Combine yeast, sugar, and water in a 4-cup measuring cup and whisk to combine. Allow to rest for 15 minutes.
Place flours and salt in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a dough hook. Add the yeast mixture and 1 tablespoon of olive oil. Run machine on low until ingredients are just combined, then increase speed medium for 3 to 4 minutes, until dough has come together in a large ball. Transfer dough to an oiled bowl and cover with a clean kitchen towel. Let rise for one hour.
Use right away or place in a freezer-safe bag and store in the freezer for up to 6 months. To defrost, place in the refrigerator overnight and allow to come to room temperature before using.


Geo3d's way of constructing polygons and paths differs in that in one case you construct points and the other you feed lat/lon values directly to the builder. Probably both should be supported for both kinds of entity.
Also it may be useful to have an accurate point-point ellipsoidal distance function. This is expensive and would be an addition to the arc distance we currently compute. It would probably be called "surface distance".


text:
Q: Prove that the area of the trangles are equal. Prove that the area of all the traingles in the figure below are equal.

I tried using geogebra to determine an arbitrary values of $a$ , $b$, and $c$. I found out that the triangles have equal measure of area.

A:
Let

*

*$*sbh$ stands for triangles have same base and height.

*$*c$ stands for triangles are congruent.

We have

*

*$A_1 \stackrel{*sbh}{=} B_1 \stackrel{*c}{=} B_3 \stackrel{*c}{=} A_3$,

*$A_3 \stackrel{*c}{=} B_3 \stackrel{*c}{=} B_4 \stackrel{*sbh}= A_4$,

*$A_2 \stackrel{*c}= A_3$

A: It is useful to know that the area of a triangle can be calculated by
$$\frac12ab\sin\theta$$
where $a$ and $b$ are two side lengths of the triangle and $\theta$ is the angle between those two side lengths.
Let $\alpha$ be the angle in $A_3$ formed by the side lengths $b$ and $c$.  Then, the angle formed by the side lengths $b$ and $c$ in $A_4$ is $\pi-\alpha$.  Since $\sin\alpha=\sin(\pi-\alpha)$, $A_3$ and $A_4$ have the same area.
This can be applied to the other triangles in your diagram.

A: Area of $A_2$ and $A_3$ is $ab/2$.
For $A_1$: draw a parallel to $b$ through the upper vertex of the square on $c$. The distance from this parallel to the side at bottom of $A_1$ is $b$ (Pythagoren theorem).
Can you do the same for $A_4$?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Goudey Gums last set, issued in 1941 were 2-3/8" X 2-7/8" (approximate due to imprecise cutting) and were issued with black and white photos with four different color backgrounds. Red, blue, yellow and green.
The cards have blank backs.


With November coming to a close, I look forward to sharing with you the things I am grateful for as part of my continuing miniseries on gratitude. As I turn over my calendar to December, I can't help but smile as I reflect on all the great things that happened last month. It was a November to remember, and I hope this trend of positivity, gratitude, and quality time spent with family and friends continues into December, my birthday month.
I know that for various reasons, the holiday season can bring mixed emotions for many, but I consider myself lucky to have always loved Christmastime. I tend to decorate early, start listening to Christmas music way ahead of others, and begin to make Christmas crafts before most people even start thinking about the holidays.
Although I despise cold weather, I love the beauty the Christmas season brings, with fresh snow making Christmas lights and décor sparkle around people's homes and in different towns and cities. A tradition I've done for many years in December is taking a drive through various neighborhoods in my city to have a look at all the different Christmas decorations, with my dog and a hot chocolate.
I don't want to start thinking of December yet and get ahead of myself, but I can't help but be excited for an upcoming trip my mom and I are taking to experience New York City at Christmastime once again. We leave in two weeks! For now, what I am grateful for is a November filled with celebrations and holiday traditions I am making for myself or sharing with others.
Christmas card-making weekend: It's no secret that as you get older, relationships tend to change, and that can be for both good and bad reasons. One relationship that has changed for the better for me is with a high school teacher and mentor who has now become a friend. Earlier this month, we spent time together making Christmas cards, as she enjoys scrapbooking and do-it-yourself card making as much as I do. In fact, I "blame" my love of crafting on her, as we would spend time together doing this when I was a student. It was so nice to have her visit, stay over, and spend time making holiday cards together, even though we made a huge mess of my living room. We also drank lots of coffee and probably too much wine and went for a nice dinner. I am so grateful for her and the mentorship that has become a friendship.
My new Christmas tree: I love Christmas trees, which is why I am excited to see the Rockefeller tree in New York City again this year. My old tree has seen better days, but I didn't want to spend a lot of money on a new one this year. However, I saw an incredible deal on a 7.5-foot tree after Black Friday, so I bought it and am very grateful for my friends who put it up for me. It's now decorated with all my meaningful ornaments and brings me a lot of comfort to have on at nighttime in my home.
Christmas vendor show: Sometimes I get a little carried away making Christmas crafts, so I am thankful for a platform to sell or give away some of my items. This month, I participated in a craft show and sold many of my handmade Christmas cards, which brought in a little extra cash and allowed me to clear out the stash of cards I'd made. It was a nice evening of empowering and supporting other women vendors who have small businesses, and I feel very lucky to have been part of such a nice night with new friends.
Frankenmuth weekend: Earlier this month, three girlfriends and I skipped across the border for the weekend to visit the Bronner's Christmas Wonderland store in Frankenmuth, Michigan. I have been there before but forgot how massive and beautiful it is. I enjoyed seeing the reaction of my friends to all-things-Christmas there as well. It was a nice, but tiring, weekend away for all of us.
Family Christmas: Our extended family is very large on my mom's side, so it is next to impossible to get everyone together in December. Therefore, it is a standing date that the last Saturday in November of each year is our family Christmas. I love catching up with my cousins and seeing all the kids' excitement about opening their gifts. While it is busy and chaotic at my family Christmas due to the number of people, it is a special day we all are so happy to be able to celebrate together.
Tagged Gratitude Miniseries, holidays, November, thankful.


