David Iain Greig
Welcome to my home page at ediacara.org!
As of May 10th 2006 I redid it with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and it's a bit transitory right now. But you're still welcome!
About Me
I'm a IT consultant, working contract presently, as one or more of:
Infrastructure Architect
Security Architect/Consultant
UNIX Systems Architect/Admin
Outsourcing Consultant
Application Architect/Consultant
I've been using computers since I was 12 (a
PDP/11 in 1980),
using
UNIX since
1986 as an undergrad in Engineering at
U of T, and a systems
architect since 1996 or so. Since then I've gone on to do security and outsourcing work (with HP) and am currently doing more application
architect-type things. I am presently an independent contractor, and am self-incorporated.
Where did 'ediacara.org' come from?
Back in the mid-1990's as a regular member of talk.origins, I decided to register the domain ediacara.org
as part of a long-running joke - based on the Monty Python 'Australian Philosophers' or
'Bruces sketch', a bunch
of regulars had noticed that there were a lot of people named 'Chris' posting at the time, and so this led to
jokes about the 'Evilutionist Chrispiracy' and then to the claim that they were all professors at the
University of Ediacara, where all profs were called 'Chris'. Since I couldn't get 'ediacara.edu', I went
for what seemed the next closest thing, 'ediacara.org'. The U of E website, with mid-1990s faculty lists,
is
here.
Where did 'ediacara' come from?
The domain name came from a famous fossil assemblage -
link - of
Precambrian fossils found in Australia in the Ediacaran Hills. As of 2004 the name
'
Ediacaran' refers
to the very end of the Precambrian. As to the name of the Hills, t.o-regular and paleontologist
Chris Nedin thinks it means 'reedy water hole' in one of the local Aborigine languages, and is
properly pronounced 'eedee-ak-ra' not 'eedee-ah-kah-ra', but I usually pronounce it
latterly as nobody will have a clue how to spell it when they ask me my email address. Selah.
What are the creepy things in the pictures on the sides?
While the website is named after Ediacara, the final part of the
Precambrian, the pictures of
Anomalocaris canadensis
(Collins 1996) (literally, 'strange Canadian shrimp', presently classed as an arthropod) and
Pikaia gracilens (Conway Morris 1979) (a primitive chordate) are
from fossils from another period of time. These beasties were found in the
Burgess Shale in
B.C. and thus date from the
Middle Cambrian era.
Anomalocaris canadensis
Pikaia gracilens