The Floodplain Is Your Friend

The people of Sheffield probably won't see it that way at the moment, but it's true. I stumbled across an article on the St Louis Today website (so it had probably been in the Post-Dispatch), discussing Missouri and how flood defences were changed after the 1993 flood which I mentioned here.

Restoring natural flood plain eases flood risks

It's co-written by Bob Criss, one of my professors at Wash U, of whom I have very fond memories. His Geochemistry class was great fun, and made 9am on Mondays not just bearable but positively exciting. I was honoured to be invited to his house for Thanksgiving (I must have been sent home with about a quarter of a turkey to last me the rest of the holiday!), and his wife Anne Hofmeister was perhaps the first faculty member to realise that something was wrong, and certainly the only faculty member to reach out to me. Their collaborative work in part inspired me to undertake research with my own husband.

Bob's expertise as an educator shines through in this article, and he clearly explains (along with his co-author) how floods in the built-up region of eastern and southern Missouri have been averted by allowing the northern and western floodplains to be used as floodplains again and to absorb the excess water.

It's early days yet with the UK floods (and more is forecast to come) and really all efforts should be on preventing further immediate damage and making the areas safe, but I hope that, if possible, over the next few months, the Government investigates diverting its money into acquiring floodplains upstream from built-up areas rather than building bigger walls round the rivers.

Well That Just About Wraps It Up For Universities

Have a look at how our new "Innovation, Universities and Skills" minister John Denham MP has voted on key issues.

Now ask yourself how fucked our universities are.

They don't come much more Blairite than that, and Blair was all about sapping the money out of students and universities. So I just hope Gordon Brown has enough power over him to make him do what he wants him to do over science.

Wellington Grey's Petition

If you are a British citizen or resident, please take a moment to read Wellington Grey's open letter to the Department for Education (which has sadly just been bastardised into Schools And Children and God knows what they'll do with universities).

And if you agree, please sign the petition at the Downing Street website.

If Gordon Brown truly does want to put funding into science and bring us back up to the same level as the rest of the developed world, then he cannot afford to turn high school science into touchy-feely media studies. It is important to know about science's place in society, but not at the expense of learning that science.

Order Of The Science Scouts Of Exemplary Repute And Above Average Physique

I have joined the Science Scouts, or at least their Facebook group, subject to eventual acceptance as a full member. And I have awarded myself badges. This is very unusual - when I was a Cub Scout leader the Cubs never awarded themselves their own badges. But I suppose it's different when you're a grown-up.

And the suggestion is that members write about why they've awarded themselves a given badge. So here goes:

The "talking science" badge


All members must necessarily have this badge. I've also done a lot for Speakers For Schools, I worked at The Mammoth Site and I taught anatomy at Warnborough University. Not to mention the three SVP and one GSA oral presentations.

The "I blog about science" badge


Well, I do.

The "I can be a prick when it comes to science" badge


I'm sure my friends and enemies will have loads more anecdotes than I can manage, but suffice to say I really can be an asshole when I think I'm right. And if I think someone's winning the argument, I actually burst into tears.

The "will gladly kick sexual harasser's ass" badge


I like to think, in my own special way, that I did. I suspect, if I hadn't made the first complaint, then the sleeping-with-student incident of this time last year would have been the first time he came onto the Dean's radar. So go me.

The "I've done science with no conceivable practical application" badge


Geometric morphometrics of sauropod dinosaurs. As Josh used to say "Well, it's not like you're curing cancer". No, I'm not. But I'm having one hell of a lot of fun with my frivolous science that only serves to enhance our knowledge about an extinct group of animals.

The "has done science whilst under the influence" badge



Most of the best fieldwork takes place after "beer thirty" in the afternoon. A bottle of Killians Red certainly made digging dinosaurs more fun.

The "I actually grew up AND became a paleontologist who studies dinosaurs" badge



While the jury may be out on how grown-up I actually am, I am a palaeontologist, and I do study dinosaurs! Self-evident really.

The truth is, I just wanted some more cool stuff for my blog.

Science And Language

As Gordon Brown's Cabinet starts to take shape, the Financial Times published "Science to count for more in exam tables". Not sure if this is one of Blair's outgoing policies or Brown's incoming policies.

But it is the first step towards restoring science to the forefront of education.

I am also glad to see the same thing will be done for modern languages. Our lack of respect for foreign languages often makes me ashamed to be British, and it was a nasty shock to learn that Labour had dropped the need for one modern language at GCSE level. Hopefully my future sister-in-law is happier knowing there should be more students wanting to learn German when she starts teaching it in just over a year's time.

