What can beat a whale?

n54 · Post by **n54** » Sat Apr 17, 2004 9:04 am

nicolas.b wrote:gigantopithecus:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~nathist/Site/giganto.html

nice link and funny quotes nico, and prey the posts by nico and me are already condensed for fast reading

Prey4Me · Post by **Prey4Me** » Sat Apr 17, 2004 10:05 am

wohoo i love you guys now

nicolas.b · Post by **nicolas.b** » Sat Apr 17, 2004 1:02 pm

nice to see your name popping up today, node. been too long...

let;s just move along and keep the posts rolling, shall we?

n54 · Post by **n54** » Sat Apr 17, 2004 4:40 pm

yeah i'm pretty sure you know how it can be, sometimes one has to concentrate on keeping afloat (if one can call it that), that's about it really + tons of bad conscience for the streamripper project which i can't allow to get to me...

just living for that next doctors appointment lol - i've discovered my purpose in life is the further enrichment of the medical establishment LOL

Prey4Me · Post by **Prey4Me** » Sat Apr 17, 2004 6:32 pm

hey i know Doctor Limey is somewhere around here, i bet she could pencil you in at any time

nicolas.b · Post by **nicolas.b** » Sat Apr 17, 2004 6:32 pm

geez, again your life sounds very similar, altho i give the streamripper project very little respect, whatever that may be.

Speedracer · Post by **Speedracer** » Sat Apr 17, 2004 8:16 pm

subby · Post by **subby** » Sun Apr 18, 2004 3:57 am

Wikipedia wrote: The only known fossils of Gigantopithecus are a few teeth and part of a maxilla (jaw bone). These are appreciably larger than those of living gorillas, but the exact size and structure of the rest of the body can only be estimated in the absence of additional findings.

mmmmm rather not much to go on i'm affraid, or is this information incorrect?

Sounds a bit suss to me.

And why did this German get arrested by the Japanese in WWII? Am i missing something about WWII ? I was under the impression that these two countries were on the same team ?

frizza · Post by **frizza** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 7:34 am

I agree subby, although they can still make assumptions on its body size, and its diet, and depending on which teeth they have, perhaps their sexual behaviour as well (generally speaking, in species of primates where there is a lot of male-male competition for mates, the males have prominent canines, eg. mandrills).
Nonetheless, they cannot create a model of the animal (as is suggested on that page) from a jawbone and some teeth!!
Methinks these scientists were fired from the 'search for the bigfoot' project

nicolas.b · Post by **nicolas.b** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 8:28 am

frizza wrote:I agree subby, although they can still make assumptions on its body size, and its diet, and depending on which teeth they have, perhaps their sexual behaviour as well (generally speaking, in species of primates where there is a lot of male-male competition for mates, the males have prominent canines, eg. mandrills).
Nonetheless, they cannot create a model of the animal (as is suggested on that page) from a jawbone and some teeth!!
Methinks these scientists were fired from the 'search for the bigfoot' project

@Q&K:

well i'm no expert, but forensic sciences, parallel evolutionary theory, comparitive osteology (or whatever that one's called), phylogenic sciences and so forth seem to be advancing quite a lot in recent years...

basically they have enough fossilised and non-fossilised remains of the hominid evolutionary record to make gigantipithicus out as a member of the orang-utan branch. hence they can make a reasonably accurate prediction of his body shape & furriness. and size of remains and male factors (as you say) hence make for an informed guess as to size. and they know exactly how old that thing was, too, so some further details can be filled in thru comparation. that's my understanding, anyway. so in the end they can determine quite useful things, like "was he good enough to go out with your other sister." (just to pick a random example)

so in essence, true enough it's a suss, but when bright people are forced to keep sussing over and over to fill in missing info and then see how their susses worked out over time when bits & pieces of new info trickle in, it allows them to get feedback on their sussing, improve it, stabilise the early sussing, create sussing algorythms in some sense, to advance and improve the quality and leading edge of their suss-work.

frizza · Post by **frizza** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 9:10 am

I suppose if I had read the site fully and not relied so much on subby's assessment I would have come to that conclusion myself *feels rather sheepish*

however, it will be interesting to see how accurate their 'suss-work' is if they ever find more gigantopithecus (sp?) remains

nicolas.b · Post by **nicolas.b** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 3:35 pm

wouldn't it be cool if they found a frozen hominid one day?, just like frozen wooly mammoths and the famous iceman guy were found in the last... thirty years, i think.

they found so many frozen mammoths at one point that the scientific / excavation team apparantly treated themselves to a celebratory round of mammoth steaks!

n54 · Post by **n54** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 9:07 pm

Prey4Me wrote:hey i know Doctor Limey is somewhere around here, i bet she could pencil you in at any time

lol i don't want that treatment, i'm messed up enough already

(no disrespect to Dr. Limey)

nicolas.b wrote:geez, again your life sounds very similar, altho i give the streamripper project very little respect, whatever that may be.

it's a very nice sourceforge project i've been involved in for a while and which i felt i had to "save" recently, but... it enables ripping of mp3 and nsv from shoutcast (winamp) streams - so much to do so little energy, none at all really