Paleo21 and Digital Burgess

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In his message of 16 August, Bruce Damer points out some important ways in
which his Digital Burgess conference pertains to the goals of Paleo21.

Digital Burgess covers a wide spectrum of disciplines (computer science,
paleobiology, digital modeling, synthetic organisms and ecosystems, genetic
algorithms, "evolutionary arts", ..... ), some of which are not represented
at more conventional gatherings.  His conference and network are supported
entirely by high-tech companies, which do not usually support paleontology
per se.  And the public outreach arm of Digital Burgess is designed to
stimulate public interest in fossils beyond the dinosaurs, and even beyond
the Burgess Shale organisms.

At the moment, there are two ways in which PaleoNetters can interact with
the Digital Burgess conference, hopefully with mutual benefit -
1) by visiting the website http://www.biota.org/ and considering whether
some of the graphic techniques displayed there could be employed in
electronic paleo publishing, and
2) by participating in discussion on the Digital Burgess listserver
described at http://www.biota.org/conf97/discuss.html

Possible connections between Digital Burgess and industrial/academic
paleontology/paleobiology may be difficult to see unless we all use a bit
of imagination.  But it seems to me likely to be worth the effort.

Bill R.


W. Riedel
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
UCSD
La Jolla, CA 92093-0220

wriedel@ucsd.edu
phone (619) 534-4386
fax   (619) 534-0784

. . . .  May the Force be with you . . . .