Arts and Crafts VI: A Tale of Two Dinosaurs

 

I’ve been doing a lot of experimentation in pottery.

 

Mostly, I throw circular objects like bowls, pitchers, etc. Sometimes, I blend handbuilt (working with clay directly) with things built on the wheel. I have a few things I’ll talk about at some point. But I don’t usually do straight handbuilt objects.

 

There are some superlative handbuilders in the studio. If I squint hard enough, I can hold my own against the wheel people but I can’t hold a candle to the good handbuilders.

 

One day I had some idle time waiting for some material to get dry enough to trim and I had a bit of extra clay. So, I shaped a small Stegosaurus. That was cool. I got kind of into it and decided to work on something larger, a Brachiosaurus—Brachi to the right.

 

Putting him together was a challenge because clay is pretty plastic when it’s wet. This is why his legs are quite thick. I wanted to make sure he didn’t collapse while he was drying.

 

(Note the tiny stegosaurus next to him. That was the little guy that started all this.)

 

When he was dry enough, I trimmed and underglazed him. I did get his legs a little thinner but didn’t get the musculature quite right.

 

I went with the color concept for dinosaurs. The only living descendants of dinosaurs are birds and they make use of color all the time. Many modern reptiles such as iguanas and anoles use color as well. This can be for camouflage but also for mating purposes. Box turtles, for example, have red rimmed eyes for the males. Ocean iguanas get quite colorful in mating season. So, I figured Brachi is a young male on the prowl.

 

This came out pretty well in the final version. I’m not terribly pleased at how the underglazing turned out—the colors streaked some. Also, while the head came out fine, for one reason or another the outer True Clear coating didn’t take. Either I failed to dip it properly or it just didn’t stick.

 

Lophi was quite a bit more ambitious.

 

Lophi is a Parasaurolophus, a genus of the duck-billed dinosaurs. Though he doesn’t have much of a bill. The crest is one of the features that makes him interesting. It has been surmised that Parasaurolophus might have made sounds through it. In 1997, they managed to produce sound through a reproduction of a well-preserved skull. You can here it here.

 

Lophi was problematic in a number of ways. Unlike Brachi, Lophi’s legs were comparatively thin. Parasaurolophus didn’t weigh over five tons—compared to Brachiosaurus’ 28-47 tons. In addition, I had a much more difficult neck and tail arrangement and I wanted him to be more dynamic. Lophi is looking back over his shoulder at something.

 

All of this concerned me and so I built Lophi with braces as shown.

 

I was quite pleased how he held up. I tried to capture as much of the muscular anatomy as I could. Lophi is a juvenile—hadrosaurs have some evidence of rearing their young—so his legs are thinner than an adult. In addition, I didn’t get his feet quite right. Parasaurolophis has a sort of thick chicken foot and I have him here with a sort of hoof/pad.

 

Then, catastrophe.

While I was working on him, he fell forward onto that raised leg, breaking it off at the upper arm. With the help of several people in the studio, I reattached the arm and placed it directly in the bisque kiln. 

 

The path is green (uncooked) to bisque (chalk like) to glazed. Bisque fires at a much lower heat than glazed but it firms up the product. My hope was that the reattachment would hold through the bisque process and be strong enough to hold afterward.

 

It did. Unfortunately, I was in such a sweat to get him dipped and into the glaze kiln I took no pictures of him as bisque. As with Brachi, there was a problem with the underglaze streaking. I repainted him, dipped him in True Clear, and put him on the glaze shelf, hoping for the best.

 

Mostly, everything worked. There was a glazing mishap with his tail. I suspect Lophi fell against an adjacent pot. He is no longer able to stand on three legs and falls onto his raised arm. If you look closely, you might notice that his head and forward body are lower. He bent a little in the kiln. This is likely how he came in contact with another pot. 

 

I’ve been thinking if/how to repair this defect. I’ve been told Mod Podge can be used in some way to correct it. However, when Wendy saw it she made a different suggestion. What if a bird had landed on Lophi’s tail? I could construct a bird to sit on the tail. That would give something for Lophi to look at as well as weight down the tail so he doesn’t fall forward. 

 

I’ll have to think about that.

 

Cheese Ends, 2024-09-01

You can never have enough cheese.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

Matter has a problem.