I've been to France (many times), Spain (once) and Greece (twice), on a mixture of holidays and fieldtrips. And with one exception (Paris) everyone I spoke to was delighted to hear me trying to speak their language. The woman in the Corfu kebab shop helped me with Greek pronunciation, and for being able to ask very nicely in Greek I got three squid for the price of two in a seafood restaurant in Loutraki.

And science and language go hand in hand. If we are pushing for more and better scientists, we will be more prominent on the international stage. Despite English now having replaced German as the language of science (although one particular member of the community would like to see all major publications written in Catalan), it really helps if you can speak the language of the host country for your fieldwork or museum visit.

So over the next five-six years I will be brushing up on my German, and learning Spanish and (I presume) Mandarin. If only to be able to say "thank you".

Trousers Are Brown

As of mid-afternoon today, the UK has a new Prime Minister. I've lived through two changes of Prime Minister - when Margaret Thatcher was rejected in favour of John Major in 1990, and when Tony Blair's Labour Party won the 1997 election. These were both momentous occasions - the fall of the Iron Lady, and then the end of years of Tory "rule".

But this time it doesn't feel any different. It's like the insignificant birthdays, the ones that aren't multiples of five or rites of passage. You're aware that something has passed, but you feel no different to how you felt yesterday. I don't see any big shake-up of politics, any new direction for Labour or a hero waiting in the wings.

I'm more interested in who will fill the other Cabinet places. Harriet Harman will be a better Deputy PM than John Prescott, not least because she's a little less "punchy". I'd like to see Jack Straw back. I'm happy to see Patricia Hewitt, John Reid and Margaret Beckett slinking away from the front bench. Most of all, though, I'd like to see Peter Hain in a high up position. This is because my grandmother and step-grandfather loathe him and everything he stands for, and I would love to hear the words "that terrorist the Home Secretary" come out of their mouths.

One thing that makes me feel positive about the change is the news that Gordon Brown is going to "enhance the profile of science". I just hope he realises that, while it's all very well encouraging more undergraduate scientists, there must be more funding for postgraduates too, otherwise, with the inevitable debts accrued by all students (tuition fees or no tuition fees), British grad students will look internationally for their PhDs, simply because obtaining subsistence funding (before you even look at research grants) is easier, and the amount of money in relation to cost of living greater.

On Floodplains

It has suddenly occurred to the Daily Mail, of all papers, that it's not such a hot idea establishing a civilisation on a floodplain. Surely the clue is in the name, but hey - at least they've taken their heads out of Richard Littlejohn's arse long enough to notice some science for a change.

Now, to borrow from Tom Lehrer, it's the baseball season at the moment, so I don't expect much of the USA has heard about it, but certain parts of the UK have been devastated by flooding. This time is a little different - in the past it's mostly been cute little market towns, e.g. Shrewsbury, York, Carlisle, Boscastle. But this week's floods have done for Sheffield and Hull - the headquarters of the steel industry and a major port. So rather than the purely sympathetic heartbreaking stories of people losing everything, there seems to be a change in the reaction.

People are finally starting to say (well, people who aren't geoscientists and archaeologists, who've been saying it for years) "It's a bit bloody stupid to build on a floodplain isn't it?".

For millennia, humans have formed towns on or near floodplains. The Ancient Egyptians had it down to a fine art, using the natural flooding of the Nile to irrigate their crops. Further down that link discusses the Mesopotamians too, so it's been important pretty much since the dawn of human civilisation as we know it. Floodplains, just like (unfortunately) the sides of volcanoes, have fertile soils, and they make for great subsistence agriculture. But, volcanoes have a nasty habit of erupting, and floodplains have a nasty habit of... well... flooding.

Flooding is good. When a river floods, water and sediment cascade across the floodplain. With each small flood, sediment builds up, raising the level of the plain close to the river, and forming natural raised banks or levees. But when you stick man-made levees on top of this, when flooding occurs, the frequency is decreased but the severity increases. Which is how you end up with the Great USA Flood of 1993. There is no doubt there was greatly increased rainfall, but upstream levee breaks were reported to have slowed the rise of the river, and strong defences serve only to contain a river.

Bernoulli's Principle, the same one that explains why you get sucked towards a tube train as you stand on the platform and why planes stay in the air and why teapots dribble, essentially means that with an increased volume of water entering a system, either the velocity of the water must increase or the cross-sectional area of the stream must increase. This is why we get fast rivers rising. Constrain the river with levees, and the only way the cross-sectional area of the river can increase is by rising even further. So we have man-made levees ensuring that minor floods do not occur but the major ones are still let through, and the levees may actually be making an already severe flood even worse by increasing the velocity and height of the water.

