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By Katie Kish, December 23, 2008 4:18 am

The Best and the Worst of 2008

It’s that time!

CDs

5. Sarah McLachlan – Closer: The Best Of … I’ve always loved S.M. I used to joke with Sam that I have a “Sarah Sense” because I’d always seem to find her music on the radio. She has probably been the most consistently admired and loved singers since I was like 10.
4. Josh Martinez – World Famous Sex Buffet …I love a little hiphop
3. Mr. Scruff – Ninja Tuna
2. Bright Eyes – Cassadaga
1. Girl Talk – Feed The Animals …I read an article recently about “girl talk killing music” because he uses clips of essentially illegal bits to make his music…but gets around it because they’re all online samples and stuff. …His mixes are amazing.

That category is always the hardest, other bands who released beauties: Tokyo Police Club, cat power, tv on the radio, the walkmen, mates of state, british sea power, …and others. sigh.

Movies

5. The Dark Knight – I’m still having a hard time deciding if I like this movie because it was so entertaining and so like…comic book looking, or if its because Heath Ledger died so there was a huge hype around his acting. I’ll say this – he did a great job. But some people were saying he should be given an award for it…even though he’s dead. I don’t really think that’s necessary. Anyway, I think the movie was really good. It was dark, but it was also a lot like the Batman with poison Ivy in it – it had that cool comic book feel to it.
4. The Strangers – this movie was weird.  …I love Liv Tyler and it scared me to death.
3. Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian – i think CON are really cute stories. Despite the obvious religious undertones to them, I really really like them.
2. Sex and the City – much anticipated and not disappointed …although I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much in a theater as I did when I saw this movie. It may have been the fact that we were drinking wine in the front row, so we were a little tipsy, or it just could have been that it was so tragic to see the girls is such sad situations. Sigh.
1. Wall-E – not only was it mine and John’s first date movie…it has a great message about the environment and mocks our consumerism. Which I always like It was by far the best movie John and I could have seen on a first date. Robot love? Seriously, it doesn’t get any better.

Books

5. In Search of Time by Dan Falk
4. The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
3. A Madman Dreams Of Turing Machines by Janna Levin
2. Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg
1. Factory Girls by Leslie T Chang

Gadgets:

5. Nokia N95 8 gb – My new phone! 8 GB worth of space, Wifi, 5 mp camera with carl zeiss optics, radio, mobile e-mail, vision tv/radio, a gorgeous screen with DVD like video capabilities, 35mm headphone jack, 8 gb internal memory, gps with preloaded maps… and best of all, it doesn’t have a full keyboard. I was so sick of the full keyboard, bulky shape and “smart phone” look of my blackberry. The Nokia looks like a normal phone, but totally does more. Its great.
4. HTC Diamond – my brothers phone… it’s sleeker and more easily customizable thank the iPhone. The only reason I didn’t get this over my phone is that it is a touch screen. They seem to be all the craze right now, but I just don’t like them.
3. Flip MinoHD – a tiny HD camcorder for only like $200… mostly because it only has 4gb worth of space…
2. The nikon D90 – *drools* an HD camera. …
1. Optoma Pico PK-101 – the MP3 player projector… I really need to get me one of these. Its the size of a regular iPod, plugs in and plays your movies on the wall. …awesome.

Games
I dont really do a whole lot of game playing…

5. Wii boxing…i played it once
4. Rock Band …I pretty much rock at everything except the drums. But…i’ll get to those in 2009
3. I started playing WoW a couple days ago, i’ve played twice
2.Sims!…one of the expansion packs came out this year, i dont remember which one. But thanks to john i have ALL the expansion packs and have WAY too many options. Its awesome.
1. Spore…. cooool

Hits of the financial crisis:

5. AIG’s credit fiasco
4. No more Fords and Chevys – the Detroit big three went belly up! the earth is happy, but hummer drivers are not.
3. Citibanks 75 000 job cuts
2. Greenspan – people are living in tents!
1. Iceland …is broke, needing to take billions of dollars from the IMF, Sweden, Germany, Denmark and Finland.

