If you’ve never read The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, I highly recommend it. It’s the true story of a kind of loser guy who spends all his unemployed time gaining the trust of the feral flock of parakeets that lives in San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill neighborhood in the early ’90s. No one knows exactly where this flock came from, but the leading theory is that there was a pet store with a number of Red-masked Parakeets that caught on fire sometime in the ’80s, and someone released all the birds to save their lives, resulting in a small starter population. As more of this species escaped from ..read more

After doing a bunch of AI-assisted portraits of fictional characters for my creative writing endeavors, as well as having done a whole bunch of photorealistic bird sketches for my Deck of Birds, I thought I might finally be ready to try drawing portraits of humans. This is something I wasn’t interested in for a long time because (a) humans have built-in face recognition hardware that’s very, very good at noticing when something is even slightly off about a face, which means drawing recognizable portraits demands a higher degree of accuracy than drawing other things, and (b) I didn’t like human ..read more

There are lots of famous examples of mutualism, or two species cooperating to the benefit of each, in nature. Flowers and pollinators. Cleaner wrasse and sharks. Trees and mycelium. Tarantulas that keep tiny frogs as pets. But what about humans? We cooperate with the microbes in our gut microbiome that help us digest, and we domesticate animals, plants, and even microbes like yeast to better serve our needs. Many organisms that are now domestic probably started out as mutualistic relationships, like dogs and cats, which are said to have effectively “domesticated themselves”. But can you think ..read more

If you saw my previous post, you’ll know that I’ve been working on a science fiction novel that includes some elements of speculative evolution. Spec evo, as it’s known in the trade, consists of applying the universal rules of natural selection to create biologically plausible organisms, whether that’s the genetically engineered distant descendants of humans or Tarrasques or how a bat might evolve to a plunge-diving lifestyle. I’ve even done speculative evolution projects in a couple previous posts. In this post, I’ll go over the various types of aliens I created for the novel, how I came up w ..read more

ix. Uriel, Part 3 This is a continuation of one of the stories in my previous two creative writing posts. If you haven’t read those (or forgot what happened), I’d recommend going back to read Part 1 and Part 2 and Ctrl-F’ing for “Uriel” before continuing. I’ve written a lot more than this and plan to attempt to publish it, but here’s a blog-post-length sneak peek. III. T+3.12 years “Sir, I have a surprise for you,” said Uriel. I raised my eyebrows. “Oh yeah?” The last time Uriel had surprised me had been about a year ago, when he’d revealed the second pasture and brought in Paola. I wondered ..read more

I just came back from Portugal, which was my first ever visit to Western Europe. It’s a cool place; the city of Lisboa has a lot in common with San Francisco, so much that sometimes I almost felt like I hadn’t even left. They both have steep, narrow streets, city traffic, similar scrubland flora, tourists in improbable vehicles, a bay breeze, numerous pigeons and House Sparrows, and even a Golden Gate Bridge (no kidding). Other than that, though, things were different! If you want really close-up pictures of beautiful birds, skip to the end, as I visited the Lisboa Zoo and took pictures of all ..read more

I had a good time researching glass for my previous material science post, and it got me thinking about other materials we often take for granted. Another source of inspiration for this post was the observation in The Human Advantage that the invention of new materials has been roughly exponential beginning from the advent of agriculture. The author provides a list of “the first ninety that come to mind”: stone, fire, obsidian, wood, bone, ceramics, copper, plaster, bronze, asphalt, cotton fabric, silk, gold, silver, graphite, glass, terracotta, parchment, papyrus, iron, latex rubber, wool, iv ..read more

I recently read Jurassic Park for the first time. Can you believe it? I’ve seen all the original movies, but hadn’t picked up the books until now. (I haven’t seen Jurassic World other than the first movie…I’m just not a big movie person and as I’ve heard it put aptly, JP was made for people who liked dinosaurs while JW is for people who liked JP.) I was pleasantly surprised that the book mostly avoided the tropey pitfalls the movie is famous for, and provided more scientific justification for animal behaviors and how the genetic engineering and computer system worked. In this post, I’ll share ..read more

Last time I was in Washington, D.C. in 2019, I visited the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and was disappointed to find out that their dinosaur exhibit was under construction. I recently went back to visit family and got to see the new (ish–I missed the opening in 2019 by just a couple months) Fossil Hall. Since it’s a publicly funded museum, it’s free to visit, something I didn’t recall from last time that was a pleasant surprise. The Fossil Hall is arranged reverse chronologically, with the most recent fossils near the entrance and the most ancient ones in the rear. Probably, this deci ..read more

Family tree: Ornithodira > Pterosauria > Pterodactyloidea > Azhdarchiformes > Azhdarchidae Hometown: Worldwide, Cretaceous Period (108-66 million years ago) Described 1984 Azhdarchids (as-DAR-kids) were a sub-group of pterosaurs (flying reptiles) that lived at the end of the Age of Reptiles and pushed the boundaries of what a flying animal could be. Whereas earlier in the Triassic and Jurassic, pterosaurs came in all shapes and sizes and often filled niches that are reminiscent of what certain birds or bats do today (such as nocturnal insect eating, filter feeding, or mud probing ..read more