In an ideal world, we'd have worked this one out long before we concreted over the floodplains and built cities with eight million inhabitants. We cannot move everyone onto high ground - not now, not with the population numbers involved. But surely we have all learned enough in the past 14 years (or more) to NOT BUILD ANY NEW HOUSES ON FLOODPLAINS. Which, in the case of the town of Catcliffe, is what the Daily Mail was angry about. I don't usually agree with the Mail's outrage, but I'm with them on this one.

Creationist = Climate Change Denier

Pharyngula posted a link to the Union of Concerned Scientists' cartoon competition yesterday afternoon. All are well worth looking at, and I particularly like number 2 - it appeals to me as a palaeontologist!

But have a look at number 9. And look at Matt Bors' final frame. Exactly the point Paul raised with me a while back. Yet, as always, a picture says a thousand words. Well spoken, Mr Bors. You, sir, have my vote.

A Convenient Truth

Today's Guardian contains an article entitled "Yes, the universe looks like a fix. But that doesn't mean that a god fixed it", elsewhere referred to as "The God Allusion" on the Grauniad's website.

According to the author, Paul Davies, scientists "have been quietly collecting samples of all too convenient 'coincidences... that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist". Everything in the universe fits together just right. Make a proton a bit heavier (as Davies notes) and atoms can't exist.

He reports that the intelligent design proponents are using this as proof that the universe was designed. My favourite passage from The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams springs to mind:

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non -existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book, Well That About Wraps It Up For God.

Surely anything that really, seriously PROVES that God exists by sheer virtue of the fact that it could not have arisen by chance negates the whole point of the Christian (and others) faith? Scientists look for proof. Creationists, however they wish to dress themselves up, should really stop looking for proof.

But I digress. Davies, within his concluding paragraph, says "The laws explain the universe even as the universe explains the laws". This whole convenience issue reminded me of an exchange I was party to. I don't remember if I was Person 2, but I do remember Person 1 vividly... It went like this:

Person 1: I think it's really cool that you guys have so much geology in England. I mean, you have the whole geological column just there.
Person 2: Umm, you know why, right?
Person 1: No, why?
Person 2: Because we INVENTED the geological column.

Doubtless we would view things differently if the majority of the 18th- and 19th-century geologists were not British. Periods and even eras could have terminated at different times, depending on the geology of the "host" country. In the US, the Carboniferous period is divided into the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian periods, because there is just so much sedimentary rock between 354 and 290 million years old over there. We will run out of coal long before they do. I also presume there are some nice extinctions about 323 million years ago which make dividing the Carboniferous simple and logical.

So, in the same way that the UK contains every geological period because the Brits designed the geological column yet the geological column contains every period (or near enough) because the rocks were observed in a location containing every period - the UK, surely the universe is perfect because we are observing it yet we are also observing it because it is perfect.

Hmm. I do better when I'm talking about dinosaurs.

Not A Kuhnian Paradigm Shift

Today in the newspaper lottery, I got the Times. And I noticed the article "Not tonight, not ever. I've got a headache. Don't come near me". The article itself is a typical example of decent science being made more sensational than it is, and it was talking about "overturn[ing] one of Charles Darwin's evolution theories".

Essentially, in "normal" sexual selection, the females select the fittest males on the basis of, say, a particularly vivid red crest. Those with the reddest crests get to mate, and the offspring are predisposed to either possess a vivid red crest (if male) or to find vivid red crests attractive (if female). Vivid plumage, energetic courtship dances and song all serve as "proof" that the male is fit, healthy and lacking parasites. It is doubtful that this is reflected in the pastel shirts, hair gel and excessive use of Lynx exhibited by the average British Homo sapiens, but at some point sexual selection kicks in with all species.

Not so, apparently. The beetle Acilius is locked in an arms race that seems more something we would see between predator and prey rather than male and female of the same species. The females have modified dorsal surfaces which reduce the ability of the males to grip on. Males with suction cups have an advantage over those who do not, and as a result, they get to mate with the females.

I was sufficiently interested enough to read the paper, which is freely available online. In the first section, the authors mention that a Kuhnian paradigm shift has been suggested, and the reader is directed to this article. Now, it's over seven years since I studied History and Philosophy of Science. Because Professor Peter Lipton was such an excellent lecturer, I still remember some of my Philosophy of Science, and both Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn can make me inadvertently shudder. A paradigm shift is also known as a scientific revolution - when the existing model stops working, or anomalies are discovered which necessitate a whole new way of thinking about things. Wikipedia has a nice list of paradigm shifts, and I think you'll agree these are pretty damn big things.