text:
The Haplocanthosaurus presentation from the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress is now a PeerJ Preprint
If you were curious about the Wedel et al. presentation on the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus at the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress but didn't attend the event, it is now preserved for posterity and freely available to the world as a PeerJ Preprint (as promised). Here's the link.
I'll have much more to say about this going forward, but for now here are slides 20 and 21 on the intervertebral joint spaces. This is obviously just the same vert cloned three times and articulated with itself. With the digital rearticulation of the reconstructed and retrodeformed caudal series still in progress, we cloned caudal 3, the only vertebra that preserves both sets of zygapophyses, to get a rough estimate of the sizes and shapes of the soft tissues that filled the intervertebral spaces and neural canal.
The reconstructed intervertebral discs (in blue) are very crude and diagrammatic. The reason I'm putting these particular slides up is to get the cited references out in the open on the blog, to start correcting the misapprehension that all non-mammalian amniotes have exclusively synovial intervertebral joints (see the discussion in the comments on this post). In the list below I'm including Banerji (1957), which is not cited in the presentation but which I did cite in that comment thread; it's an important source and at least for now it is a free download. These refs are just the tip of a very big iceberg. One of my goals for 2019 is to do a series of posts reviewing the extensive literature on amphiarthrodial (fibrocartilaginous) intervertebral joints in living lepidosaurs and birds. Stay tuned!
And please go have a look at the presentation if you are at all interested or curious. As we said in the next to last slide, "this research is ongoing, and we welcome your input. If there are facts or hypotheses we haven't considered but should, please let us know!"
Baumel, J.J. (ed.) 1993. Handbook of Avian Anatomy: Nomina Anatomica Avium. Nuttal Ornithological Club, Publication No. 23, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Banerji, K.K. 1957. The comparitive anatomy of the intervertebral joints. Doctoral dissertation, University of St Andrews, 132 + viii pp.
Wedel, M.J., Atterholt, J., Macalino, J., Nalley, T., Wisser, G., and Yasmer, J. 2018. Reconstructing an unusual specimen of Haplocanthosaurus using a blend of physical and digital techniques. Abstract book, 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress, http://palaeovc.uv.es/, p. 158 / PeerJ Preprints 6:e27431v1
Winchester, L.A. 1978. Development and morphology of vertebrae and intervertebral joints in lizards and snakes. PhD thesis, Imperial College London, 326 pp.
Winchester, L.A., and Bellairs, A.D.A. 1977. Aspects of vertebral development in lizards and snakes. J. Zoology 181(4): 495-525.
Filed in 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress, 3D models, cartilage, caudal, conferences, everything's better cut in half, Haplocanthosaurus, open access, PeerJ Preprints, timely
We may never know how flexible sauropod necks were
The more I look at the problem of how flexible sauropod necks were, the more I think we're going to struggle to ever know their range of motion It's just too dependent on soft tissue that doesn't fossilise. Consider for example the difference between horse necks (above) and camel necks (below).
The skeletons of both consist of vertebrae that are pronouncedly opisthocoelous (convex in front and concave behind), so you might think their necks would be similarly flexible.
But the balls of horse cevicals are deeply embedded in their corresponding sockets, while those of camels have so much cartilage around and between them that the tip of the ball doesn't even reach the rim of the socket. As a result of this (and maybe other factors), camel necks are far more flexible than those of horses.
Which do sauropod necks resemble? We don't currently know, and we may never know. It will help if someone gets a good handle on osteological correlates of intervertebral cartilage.
[This post is recycled and expanded from a comment that I left on a Tetrapod Zoology post, but since Tet Zoo ate that comment it's just as well I kept a copy.]
Filed in camel, cartilage, cervical, cross sections, horse, necks, other long-necks, recycled
Sauropods' neutral neck postures were really weird
Last night, I submitted a paper for publication — for the first time since April 2013. I'd almost forgotten what it felt like. But, because we're living in the Shiny Digital Future, you don't have to wait till it's been through review and formal publication to read it. I submitted to PeerJ, and at the same time, made it available as a preprint (Taylor 2014).
It's called "Quantifying the effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs", and frankly the results are weird. Here's a taste:
Taylor (2014:figure 3). Effect of adding cartilage to the neutral pose of the neck of Apatosaurus louisae CM 3018. Images of vertebra from Gilmore (1936:plate XXIV). At the bottom, the vertebrae are composed in a horizontal posture. Superimposed, the same vertebrae are shown inclined by the additional extension angles indicated in Table 1. If the slightly sub-horizontal osteological neutral pose of Stevens and Parrish (1999) is correct, then the cartilaginous neutral pose would be correspondingly slightly lower than depicted here, but still much closer to the elevated posture than to horizontal. (Note that the posture shown here would not have been the habitual posture in life: see discussion.)
A year back, as I was composing a blog-post about our neck-cartilage paper in PLOS ONE (Taylor and Wedel 2013c), I found myself writing down the rather trivial formula for the additional angle of extension at an intervertebral joint once the cartilage is taken into account. In that post, I finished with the promise "I guess that will have to go in a followup now". Amazingly it's taken me a year to get that one-pager written and submitted. (Although in the usual way of things, the manuscript ended up being 13 pages long.)
To summarise the main point of the paper: when you insert cartilage of thickness t between two vertebrae whose zygapophyses articulate at height h above the centra, the more anterior vertebra is forced upwards by t/h radians. Our best guess for how much cartilage is between the adjacent vertebrae in an Apatosaurus neck is about 10% of centrum length: the image above shows the effect of inserting that much cartilage at each joint.
And yes, it's weird. But it's where the data leads me, so I think it would be dishonest not to publish it.
I'll be interested to see what the reviewers make of this. You are all of course welcome to leave comments on the preprint itself; but because this is going through conventional peer-review straight away (unlike our Barosaurus preprint), there's no need to offer the kind of detailed and comprehensive comment that several people did with the previous one. Of course feel free if you wish, but I'm not depending on it.
Gilmore Charles W. 1936. Osteology of Apatosaurus, with special reference to specimens in the Carnegie Museum. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 11:175–300 and plates XXI–XXXIV.
Stevens, Kent A., and J. Michael Parrish. 1999. Neck posture and feeding habits of two Jurassic sauropod dinosaurs. Science 284(5415):798–800. doi:10.1126/science.284.5415.798
Taylor, Michael P. 2014. Quantifying the effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e588v1 doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.588v1
Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2013c. The effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture and range of motion in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs. PLOS ONE 8(10):e78214. 17 pages. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078214
Filed in 100% totally real, Apatosaurus, cartilage, CC BY, cervical, Creative Commons, Diplodocus, math, necks, open access, opportunities, papers by SV-POW!sketeers, Peer review, PeerJ, PeerJ Preprints, skeletal reconstructions, Things I should have posted a year ago, Thinking it through
Does anyone want a project? How can we understand sauropod neck cartilage better?
A couple of times now, I've pitched in an abstract for a Masters project looking at neck cartilage, hoping someone at Bristol will work on it with me co-supervising, but so far no-one's bitten. Here's how I've been describing it:
Understanding posture and motion in the necks of sauropods: the crucial role of cartilage in intervertebral joints
The sauropod dinosaurs were an order of magnitude bigger than any other terrestrial animal. Much sauropod research has concentrated on their long necks, which were crucial to their success (e.g. Sander et al. 2010). One approach to understanding neck function tries to determine neutral posture and range of motion by modelling the cervical vertebrae as a mechanical system (e.g. Stevens and Parrish 1999).
The raw material of such studies is fossilised vertebrae, but these are problematic for several reasons. The invariable incompleteness and distortion of sauropod neck fossils causes fundamental difficulties; but even given perfect fossils, the lack of preserved cartilage means that the bones are not shaped or sized as they were in life.
Ignoring cartilage has dramatic consequences for neutral posture, range of motion and even length of necks: pilot studies (Cobley 2011, Taylor 2011) found that intact bird necks are 8–12% longer than articulated sequences of their dry bones, and that figure is as high as 24% for a juvenile giraffe neck. A turkey neck postzygapophysis was 26% longer when cartilage was included than after being stripped down to naked bone.
We do not yet know how much articular cartilage sauropods had in their necks, nor even what kind of intervertebral joints they had: crocodilians have fibrocartilaginous discs like those of mammals, while birds have synovial joints, so the extant phylogenetic bracket is uninformative.
The project will involve dissection and measurement of bird and crocodilian necks, documenting the extent and shape of articular cartilage, identifying osteological correlates of fibrocartilaginous and synovial joints, and applying this data to sauropods to determine the nature of their neck joints and length of their necks, to reconstruct the lost cartilage, and to determine its effect on neutral pose and range of motion.
Following completion, we anticipate publication of the project.
Cobley, Matthew J. 2011. The flexibility and musculature of the ostrich neck: implications for the feeding ecology and reconstruction of the Sauropoda (Dinosauria: Saurischia). MSc Thesis, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol. vi+64 pages.
Sander, P. Martin, Andreas Christian, Marcus Clauss, Regina Fechner, Carole T. Gee, Eva-Maria Griebeler, Hanns-Christian Gunga, Jürgen Hummel, Heinrich Mallison, Steven F. Perry, Holger Preuschoft, Oliver W. M. Rauhut, Kristian Remes, Thomas Tütken, Oliver Wings and Ulrich Witzel. 2010. Biology of the sauropod dinosaurs: the evolution of gigantism. Biological Reviews 86:117–155. doi:10.1111/j.1469-185X.2010.00137.x
Stevens, Kent A., and J. Michael Parrish. 1999. Neck Posture and Feeding Habits of Two Jurassic Sauropod Dinosaurs. Science 284:798–800. doi:10.1126/science.284.5415.798
Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2011. Sauropod necks: how much do we really know?. p. 20 in Richard Forrest (ed.), Abstracts of Presentations, 59th Annual Symposium of Vertebrae Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy, Lyme Regis, Dorset, UK, September 12th–17th 2011. 37 pp. http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/dino/pubs/svpca2011/TaylorWedel2011-what-do-we-really-know.ppt
