Here comes the weekend

April 17th, 2008 • chatter

I’m ready for the weekend, this week is the Binrev 561 meeting at Holloway’s and I’m ready to unwind. My friend is bringing his Sony Reader PRS-505 so I can see if the PDF processing is as bad as people make it out to be. Why can’t e-readers process PDFs very easily these days? I understand PDFs are formatted for 8.5″x11″ but it’s such an old format, you’d figure people would work around this stuff by now and make it very usable especially since so many published e-books are PDFs (and almost never in the formats the e-readers process well, what the hell?). Hopefully tomorrow’s bar time will be a welcome reprieve from this crappy week. I haven’t slept well all week but I know I will tomorrow night.

This weekend, I should be cooking as well but what, I’m not sure yet. I plan on making something out of Nigella Express, just not sure what. It’s got a lot of easy recipes that sound so tasty. There’s some ideas kicking around but I really need to get to the farmer’s market and to Whole Foods for supplies, I’m out of almost everything!

In class tonight, I found out I bombed the last test but then “it wouldn’t affect me that much”. Not too happy about the grade but happy that my cladogram is an “easy A”. A bunch of us were wondering if Halloran is even going to pay close attention to them, especially since so many people did a horse or horse cousin like a zebra. Oh well, I’ll find out soon enough. I got more books in the mail today and am pretty eager to read them. But I’m also stacking my summer to be as busy as it can be since I’m trying to get my music review site back off the ground along with photo shoots and such. It’ll be a busy summer, leading into a hopefully busy fall.

As for now, I’m going to go read.

I hate cladograms

April 17th, 2008 • chatter

Especially when we were assigned this at the beginning of the semester and the teacher has barely touched on this project at all. Now, not having discussed this in class wouldn’t be such a big deal if everyone had done a phylogenic tree or cladogram before but a lot of people have not done them before and had never seen them before being in this evolution class. I originally thought about doing something fancy like a tree-human concestor but the closer time came to do this project, I simply settled on a human-horse concestor. Only to find out that there is still no currently verifiable species that would be considered the concestor, only that scientists know — based on DNA — that Boreotheria was our last common ancestor.

I know a lot of my classmates are struggling with this as many, many of them are either not anthropology majors or this is one of their first classes to take as an anthro major. I have a feeling a lot of people will be turned off to taking more classes like this in the future because of any lack of real direction on behalf of our professor, a smart man in his own right. I’ve just finished my cladogram, it’s really pathetic looking but it’s also the third one I’ve drawn tonight, by hand. I don’t have time to try and draw a fancy one in Photoshop or something. Now I just need to get my girlfriend to draw some pretty arrows and it’s done.