This doesn't strike me as a paradigm shift though. It's not big enough. It's not shocking enough. This just seems like a more aggressive form of sexual selection. Rather than acting aloof, not being particularly interested in the male's advances etc, (I have an image of really unimpressed birds of paradise) the females are going all out to deter the male, running away from him, putting up defences, leaving him with no option but to chase her to exhaustion and rape her. The offspring of a mating between a very fit male (one which can chase, hold on and overpower the female) and a very fit female (one which can induce the chase) will themselves have a tendency towards fitness.

If we pair fit and unfit beetles, what happens? A fit male and a fit female will beget fit offspring. A fit male and an unfit female will beget, say, some fit and some unfit offspring. An unfit male and a fit female will never mate. And an unfit male and an unfit female will beget all unfit offspring. Where is the drive to be fit? An unfit female may only produce 25% fit offspring. A fit female will produce 100% fit offspring. An unfit male will only ever produce unfit offspring, and a fit male has a 75% chance of producing fit offspring. During development it is natural selection which "kicks in", and unfit offspring are unlikely to survive to adulthood.

Apart from the aggression involved in the Acilius beetles, this seems very similar to "normal" sexual selection. The male has to be REALLY fit, and the female has to be REALLY choosy. This doesn't really refute Darwin's theory. It just means the particular example of organism he chose has turned out not to agree with his theory, which nonetheless still holds. Almost all Darwin's theories have been modified over time, but it's a little-by-little approach.

My big fear is that the creationists will seize this as "proof" that Darwinian evolution is wrong. My succinct pre-emptive response is "Any intelligent designer who would design rape - even among animals - as a normal means of reproduction is a knob". So let's not continue that argument.

When I mentioned to Paul that a paper had discussed a Kuhnian paradigm shift, the first thing he asked me was "Was it written by a newly minted PhD?". I remember hearing postgrads talking about paradigm shifts all the time. I don't know of any graduate scientist who hasn't read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". But a paradigm shift cannot be used, surely, to describe any piece of work which goes against a previous paper. That cheapens the concept of a paradigm shift and makes it worth less when it's used to describe something really mindblowing.

It's still a pretty cool paper though.

Bergsten, J. & K.B. Miller. 2007. Phylogeny of Diving Beetles Reveals a Coevolutionary Arms Race between the Sexes. PLoS ONE 2(6): e522. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0000522.
Tregenza, T., N. Wedell & T. Chapman. 2005. Introduction. Sexual conflict: a new paradigm? Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 361(1466): 229-234. DOI:10.1098/rstb.2005.1796.

And Another Thing!

Why do so many bloggers default to subtitling their blogs "The musings of a [Insert adjective, noun]"? There are all sorts of synonyms for this. I faithfully promise never to call my blog "The musings of an ethical palaeontologist" or words to that effect, as long as I shall live.

If I do, you have my permission to feed me to the Komodo dragons.

What's In A Name?

Browsing the Scienceblogs site, I saw a post in Adventures in Ethics and Science entitled "A few words on names and expectations". I saw this news a little while ago - almost certainly in the Guardian article to which the author links.

So, did my name set me on a path to a scientific career? Did it just mean that I wasn't dissuaded from science and moved towards subject more "suitable" for a girl? Or did it have absolutely no effect on my career whatsoever?

The name has certainly made me stick out. It's a nice unusual name. I've only discovered one other in my field, who co-authored a morphometrics paper in 1963. My lecturer was so surprised that he genuinely thought this guy might have been my father (Dad's old but not old enough to have written a journal article in the early 60s). There are rather more Julias though.

I'd never gone to school with anyone else called Julia until I went to Nottingham High School (for Gels), whereupon I hit full-on middle-class Midlands suburbia and found at least three in my year group, and many more in the years above and below me. Turns out that the film "Julia" had come out three years before my birth, and along with a lot of other professional wives, Mum had decided that was the name for me. A strong, driven heroine who came to a rather messy end. Oh don't YOU start.

I can think of at least three Julias in vertebrate palaeontology. Sadly the new SVP membership directory enables you only to search by surname, so I can't do a quick study of women in the field to see what other names are common. I'd hazard a guess at Rebecca, Jennifer, Amy, Alison and Laura, on the basis that I know of at least 2-3 of each (has to be Paul, William/Bill, James/Jim and perhaps David for the men).

Like me, they have no doubt had to endure years of being called Julie. There's nothing wrong with the name Julie - I have a good friend from university called Julie. But it's so annoying having to correct people - it's not my name. Yet so many people seem incapable of calling me Julia. Google is pretty bad too - on a search for me it will inevitably throw up some links to someone called Julie. It is as though even the Googlebot just can't be arsed to pronounce that third syllable.