(Obviously some part of this have since been covered by my and Matt's first cartilage paper, but plenty has not.)
I now think there are two reasons no-one's taken up this project: first, because I wrote it as very focussed only on the question of what type of joint was present, whereas there are plenty of related issues to be investigated along the way; and second, because I wrote it as a quest to discover a specific treasure (an osteological correlate), with the implication that if there's no treasure to be found then the project will have been a failure.
But I do think there is still plenty of important work to be done in this area, and that there's lots of important information to be got out of comparative dissection of extant critters.
If anyone out there fancies working in this area, I'd be delighted. I'd also be happy to offer whatever advice and help I could.
Update (18 October 2014)
Somehow I'd forgotten, when I wrote this post, that I'd previously written a more detailed post about the discs-in-sauropod-necks problem. If you're interested in the problem, you should read that.
Filed in cartilage, cervical, help SV-POW!, Hey you! Want a project?, necks, opportunities, recycled, Things I should have posted a year ago
How long was the torso of Dreadnoughtus?
In a comment on the last post, on the mass of Dreadnoughtus, Asier Larramendi wrote:
The body mass should be considerably lower because the reconstructed column don't match with published vertebrae centra lengths. 3D reconstruction also leaves too much space between vertebrae. The reconstruction body trunk is probably 15-20% longer than it really was. Check the supplementary material: http://www.nature.com/srep/2014/140904/srep06196/extref/srep06196-s1.pdf
So I did. The table of measurements in the supplementary material is admirably complete. For all of the available dorsal vertebrae except D9, which I suppose must have been too poorly preserved to measure the difference, Lacovara et al. list both the total centrum length and the centrum length minus the anterior condyle. Centrum length minus the condyle is what in my disseration I referred to as "functional length", since it's the length that the vertebra actually contributes to the articulated series, assuming that the condyle of one vertebra sticks out about as far as the cotyle is recessed on the next vertebra. Here are total lengths/functional lengths/differences for the seven preserved dorsals, in mm:
D4 – 400/305/95
D5 – 470/320/150
D9 – 410/ – / –
D10 – 330/225/105
The average difference between functional length and total length is 82 mm. If we apply that to D9 to estimate it's functional length, we get 330mm. The summed functional lengths of the seven preserved vertebrae are then 1890 mm. What about the missing D1-D3? Since the charge is that Lacovara et al. (2014) restored Dreadnoughtus with a too-long torso, we should be as generous as possible in estimating the lengths of the missing dorsals. In Malawisaurus the centrum lengths of D1-D3 are all less than or equal to that of D4, which is the longest vertebra in the series (Gomani 2005: table 3), so it seems simplest here to assign D1-D3 functional lengths of 320 mm. That brings the total functional length of the dorsal vertebral column to 2850 mm, or 2.85 m.
At this point on my first pass, I was thinking that Lacovara et al. (2014) were in trouble. In the skeletal reconstruction that I used for the GDI work in the last post, I measured the length of the dorsal vertebral column as 149 pixels. Divided by 36 px/m gives a summed dorsal length of 4.1 m. That's more than 40% longer than the summed functional lengths of the vertebrae calculated above (4.1/2.85 = 1.44). Had Lacovara et al. really blown it that badly?
Before we can rule on that, we have to estimate how much cartilage separated the dorsal vertebrae. This is a subject of more than passing interest here at SV-POW! Towers–the only applicable data I know of are the measurements of intervertebral spacing in two juvenile apatosaurs that Mike and I reported in our cartilage paper last year (Taylor and Wedel 2013: table 3, and see this post). We found that the invertebral cartilage thickness equaled 15-24% of the length of the centra.* For the estimated 2.85-meter dorsal column of Dreadnoughtus, that means 43-68 cm of cartilage (4.3-6.8 cm of cartilage per joint), for an in vivo dorsal column length of 3.28-3.53 meters. That's still about 15-20% shorter than the 4.1 meters I measured from the skeletal recon–and, I must note, exactly what Asier stated in his comment. All my noodling has accomplished is to verify that his presumably off-the-cuff estimate was spot on. But is that a big deal?
Visually, a 20% shorter torso makes a small but noticeable difference. Check out the original reconstruction (top) with the 20%-shorter-torso version (bottom):
FWIW, the bottom version looks a lot more plausible to my eye–I hadn't realized quite how weiner-dog-y the original recon is until I saw it next to the shortened version.
In terms of body mass, the difference is major. You'll recall that I estimated the torso volume of Dreadnoughtus at 32 cubic meters. Lopping off 20% means losing 6.4 cubic meters–about the same volume as a big bull elephant, or all four of Dreadnoughtus's limbs put together. Even assuming a low whole-body density of 0.7 g/cm^3, that's 4.5 metric tons off the estimated mass. So a ~30-ton Dreadnoughtus is looking more plausible by the minute.
For more on how torso length can affect the visual appearance and estimated mass of an animal, see this post and Taylor (2009).
* I asked Mike to do a review pass on this post before I published, and regarding the intervertebral spacing derived from the juvenile apatosaurs, he wrote:
That 15-24% is for juveniles. For the cervicals of adult Sauroposeidon we got about 5%. Why the differences? Three reasons might be relevant: 1, taxonomic difference between Sauroposeidon and Apatosaurus; 2, serial difference between neck and torso; 3, ontogenetic difference between juvenile and adult. By applying the juvenile Apatosaurus dorsal measurement directly to the adult Dreadnoughtus dorsals, you're implicitly assuming that the adult/juvenile axis is irrelevant (which seems unlikely to me), that the taxonomic axis is (I guess) unknowable, and that the cervical/dorsal distinction is the only one that matter.
That's a solid point, and it deserves a post of its own, which I'm already working on. For now, it seems intuitively obvious to me that we got a low percentage on Sauroposeidon simply because the vertebrae are so long. If the length-to-diameter ratio was 2.5 instead of 5, we'd have gotten 10%, unless cartilage thickness scales with centrum length, which seems unlikely. For a dorsal with EI of 1.5, cartilage thickness would then be 20%, which is about what I figured above.
Now, admittedly that is arm-waving, not science (and really just a wordy restatement of his point #2). The obvious thing to do is take all of our data and see if intervertebral spacing is more closely correlated with centrum length or centrum diameter. Now that it's occurred to me, it seems very silly not to have done that in the actual paper. And I will do that very thing in an upcoming post. For now I'll just note three things:
As you can see from figure 15 in our cartilage paper, in the opisthocoelous anterior dorsals of CM 3390, the condyle of the posterior vertebra is firmly engaged in the cotyle of the anterior one, and if anything the two vertebrae look jammed together, not drifted apart. But the intervertebral spacing as a fraction of centrum length is still huge (20+4%) because the centra are so short.
Transferring these numbers to Dreadnoughtus only results in 4.3-6.8 cm of cartilage between adjacent vertebrae, which does not seem unreasonable for a 30- or 40-ton animal with dorsal centra averaging 35 cm in diameter. If you asked me off the cuff what I thought a reasonable intervertebral spacing was for such a large animal, I would have said 3 or 4 inches (7.5 to 10 cm), so the numbers I got through cross-scaling are actually lower than what I would have guessed.
Finally, if I've overestimated the intervertebral spacing, then the actual torso length of Dreadnoughtus was even shorter than that illustrated above, and the volumetric mass estimate would be smaller still. So in going with relatively thick cartilage, I'm being as generous as possible to the Lacovara et al. (2014) skeletal reconstruction (and indirectly to their super-high allometry-derived mass estimate), which I think is only fair.
Gomani, Elizabeth M. 2005. Sauropod dinosaurs from the Early Cretaceous of Malawi, Africa. Palaeontologia Electronica 8(1):27A (37 pp.)
Lacovara, Kenneth J.; Ibiricu, L.M.; Lamanna, M.C.; Poole, J.C.; Schroeter, E.R.; Ullmann, P.V.; Voegele, K.K.; Boles, Z.M.; Egerton, V.M.; Harris, J.D.; Martínez, R.D.; Novas, F.E. (September 4, 2014). A Gigantic, Exceptionally Complete Titanosaurian Sauropod Dinosaur from Southern Patagonia, Argentina. Scientific Reports. doi:10.1038/srep06196.
Taylor, Michael P. 2009. A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janensch 1914). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29(3):787-806.
Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2013c. The effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture and range of motion in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs. PLOS ONE 8(10): e78214. 17 pages. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078214
Filed in cartilage, Dreadnoughtus, mass estimates, math, size, skeletal reconstructions, titanosaur
Estimating sauropod intervertebral cartilage thickness from CT scans
[This is part 4 in an ongoing series on our recent PLOS ONE paper on sauropod neck cartilage. See also part 1, part 2, and part 3.]
Weird stuff on the ground, Big Bend, 2007.
Here's a frequently-reproduced quote from Darwin:
About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorise; and I well remember some one saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!
It's from a letter to Henry Fawcett, dated September 18, 1861, and you can read the whole thing here.
I've known this quote for ages, having been introduced to it at Berkeley–a copy used to be taped to the door of the Padian Lab, and may still be. It's come back to haunt me recently, though. An even stronger version would run something like, "If you don't know what you're looking for, you won't make the observation in the first place!"
Kent Sanders looking at scans of BYU 12613, a posterior cervical of either Kaatedocus or an anomalously small Diplodocus, at the University of Utah in May, 2008.
For example: I started CT scanning sauropod vertebrae with Rich Cifelli and Kent Sanders back in January, 1998. Back then, I was interested in pneumaticity, so that's what I looked for, and that's what I found–work which culminated in Wedel et al. (2000) and Wedel (2003). It wasn't until earlier this year that I wondered if it would be possible to determine the spacing of articulated vertebrae from CT scans. So everything I'm going to show you, I technically saw 15 years ago, but only in the sense of "it crossed my visual field." None of it registered at the time, because I wasn't looking for it.
A corollary I can't help noting in passing: one of the under-appreciated benefits of expanding your knowledge base is that it allows you to actually make more observations. Many aspects of nature only appear noteworthy once you have a framework in which to see them.
BYI 12613 going through a CT scanner at the University of Utah medical center. We were filming for the "Megasaurus" episode of Jurassic CSI. That shoot was crazy fun.
