found a more recent edition (2018) of the Alex Ries illustrated Sink your Teeth into Dinosaurs kids book at the flea market :D
interestingly the two non-dinosaurs (kronosaurus and pteranodon) have been replaced with dinosaurs this time around. i wonder if that was intentional
i've been trying to come up w a non humanoid klingon design. i know i want to give them a ramming sperm whale inspired head, but so far i'm unsure on what to do for the body. i keep (poorly) copying Alex Ries' (excellent) alternative design
@gay_ornithischians
animal brains do not seem especially similar to the digital electrical computers that humans build and design. However - certain mathematical rules associated with computer science, such as the halting problem, are actually far more general in what systems they apply to; they don't just apply to modern digital electrical computers, and they most likely apply to animal brains.
@gay_ornithischians
essentially all software is written in programming languages designed by humans, and most of them with the intention that other humans are meant to understand them. Even the few deliberately pathological exceptions, like brainfuck, are still founded in human assumptions about how programmers think.
The design of software systems is expressed in code that other humans are meant to read and modify, and that is not remotely true of the human mind.
on the way home i passed an apartment building that had a trash bag filled with lots of books. many were falling apart, but some were in good condition. i tried to dig around but in the end i only took 2. one about the rescue of a rescue dog and the other a copy of 3001: the final odyssey
on my way home i got to see several of the juvenile squirrels again. they are pigeon like in their fearlessness, wich is not common here. i also saw one the hens again. just one chick this time. one the rooster's lost all it's tail feathers but seemed to be alright. i wonder if it was a failed predation attempt
what he said: I am suggesting that a laminar pallium may be more expansible to a human level without a significant loss of processing power than is a nuclear pallium
friends do you think "animals" in the tetrapod size range that had hydaulic driven limbs would be too heavy to evolve flapping flight of the type seen in birds, bats and pterosaurs?
@gay_ornithischians
I'm not a biomechanicist, but I don't see any reason the limits for hydraulic driven limbs would be greatly different than those for typical vertebrate muscles.
@gay_ornithischians
I read Dougal Dixon's After Man when I was about 7 or 8, and The New Dinosaurs about 7 years later.
Sometime between those, I read Harrison's West of Eden.
Curiously, for many years these two books (and the dreaded third, whose title I refuse to divulge, lest someone seek it out and be harmed thereby) where the only Dixon books I knew of; it wasn't until stumbled across the blog Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs that I learned Dixon wrote a great many dinosaur books.
@gay_ornithischians
Unfortunately, I know almost nothing about them. Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs reviewed the art in two of them, but the art isn't Dixon's; he did the writing, and they don't say much about it.