I happen to think Julia is less feminine than Julie. Which suits me fine. If I had been Julie would I have followed this path? And if I had, would it have been any harder for me with what I perceive to be a more feminine name? I'm on a bit of a feminist roll at the moment - normal ranty service will be resumed shortly, promise.

Networking

Dr Shellie posted some really good advice about networking at conferences a few weeks ago. I've only just found it through one of the new blogs I've started reading, On being a scientist and a woman. I gave myself a bit of a pat on the back for already doing a lot of these things. I'm not even really guilty of sitting on the "kids' table" at the SVP banquet, although I do tend to sit on the "Brits' table". Last time I did that I disgraced myself and ended up pennying (a great Cambridge drinking tradition) a Respected Pillar of the Scientific Community.

I just read Dr Shellie's post out to Paul. He said the one thing he would add would be to end the chat by offering the faculty member in question a business card. I'm going to make sure I carry a stash around in the back of my name badge at SVP (a tip I picked up from some grain merchants at the agricultural show last week). And I would be tempted, if I'd had a really good long talk with someone, to follow it up after the conference with an "It was really nice to meet you" sort of e-mail.

Once upon a time, for one year only, I was someone a LOT of people wanted to talk to. I had to lug my laptop around with me even the day after I'd given my talk as so many people wanted to look at the software I'd used. I never suffered the snide "Whose arm-candy is she?" remarks that a friend of mine overheard directed at another student (who to be fair, presented as though she was trying to understand her boyfriend's research rather than her own), and I've always been taken pretty seriously. This is a good thing.

I am now watching the fares from London to Dallas. Paul and I are going to have our annual holiday in Texas and New Mexico this year, before SVP. Even though we have two big eight-hour drives to get to and from NM, we're doing about 1000 miles less than we did when we did the Grand Circle in 2005, and nearly 1500 miles less than on honeymoon. Out on I20, back on I10. I'm so excited!

Sisterhood?

I've been looking for blogs to add to my blogroll (scroll down a bit and look to the left). Reading some of the posts reminded me of an incident in November 2004. Needless to say none of the bloggers I've added today were involved - this just suddenly popped into my head.

I was at the GSA conference in Denver. It was the last GSA I went to, probably because I can't stump up two trans-Atlantic flights in the space of two weeks and despite being told that GSA was more important than SVP, the latter beats GSA hands down in terms of networking opportunities, interesting relevant talks and generally having a good time.

I was spending the afternoon wandering around the exhibit hall, and I stopped by the Association of Women Geoscientists stand. I'd joined the previous year and wanted to renew my membership. I'd also seen that there was a grant available for helping female graduate students whose studies had been interrupted for over a year. As I knew I was taking at least a year out by that point, I thought it might be useful to me.

So I asked for some information, and as I was filling in my membership form I explained my situation to the woman on the stand. Her response? "Wow, that is just so typically British to just give up and walk away like that. We'd have fought it."

It rendered me speechless. And like a dumbass I just carried on filling in the form in silence, then walked away. When what I really should have said was "Oh yeah? Well you try fighting your sexual assault and sexual harassment complaint when the university isn't taking you seriously, when your entire lab have resorted to sabotaging your data, and when you're 4000 miles and six time zones away from your parents and your fiancé. Then see how much you feel like fighting it, you stupid bitch."

L'esprit de l'escalier... But you know, nearly three years on, it feels really really good to say that, if only on my little backwater blog. And of course the AWG will never get any membership dues from me again, especially if that is how its officers "support" female students.

PG? Only A PG??

On the basis that I happen to have mentioned the word "pain" once (okay, twice now), my blog has been deemed to be PG-rated:


Thank you to Pharyngula for linking to the little tool there. Evidently only the front page gets rated. Paul's blog unsurprisingly gets a restricted rating. And I'm delighted to see that my February archive gets an R rating on account of mentioning bombs, dicks and death. Sweet!

Dinosaur Ride

Being a bit past it I like listening to Radio 4 (no music), and I don't like watching music channels. So I rarely know what music is out at the moment, and I never see the videos. On my lunch break today I had a look at some of the recent Muse videos, and saw "Invincible" for the first time. It's got dinosaurs! And people! And dinosaurs WITH people!


Do not play this song to Paul. Or if you do, make sure you don't play it in quick succession with "1812 Overture", "Killing In The Name Of" by Rage Against The Machine" or "Do You Hear The People Sing" from Les Misérables. He WILL overthrow your government.

