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Post by theropod on Mar 19, 2021 19:41:27 GMT 5
TIL that Blaire Van Valkenburgh was a doctoral student of Robert Bakker's (I've somehow never noticed this from all the times I've looked at his Wikipedia page). I would never have guessed that, considering how their main focuses seem to be different. Van Valkenburgh's research is focused on carnivorans, while Bakker's is focused on dinosaurs. Does this mean my doctoral advisor and I don't have to share the exact same research interest? No you don’t. Actually if your advisor had the exact same research interest as you, that might be a problem, as they would likely have already done whatever research it is you want to do. Of course there should be some sort of overlap, otherwise why would you even choose that advisor (or they you)? E.g. working with similar taxa, or doing so with similar methods. But not necessarily both. Or working on something within the overarching theme of a working group they are leading (e.g. "fossilization" or "gigantism"). I know my advisor doesn’t personally work with theropods, but one of his PhD students specialized in them. From what I’ve seen this gets more and more loose the further up on the career ladder you climb (also because there are less and less people qualified to supervise you), e.g. for habilitations it’s not that uncommon for people and their advisors having pretty distantly related fields of research. |
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Post by Infinity Blade on Apr 5, 2021 1:56:07 GMT 5
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Post by Supercommunist on Apr 5, 2021 2:04:55 GMT 5
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Post by Infinity Blade on May 20, 2021 1:21:16 GMT 5
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Post by Infinity Blade on May 29, 2021 17:51:33 GMT 5
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Post by Infinity Blade on Jun 2, 2021 1:08:59 GMT 5
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Post by Infinity Blade on Jul 15, 2021 5:46:26 GMT 5
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Post by Infinity Blade on Jul 25, 2021 9:34:27 GMT 5
Recently I learned that during the development of Walking with Beasts, one episode would have been dedicated to the Riversleigh fossil site in Australia. Of course, the idea was scrapped because there were enough episode ideas, and by that I mean they filled in the six episode quota. I say pish posh! They should have gone the extra mile and done one more episode than they did with Walking with Dinosaurs! Miocene Australia FTW!!!!!! In all seriousness, I understand the practical reasons for making only six episodes. Six episodes take enough time, money, and effort as is. Nevertheless, it's a shame we didn't get to see their take on Late Oligocene/Miocene Australia. This point in time in Australia's history is rarely ever depicted in media. One old stop-motion documentary about prehistoric Australia featured Ngapakaldia (which has been found in the Riversleigh Local Fauna) for a bit, but that's it. www.bbc.co.uk/sn/prehistoric_life/tv_radio/wwbeasts/making_of7.shtmlwww.imdb.com/title/tt0286285/triviaEDIT: I mistakenly assumed the site was Pleistocene in age, probably because the Pleistocene is a popular epoch in Australia's history. I literally could have just looked at the Wikipedia page to fact check myself. Oof. EDIT 2: I read suggestions on a Discord server that the saber-tooth and mammoth episodes could be combined and set in Late Pleistocene Montana, where both Smilodon and woolly mammoths lived. That's actually pretty cool, considering these two species didn't actually coexist for most of their range (with only a bit of overlap). That would open up the door for other creatures to appear too. |
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Post by Infinity Blade on Jul 25, 2021 18:44:04 GMT 5
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Post by Infinity Blade on Aug 7, 2021 5:47:18 GMT 5
TIL that male vervet monkeys have a blue scrotum ( image source).  |
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Post by Infinity Blade on Sept 4, 2021 19:19:00 GMT 5
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Post by Infinity Blade on Sept 15, 2021 6:53:19 GMT 5
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Post by creature386 on Sept 15, 2021 12:04:15 GMT 5
This really shows how much recent movies influence popular opinion of the genre. I mean, Lex Luthor isn't even mentioned among the most popular supervillains.
Pretty sure had this been carried out before the recent superhero movie hype, Superman and his ilk would have fared much better.
A bit surprised that Spiderman leads that handily though. I mean, he's my fave, too, but still. Didn't expect the distance between him and the others to be that great.
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Post by Infinity Blade on Sept 15, 2021 17:04:42 GMT 5
Yeah, DC only fares reasonably well in two of the four fronts: popularity by U.S. state and in the world's most popular superheroes. The latter is because superheroes are a lot more likely to be famous than supervillains, and there's no denying DC has popular superheroes. I'm sure the former is because the U.S. is home to both companies and that Americans themselves were the primary target demographic of the comics for the longest time (and probably still are). So when you look more closely at the U.S., you're going to find quite a bit of differing opinion.
I can't tell if Alaska really prefers Captain America more than the other states or if that's just an error.
Also, I have no idea who Emplate and Daken are. I mean, they're by no means the most popular supervillains on that list, but whoever those two are, their popularity shocked me.
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Post by Infinity Blade on Oct 7, 2021 2:05:56 GMT 5
TIL what a penny sit-up is. They were one the first homeless shelters in Blackfriars, London. For a penny, homeless people could sit on a bench in a reasonably warm room all night with food. They were not allowed to lie down and sleep on the bench.  If you had two pennies, you could opt for a two-penny hangover, which was similar to a penny sit-up except you had a rope across the bench that you could lean over and sleep on (contrary to popular belief, there were no standing hangovers).  If you had two or four pennies, you could opt to sleep in a coffin. Two pennies got you the coffin alone, while four pennies could get you food.  Of course, these would be seen as pretty bad by modern standards, but back then they were at least an attempt to help the poor and homeless. They were better than sleeping out on the streets all cold and hungry. www.geriwalton.com/victorian-four-penny-coffins-penny-beds-homelessness/ |
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