 

We pretty much understand how nucleosynthesis up to iron happens in supernovae. Above iron there’s a phenomenon known as Coulomb repulsion, where the positive charges of positively charged nuclear protons resists inclusion of other positively charged protons. The number of protons—the atomic number—determines what element is represented by an atom. It’s the atomic number that determines where in the periodic table a given element is placed. Hydrogen’s atomic number is 1, a single proton. Helium’s is 2. Lithium’s is 3. Iron’s is 26.

 

After iron, the numbers go all the way up to Uranium (92) in nature. They may go a bit higher but those upper elements fission relatively quickly so we would never see them currently. 

 

The r-process (rapid neutron capture process) is the mechanism by which these heavier elements can be synthesized. In fact, these elements have been created in the lab and some in thermonuclear explosions. Neutron star collisions have been implicated as the source of the r-process in nature. However, there’s some doubt that such collisions are the sole source of heavier elements. Observation suggests the amount of heavier elements produced in these collisions is relatively poor. 

 

A new model suggests that a neutron star that has a red supergiant partner might have r-process capability. As the supergiant engulfs its partner, the neutron start reaches the core. This environment might be r-process friendly. Thus, the interesting matter—not that namby pamby light stuff—is created. 

 

This is an improved model in that neutron star/neutron star mergers are not common. It requires two giants both becoming neutron stars that then merge into black hole. However, supergiant binaries aren’t that uncommon and the idea that one becomes a neutron star that then is absorbed by the partner makes a lot of sense. Then, the neutron star jets start making heavy elements without a merger or collapse. 

 

That was the fun stuff. Now, I’m going to get a little political.

 

There’s a sort of “regulation is bad” mindset that is going around these days. 

 

I do not subscribe to this idea. I do believe that bad regulation is bad, just like I believe bad government is bad, bad medicine is bad, and bad marriages are bad. But if you have a bad regulation, government, medicine, or marriage that does not reflect on the institutional concept. It reflects badly on the implementation of an institution.

 

Recently, there was a massive recall of Boar’s Head products linked to a Listeria infection. Many people have gotten sick and several people have died. An investigation into the factory has produced some pretty horrifying results. Once the factory was examined, it was no surprise that’s where the infection originated. 

 

The problem here is that the FDA is underfunded and badly managed not because it is run by incompetents, but because it is bounced around as a function of politics. This is true of many of the agencies from the FAA to NASA. 

 

Boeing’s troubles with Starliner and  its aircraft are another example of regulation failure—not because the FAA didn’t do its job but because Boeing gamed the FAA system. I worked with both the FAA and NASA for some years. Their engineers and regulators were good to work with, knowledgeable, and knew their jobs. But we didn’t try to game the FAA process. Instead, we used FAA process as a tool to make our products better. Blaming the FAA is like blaming the cops when there’s a murder. Maybe the cops could have done more but they didn’t do the murder. Boeing is the expert here. If there is an engineering failure, it’s Boeing’s fault, not the FAA.

 

A good example of greed trumping good sense is the way Big Pharma works. Nowhere is this better shown than in a recent Eli Lilly decision. 

 

Eli Lilly has a popular weight-loss drug, Zepbound. It’s quite effective. They have been selling it in injectable pens for about a thousand dollars a month, if not covered by insurance. Recently, they announced they’d be selling in vials so that the patient can use their own syringes. Price? 5mg for $549. We can debate the price different of close to 50% for a delivery mechanism another time. We can even avoid debating the price of better than $6000/year for a weight loss drug.

 

However, in the past Lilly offered a “savings card” to buy a pen for $550 as a starter offer—I think of this as a sort of “the first one’s free” sort of thing. But that’s just me. 

 

At the same time, they announced the vial announcement, Lilly quietly raised that starter price to $650. In addition, another Lilly product, Mounjaro, is essentially the same drug packaged and prepared to treat type II diabetes. It also costs a thousand a month—here. In the UK it costs $485 and in Japan it costs $94. 

 

This is an example of failed regulation.

 

But it gets worse.

 

For the last forty years, courts have been instructed to defer to the expertise of regulatory bodies in lawsuits. I.e., let’s defer to the organizations that actually know something about the science behind decisions. 

 

This year SCOTUS rejected that, saying that the courts should have all power in this regard. 

 

So, we now have a regulatory process made already difficult by political interference to be bound up in courts run by judges that can barely use their phone, much less understand the intricacies of the scientific process. 

 

Boar’s Head is just the beginning.