Sciencey Stories:

5. The Invisibility Cloak
4. Bigfoot is a rubber suit with dead animals inside of it
3. a squid with elbows
2. something tugging at the universe
1. The Large Hadron Collider

Absolutely Hilarious

5. The McCain green screen challenge – McCain did an interview in front of a green background, prompting Colbert to challenge his audience to come up with the best scenes to put McCain into
4. Letterman to McCain “You don’t show up for me, America doesn’t show up for you!”…after McCain stood up Letterman, and was shown at another interview instead, it was the core of Lettermans jokes for weeks.
3. The writers strike… so many late night talk show hosts were SO strapped for content. …hahahaha suckers.
2. is america ready for a woman president? – Samantha Bee as Carrie Bradshaw
1. Tina as Palin…and she didn’t change any words.

Personal Worsts:

5. Working in retail – even though I was the boss, i hated it. i hated bending over backwards for jerk ass customers and seeing people spend 800 dollars on clothes. I hated fitting plus women for bras in the summer when they smelled funny and I hated answering to my overly bitchy and micromanaging district manager. She treated me like a moron. I hated that job.
4. I miss a lot of people including Shaneka, Mark, Caitlin, Torrie, Ashley, Dan, Patrick, Karl and family
3. My currently housing situation – my roommates are annoying, they turn the heat up to over 30 (literally!) and leave messes in the kitchen all the time. My door doesn’t really lock and I’m an hour out of the city. I can’t walk around with no pants on and I have to pay to wash my clothes.
2. The York U strike…dont even get me started
1. My grandma died and it was the sadest of all sad.

Personal Bests:

5. Working at acculink where I met Christine and Stacey – two of the best women I’ve ever met in my life. Plus it made me value the 4/10hr shifts a week thing, and loved being on midnights.
4. Moving to Toronto in June. Although I had to shack up with Allen for quite sometime, I love living here and will be sad if I ever have to move out of the city.
3. Getting a job at CFI… my job is to advance science and secularism in society. How cool is that?
2. I’ve lost 20 lbs in the past 2 months! woo!! i love weight watchers…except now the skin on my belly feels really weird, like loose. its kinda gross.
1. June 24th – John and I had our first kiss and were a “couple” by the next day. awe, <3

Comments (1)

By Tyler E, June 17, 2008 6:34 pm

If you hadn’t heard recently a story broke on numerous websites that some researchers had found ” building blocks of life” in a meteorite. Numerous headlines stated that we were aliens and other such things to grab the attention of readers. I’ve never found science journalism to be particularly great at explaining things so I thought I might clarify things a little. Several researchers from around the world ( Imperial College London, Nasa Goddard Space Flight Centre, Radboud University Nijmegen etc.) extracted and analyzed a 15 g sample from the interior of the Murchison meteorite.

They crushed it and going through an extensive purification process eluted out any organic compounds they could find. Then using mass spectroscopy ( a way of determining what a compound is by ionizing it and firing it against a detector and determining it’s time of flight) they determined samples of both uracil and xanthine were present in the meteorite. This actually fairly cool since uracil is a component of RNA and xanthine is an intermediate in the biosynthetic pathway to guanine, another nucleobase found in both DNA and RNA.

It was determined through isotope analysis of these samples that significant proportions of the carbon atoms found in them were of carbon 13 indicating that the molecules likely formed extraterrestrially since carbon 13 is rarely found on earth.

A damn cool story but it’s not like they’ve found incontrovertible evidence that earth was seeded from the heavens by aliens. It just means that life on this planet may have been partially jump started by these biological precursors from the stars, which is still fairly cool I think.

Incidentally, xanthine is one of the intermediates in the pathway that leads to caffeine. Looks like it’s always had a role in getting things going

Reference:

Martins, Z. et al. 2008. Extraterrestrial nucleobases in the Murchison meteorite. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 270: 130-136

Comments (2)

By Katie Kish, May 27, 2007 11:43 pm

Dinos likely didn’t really have feathers…

The theory that dinosaurs gave rise to birds has been dealt a blow by palaeontologists who have examined critical evidence from a Chinese fossil.

The discoverers of the turkey-sized dinosaur Sinosauropteryx say it would have had primitive feathers, supporting the bird-from-dinosaurs theory.

But the latest research says these ‘proto-feathers’ are really frilly structures on the creature’s back.

The meat-eating dinosaur was covered in these fibers that looked like they could have been primitive feathers. These feathers were not said to be used of flight but were there only for aesthetic purposes.

Under a high powered microscope it turns out the feathers were actually the remains of a frill of a collagen fiber that would have ran down the dinos back. THis is the same sort of fiber that is found on the back of common day reptiles.

