Mike Taylor here. I've been co-writing Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the week with Matt Wedel for seventeen years, and the reason we keep doing it is because we keep loving it. I couldn't be more delighted that he won the Grand Prize here.
When Matt first told me he was going to finally finish We’re Not Going To Run Out Of New Anatomy Anytime Soon and submit it to this competition, I replied, and I quote: "Maybe a bit TOO obviously Mastroianni-bait?" After he got the notification that he'd won, he replied "Apparently just the right amount of Mastroianni-bait." :-)
Adam ... thanks for causing this interesting collection to come into existence. As a high school student I enjoyed dissection and as a teaching assistant I always volunteered to help with this task. Along the way I worked as an intern at an experimental surgery lab and saw this issue first hand. I am certain that "there is a lot yet to learn" is true. Anyone who likes baskets knows they are: an artform, beautifully useful, and usefully beautiful. The phrase I'm familiar with for a waste of time was "basket weaving underwater". To her point this phrase is also probably also misleading as I can imagine that eel traps and fish traps might very well have been woven in the water in which they were set. A great time reading the collection was had by me... Thanks, Bill
While he hasn't written on Medieval basket weaving, the historian Brett Deveraux has written on making cloth, iron and bread, which lets him show how pre-modern economies and societies work. Totally fascinating. A sword, for instance, pretty much required a forest to make.
Also his analysis of the military operations in Lord of the Rings is amazing.
Hey thanks for the post! I especially enjoyed the medieval basket weaving course, what a great idea! I liked the anatomy one a lot too, but I have to ask — isn’t this a (literally) textbook example of “ideas getting harder to find”?
“I note that almost all the anatomical variants I’ve helped students present at conferences or publish are things that they found in complicated areas – nerve plexuses, bundles of tendons crossing a joint, and so on – where they could easily have escaped detection if people hadn’t really been on the ball.”
There’s tons more to discover out there, for sure! But as the article says, “So one way to make new discoveries is to simply look in inconvenient places.”
I started a blog during the lockdown in 2020 and put my email on one of the pages in case anyone wanted to contact me. Then, many spammers began emailing me constantly, telling me I should build a website through their company. I got overwhelmed and shut down the blog.
Maybe I wouldn't have gotten any emails if I hadn't put my email in the blog, but maybe I would have anyway. I can't remember. I'm sure that four years later, if I started a blog again, I would figure out a way so that readers could only comment on my blogs and not email me. However, I don't have as much motivation or time to write one as I had in 2020.
I believe that picture is Don Farmer from "Augies Eagles" basketball team that were state champs. He went on to be basketball coach (or just helped with practices, not exactly sure but I saw him around when I was in junior high). Nice guy. I had Coach Ausberger for history class after he had stopped coaching. He had that one bad eye that turned off to the side so you never knew if he had you in his peripheral vision. His class was Ok, except he insisted the US civil war was not about slavery, it was about succession, which of course is a now seen as a white revisionist take on it. Anyhow, thanks for the blast from the past!
Mike Taylor here. I've been co-writing Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the week with Matt Wedel for seventeen years, and the reason we keep doing it is because we keep loving it. I couldn't be more delighted that he won the Grand Prize here.
When Matt first told me he was going to finally finish We’re Not Going To Run Out Of New Anatomy Anytime Soon and submit it to this competition, I replied, and I quote: "Maybe a bit TOO obviously Mastroianni-bait?" After he got the notification that he'd won, he replied "Apparently just the right amount of Mastroianni-bait." :-)
Don’t know anything about anatomy and found your article electrifyingly exciting.
Adam ... thanks for causing this interesting collection to come into existence. As a high school student I enjoyed dissection and as a teaching assistant I always volunteered to help with this task. Along the way I worked as an intern at an experimental surgery lab and saw this issue first hand. I am certain that "there is a lot yet to learn" is true. Anyone who likes baskets knows they are: an artform, beautifully useful, and usefully beautiful. The phrase I'm familiar with for a waste of time was "basket weaving underwater". To her point this phrase is also probably also misleading as I can imagine that eel traps and fish traps might very well have been woven in the water in which they were set. A great time reading the collection was had by me... Thanks, Bill
While he hasn't written on Medieval basket weaving, the historian Brett Deveraux has written on making cloth, iron and bread, which lets him show how pre-modern economies and societies work. Totally fascinating. A sword, for instance, pretty much required a forest to make.
Also his analysis of the military operations in Lord of the Rings is amazing.
https://acoup.blog/resources-for-world-builders/
Thank you for this. Thank you
Amazing blogs! Thanks so much for sharing them
This is just brilliant. All things are never thought I needed to know but now I’m so glad I do. Medieval Basket Weaving- I’d take that course!
We humans individually know SO much - the stairs in the Reality/Detail list sums this up.
Collectively, that amount of information is a lot - that’s the even more mind-blowing part.
Hey thanks for the post! I especially enjoyed the medieval basket weaving course, what a great idea! I liked the anatomy one a lot too, but I have to ask — isn’t this a (literally) textbook example of “ideas getting harder to find”?
“I note that almost all the anatomical variants I’ve helped students present at conferences or publish are things that they found in complicated areas – nerve plexuses, bundles of tendons crossing a joint, and so on – where they could easily have escaped detection if people hadn’t really been on the ball.”
There’s tons more to discover out there, for sure! But as the article says, “So one way to make new discoveries is to simply look in inconvenient places.”
I started a blog during the lockdown in 2020 and put my email on one of the pages in case anyone wanted to contact me. Then, many spammers began emailing me constantly, telling me I should build a website through their company. I got overwhelmed and shut down the blog.
Maybe I wouldn't have gotten any emails if I hadn't put my email in the blog, but maybe I would have anyway. I can't remember. I'm sure that four years later, if I started a blog again, I would figure out a way so that readers could only comment on my blogs and not email me. However, I don't have as much motivation or time to write one as I had in 2020.
That's my boy! #kvell
I believe that picture is Don Farmer from "Augies Eagles" basketball team that were state champs. He went on to be basketball coach (or just helped with practices, not exactly sure but I saw him around when I was in junior high). Nice guy. I had Coach Ausberger for history class after he had stopped coaching. He had that one bad eye that turned off to the side so you never knew if he had you in his peripheral vision. His class was Ok, except he insisted the US civil war was not about slavery, it was about succession, which of course is a now seen as a white revisionist take on it. Anyhow, thanks for the blast from the past!