neonvincent

Saved comment at My Week on Crooks and Liars

Thanks for linking to my blog Crazy Eddie's Motie News at Crooks&Liars last week and thanks for reposting the link here!

My comment on Miocene (Pt 14): Sabre-toothed Sea Otters.

Reading about Kolponomos reminds me that there were other strange and difficult to classify marine mammals along the Pacific coast of North America at the same time, the Desmostylia. I searched your blog to see if you've mentioned them yet but retrieved no results. I'm looking forward to your entries about them, since they also existed during the Oligocene.

My comment on Lots of Little Deer Mice.

"(The 'K' stands for 'capacity'... in German)." I took three years of German and I've been teaching about r and K for decades and knew K stood for carrying capacity, but it never occurred to me that K came from Kapazität. I feel slow. Also, if you hadn't linked to the Wikipedia article about Norn as the source for vole, I'd have never known that extinct descendent of Old West Norse had ever existed. Thanks to you, I learned two items of knowledge about language in addition to the all the zoological information I read your blog for. Thank you. It's a good day when I learn something.

On the other hand, I think you misread the paper "Temporal variations in frost-free season in the United States: 1895–2000." You wrote "there are, on average, fewer frost-free days each year in modern America than there [were?] in the last century." That's not how I read the paper. Here's the relevant passage:

During the early part of the period (prior to about 1930), the frost-free season was shorter than the 1895–2000 period average by about 5 days with earlier fall frosts and later spring frosts. During this pre-1930 period, the frost-free season length decreased from 1895 to a minimum around 1910 with an increase in length of about 1 week from 1910 to 1930. During the period 1930–1980, the frost-free season length in individual years was near the long-term average and had remarkably little variability. After 1980, the frost-free season increased in length by 5–10 days.

Yes, the first 35 years studied were cooler than average, but the data in the linked study show that the U.S. warmed during the rest of the 20th Century first to average and then well above the average. I don't know what that does to your conclusions about litter size in deer mice, but what you wrote is not consistent with the data you cite.

My comment on The Beaches of Bakersfield.

As a paleontologist who used to live in Bakersfield, I took great interest in this entry. Before I clicked on the link, I was expecting something about whales, fossils of which are found at Sharktooth Hill. I was surprised to see that your entry was about ancient walruses. I shouldn't have been, as Neotherium made an appearance in the PBS Eons video "How the Walrus Got Its Tusks" along with a host of other Miocene walruses. In a bit of synchronicity, the subject of this week's posts, deer, make a cameo to explain the differences in size between male and female Neotherium and other pinnipeds. Here's the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKDGYGV2LK8

My comment on All the World's Deer: The Red Deer Species Complex.

"There's a further complication in that the American word 'elk' is often used in Europe to refer to an entirely different animal" — yes, what Americans call moose — "so that it's sometimes referred to by the Algonquian name 'wapiti' instead." There is a lot less ambiguity in calling the animal that, although only the more knowledgeable Americans are familiar with the name.

This reminds me of other wildlife shared across the Atlantic that have different names, like loon and wolverine in North America but diver and glutton in Europe. My graduate alma mater has the wolverine as its mascot. It also has a lot of rivals who leave a potential insult lying on the floor. They could call us gluttons, but no one has yet bothered. I guess that synonym for wolverine is even more obscure than wapiti for the elk!

My comment on D&D Monsters: Bulettes.

I didn't know that Gygax pronounced its name that way. As I've written before, it's a good day when I learn something new. However, it wouldn't have mattered to my friends. We called them "landsharks" because of the crest and subterranean habit and habitat of the animal. Also, we watched a lot of "Saturday Night Live" at the time, where landsharks were a recurring bit on the show.

My comment on THE ELEVEN WORDS IN TRUMP'S "PERSECUTION" STATEMENT THAT SCARE ME.

"When Trump says, 'the people of our Country,' he always means the people of his country: Trump voters, whom he regards as the only legitimate Americans." That's the most expansive interpretation. I favor a narrower one, that he suffers from a bad case of "L'etat c'est moi," which becomes "L'etat c'est Trump." He always confuses himself with the country. That written, I think you're right that "The risk of a violent mass disruption of a Trump trial is great." What would one call it, an anti-lynch mob?