So anyway, the very first specimen we scanned way back when was the most anterior of the three plaster jackets that contain the four cervical vertebrae that make up OMNH 53062, which was destined to become the holotype of Sauroposeidon. I've written about the taphonomy of that specimen here, and you can read more about how it was excavated in Wedel and Cifelli (2005). We scanned that jacket first because, although the partial vertebrae it contains are by far the most incomplete of the four, the jacket is a lot smaller and lighter than the other two (which weigh hundreds of pounds apiece). Right away we saw internal chambers in the vertebrae, and that led to all of the pneumaticity work mentioned above.
Internal structure of a cervical vertebra of Sauroposeidon, OMNH 53062. A, parts of two vertebrae from the middle of the neck. The field crew that dug up the bones cut though one of them to divide the specimen into manageable pieces. B, cross section of C6 in posterior view at the level of the break, traced from a CT image and photographs of the broken end. The left side of the specimen was facing up in the field and the bone on that side is badly weathered. Over most of the broken surface the internal structure is covered by plaster or too damaged to trace, but it is cleanly exposed on the upper right side (outlined). C, the internal structure of that part of the vertebra, traced from a photograph. The arrows indicate the thickness of the bone at several points, as measured with a pair of digital calipers. The camellae are filled with sandstone. Wedel (2007: fig. 14).
Happily for me, that first jacket contains not only the posterior two-thirds of the first vertebra (possibly C5), but also the front end of the second vertebra. Whoever decided to plow through the second vertebra to divide the specimen into manageable chunks in the field made a savvy choice. Way back in 2004 I realized that the cut edge of the second vertebra was not obscured by plaster, and therefore the internal structure could be seen and measured directly, which is a lot cleaner than relying on the artifact-heavy CT scans. (The CT scans are noisy because the hospital machines we had access to start to pant a bit when asked to punch x-rays through specimens this large and dense.) A figure derived from that work made it into a couple of papers and this post, and appears again above.
But that's pneumaticity, which this post is allegedly not about. The cut through the second vertebra was also smart because it left the intervertebral joint intact.
Fifth and partial sixth cervical vertebrae of Sauroposeidon.
Photograph and x-ray scout image of C5 and the anterior portion of C6 of Sauroposeidon OMNH 53062 in right lateral view. The anterior third of C5 eroded away before the vertebra was collected. C6 was deliberately cut through in the field to break the multi-meter specimen into manageable pieces for jacketing (see Wedel and Cifelli 2005 for details). Note that the silhouettes of the cotyle of C5 and the condyle of C6 are visible in the x-ray. Taylor and Wedel (2013: figure 11).
Here are a photo of the jacket and a lateral scout x-ray. The weird rectangles toward the left and right ends of the x-ray are boards built into the bottom of the jacket to strengthen it.
CT slices from fifth cervical vertebrae of Sauroposeidon.
X-ray scout image and three posterior-view CT slices through the C5/C6 intervertebral joint in Sauroposeidon OMNH 53062. In the bottom half of figure, structures from C6 are traced in red and those from C5 are traced in blue. Note that the condyle of C6 is centered in the cotyle of C5 and that the right zygapophyses are in articulation. Taylor and Wedel (2013: figure 12).
And here's a closeup of the C5/C6 joint, with the relevant radiographs and tracing. The exciting thing here is that the condyle is centered almost perfectly in the cotyle, and the zygapophyses are in articulation. Together with the lack of disarticulation in the cervical rib bundle (read more about that here and in Wedel et al. 2000), these things suggest to us that the vertebrae are spaced pretty much as they were in life. If so, then the spacing between the vertebrae now tells us the thickness of the soft tissue that separated the vertebrae in life.
I should point out here that we can't prove that the spacing between the vertebrae is still the same as it was in life. But if some mysterious force moved them closer together or farther apart, it did so (1) without decentering the condyle of C6 within the cotyle of C5, (2) without moving the one surviving zygapophyseal joint out of contact, and (3) without disarticulating the cervical ribs. The cervical ribs were each over 3 meters long in life and they formed vertically-stacked bundles on either side below the vertebrae; that's a lot of stuff to move just through any hypothetical contraction or expansion of the intervertebral soft tissues after death. In fact, I would not be surprised if the intervertebral soft tissues did contract or expand after death–but I don't think they moved the vertebrae, which are comparatively immense. The cartilage probably pulled away from the bone as it rotted, allowing sediment in. Certainly every nook and cranny of the specimen is packed with fine-grained sandstone now.
Anyway, barring actual preserved cartilage, this is a best-case scenario for trying to infer intervertebral spacing in a fossil. If articulation of the centra, zygs, and cervical ribs doesn't indicate legitimate geometry, nothing ever will. So if we're going to use the fossils to help settle this at all, we're never going to have a better place to start.
Geometry of opisthocoelous intervertebral joints.
Hypothetical models of the geometry of an opisthocoelous intervertebral joint compared with the actual morphology of the C5/C6 joint in Sauroposeidon OMNH 53062. A. Model in which the condyle and cotyle are concentric and the radial thickness of the intervertebral cartilage is constant. B. Model in which the condyle and cotyle have the same geometry, but the condyle is displaced posteriorly so the anteroposterior thickness of the intervertebral cartilage is constant. C. the C5/C6 joint in Sauroposeidon in right lateral view, traced from the x-ray scout image (see Figure 12); dorsal is to the left. Except for one area in the ventral half of the cotyle, the anteroposterior separation between the C5 cotyle and C6 condyle is remarkably uniform. All of the arrows in part C are 52 mm long. Taylor and Wedel (2013: figure 14).
So, by now, you know I'm a doofus. I have been thinking about this problem literally for years and the data I needed to address it was sitting on my hard drive the entire time. One of the things I pondered during those lost years is what the best shape for a concave-to-convex intervertebral joint might be. Would the best spacing be radially constant (A in the figure above), or antero-posteriorly constant (B), or some other, more complicated arrangement? The answer in this case surprised me–although the condyle is a lot smaller in diameter than the cotyle, the anteroposterior separation between them in almost constant, as you can see in part C of the above figure.
Joint between sixth and seventh cervicals vertebrae of Sauroposeidon.
X-ray scout image of the C6/C7 intervertebral joint in Sauroposeidon OMNH 53062, in right lateral view. The silhouette of the condyle is traced in blue and the cotyle in red. The scale on the right is marked off in centimeters, although the numbers next to each mark are in millimeters. Taylor and Wedel (2013: figure 13).
Don't get too worked up about that, though, because the next joint is very different! Here's the C6/C7 joint, again in a lateral scout x-ray, with the ends of the bones highlighted. Here the condyle is almost as big in diameter as the cotyle, but it is weirdly flat. This isn't a result of overzealous prep–most of the condyle is still covered in matrix, and I only found its actual extent by looking at the x-ray. This is flatter than most anterior dorsal vertebrae of Apatosaurus–I've never seen a sauropod cervical with such a flat condyle. Has anyone else?
The condyle of C6 is a bit flatter than expected, too–certainly a lot flatter than the cervical condyles in Giraffatitan and the BYU Brachiosaurus vertebrae. As we said in the paper,
It is tempting to speculate that the flattened condyles and nearly constant thickness of the intervertebral cartilage are adaptations to bearing weight, which must have been an important consideration in a cervical series more than 11 meters long, no matter how lightly built.
Anyway, obviously here the anteroposterior distance between condyle and cotyle could not have been uniform because they are such different shapes. Wacky. The zygs are missing, so they're no help, and clearly the condyle is not centered in the cotyle. Whether this posture was attainable in life is debatable; I've seen some pretty weird stuff. In any case, we didn't use this joint for estimating cartilage thickness because we had no reason to trust the results.
First and second dorsal vertebrae of Apatosaurus CM 3390.
Articulated first and second dorsal vertebrae of Apatosaurus CM 3390. A. Digital model showing the two vertebrae in articulation, in left lateral (top) and ventral (bottom) views. B-G. Representative slices illustrating the cross-sectional anatomy of the specimen, all in posterior view. B. Slice 25. C. Slice 31. D. Slice 33. E. Slice 37. F. Slice 46. G. Slice 61. Orthogonal gaps are highlighted where the margins of the condyle and cotyle are parallel to each other and at right angles to the plane of the CT slice. 'Zygs' is short for 'zygapophyses', and NCS denotes the neurocentral synchondroses. Taylor and Wedel (2013: figure 15).
Kent Sanders and I had also scanned several of the smaller sauropod vertebrae from the Carnegie collection (basically, the ones that would fit in the trunk of my car for the drive back to Oklahoma). Crucially, we'd scanned a couple of sets of articulated vertebrae, CM 3390 and CM 11339, both from juvenile individuals of Apatosaurus. In both cases, the condyles and cotyles are concentric (that's what the 'orthogonal gaps' are all about in the above figure) and the zygs are in articulation, just as in Sauroposeidon. These are dorsals, so we don't have any cervical ribs here to provide a third line of evidence that the articulation is legit, but all of the evidence that we do have is at least consistent with that interpretation.
So, here's an interesting thing: in CM 3390, above, the first dorsal is cranked up pretty sharply compared to the next one, but the condyle is still centered in the cotyle and the zygs are in articulation. Now, the vertebrae have obviously been sheared by taphonomic deformation, but that seems to have affected both vertebrae to the same extent, and it's hard to imagine some kind of taphonomic pressure moving one vertebra around relative to the next. So I think it's at least plausible that this range of motion was achievable in life. Using various views and landmarks, we estimate the degree of extension here somewhere between 31 and 36 degrees. That's a lot more than the ~6 degrees estimated by Stevens and Parrish (1999, 2005). And, as we mentioned in the paper, it nicely reinforces the point made by Upchurch (2000), that flexibility in the anterior dorsals should be taken into account in estimating neck posture and ROM.
Dorsal vertebrae of Apatosaurus CM 11339.
Articulated middle or posterior dorsal vertebrae of Apatosaurus CM 11339. A. X-ray scout image showing the two vertebrae in articulation, in left lateral view. B–D. Slices 39, 43 and and 70 in posterior view, showing the most anterior appearance of the condyles and cotyles. Taylor and Wedel (2013: figure 16).
