Tag Archives: anthropology

Global Warming FTW!

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Screenshot from Weather.com showing that it was 46 degrees in Tulsa, OK today.

This is freaking me out.

On Saturday, the family and I ventured up to Winslow, AR to stay with my grandparents for Christmas. After the 14-hour drive (complete with our very own simple dog) to my grandparents’ my family loaded back up into the car for the 2 1/2 hour drive to Tulsa, OK that we make every year in order to placate my sister and me. It may have been 8 years ago, but dammit, we are still bitter about being uprooted.

In Tulsa I got to see a few of my friends who were in town and eat some Mexican fusion, so it was good times all around. We spent part of the day wandering around Utica Square, in December, in Tulsa, without jackets. You guys, this is freaking me out. The first year we went back to Tulsa, my friends and I hung out at the zoo because we were 12 and what the hell else were we going to do. We had to cower inside the rain forest exhibit to restore feeling to our extremities. This weather is unseasonably nice, is what I’m saying.

Because I am from the Midwest, this mostly makes me idly wonder what God is going to do in order to even the karmic scales. I’m thinking a hail storm, tomorrow. Given that my grandparents’ power just went out (they live on a mountain in a town with 399 people), this may, in fact, be the route that He has chosen to go. Still not worse than a tornado! Continue reading →

Back from New York

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I just came back from my whirlwind Fall Break weekend trip up to New York for Microsoft’s Open House. (The trip was sponsored by Microsoft and run by uniformly delightful people, so I feel bad that I’m writing this on a MacBook. Not enough to switch, but, y’know, bad.)

Managed to start the trip off with a solo subway trip from the swanky hotel (in which I was not able to work the elevator, because I am not wealthy enough for that kind of crazy) to the American Museum of Natural History. I managed to unintentionally stumble onto their 10th anniversary celebrations on 10/10/10 for the Rosa Space Center. There was acapella music done by astrophysicists in addition to the normal battery of amazing bones and things. I was delighted.

I even got to commune with my friend the giant ground sloth!

It was more fun this year (in addition to just being nerdy) because I’m in Biological Anthropology, and the Human Origins hall was basically just a collection of the things that will be on my next test, except that they may have actually been real and certainly weren’t made out of plaster. Turns out the American Museum of Natural History is better funded than Oxford. Shocking, I know. I’ll let you catch your breath. Continue reading →

Shit My Textbook Says

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The bush baby watches you sleep.

Biological anthropology is full of bitter, bitter anthropologists. And bush babies. Image courtesy of Flickr user Joachim S. Mueller under CC 2.0 BY-NC-SA.

“Generally, it was a good idea to avoid being accused of heresy because it was a crime that could be punished by a nasty and potentially fiery death (Fig. 2-1). (p. 25)

“Many people think of paleontology as pretty boring and only interesting to overly serious academics.” (p. 110)

“How do we deal scientifically with all this diversity? As humans, biologists approach complexity by simplifying it.” (p. 110, emphasis mine)

“It’s no wonder that people resist the concept of deep time; it not only stupefies our reason, but implies a sense of collective meaninglessness and reinforces our individual mortality.” (p. 128)

“Moreover, as we have already pointed out (see Chapter 2), the creationist perspective fundamentally fails to understand the nature of science itself.” (p. 134)

— Physical Anthropology, Jurmain et. al

My Biological Anthropology textbook is written by bitter, bitter anthropologists. The figure 2-1 cited in the first quote was a painting of someone being burned at the stake for heresy. Science comes alive!