Posterior? Caudal? Distal? Up, Up And Away?

Fortified by a stiff margarita, I'm really trying to nail the Cetiosauriscus description this evening. Then it's just the small matter of the introduction, literature review, materials and methods, systematic palaeontology, phylogenetic analysis, discussion and conclusion (anything else?).

But one thing is bothering me. As Jerry reminded me in my comments earlier today, when describing the tail, "proximal" is used to refer to the bits closest to the rest of the body, and "distal" is used to refer to the bits further away from the rest of the body.

Consider caudal vertebra 13 of C. stewarti (oh God I hope there's nothing in the journal terms and conditions about putting up one of my crappy photos online way before the paper's submitted...).


Few palaeontologists would dispute that on the left hand side of the picture is the proximal end and on the right hand side of the picture is the distal end. So I would describe the proximal or distal surface of the centrum, for example. But I've got myself massively confused over the neural spine (the bit sticking up). Now, I would have expected to describe the proximal and distal sections of the spine, referring to the bit nearest the centrum (proximal) and the bit the furthest away from the centrum (distal). A cursory glance over Romer's "Osteology Of The Reptiles" shows it to be silent on this matter, so I'm on my own.

But if I were using proximal/distal faithfully, then surface/edge A (labelled) would be the proximal surface and surface/edge B would be the distal surface. Yet if that's the distal surface then what's the bit at the tip of the spine called? Unfortunately (or fortunately?), it's fairly significant, so a brief mention only is out of the question.

And how would you, the palaeontologically/anatomically-inclined reader describe the direction indicated by arrow C? The spine projects/slants/slopes caudally? Slopes distally? Slopes posteriorly? Vertical it ain't. I'm confused. More to the point, I was confused before I made the margarita.

A picture says a thousand words, but as much as I'd just love to submit a DVD of me videoing the skeleton, I have to describe the wee beastie.

I'm Ph-eeling The Ph-ear

I went to an introductory students' evening at Birkbeck last night. I'm really glad I went and met some of the other students, and I got some really good advice.

But golly am I terrified. All the way through I was thinking about the various bits of advice and how they related to me. And I realised that I've probably forgotten most of the theory behind geometric morphometrics. I used to be really good at maths, but the moment I started at Cambridge I ceased to be able to do it (except matrices - I was damn good at matrices and that alone got me a 2.2 in maths at the end of 1A). So non-Euclidean geometry makes my brain hurt. As do more than three dimensions all at right angles to each other, so principal components analysis is going to be a bitch. I know what my programmes do, and how to interpret the results, but if I don't know the fundamental principles of the technique then my interpretations are worthless.

I'm also not so hot on the old anatomy. When I was away last week I took the descriptive part of the Cetiosauriscus paper with me to edit, and all I can say with any confidence is that I know slightly more anatomy than I did six years ago when I first described him. Having converted all my "anterior" to "cranial" and all my "posterior" to "caudal" I still have a long way to go.

And then there are the papers. I have so much reading to catch up on. So many new discoveries made in the last three years that I haven't noticed. Where do I even start?

Scared? I'm bricking myself.

Students

I was away earlier in the week manning a stand at an agricultural show. I baked about 600 bread rolls over the two days to give to hungry farmers. Towards the end of the day I knew I had an excess of part-baked rolls, so I was happy to give a few packets away to a group of hungry students who arrived on my stand from a certain Shropshire-based university. As they grabbed a pack of 10 each, I explained that they should cook the rolls for about eight minutes at 180°C. One lad asked me "What's that in gas mark?". Fortunately for me (I haven't cooked with a gas oven in years) a woman nearby said it was about gas mark 4-5.

Then one of the other students piped up "What's that in the microwave?". I told him "You can't cook these in the microwave! They'll go all soggy!". So his mate asked "If we squash them really really flat, can we put them in our toaster?". I laughed and said he probably could. So if you live in halls of residence at Harper Adams, beware - there will probably be a lot of flaming toasters setting off the fire alarms.

I was slightly more prepared for the old farmer who asked me "What's that in an aga?", because I know enough about agas to know you shove it in and you keep checking on it until it looks done.

Watch me now get a comment from "Julia's Mum" disowning me for not knowing my gas marks...

Creationist Humour

Yesterday, two bastions of time-wasting on the internet converged in a simple image mocking creationism. The B3ta website issued the following image challenge:

Creationists believe that everything in the universe was created absolutely by a deity, and that evolution is hocus pocus, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Please portray this conflict using God's own image-manipulation software.