Here's our last specimen, CM 11339. No big surprises here, although if you ever had a hard time visualizing how hyposphenes and hypantra fit together, you can see them in articulation in parts C and D (near the top of the specimen). Once again, by paging through slices we were able to estimate the separation between the vertebrae. Incidentally, the condyle IS centered in the cotyle here, it just doesn't look that way because the CT slice is at an angle to the joint–see the lateral scout in part A of the figure to see what I mean.
So, what did we find? In Sauroposeidon the spacing between C5 and C6 is 52mm. That's pretty darn thick in absolute terms–a shade over two inches–but really thin in relative terms–only a little over 4% of the length of each vertebra. In both of the juvenile Apatosaurus specimens, the spacing between the vertebrae was about 14mm (give or take a few because of the inherent thickness of the slices; see the paper for details on these uncertainties).
Now, here's an interesting thing: we can try to estimate the intervertebral spacing in an adult Apatosaurus in two ways–by scaling up from the juvenile apatosaurus, or by scaling sideways from Sauroposeidon (since a big Apatosaurus was in the same ballpark, size-wise)–and we get similar answers either way.
Scaling sideways from Sauroposeidon (I'm too lazy to write anymore so I'm just copying and pasting from the paper):
Centrum shape is conventionally quantified by Elongation Index (EI), which is defined as the total centrum length divided by the dorsoventral height of the posterior articular surface. Sauroposeidon has proportionally very long vertebrae: the EI of C6 is 6.1. If instead it were 3, as in the mid-cervicals of Apatosaurus, the centrum length would be 600 mm. That 600 mm minus 67 mm for the cotyle would give a functional length of 533 mm, not 1153, and 52 mm of cartilage would account for 9.8% of the length of that segment.
Scaling up from the juveniles: juvenile sauropods have proportionally short cervicals (Wedel et al. 2000). The scanned vertebrae are anterior dorsals with an EI of about 1.5. Mid-cervical vertebrae of this specimen would have EIs about 2, so the same thickness of cartilage would give 12mm of cartilage and 80mm of bone per segment, or 15% cartilage per segment. Over ontogeny the mid-cervicals telescoped to achieve EIs of 2.3–3.3. Assuming the cartilage did not also telescope in length (i.e., didn't get any thicker than it got taller or wider), the ratio of cartilage to bone would be 12:120 (120 from 80*1.5), so the cartilage would account for 10% of the length of the segment–almost exactly what we got from the based-on-Sauroposeidon estimate. So either we got lucky here with our tiny sample size and truckloads of assumptions, or–just maybe–we discovered a Thing. At least we can say that the intervertebral spacing in the Apatosaurus and Sauroposeidon vertebrae is about the same, once the effects of scaling and EI are removed.
Finally, we're aware that our sample size here is tiny and heavily skewed toward juveniles. That's because we were just collecting targets of opportunity. Finding sauropod vertebrae that will fit through a medical-grade CT scanner is not easy, and it's just pure dumb luck that Kent Sanders and I had gotten scans of even this many articulated vertebrae way back when, since at the time we were on the hunt for pneumaticity, not intervertebral joints or their soft tissues. As Mike has said before, we don't think of this paper as the last word on anything. It is, explicitly, exploratory. Hopefully in a few years we'll be buried in new data on in-vivo intervertebral spacing in both extant and extinct animals. If and when that avalanche comes, we'll just be happy to have tossed a snowball.
Stevens, K.A. and Parrish, J.M. 1999. Neck posture and feeding habits of two Jurassic sauropod dinosaurs. Science 284: 798-800. [Free subscription required]
Stevens, Kent A., and J. Michael Parrish. 2005. Neck posture, dentition, and feeding strategies in Jurassic sauropod dinosaurs. pp. 212-232 in: Virginia Tidwell and Ken Carpenter (eds.), Thunder Lizards: the Sauropodomorph Dinosaurs. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana. 495 pp.
Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2013c. The effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture and range of motion in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs. PLOS ONE 8(10): e78214. 17 pages. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078214 [PDF]
Upchurch, P. 2000. Neck posture of sauropod dinosaurs. Science 287: 547b.
Wedel, M.J. 2003b. The evolution of vertebral pneumaticity in sauropod dinosaurs. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 23:344-357.
Wedel, M.J. 2007. Aligerando a los gigantes (Lightening the giants). ¡Fundamental! 12:1-84. [in Spanish, with English translation]
Wedel, M.J., and Cifelli, R.L. 2005. Sauroposeidon: Oklahoma's native giant. Oklahoma Geology Notes 65 (2):40-57.
Wedel, M.J., R.L. Cifelli and R.K. Sanders. 2000. Osteology, paleobiology, and relationships of the sauropod dinosaur Sauroposeidon. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 45(4): 343-388.
Filed in Apatosaurus, cartilage, cross sections, CT, diplodocids, I'm stupid, juvenile, Sauroposeidon
Did sauropod necks have intervertebral discs?
One aspect of sauropod neck cartilage that's been overlooked — and this applies to all non-avian dinosaurs, not just sauropods — is the configuration of the cartilage in their necks. It's not widely appreciated that birds' necks differ from those of all other animals in this respect, and we don't yet know whether sauropods resembled birds or mammals.
Here's a classic sagittal view of a mammal neck — in this case a human — from The Basics of MRI (Joseph P. Hornak, 1996-2013):
You can see two distinct kinds of structure alternating along the neck: the big, square ones are vertebral centra (slightly hollow at each end), and the narrower lens-shaped ones are the intervertebral discs.
In mammals, and most animals, we find this distinct fibrocartilaginous element, the disc, between the centra of consecutive vertebrae. These discs have a complex structure of their own, consisting of an annulus fibrosus (fibrous ring), made of several layers of fibrocartilage, surrounding a nucleus pulposus (pulpy centre) with the consistency of jelly.
But in birds, uniquely among extant animals, there is no separate cartilaginous element. Instead, the articular surfaces of the bones are covered with layers of hyaline cartilage which articulate directly with one another, and are free to slide across each other. The adjacent articular surfaces are enclosed in synovial capsules similar to those that enclose the zygapophyseal joints. You can see this in the hemisected Rhea neck from last time:
Taylor and Wedel (2013c: Figure 18). Cartilage in the neck of a rhea. Joint between cervicals 11 (left) and 10 (right) of a rhea, sagittally bisected. Left half of neck in medial view. The thin layers of cartilage lining the C11 condyle and C10 cotyle are clearly visible.
The difference between these two constructions is very apparent in dissection: in birds, adjacent vertebrae come apart easily once the surrounding soft tissue is removed; but in mammals, it is very difficult to separate consecutive vertebrae, as they are firmly attached to the intervening intervertebral disc.
Taylor and Wedel (2013c: Figure 19). Alligator head and neck. Sagittally bisected head and neck of American alligator, with the nine cervical vertebrae indicated. Inset: schematic drawing of these nine vertebrae, from ([62]: figure 1), reversed.
To complicate matters further, thin articular discs occur in the necks of some birds — for example, the ostrich (see illustration below), the swan, and the king penguin. But these discs do not occur in all birds — for example, they are absent in the turkey and the rhea. When they are present, these articular discs divide the synovial cavity and prevent the (cartilage-covered) bones on either side from ever articulating directly with each other, just like the articular discs in the human temporomandibular and sternoclavicular joints. These discs are thinner than the true intervertebral discs of mammals and crocodilians; and they are different in composition, lacking the annulus/nucleus structure and consisting of a simple sheet of fibrocartilage.
Taylor and Wedel (2013: Figure 4). Intervertebral articular discs of an ostrich (not to scale). Left: first sacral vertebra in anterior view, showing articular disc of joint with the last thoracic vertebra. Right: posterior view view of a cervical vertebra, with probe inserted behind posterior articular disc. The cervical vertebra is most relevant to the present study, but the the sacral vertebra is also included as it shows the morphology more clearly. These fibrocartilaginous articular discs divide the synovial cavity, like the articular discs in the human temporomandibular and sternoclavicular joints, and should not be confused with the true intervertebral discs of mammals and other animals, which consist of a nucleus pulposus and an annulus fibrosus.
Crucially, the extant phylogenetic bracket (EPB) does not help us to establish the nature of the intervertebral articulations in sauropods, as the two extant groups most closely related to them have different articulations. As noted, birds have synovial joints; but crocodilians, like mammals, have fibrocartilaginous intervertebral discs. So their most recent common ancestor, the ur-archosaur, could equally have had either condition, and so could its various descendants.
This seems like a mystery well worth solving. For one thing, in the wholly inadequate database that we assembled for the paper, the birds had much thinner cartilage than the other animals. Since they are also the only animals with synovial neck joints, thin cartilage correlates with this kind of joint — at least across that tiny database. Is that correlation reliable? Does it hold out across a bigger sample? Is there a causation? If so, then finding out what kind of intervertebral joints sauropods had would help us to determine how thick their cartilage was, and so what their actual neutral posture was.
But we can't tell this directly unless we find sensationally well preserved specimens that let us see the structure of the cartilage. We might speculate that since birds have unique saddle-shaped joints and sauropods have ball-and-socket joints like those of mammals and crocs, they'd be more likely to resemble the latter in this respect, too, but that's rather hand-wavey.
Can we do better?
If we can, it will be through osteological correlates: that is, features of the bones (which are preserved in fossils) that are consistently correlated with features of the soft tissues (which are not). We'd want to find out from analysis of extant animals what correlates might exist, then go looking for them in the bones of extinct animals.
A couple of times now, I've pitched this as an abstract for a Masters project, hoping someone at Bristol will work on it with me as co-supervisor, but so far no-one's bitten. Maybe next year. It would be a very specimen-based project, which I'd think would be a plus in most people's eyes.
Taylor and Wedel (2013: Figure 8). Cervical vertebra 7 from a turkey. Anterior view on the left; dorsal, left lateral and ventral views in the middle row; and posterior on the right.
Anyway, the awful truth is that at the moment we know spectacularly little about the cartilage in the necks of sauropods. We don't know whether they had true intervertebral discs. If not, we don't know whether they had articular discs like those of ostriches. We don't know how thick these elements, if present, were. We don't know how thick the hyaline cartilage on the bones' articular surfaces was, or how evenly it covered its those surfaces.
And until we know those things, we don't really know anything about neck posture or range of movement.
There's lots of work to be done here!
Filed in cartilage, cervical, dissection, Hey you! Want a project?, necks

