Drew's Blog

 This is just something fun I've had bouncing around in my head for a little while and I thought I might as well share it with you all. Magic the Gathering is a trading card game that I believe has been around since the 90s, and it is still one of the most popular trading card games around. And one of the reasons for MTG's extended popularity is one of its primary gimmicks, the color pie: The cards of MTG all belong to one or several of the "colors" shown as the above pie chart. In the game itself these colors all represent different play styles and strategies that a player can choose to focus on based on what works best for them. Now, I myself have played MTG very little, so the actual play style of each color isn't what interests me. What does interest me however is how these colors also represent different philosophies and ideologies that a player can also choose to favor based on their own personal philosophies. An individual could actually learn something abo...

 With my internship with the Bureau of Land Management and ACE coming to an end I thought I would share with you guys some of the projects I've been working on over the summer. These are all PowerPoint slides that will hopefully wind up as posters that will be hung up at the Jurassic National Monument visitor center. These first three are a kind of diagram called a cladogram. Cladograms are basically "Family Trees", but for different species. They show us how individual species are related to each other, and where the division between the two groups happened (biologically speaking). I made three different cladograms. This first one was made in the standard style of a cladogram, and it is made up of all the different dinosaur species found at the Cleveland-Llyod Dinosaur Quarry where I worked over the summer, as well as a few well known Dinosaur species. This second cladogram was made in a style that emphasizes simplicity above all else. It was made to be the cladogram tha...

 Just something silly I thought about and wanted to share. One of the most famous species of Dinosaurs is the herbivore Stegosaurus. And probably the most iconic characteristic of this species of Dinosaur is the collection of spikes on the end of its tail. This collection of spikes is called a Thagomizer, which is a pretty cool sounding name for a body part, but whats funny is where this term came from. The word "Thagomizer" was not originally a scientific term. But, instead, came from (of all things) a The Far Side comic strip. Comic author Gary Larson completely made up the word "Thagomizer". But it was used by an actual paleontologist named Kenneth Carpenter when describing a Stegosaurus fossil during the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference of 1993. The term stuck, and has since become an informal anatomical term that has been used by museums, monuments, documentaries, and even scientific research papers. The more you know I guess. :)

 Here is a video of a comic strip that I thought was pretty funny and wanted to share. The person who made the video also did voices for the characters so you can here them speak while also reading what they're saying. For anyone who wants some context. This strip is from an online comic series called Lackadaisy. It's a Crime Drama/Comedy about bootleggers and gangsters in St. Louis during the prohibition.  But instead of humans, the characters are all drawn as anthropomorphized cats to both make the series stand out more, and to make the characters appear more expressive. The characters in this strip specifically are two of the comic's main characters. They're a duo of hit-men who work for one of the big crime bosses in the series. But they're the kind of team where their personalities bounce off of each other in such a way that makes them more comedic then anything else.

 Last week I completed a project I was working on for BLM where I would travel around to visit areas that are under BLM's jurisdiction to make sure said areas are being properly carried for, and have not been noticeably damaged by the general public. This was my last spot to visit, the Buried Forest. Named so due to the round formations you can see in the mountains' sides which look like trees that have been cut in half. I know that when I first heard of this area I thought it had formed when a flash flood, or something similar, washed through this area and buried a forest under tons of dirt and mud. But that's not actually true. The truth is that those circular formations you see are not trees at all. They are solidified chunks of dirt that swirled together during a time when this area was under water. Though no one knows for certain why they formed these circular formations exactly. Or why the soil that forms these formations dots the mountains' sides like they do, in...