The internet officially broke today. You might think I’m being a little melodramatic, but I clearly saw a triangular yellow sign with an exclamation mark on it hovering over the wireless signal strength meter down in the tray for several hours. It could have been “the end of all things” the end of the world that the preacher in the US predicted a few months back, much to my amusement.
Ok, so perhaps the world isn’t about to end. The cessation in communication caused by the outage was pretty great thoughthe office turned into a ghost town. I imagine various staff were staring at the internet connection symbol on their machines, and clicking retry in their browsers repeatedly. Some probably began praying in the same manner I do when I run out of pizza or wine.
As I write this, the BBC is reporting a major outage of broadband across the countryso it turns out the news writers at the Beeb rely on pizza and wine just as much as me.
What to do while every avenue of your continued work has been blocked by unforseen circumstances? Write a blog post perhaps.
While I was sat in bed last night reading stuff on the iPad (as you do), I ended up reading about dinosaurs. I know this is completely random, but stick with itit’s interesting.
When I was a kid, I had a huge collection of plastic dinosaurs and knew all their names. Imagine my surprise last night when I discovered that some of them don’t exist. “Brontasaurus” for example. It turns out “Brontasaurus” was an Apatasaurus with the misplaced head of a Camarasaurus. Who knew?As I carried on reading Wikipedia I ended up reading about the quarry in Stonesfielda few miles from where I grew upand the place many of the first dinosaurs were discovered (the Cotswold hills are full of limestoneessentially the same jurassic sea bed that falls out of the cliffs on the south coast near Dorset). The first major fossil discovery was a huge end of what looks like a femur, and was mistakenly classified as “Scrotum Humanum”the end of the thigh bone of an enormous human. The only problem then was they found a few more bits of bone; some jaw, and some huge sharp teeth.
Here’s the funny bit. Based on the end of one femur, a few teeth, and a piece of jaw bone, they drew an entire bipedal dinosaurnot looking too unlike what we now know as Allosaurus or Tyrannosaurus Rexand named it “Megalosaurus”. The weird thing is that they have never found many more fragments of a “Megalosaurus”the only fossils we really have are an arm, some shoulder blad, a piece of jaw, and a piece of femur.
I used to watch this cartoon when I was little”Secret Squirrel”and he had a machine in his coat that he could feed a single piece of hair into, and it would print out a facsimile of the entire baddie they were chasing. That seems to be what the paleontologists have done with Megalosaurus; extrapolated from anything vaguely similar, and drawn artists impressions of what it might have looked like.
It reminds me a little of the “Carcharadon Megaladon”the distant ancestor of the Great White. All we have ever found is teeth, and that’s been enough to imagine an entire shark.
Anywaythe internet connection is back upbetter get on with some work!