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Its compact and light weight design makes it simple and very easy to use and transport. With its low toe plate height, it is able to get into the tightest gaps.
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text:
Q: LINQ: Sum from M-M table Inside my M-M table I have Quantity(int) of a product for a specific order.
I'm trying to calculate Total of Quantity of same ProductId, disregard OrderId. Meaning I want to Sum all Quantity of a specific product within my List collection.
Product_Order:
    ---------------- ----------- ---------
    |   ProductId   | OrderId   | Quantity |
    ---------------- ----------- ---------

This is what I had in mind(code wont work):
SumQuantity = collection.Sum(x=> x.Product_Order
                         .Where(c=>c.ProductId == product.ID)
                         .Select(Quantity))

(collection-list is a list of products selected product that I added)

A: As far as i understand, your Quantity is a property of Product_Order. So you need collection just to restrict your product Ids.
I would suggest to use this query:
var SumQuantity = Product_Order.Where(x=>collection.Any(o=>o.ProductId==x.ProductId))
                       .Sum(x=>x.Quantity);

Or if you do have Quantity on your Product Entitiy and want to use this one:
var SumQuantity = collection.Where(x=>Product_Order.Any(o=>o.ProductId==x.ProductId))
                   .Sum(x=>x.Quantity);

A: You need to structure the Linq like this
collection.Where(c => c.Product_Order.ProductId == product.ID).Select(x => x.Product_Order.Quantity).Sum();

A: if Product_Order.Product is a list then you can try this
collection.Where(c => c.Product_Order.Product.Any(p=>p.id == product.ID)).Select(x => x.Product_Order.Quantity).Sum();


text:
The Appointment est le titre original du film Le Rendez-vous de Sidney Lumet (1969).
 The Appointment est un film de Lindsey C. Vickers (1981).
 The Appointment est un film de Todd Wade (1996).

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Property management it is a service that is provided by property management companies. There are countless companies that are taking responsibilities for the management of the property to their clients. Management of property is not a single operation that is containing numbers of other operations such as repair, maintenance, dispatch position, utilization and many more others. As Gold Coast property management, these services are best option to maintain the value of a property. There are different kinds of properties that are managing by these agencies.
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If you want to get more detail then you can check the different website of these companies. Hope so this information will be useful for your personal purposes.


A Teaser for/Prueba del Desfile de Carnavál | ¡VidaMaz!
This morning as we rode our bicycles on the malecón, city drivers were moving a few of the carrozas or floats from the taller on Ejército Mexicano towards El Centro Histórico. The city workers were having a blast, waving like Kings and Princes of Carnavál. Here's a little taster to whet your appetite for the parade next Sunday. It's easy to see the theme of this year's Carnavál, but can you tell us which movies or movie stars are represented in these pictures??