Cuthbert Annihilator, a B3ta regular, posted this brilliant image:


I think it's great. Scipionyx samniticus if I'm not mistaken - found with soft-tissue preservation back in 1981. It's in the style of ICANHASCHEEZBURGER, the second of the time-wasting websites. I really like the image, and hope that neither Cuthbert Annihilator nor B3TA replace it with a huge magenta cock.

My palaeontologically-inclined friends might be interested in the rest of the images.

Rusty Dinosaurs

My friend Dave e-mailed me a link to this exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, and I decide to amble down there as it's only about 5 minutes' walk from work. Entitled "The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth But Not The Mineral Rights", it features three rusty metal dinosaurs. Two Made-Up-A-Sauruses, and a token theropod.




Apart from it being a quote by J Paul Getty, I have no idea what it's all about. I sometimes wonder if I just don't "get" art, because I find no talent in the majority of modern works - I like paintings and sculptures that look as though the creator had skill. I'd have been a bit more impressed if the dinosaurs were recognisable (one purports to have a frill, so may be a ceratopsian, and there is a recognisable generic carnivore).

One of my favourite works is Holbein's "The Ambassadors":


Wikipedia has a brief description of it, and hints that there is much more symbolism in the painting than it describes. And of course I'm mightily impressed by the anamorphic skull. But I'm sure people will say an optical illusion is not necessarily art. I don't know. I see "The Ambassadors" and I see an extremely talented artist. I see "The Meek Shall..." and I see a couple of okay engineers. And three not very good dinosaurs.

Tyrannosaurus And Smilodon?!

New Volvic advert came out this week.

Are these just out in the UK? Can't see an advert where a stuffed dinosaur tells a volcano he's off to kill someone's parents going down too well in the USA.

Earthcore

For ages, I've listened to Dan Klass's podcast, The Bitterest Pill. Although I can hardly believe it, it was just over a year ago when I listened to his interview with Scott Sigler, who had been podcasting his novels as weekly downloads. I listened to Ancestor, then Infection, and finally The Rookie, which has only just finished.

I really enjoyed Ancestor - it appealed to me as a palaeontologist. I found Infection tested my constitution a little - some of the more graphic descriptions I couldn't deal with (if you were reading a book you could skim through to a less gory bit, but no can do when you're listening to it!). The Rookie was a different type of book. I'm a football fan, so I picked up the plays as they were being described, but it was a more active listening experience - it required thought. I ordered my copy of Ancestor the same day it was released, and decided to finally buy Earthcore too.


Earthcore was Scott's first podcast novel, and because I was a late arrival to the world of Sigler junkies, I didn't start listening to it. So I found it an interesting experience reading a book by an author whose work I had only ever HEARD.

And I thoroughly enjoyed it. Scott does several things in his stories that I haven't seen in anything I've read:

1. He is not afraid to kill off anyone, and I mean anyone. Main characters are not safe.
   
2. The heroes are very often distinctly unlikeable. They're not just flawed - we have enough "flawed" heroes. Quite often the main characters have absolutely nothing to recommend them - they are arrogant, aggressive, callous bastards.
   
3. He uses science. A lot of it is futuristic science, extrapolation of our existing technology, but it gets you thinking.
   
4. He keeps the action going right up to the end. Most books I've read recently have a nice long calming-down chapter at the end, but with a Sigler novel you shut the book and your heart is still pounding.

I really urge you all to give him a go. He is an inspiration to anyone looking to break into podcasting or writing. And although I've never met him, he seems like a really nice guy. He's even given my husband advice as he tries to get his writing career off the ground.

Buy Earthcore from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. It's an adrenaline-rush of a book and it blew me away. And then go buy Ancestor too. You will never look at a cow in the same way again.

One Hundred

For the 100th post on this blog, I wanted to do something special. This is why I've left a bit of a gap between entries - I've been thinking about what to write. This is going to be a big one, so grab a cup of tea.

On 28 May 2007, the Creation Museum opened in Petersburg, KY. This was covered in the New York Times, and featured on NPR and BBC Radio 4 (to early morning howls of anguish on my part), where we listened to proud American parents saying how wonderful it was that there was a museum that reflected what they were teaching their children at home and at church.

On one hand it's nice that there's somewhere the Creationists can go - it keeps them out of my hair when I'm visiting palaeontological sites. As an intern many years ago, one Sunday a colleague had a visitor on his tour who asked "Are you going to talk about evolution? Because I don't want my kids hearing that crap". Seriously - don't bring your kids to something that proclaims to be 20 million years old, because there's a distinct possibility that it might not fit in with your Young-Earth Creationism beliefs.

