ropods which lived between 525-250 million years ago. Like all arthropods they had an exoskeleton which protected them from predators as well as protecting their soft body parts. The trilobite exoskeleton was comprised of three parts, the cephalon (head), a segmented body called the thorax and the pygidium or ‘tail’. Trilobites first appeared in the rock record in the earliest Cambrian, and were quite complex organisms, possessing an exoskeleton and one of the first groups to have a complex visual system. They rapidly became a diverse and wide spread group living in a wide range of environments from shallow to deep marine water.
This exceptionally preserved trilobite displays sharp pleural and pygidial spines. It was found in Anti Atlas in Morocco and is from the Lower Devonian period and therefore approximately 415-400 million years old. Crotalocephalus sp. was likely to have lived on the sea floor, the spines on its thorax would have helped it not sink into the soft sediment as well as offering protection from predators.
Trilobites were a successful and diverse group for over 275 million years, however, after the Devonian,trilobites were confined to just one order the Proetida, and later following the major end Permian mass extinction event, which was responsible for the loss of 95% of all marine life, trilobites became extinct.On Saturday, December 15, lovers of history and seafaring can enjoy an illuminating two-hour excursion..
[caption id="attachment_52340" align="aligncenter" width="695"] The Tennessee Williams Museum, 513 Truman Ave., one of four..
[caption id="attachment_52336" align="aligncenter" width="400"] Fans of Walker Evans can explore the Havana of 1933..
[caption id="attachment_51764" align="aligncenter" width="900"] Nineteenth-century drawing by Captain William Bainbridge Hoff, U.S.N. of Commodore..
[caption id="attachment_51375" align="aligncenter" width="800"] The iconic Custom House Museum at 281 Front Street is..
[caption id="attachment_34297" align="aligncenter" width="609"] Key West Art & Historical Society Curator Cori Convertito, PhD.,..
[caption id="attachment_34286" align="aligncenter" width="516"] Human powered kinetic sculptures can be simple or over-the-top stupendous,..a tiny budget, visually stunning, Monsters heralds the arrival of a new talent.
The plot follows Andrew (McNairy), a photojournalist working in Central America trying to get ‘the shot’, who is tasked with bringing his boss’s daughter, Sam (Able), back to the US from ‘the infected zone’ – a strip along the Mexico-US border inhabited by huge aliens.
As the pair negotiate the treacherous environment they start to develop feelings for each other. Showing a deft touch early in his career, Edwards takes familiar sci-fi themes and weaves them together in an original way.
Much of the film’s impact owes to its guerrilla-style – the director filming in Mexico and South America with just one camera to ensure Monsters has a different feel to most blockbusters. Add the fact that Edwards also wrote the script and is the man behind the brilliant special effects and Neill Blomkamp has some serious competition.
Good for: Fans of smart sci-fi.
Our minds wander. We lose focus, or we focus on things that distract from what we intend to be doing. Our minds also cycle, taking us on emotional or cognitive loops, perhaps in ways that merely distract, and perhaps in ways that help define us as conscious, sentient beings, or more simply as human. In this initial post on the topic, I propose something audacious: emotional or cognitive cycling helps to explain consciousness, and perhaps what it means to be human.
Opposite extremes bend our emotional spectrums into a loop. Intense hatred or intense love lead to obsession. Extreme happiness or extreme sadness produce tears. In “normal” emotional states, we neither obsess nor cry. And yet, we tend to think of these states as juxtapositions on a single dimensional scale: extremely happy, happy, content, disturbed, sad, extremely sad or intense love, love, like, indifference, dislike, hate, intense hate. These emotional states are better conceived as a loop, revealing dimensionality in our states of mind. See http://tinyurl.com/lz9fnmj.