Brett Goodroad (b. 1979) is an artist and painter based in San Francisco. Born and raised in rural Montana, in 2012 he received the Tournesol Award, overseen by Sausalito's Headland Center for the Arts. The Award recognises one Bay Area painter each year and financially assisted Goodroad and gave him studio space, allowing him to develop his distinctive, figurative, abstract style. He has since exhibited extensively in California as well as New York and Vermont. His monograph, A Sequence in Love was published in 2016 and in May he will be exhibiting at the Phoenix Gallery in Brighton as part of the Brighton Festival.
For some years Goodroad has partially funded his existence by driving trucks for Veritable Vegetable, an organic vegetable distributor. theartsdesk caught up with him two days into a New Mexico run. He honks his horn to show that he is truly on the highways of the American West.
THOMAS H GREEN: How did you get involved in the Brighton Festival?
BRETT GOODROAD: David Shrigley [Guest Director of Brighton Festival 2018] asked me to show. I met him up at the Headland Center for the Arts in 2012. We've been in touch since. You could say we're pen pals, I guess. You know, he seems to really like my work but he's not the kind of guy who showers you with praise. He's always just been a really good person as far as all artists I've known are concerned.
Are you coming over for your exhibition in Brighton?
I'll be over for the opening. I've never been to Brighton. I've never even been to the UK. There are lots of things I'd like to check out. I'd like to see the Lake District, then over to Italy for a bit, and fly back home from there.
I hear you spend your time in the cab of your truck listening to audiobooks. What are you listening to at the moment?
Well, the one I'm kind of circling round right now is A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. It's about India over a couple of different time periods. I get through a lot of stuff. My education in Montana wasn't that involved in literature. Of course, I had kind of a religious background so I had a lot of interest in language in a quizzical fashion, finding meaning out of language. But people like Marcel Proust were an enigma to me. Being able to listen to that aloud gave me some access into how to actually read the sentences. Same with James Joyce. I didn't know how to get into it until I started listening to it. The road, in more than one way, has been very profitable to my practice as a painter.
Are your figurative abstract paintings flavoured by the endless American landscapes you see on the road?
I think what you'll see in the exhibition is definitely landscapes but I've never been somebody who's very direct, not literally making paintings about truck driving or landscapes. All this time behind the wheel, especially in the deserts of the south west, I've definitely learnt how to create space in all my work.
And you do your painting in your backyard?
All the paintings are done in my backyard. In San Francisco we get a lot of fog from the ocean which works really well for painting. The light is amazing, glowing light that comes through the clouds. It's beautiful, really perfect for painting. I have a small paper studio 10 blocks away from where I live. This lady who frames my work lets me use it for printmaking and actually all the work for the Festival is going to be done out of there. I've been in that space for the last six years and even that has had an influence on my work. It's moist and I've had to battle mould there. A lot of influences popped up into my work without my knowing.
Have your family been supportive of your artistic career?
You know they never really had an artist in the family so they've never really known what to do with me. My dad did OK, he went into the business of agriculture, he grew up on a farm, all my uncles are farmers, my grandfather was a famous farmer who went to Russia and taught a bunch of people how to grow corn. The one thing I can say about having a family that's more blue-collar is I didn't have a lot of pressure on me to go to the right school, they were just happy that I could make a living. They never really understood my work but they've never been against it.
Do your trucking friends know about your art career?
They've been incredibly supportive. They give me my schedule. I work a five-day run, then nine days off, and now my art career's been starting to make more money. It's a woman-run company out of San Francisco that's been supporting sustainable agriculture since '74. They're actually one of the main cornerstones of the organic movement that brought it out of California in the Sixties and Seventies, so they've been an inspiration too. They've really grinded it out, a totally woman-run company coming into the totally male world of trucking. I'm really proud to work for them. I'm incredibly lucky to have landed where I did. When I got done with grad school I was working for a gallery. I got fired from that for, like, the dumbest reason. I had the truck-driving experience from when I was growing up. I worked on harvest runs when I was 17, travelled up from Texas to Canada, harvesting wheat, barley and all these small grains, so I had all that experience. I knew that I could drive trucks but most people I could drive for I'd be out on the road six days, maybe a day off, six more days, then another day off, but by some little miracle I started working for these ladies. I can't say enough about them, actually. They're really stoked on the Brighton Festival thing.
Tell us about Arrival, your monotype that's being used to promote the Brighton exhibition [and which readers can see at the head of this interview].
Well, there are a few things going on. It's not direct but immigration, all the things happening in Europe and the States, but not like I'm actually putting symbols in there. Those two figures are travelling from the East to the West. If you look, there's a really tiny gate. It's got these pillars and a small doorway. The figure in the front is actually putting his hand out and he's in a bucket. I imagine them both kind of in the water, floating across the water. The figure next to him, in my mind, isn't necessarily a child but a strange animal-like, bird-like figure that's just sneezed and is wiping his nose with a wing. Another thing that happens in my work a lot is figures turn into animals. All the work in Brighton is going to be black and white. That image gives some sense of the exhibition.


text:
Q: how can i delete a folder on app deletion which was made by app outside the appfolder I made an application from which I make a folder and save some files in it.
What I want is, when I delete the application the folder that I make outside from application should be deleted.

A: Add your manifest following permission
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" />
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" />
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WRITE_INTERNAL_STORAGE" />

Then java code
File dir = getActivity().getFilesDir();
if (dir.isDirectory())
{
String[] subDir = dir.list();
for (int i = 0; i < subDir.length;i++)
{
   new File(dir, subDir[i]).delete();
}
}

A: Follow this link to listen to when your application is being uninstalled, and in the callback, delete the folder using @sasikumar's code below. Hope this helps.


text:
"Majority" Clarified for Macomb Elections
Published November 5, 2013 at 6:43 PM CST
It took a while, but Macomb city code finally defines the word "majority" to mean a number that is more than half.
The meaning of the word was at the center of a dispute over this year's election in the second ward.
Challenger Steve Wailand appeared to defeat incumbent Kay Hill, 17-to-16, on election day. But County Clerk Gretchen DeJaynes said there should be a run-off because neither candidate received 50% plus one – a standard she said the city had always told her to apply.
The city said the decision rested with the clerk's office because that office administers elections.
Wailand took the case to court after Tri States Public Radio reported the phrase "50% plus one" appeared nowhere in the city's municipal code. The code referred to a winner receiving a "majority" of the votes but it failed to define that word.
A judge sided with Wailand and awarded the election to him.
Wailand was sworn into office in May and he joined the rest of the city council in approving the code change this week.
TSPR Local MacombKay HillSteve Wailand50% Plus One


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text:
Q: UWP transparent LinearGradientBrush I'm having trouble with my c# UWP App.
<Grid VerticalAlignment="Bottom" Height="40" Grid.Row="3" Margin="0,0,0,-1">
  <Grid.Background>
    <LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="0.5,1" StartPoint="0.5,0">
        <GradientStop Color="#00000000" Offset="0"/>
        <GradientStop Color="{StaticResource stdBackgroundColor}" Offset="1"/>
    </LinearGradientBrush>
  </Grid.Background>
</Grid>

This code snippet should show a transparent overlay at the bottom of the page, but instead it creates a blackish overlay, like it is adding transparent values on top of the existing background (which is also of Color stdBackgroundColor) and therefore looks quite strange (see image below)

How can I achieve an transparent overlay to content (such as ScrollViewer) without this effect?

A: Disclaimer, I'm at work and I don't have access to a platform I can test this code in, but from what I've looked up it should work.
The underlying problem is one of color blending, namely that we want to smoothly blend from full alpha to any arbitrary color.  The problem with starting with Color.Transparent is that you'll get a band of white while the alpha channel progresses more than the other components.  A similar problem occurs with #00000000 as that has a band of black.  The solution is to start with a version of your color that has the opacity set to 0.  How we go about this is slightly different based on which version of XAML based application you are developing--and I find it difficult to keep them straight.  In UWP we don't have an opacity mask and we can't create a gradient on opacity alone.  The only thing left is to use an IValueConverter.
The Color property in GradientStop is a Color and not a Brush, as that would overly complicate the rendering system.  So the first step we need is an IValueConverter that takes any Color and strips out the alpha value:
public class TransparentColorConverter : IValueConverter
{
    public object Convert(object value, Type targetType,
                          object parameter, string language)
    {
        Color convert = (Color) value; // Color is a struct, so we cast
        return Color.FromArgb(0, convert.R, convert.G, convert.B);
    }

    public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType,
                              object parameter, string language)
    {
         throw new NotImplementedException();
    }
}

The next challenge is to create a binding that we can use this color against.  The binding object allows us to specify a Source, which can be any object we pass in.  ElementName won't work because resources are referenced by key, not name.
<LinearGradientBrush x:Key="OpacityGradientBrush" StartPoint="0,0" EndPoint="0,1">
  <GradientStop Color="{Binding Source={StaticResource stdBackgroundColor},
                       Converter={StaticResource TransparentColorConverter}}" Offset="0"/>
  <GradientStop Color="{StaticResource stdBackgroundColor}" Offset="1"/>
</LinearGradientBrush>

Of course, don't forget to put the TransparentColorConverter in your Resources so you can reference it here.  Personally, I would prefer not to have to use converters, but in this case I think it is warranted.
NOTE: We use Source in the binding so we can reference a static resource.  If we had a property we could bind to, we could use a Path instead.

