging the #10 spot, was an article named "T. Rex Time Machine." The article talks about Mary Schweitzer's work sequencing proteins preserved in T. Rex soft tissue. Said proteins turned out to be extremely similar to modern chickens.














But the T. Rex protein isn't the real breakthrough, but the fact that soft tissue was preserved over around 68 million years. Conventional wisdom for the past, well, forever, has told us that soft tissue does not survive the fossilization proccess. Who's willing to bet that, now we know to look, we start finding all sorts of cool stuff?

Another article, #57, dealt with research into the classic dinosaur death pose, controversial, because some claim that only death in, well, a great flood would produce the pose. Cynthia Marshall Faux has suggested that the pose may be a result of opisthotonos, which apparently is caused by injury to the cerebellum. Apparently this has been observed in modern birds, so why not dinosaurs as well?

There were several other interesting tidbits for the paleo-minded, but you'll just have to buy the magazine to find out the rest!