Re: *Brachiosaurus* labyrinth paper...

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

> However, his method (actually Preuschoft's)

Yep -- Preuschoft, no later than 1976. <rant>In German, in a ?journal called 
(translated) "Essays and speeches of the Nature-Researching Society of 
Senckenberg", so it was probably published irregulary. In other words, 
hardly anyone can ever have read it.</rant>

> depends on what seems like
> a very questionable assumption, namely that the habitual posture of an
> animal's neck is the one that most nearly equalises the stress exerted
> on the intervertebral discs.  I can't for the life of me see why this
> should be true.  If a useful posture entails more stress on
> intervertebral joint A than on B, the animal is hardly likely for that
> reason to favour a posture in which the stress on B is _increased_ to
> match that on A.

Surely the assumption is that the habitual posture should be the one with 
minimal stress everywhere? At least that's how I read Christian & Heinrich 
1998.

> To be fair to Christian 2002,
> though, it does apply the method to a couple of extant critters

Giraffe, camel.

> "In the late 40s, it was felt by some academics that Britain
> would need 3 or 4 computers, and the US 6 or 7.  Unbelievable
> but true.  Those early computer pioneers certainly were morons"
> -- Andrew Brand.

Obviously they believed computers would only be used as supercomputers. They 
just failed to anticipate Moore's Law.