Saved comments for November 2020

[neonvincent]

I already posted the first saved comment, so here are the rest. I wrote about as many as last month, but wrote more in each one. Also, no politics this time. Instead, drum corps, science fiction, and science are the topics.

My comment on Front and Center with SCV.

Hi, Sherry! It's been a long time since I dropped by your blog. From the looks of this post, too long. :-) I might have something to say about all these shows, as I competed against SCV from 1978-1981 and my ex-girlfriend marched in the B corps from 1975-1976 and in the A corps from 1977-1979 before taking a break then marching in BD in 1981-1982. Until then, since I know you're an Arcadia alum, I'm sharing this link to one of the videos of the virtual Arcadia Band Review - History of the Apache Marching Band, with Tom Landes. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBQBftdR5qQ (Sherry did not approve this, so this is the only place where it will appear to the public.)

My comment(s) on The Great Leap Backward.

"Sea Spray, good heavens. I had no idea. (This will doubtless tell you how connected I am to current media culture.) Did its ratings tank?" Not Sea Spray, but I can tell you that there seems to be no public way to readily know that. "Star Trek: Discovery" is on CBS All Access, the streaming service of ViacomCBS, the parent company of Paramount Studios, not CBS proper, so Nielsen does not cover it. Yes, Nielsen does compile streaming ratings, but only for the top ten streaming shows and only on the top four streaming platforms, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, and Hulu. CBS All Access does not even rate. Mind you, I'm sure ViacomCBS knows, but short of the fine print of an annual report to stockholders, they're not likely to tell. When you wrote that you had no idea, you weren't alone.

As for the "Star Trek" future, even the writers of the Star Trek franchise have figured out there is no straight line from anything past the early 1990s to the 23rd Century of the original series. During the mid-1990s, the Star Trek writers in movies and television depicted a 21st Century that became more dangerous and violent, leading to a global nuclear war in the 2060s that killed one billion people. Then the fictional Zephram Cochrane developed warp drive in the immediate aftermath, got the attention of the Vulcans, who decided to help humanity by guiding our cultural and political evolution, creating the utopian civilization of the original series. Viola, Alien Space Bats solved the problem of human nature getting in the way of the future! In the early 2000s, the writers of "Star Trek: Enterprise" elaborated on that theme, showing that in a parallel universe, instead of accepting Vulcan help, humans captured their ship and reverse engineered it, then used the technology to conquer the galaxy, becoming the Terran Empire of the mirror universe, the one where Spock wore a beard. Without the help of the Alien Space Bats, humanity became worse, not better, although there is some evidence that the humans in that timeline were always nastier than their counterparts in the main Star Trek universe.

By the way, the first Star Trek episode was actually completed in 1965, but was rejected by NBC as "too cerebral", "too intellectual", and "too slow" with "not enough action." It was only after the second pilot was accepted that the series began airing in 1966.

My comment on Were 'Cave Lions' Really Lions? at Synapsida.

Even after the 2009 DNA study of cave lions and American lions you mentioned, there was still some doubt about whether American lions were more closely related to lions or to jaguars. In 2011, Wired published an article asking American Lion, or Giant Jaguar? It referenced a 2009 study by Per Christiansen and John Harris in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology that concluded Panthera atrox was the sister taxon to jaguars, not cave lions, based on skeletal, particularly skull, morphology. A 2010 article in National Geographic took Christiansen and Harris's side.

This is not a new idea. Brian Switek, who wrote the Wired article, documented that it went back to John Merriam and Chester Stock in 1932 and George Gaylord Simpson in 1941, who thought that Joseph Leidy, who named the species, was mistaken in identifying it as a lion. While this was not the dominant interpretation when I was a research associate at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History and specifically at the George C. Page Museum from 1985 to 1989, so I knew Harris personally and reported indirectly to him — P. atrox as a lion was — it was never rejected, either.

By the time Switek wrote his article, the display specimen was relabled as "Naegele’s giant jaguar." Apparently, that one of their own curators thought it was more of a jaguar than a lion was enough to sway the people in charge of exhibits. According to a blog post from 2014 by Max Greene, so was the generosity of a donor to the museum, which is why it was named after Naegle. Both Switek and Greene, like you, think DNA trumps bones, so they fall on the lion side of the controversy, as do I.

My comment on What's the Closest Living Relative of Whales?

Whales and hippos being each others closest living relatives is an idea that goes back to Ernst Haeckel, who united them in the clade Obesa in 1866 and considered them to be the sister group to all other Artiodactyla. On the one hand, it's too bad his ideas were ignored for more than a century. On the other, it's a good thing clade names don't have priority in the same way that species names do. Obesa would be very insensitive these days. Besides, I like Whippomorpha better.

On a more personal note, I used to frequent a coffee shop chain (not the one named after the character in "Moby Dick," speaking of whales) that wrote a question of the day on a blackboard by the cash register. Back then, if a customer answered the question correctly, they would get a credit on the company's frequent customer program. One day, the question was "what is the hippopotamus's closest relative?" I told the cashier "the answer you're looking for is the pig, but it's wrong. The correct answer is the whale." She still punched a hole in my frequent customer card.