But on the other hand it makes me cry. Because this is one more aspect of the onslaught the palaeontological community is facing from the Religious Right. Admittedly it's an aspect that is probably safe to ignore, just as long as state-run high school science classes don't start visiting it, as it's a little out of the way in darkest Kentucky. It also costs $19.95 for an adult to get in - more expensive than the AMNH ($14.00), the Field Museum ($12.00), the Smithsonian Institution NMNH (err, free), the Carnegie Museum ($10.00 including admission to the Art Museum) and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (also free). So it's perhaps not competing for the attentions of the general American public in the same way it may if it was on Central Park West and it was $2.00. And according to the BBC's Our Own Correspondent, "There is nothing remotely convincing about the Creation Museum". What a relief.

No, the danger comes from Creationism's younger, richer and better-dressed brother - Intelligent Design. According to the Discovery Institute, ID is the theory that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection". They are dressing up ID as a science. We have had several states' education systems plunged into disarray by proponents of ID attempting to force schools to put disclaimers in textbooks that mention evolution and to teach ID in science classes (some successfully). The list of "peer-reviewed articles" on the Discovery Institute's website boils down to a load of papers on "why ID is true" in books about "why ID is true" (peer review only works as an argument if the peers concerned are scientists in the same field), and journal articles (some in dubious low-impact titles) that say "this is really really complicated shit and we don't understand how something this complex evolved" which either they or the commentators use as evidence for a process more "refined" and directional than what they perceive to be the haphazard and blunt process of evolution.

I could go into long arguments about the numerous flaws in ID my colleagues and I have picked up. But this blog entry would become far too long, probably incoherent (more so than usual, I hear you cry) and would probably end with a scream of rage. Suffice to say, every time I choke on a bit of food that's gone down the wrong way, I am reassured of the existence of evolution, natural selection and speciation.

In Mesa in 2005, at the annual SVP conference, Stephen Godfrey gave a great talk - "The structure of the Universe through the eyes of the Bible: a personal pilgrimage from a Young-Earth 'Scientific Creationist' position". In this, he went through Genesis Chapter 1 (my mum would be proud of me - I always go with the New International Version) and showed us what else we would have to believe if we believe that God created all living things (no evolution needed). His abstract concluded (I'm sorry, I can't find a PDF):

It is doubtful that many would want to begin their scientific investigations in any field with the premise that the earth is flat and the sky is a solid dome above it. The Bible, in part, is about the need for good people, not a guide to good science.

Genesis is a story of creation passed down by nomadic people from generation to generation by oral tradition. At some point (some 2000 years after it all happened?), Moses is said to have written it all down. Now, he'd have written it in Hebrew, I suppose. Then at some point it was translated into Greek. I have a feeling St Paul did that when he was feeling particularly ecclesiastical. Then it was translated into Latin. Then, about 500 or so years ago, it was finally translated into English. The urban legend goes, that a computer translated the phrase "out of sight, out of mind" into Russian/Chinese and back again, and the result came back "invisible idiot". We find errors in our translations of the New Testament when we go back and look at the Dead Sea Scrolls and other documents close to the source. How many more errors of translation must there be in a document that is nearly double the age of the New Testament?

When I was at university, I took History and Philosophy of Science. I wasn't clever enough to understand all the Philosophy, but I adored History of Science. A kick-ass essay on Darwin saved my grade in the final exam (although the bagpiper who started up outside the Guildhall didn't help matters). I remember my professor referring to nature as "God's other book". A quick googling refreshes my memory of it being used at numerous points. If the word of God is contained within the Bible, then as God is deemed to have created the Universe and all within it, He must be responsible for everything in nature. Is it therefore not a little insulting to His creation to believe a mis-translated collection of writings (not all of which are allowed to be in the official packaging of the Bible) over and above something He has made, which is therefore a direct communication? Is it not hypocritical of a Creationist to bash the old creation, when the scientists have just read one of the other books in the series?

From a pessimistic agnostic viewpoint, I would have thought it took more talent for a supernatural being to click his fingers and create a universe from nothing, safe in the knowledge that 15 billion years later there would be some monkey-like creatures worth infusing with a soul, than for Him to painstakingly construct everything from scratch, or to design the really really complicated stuff. Bit more omnipotent and omniscient to just know that lightning + primordial soup = DNA.

In 2008, the SVP conference is to be held in Cleveland. I would like to propose a field trip to Petersburg, KY. I will even share the driving. I just want to go on a guided tour of the Creation Museum and say "Are you going to talk about the Earth only being 6000 years old? Because I don't want to hear that crap". The only thing that would deter me would be having to part with nearly $20.00 for the privilege.