The answer below is valid for WPF, but not UWP.  I wish Microsoft would stop redefining the same concept in incompatible ways, but this is the world we live in.
Correcting my answer based on this answer
You want to change your LinearGradientBrush to use the Opacity property rather than the color #00000000.  The problem is that it is interpolating from basically black to your desired color.  To get the affect you want you'll need to set up an opacity mask brush like this:
<LinearGradientBrush x:Key="OpacityGradientBrush" StartPoint="0,0" EndPoint="0,1">
  <GradientStop Color="#00FFFFFF" Offset="0"/>
  <GradientStop Color="#FFFFFFFF" Offset="1"/>
</LinearGradientBrush>

Then in the code you need to apply the opacity mask to, you reference it like this:
<Grid VerticalAlignment="Bottom" Height="40" Grid.Row="3"
    Background="{StaticResource stdBackgroundColor}"
    OpacityMask="{StaticResource OpacityGradientBrush} Margin="0,0,0,-1"/>

The problem is that if you want the blend to only affect the opacity, the rest of the color has to be the same.  You'll get a band of your starting color fading in and changing to the ending color otherwise.


In an extraordinary victory for voting rights, Judge Steve C. Jones of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, granting the Abrams for Governor campaign's motion to require all counties statewide to accept absentee ballots with minor discrepancies. These are ballots which were cast in good faith by thousands of Georgians attempting to exercise their fundamental right to vote, and which were among the countless votes Brian Kemp attempted – but ultimately failed – to suppress in this year's election. Judge Jones is the fourth Federal judge in the past three business days to find that portions of the Secretary of State's administration of the 2018 election violate the United States Constitution.
With regards to the additional motion requested, the court was unable to grant relief to thousands of voters who were forced to cast provisional ballots. Hampered by shoddy record keeping as orchestrated by Brian Kemp, counties simply did not maintain the documentation that would have been necessary to ensure that every eligible vote cast was a vote counted. Judge Jones also appropriately refuted the defendant's weak claim that the Democratic Party of Georgia should have filed motions regarding these widespread voter suppression tactics prior to Election Day. Nonetheless, the court was unable to grant immediate relief regarding the widespread irregularities and challenges faced by voters forced to cast provisional ballots out of county.


text:
The Challenge of Apostasy: Last Message of Paul
What were the Apostle Paul's famous last words?
Lamb & Lion Ministries conducts a number of Bible conferences in the Dallas, Texas area each year. Our June 2011 conference theme was Christianity Under Attack.
James Walker, the president of Watchman Fellowship, leads a ministry that is devoted to identifying and monitoring cultic and occultic groups and also false religions. He made a presentation at our conference based upon the last sermon that Paul delivered to the leaders of the church at Ephesus in Acts 20. Mr. Walker's topic at our conference was "The Challenge of Apostasy," (watch).
Paul's Last Words
The next famous last words I want to share with you are actually the words of the Apostle Paul. These are not Paul's actual last words, as Paul died according to Church history as a martyr in Rome. We don't actually have his very last recorded words, but we do have Paul's famous last words to the leaders of the church in Ephesus. And so, Acts 20 is considered Paul's famous last recorded words.
In Acts 20 beginning in verse 17 Luke records, "From Miletus, Paul sent to Ephesus for the elders of the church." Paul was calling the leadership of the Church in Ephesus together. Back in chapter 19, Paul had spent three years training, mentoring, equipping and disciplining the young church there at Ephesus. Paul then continued on with his missionary journey, but now he's on his way back to Jerusalem. On his way back he gets close enough to Ephesus again in the nearby town of Miletus. The town is close enough where he can send a messenger to get the elders down to him for one last message, for some famous last words.
Looking now at verses 26-27, Paul says, "Wherefore, I take to you to record this day that I am pure from the blood of all men. For I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God." Paul wants to introduce his last words by letting everyone know he is pure of the blood of all men. Now, that's kind of an odd thing to say. Of all the things that Paul could share, he wants them to know that he is pure and innocent of the blood of all people. What in the world could he mean by that? Does he mean he never hurt anybody? Or, he never drew blood? Or, he never physically harmed anyone? Is that his last words he wants these Ephesian elders to know?
We know that none of the above is the case, because we know Paul's story earlier in the book of Acts. We know before his name was Paul his name was Saul. He wasn't innocent of everyone's blood in that regard, because this same Paul was once a co-conspirator in the stoning death of the first recorded Christian martyr, Stephen. He was guilty of that. Paul knew that, so he wasn't meaning he was innocent of blood in that regard.
So, what's Paul really talking about in Acts 20:26-27? He also said, "For I've not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God." Almost without hesitation the commentators agree that Paul is making a reference to Ezekiel 33. "Innocent of the blood" is a reference to Ezekiel 33 concerning God placing a watchman on the wall.
Ezekiel recorded that the duty of the watchman was to scan the horizon for any kind of danger and any kind of attack that was going to impact that community or that city. The watchman was to pray for the city, but he was to pray with one eye open because he was also looking. The idea is to watch and and see if danger was coming. The watchman's first responsibility was not to fight the battle, but to blow the horn, sound the trumpet, or blow the shofar.
The shofar has many purposes in the Bible. For instance, the Second Coming of Christ is going to be announced with the sound of a trumpet which is most likely the shofar. But, the other purpose is that the shofar was used by the watchman.
Ezekiel 33 says that if the watchman sees danger coming but he doesn't blow the shofar to sound the alarm and the city is overrun, the Lord said the blood of those people who were destroyed under the watchman's watch, "I will require at the watchman's hands." The watchman's duty was to blow the shofar, and yet the watchman failed, so he was responsible for all those deaths.
That's what Paul means. Paul was saying he was innocent and pure of the blood of all men because Paul was referring to himself as a good watchman. Here's what Paul meant. Anytime God gave Paul an opportunity to share the whole counsel of God, to give the whole Gospel, anytime God opened a door like before the kings like Agrippa and Festus and the philosophers at the Areopagus at Mars Hill, whether he was in chains between two Roman guards or he was at the Agora in the market place, wherever God gave him an opportunity — he shared that whole Gospel. What did Paul specifically share? He preached repentance towards Gods and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. Paul could therefore say to the people in this respect that he was innocent and pure of the blood of all men. Would it be that we could also be so pure!
The Real Watchman
So, who is the watchman? You can make the case that Paul is the watchman because he is obviously referring to himself to Ezekiel 33, or you could try to argue that Ezekiel was the watchman because that is the Bible reference we are looking at. Or, you could try to put the blame on me and declare, "James, you are the president of Watchman Fellowship, so that makes you the watchman."
But really, God calls every one of us who claim the name of Christ to be that kind of watchman. These are Paul's last words in the following verses of Acts 20 in summary, "You've got to be a watchman." So, who is the watchman? I am. You are. All believers in Christ are.
In the final segment of this series on the challenge of apostasy, James Walker will answer three questions on how to become an effective watchman.
Christianity Under Attack 2011 Conference DVD Album
The Christianity Under Attack 2011 Bible Conference takes an in-depth look at some of the attacks on Christianity. Learn how to counter these attacks in this 6-part conference album!
"The Challenge of Islam" – Kerby Anderson
"The Challenge of Humanism and Atheism" – Ron Rhodes
"The Challenge of Evolution" – John Morris
"The Challenge of Apostasy" – James Walker
"The Challenge of Government" – Frank Wright
"The Promise of Victory" – David Reagan
Apologetics Bible Church and Ecclesiology Conferences God Judgment
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