However this small set back doesn’t discredit the amount of other discoveries that could link dinosaurs to birds. The archaeopteryx (seen in the picture at the top of this post) is known as the very first bird, and most definitely evolved from dinosaurs… it fills in a huge gap in the fossil record, but still leaves a lot of space for debate.

The theory that dinosaurs evolved into birds mostly stands on the shoulders of the idea that smaller dinosaurs gained their evolutionary advantage by growing feathers to keep warm and to fly to high levels for safety. 

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By Katie Kish, May 18, 2007 11:39 am

The animal with the earliest sexual differentiation.

Name: diictodon (DY-ik-toe-don) means two teeth
animal: therapsid reptile
size: 45 cm long
diet: herbivore
lived: 256 – 252 mya
found: Africa and Asia
fossil:

In the late Permian period, the same time as the gorgonopes, these extremely common mammal-like synapsids burrowed deep in the ground living in couples, probably staying with the same partner its entire life. It’s head was large, with a beak that had no teeth except two saber like tusks. The tusks are extremely important as they are the characteristic of the first sexual dimorphism in all of animal history. Only the males were found having the pair of tusks. It lived in deep narrow tunnels protecting it from harsh weather and larger predators – making it an extremely successful animal of its time.

The diictodon were abundant, not only would you find multiple burrows within the same patch of land, their fossils also make up about 1/2 of all backboned animals in South Africa from the Late Permian Period. None of the burrows were interconnected further stressing the theory that the diictodon were strictly monogamous. A small chamber at the end of the burrow would have vegetation for comfort, this is where the diictodon female would have and raise her children.

These underground burrows would have been excellent for times of drought. The burrows would have remained cooler, and had a damp environment. The diictodon could also feed on the roots that were underground. The animals would, however, build their burrows in areas that were not so great, such as river banks. They burrows would often flood killing the animals. The particular fossil above is a pair of diictodon that were cuddled together when flood struck.

The diictodon’s arms and legs did not lack in strength, still they were strictly herbivores. It had an excellent sense of balance, sight and smell. It would use these keen senses to dart in and out of its burrow knowing danger was not near. It would then use its beak to break of vegetation and other plant pieces to eat and use in their housing.

The diictodon is widely studied since it is such an abundant animal. Not only was it the first animal with sexual differentiation, it was also the missing link between reptiles becoming mammals. This little reptile is thus a hugely important link in the evolutionary chain.

The finding of the sexual dimorphism led scientists to believe there was an extremely complex set of social behaviors within the diictodon community. They could have been used to combat other males in an attempt to find a mate, or could have been used ritualistically.  These tusks gave rise to unbelievably huge developments in mammals in the near future.

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By Katie Kish, May 14, 2007 9:30 am

With a name like “Gorgonops” I expected it to look more sci-fi-ish.

Name: Gorgonops (gore-gon-ops) “Gorgon’s arch”
Animal type: Therapsid reptile
lived: 252 – 248 mya
diet: Carnivore
size: 3.5 meters
found: Africa
fossil:

The Earth was slowly dying as it Pangaea died up from coast to coast, temperatures were getting higher and higher very quickly and rainfall became more and more scarce. In these harsh conditions few animals were surviving. The gorgonops was preying on anything that was left. It was a gigantic carnivorous reptile, the size of an elephant but moving sleek and quickly like a fox. It had large, long and sharp teeth permitting it to take down large animals with its strong jaw. It also had two long saber teeth, one of the first animals to have such a thing.

The gorgonops was extremely well adapted for life in these harsh conditions. Its long and upright legs allowed it to walk and run efficiently while it’s keen eye sight and sense of smell made it a very dangerous predator. The animals probably lived in groups, hunting during the cooler times of day and resting in the shade at peak hours. It would have taken several of the animals to take down the larger herbivores dwelling in the same areas.

The gorgonops is a member of the therapisid family – a group of reptiles that adapted well to change, were cold blooded and had a variety of mammalian characteristics. Their long legs tucked under the body and their oddly shaped teeth (odd for reptiles) gave way for the first mammals to evolve such as the thrinaxodon. Although the gorgonops seemed to be a wonder animal fully adapted for harsh weather it did not survive the great extinction 248 mya, mostly due to the fact that most of the animals they hunted became extinct.