To discuss your weekly readings or books, textbooks and papers.
I finished “The Lady with the Little Dog” by Chekhov yesterday, there's only one more short story on the compilation book I have, “The Bishop”. Next I want to start “Père Goriot” by Balzac as I downloaded the epub on my kindle like 3 years ago but never read it.
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I'm still reading Humans: From the Beginning. It's finally starting to get good, and discussing the emergence of Homo sapien. I also just read through the technical appendix which includes details about, among other things, how isotope analysis is used in paleoarchaeology.
One interesting tidbit is that there are two stable isotopes of Carbon, 12C and 13C. Plants absorb both from the atmosphere so any animal eating them will have a mixture. However, different plants have slightly different methods of photosynthesis which favors one over the other. The book describes C3 and C4, where most plants are C3 (including trees, shrubs, etc.), whereas the rarer C4 process is used in grasses (and a few other minor plants). By analyzing the ratio of 12C to 13C in an animal, you can therefore determine whether it ate primarily C3 plants, primarily C4 plants, or a mixture. (If that animals eats meat, you'd determine whether the meat comes from C3 or C4 herbivores - it grazing animals which eat primarily grasses vs browsing animals which eat primarily leaves).
I just thought that was really neat.
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