| An Early trilobite around 515,000,000 years old. Olenellus fremonti from the Lower Cambrian Latham Shale, Marble Mountains, NE of Chambless Store, San Bernardino County, CA | |
Welcome to my website: You'll find several different bunches of stuff here:
Since September 2009 I added several hundred entries to the fossil site database, However, I decided that 15000 entries is enough for now. As I planned in September, I tackled the Fossils Found field in the database and thanks to the Sepkowski and Paleobiology data bases and the Global Names Index, I was able to make pretty good progress in cleaning the field up. There are still a large number of entries to be checked for spelling and content. After that, a couple of hundred names that might be might be valid but might also be misspellings or otherwise invalid have to be individually researched. Finally, I need to check all 15000 entries for consistency of layout and punctuation. ... Maybe 9 months worth of work.
Once the fossils found field is sorted out, I will tackle the job of reviewing and combining the locations. That certainly will require several years.
I did accomplish some things:
Some statistics as of early December 2009
Lat-Long statistics:
| 15025 sites in list | 3584 sites without position |
| 11352 sites with latlong | 0 sites with ddmmss format |
| 754 sites with PLSS/DLS positions | 0 sites with only PLSS/DLSS positions |
| 1 unconvertable locations | 0 short entries |
| 4 UTM locations | 103 Dubious locations |
| 0 Probably reversed locations | 86 Unknown locations |
| 0 Truncated Lat/Long | 0 Unresolved locations |
| 0 Positive longitudes | 680 PLSS/DLS Positions without PM |
Fossils Found statistics:
| 15025 sites in list | 3 tabulated sites |
| 2185 unknown words (3679 initially) | 3106 incorrect entries (7244 initially) |
For previous plans see PLANS.HTM
For a history of changes see HISTORY.HTM
The primary copy of my site is hosted at http://donaldkenney.110mb.com There is a second copy at http://donaldkenney.freewebsitehosting.com. Three reasons for using the 110mb site instead:
This is a list of something about 15000 fossil localities in the United States and Canada. The list has been built up from a variety of sources over about 35 years. A few general comments:
Most users would probably prefer to access the relatively short state listings.
For other options, additional information, etc, see the Fossil Site Info Page --
A catalog of pictures of part of my small and quite undistinguished fossil collection. If nothing else, it may provide someone with images of some fossils that they can freely reuse without worrying about Copyright and permissions. I plan to add to the catalog over time, and probably to reimage some of the lousier pictures. As of October 2008, there should be a copy of the CATALOG on the website. Their previous repository at http://vtcodger.blogspot.com/ is still there, but it will be converted to a real blog someday.
A few photos of fossils exposed in Middle Ordovician, Glens Falls(?) Limestone at DAR State Park, Addison County, VT
The Sepkoski Database A database of about 30000 fossil taxa and their time of first appearance and of disappearance. Download in csv format.
The intent is to describe the general geologic and paleontologic setting of regions where similar fossils are found. Roughly, these correspond vaguely to the modern concept of Terranes -- collections of rock sequences that resemble each other closely and do not resemble those of other terranes. The vast interior of North America that stretches from the Hudson River to the Sierra Nevada is basically a single terrane. There, I intend to use the Geolex Areas (e.g. "The Appalachian Basin") and their Canadian analogs instead of terranes. For starters, we have two region descriptions:
Blackhole Routing What is it and do you have it? If your network generally works, but a few functions fail in ways that don't make much sense, you might have a black hole routing problem.
A Description of the .CRD File Format used by the Windows 3 CARDFILE.EXE.
A few notes on CAUSEWAY errors ... What they are and what to do about them.
A FAQ on computer clipboards. It's still a draft and needs some work, but I think that it is far enough along to post.
A quick tutorial on the Ctypes Module that allows foreign (e.g. C language) library functions to be used by Python code.
I envision these as a set of articles on current and future American energy usage. My reason for writing them is simply to educate myself on the subject. I think that the series will end up as about half a dozen articles. Only one is complete, four others are in various stages of production. Barring death, crippling disease, or an attack of lack of interest, I would expect the completed articles to creep onto the web site over the next few years.
A short tutorial on how energy usage is measured and some data on the US and other countries
Some notes on getting the inexpensive Epson Perfection V300 flatbed scanner to work in Linux.
How to install and run Firefox V1.5 (and Mozilla 1.1.7) on WINDOWS 95. Firefox does not officially support Windows 95, but with updates to only three files, it can be installed and used.
An (undocumented?) bug in the Installshield program The installer starts but vanishes with no error message if insufficient file handles are configured in Windows.
A few notes on the KDE GUI interface -- KCRON -- for task scheduling and why it does not work in Slackware 11.0.
Short notes on various technical problems
Configuring Samsung CLP-300 Laser Printers in Linux Some notes and suggestions on setting up the CLP-300 and Hewlett Packard HP-IIP printers in Linux.
Notes on removing a viral virus remover How I managed to remove an infestation of malware known as Spyaxe.
Notes on the Windows FIND/SEARCH Command How to run Windows Search from a command line -- optionally with multiple drives selected for search.
Dealing with Windows 98 Shutdown Problems How to fix Windows 98 Shutdown problems if you can, and how to turn off the annoying and largely unnecessary automatic file scan on boot if you can't fix shutdown.
How to validate a web site image with the W3C HTML validator before uploading it to the site.
An analysis of flying cars and Personal Air Vehicles (PAVs). I'm not quite sure why I undertook this as it was quite time consuming and I really don't much care about PAVs one way or the other. I'm not sure that I'd own one even were they widely available and cheap. Anyway, here's the discussion. Bottom Line: There are huge technical problems. Also, broken cars mostly stop. Broken aircraft mostly drop. That leads to very large and quite intractable liability and maintenance issues. There are also security issues. PAVs for everyman aren't happening any time soon.
Glossary Material: PC Technical Articles Glossary. A collection of several hundred short articles on PC related topics. New articles were posted weekly in the Compuserve PC Hardware Forum for many years. I stopped posting them in April 2005 for several reasons -- the most important being that the Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org Wikipedia has largely replaced any real purpose that they may have served.
I hope to fill this out with more material someday, but for now, here's two short humor pieces and two short unpublished humorous pieces:
These are stories that I wrote for Datamation back around 1970. (Note, I'm the author of the pieces, not the copyright holder. I don't think it's likely that whoever holds the copyright nowadays will want them taken down, but they have only to ask ...).
Here are two unpublished, humor pieces
Some fragments of a novel that will never be written. The original plan was to retrace Dante's path to Hell in reverse with lots of hopefully entertaining satire and social commentary. The problem turned out to be that I am a deeply flawed individual who finds Dante to be terminally boring. I'm quite sure that is my fault, not that of Signor Dante or his translators.
What does the working title -- Pangloss Lives! -- have to do with the content of the story? Nothing whatsoever. But it is a really fantastic title, No? (At least for those who have read Candide).
A science fiction juvenile story that's maybe half written. Might finish it someday.
Links to sites I find interesting for one reason or another. Maybe you will also. I have many more, but the list needs to be examined in detail, and I won't have time for that for a while:
Copyright 2006,7,8, Donald Kenney (Donald.Kenney@GMail.com). Unless otherwise stated, permission is hereby granted to use any materials on these pages under the [Creative Commons License V2.5 href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/].
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