Results of Ruminations

I am one of those people who, after 32 years of birthdays, still likes getting older. Well, I suppose I should clarify that: I love having a birthday. When I was about to turn 24, my first son was born. In fact, it was the day before my own birthday when he came into this world. In part because I was happy to be a dad, and in part because he almost didn't stay in the world for long, I enveloped Peter's birthday into my own. The one day's difference didn't bother me (even though, as a child, I secretly hated my younger brother for having a birthday in March), and I have always deeply enjoyed celebrating my son's birthday with my own. Part of my love of a birthday is from growing up. In a family of four kids, there were plenty of ways in which I could get attention from my parents, but I was always content to just kind of...be there. I didn't do a lot of sports, extra-curricular activities, or trouble. I was pretty content to cruise, rarely doing much out...

I'm confident many (read: three or four) people will want me to weigh in on today's exciting news  about the maybe-reinstatement of Brontosaurus  as a "real" dinosaur. I'm not terribly thrilled. "What?" I can hear you say. "But you love dinosaurs!" Yes. Yes, I do. But I really love what's real  about dinosaurs, and what's real is what's understood through a very meticulous process of the scientific method, analyses, and debates. One paper does not an improper classification change. See, the Internet's deep love for Pluto and Brontosaurus (I've decided not to put it into quotation marks the way Brian Switek does throughout his incredible book, My Beloved Brontosaurus   because that's a stylistic choice that I'm not super fond of) has given a disproportionate sense of science having 'robbed' childhoods and assumptions due to best guesses made off of insufficient data. This sense of victimhood--of depriv...