Our thoughts, including how we rank our priorities, sometimes cycle. I previously explained how inheriting a vast historical collection put my sister and me in a cognitive loop: (1) unable to absorb it, I’ll donate or sell it all; (2) I want certain keepsakes as a remembrance, so I’ll retain portions; (3) the collection has integrity, so if I keep some, I must take all; (4) I can’t absorb it all, so I’ll donate or sell; etc. (See http://tinyurl.com/l7l7c6l). Some cycles are existential: A pregnant woman with small children suffers pre-eclampsia. Continuing the pregnancy endangers the mother’s life; premature delivery endangers the baby. (1) She prioritizes the baby’s welfare ahead of her own, planning to go full term; (2) She prioritizes her young children’s welfare ahead of the unborn child, so she plans an early C-section, putting the baby at risk; (3) She realizes that she lacks the resources, financial and emotional, to care for a child with associated complications that might accompany premature birth, so she chooses to terminate the pregnancy; (4) She refuses to prioritize her well-being over that of her unborn child, so she’ll carry the baby to term. Etc. Others involve “first-world problems”: (1) Marcia wants the career options that she believes only an elite education brings, so she’ll attend an expensive private college; (2) Marcia realizes that the resulting debt will restrict her career options, so she’ll attend a less expensive public institution; (3) Marcia believes that the latter institution will not open the same doors, concluding the investment is unwise, so she’ll forego college; (4) Marcia believes that without higher education, especially at a prestigious institution, she cannot pursue her career goals, and so she will attend an elite private college. Etc.
To be sure, people eventually decide, or fail to do so, sometimes with the effect of having decided. Eventual outcomes don’t negate the cycles; they embed them. Our cognitive development is affected by random factors: timing, ordering of options, who we consult, simple fatigue. Our minds develop in ways that are path dependent: An abandoned child will develop differently if left destitute versus being adopted into a happy, functional home, with pronounced effects on language, culture, wealth, and family and career prospects. Twin studies, although fascinating, do not contradict the inevitable influence of both biology and environment on our cognitive development. (See, e.g., http://tinyurl.com/lpv88oa). For example, we are programmed to learn language, but no specific language (see http://tinyurl.com/kvvvxqk). This critical element in programming our minds is fortuitous, or path dependent.
Within social choice, cycling is presented as a function of group decision making. “Social choice” captures the intuition that even if individuals hold transitive preferences—preferring A to B to C implies preferring A to C—under specified conditions, group preferences can cycle. With three persons holding transitive preference orderings (Person 1: ABC; Person 2: BCA, Person 3, CAB), binary pairs reveal separate non-transitive majority preferences: preferring A to B to C, yet C to A. The “even if” formulation is a helpful heuristic device whose premise doesn’t always hold.
Individuals sometimes cycle. This is apt to arise when a rule, norm, or value complicates how we conceive our preferences. The daunting phrase, “multi-criterial decision making,” (http://tinyurl.com/l3uwg2n), should not obscure the essential insight. Increasing our frames of reference can sometimes force us into cognitive or emotional loops. Combining concern for others, for our personal limitations, and for the conflicting needs of those in our care, can force our minds to cycle. So too can juxtaposing the expected benefits of an elite education with the burdens of crushing debt; or the conflicting concerns over sentimentality versus practicality in choosing what to keep.
The likelihood of cycles increases with the number of choices we confront. New options reframe old problems, disrupting earlier priorities. We sometimes evaluate choices dispassionately: which investment strategy will yield the highest return, the lowest tax obligation, or both? Which career path accomplishes the greatest good, produces the highest income, or holds the most prestige? But we aren’t machines. For important choices, we customarily write long lists of pros and cons, consult friends and family, engage in extensive research, then mull, and mull some more, until finally, at the 11th hour, we go with our gut. Our minds overlay, or interweave, analysis with emotion. The rich mix—happiness, sadness, anticipation, pleasure, guilt, obligation, anxiety, uncertainty, plus careful dispassionate calculation and assessment—forces dimensionality onto our choices: which school; which major; which career path; which city; who to date; whether to marry, and, if