Not In My Right Mind

If I may step away from ethical palaeontology for a moment...

For years and years my mother's family have been convinced there is a genetic link to left-handedness. Maybe peer-reviewed research had been published on the subject, but it never made it into the British Medical Journal, which nearly everyone in the family have all read at some point.

Grandpa was left-handed. One of his grandparents was left-handed too (I forget which one, although it may have been his maternal grandmother - that sounds right). None of his children were left-handed, although my mother and my aunt both have one left-handed child: my cousin and me. The fact that left-handedness had skipped a generation on two occasions rendered chance an unlikely explanation, and, considering Grannie and Grandpa and their descendants, three southpaws in a family of 12 is way over the statistical norm of 10%.

I was delighted to see the BBC report Gene for left-handedness is found today. Sadly, I don't have full-text access to Molecular Psychiatry, but I've had a look at the abstract. And the first thing that leapt out of the title was: "LRRTM1 on chromosome 2p12 is a maternally suppressed gene that is associated paternally with handedness and schizophrenia". The abstract then goes on to mention "maternal downregulation". I feel completely out of my depth here - I last did genetics in detail in A-level biology (although we discussed Hox, Pax and Sonic Hedgehog genes in Vertebrate Structure and Palaeobiology classes). But does this correlate with the fact that the mothers of the left-handed members of the family (Grandpa, my cousin and me) did not or do not show left-handedness? Does the suppressed gene nevertheless manifest itself in the creative, artistic, musical minds of my mother and aunt? I'm sure a geneticist would love our family as a case-study. It's a pity the research has only just come out now as Grandpa would have been fascinated by it.

Left-handed people are traditionally supposed to be more creative, although a quick trawl through the related articles shows that in addition to this Left-handers "think" more quickly, Left-handers "better in fights" and Left-handed people "don't die young" (very reassuring). And we're apparently excellent at cricket and being cavemen. Although one wonders if the cave paintings were just carried out by the creatively-minded lefties of the tribe while the right-handers were off doing more useful stuff like hunting and gathering.

I should point out, however, that there is absolutely no history of mental illness in our family - we've done quite well out of that one. We'll all need pacemakers (I always called Grannie the Duracell Bunny because she ran on batteries), and we'll have appalling arthritis, but that's it.

The authors allude in the abstract to the gene's role in "cognitive and behavioural evolution". I'd love to know the "reason" for left-handedness. I understand handedness exists in other animals. I suppose a mutation, if it does not confer an advantage or disadvantage on the organism, will remain in the population at a constant (perhaps slightly increasing?) percentage. Maybe we're all just the result of random, harmless mutations, condemned to spend our days smudging our fountain pen script, unable to use cake forks or scissors, drinking from the wrong side of the slogan mug, swapping over the mouse buttons, needing our own rulers and having incredible hassle at public transport ticket barriers.

Five Things About Me

Tech Tags: meme five questions

This is a new type of meme - if you'd like to join in, rather than have me tag you, post a random comment about yourself in response to this, and I'll ask you five questions. Full rules are at the bottom of the post. Anyway, Laelaps has asked me to answer these five questions:

1) Out of your paleontological travels so far, what's your favorite fossil site? What did you find there?

It has to be the Triceratops site I worked on near Newcastle, WY, with Pete Larson and volunteers and staff from the Black Hills Institute. The dinosaur had already been found - I went for a wander down a gully and came back with nothing but fragments of bone. But when excavating I did find the other brow horn, which they thought had been lost. Wyoming is one of my favourite states, and that was the first time I'd been.

2) Given your travels to the U.S., what's the biggest difference between the states and your home country?

Well there are all the language barriers - trousers/pants, pavement/sidewalk, the fact that "pot plant" means something completely different in the US versus the UK, and there's the existence of root beer in the US (I miss it so much when I'm in Britain!). But really, the one thing that I really picked up on is how far behind the education system in the US is. I took so many graduate-level courses, which were taught solely from secondary literature. We were habitually reading primary literature by our third undergrad year in the UK, and we were given references to follow up if we wished before then. I do understand that it is impossible to do a pure science degree in the US, but whilst students receive a broad education, it doesn't seem to go into the necessary depth to fully prepare them for graduate study.

3) Do you have a theory on the Brontosaurus?

Well I think the thin-at-the-front-fat-in-the-middle-thin-at-the-end theory is flawless... I would like to see the name resurrected, because it's a really cool name. I can see why Apatosaurus has to take precedence (and yes, I know the principles of the ICZN mean Brontosaurus can't really come back), but it's a better-sounding name, and it sounds awesome and magical to children. I'm possibly biased by my favourite childhood dinosaur song, the "Prehistoric Animal Brigade", which starts #Listen to the chorus of the Brontosaurus#.

4) How did you and your husband meet?

Aha - here's a good story. When I was 13, I joined Mensa, the high-IQ society (had no friends at school anyway...), and I became quite involved, eventually being appointed to the editorial board of the Junior Mensa magazine. Two years later, this Scottish kid joined, and almost the first thing he did was write into the magazine requesting a penfriend. I hummed and haaed over whether to write to him, but I did. I am told my letter arrived after his self-imposed cut-off date for replying to letters (he'd had loads of replies), but something about my letter caught his eye, and only a month later, he'd decided I was his favourite. This was autumn 1995. After three years of intermittently writing, we finally decided to meet up. It wasn't entirely love at first sight, as we had effectively already fallen in love with each other way before, through writing (and eventually e-mails and phone calls). But we've been together ever since.

5) If you got a blank-check grant to study anything you wanted, what would you do with it?

Can I use some of it to fund my PhD full-time first? I would actually like to undertake a huge bone-scanning project. If I could have any amount of money, then I would set up a CT-scanner (for bones still in the matrix) and an infra-red (or whatever it actually is) scanner for free bones. I would then want to set up a 3-D extended eigenshape analysis (if that's even possible yet - if not, then design one), and get morphometric data for the whole Dinosauria (and hell, if it's unlimited, let's do the whole Vertebrata!). Rid ourselves of subjective characters and see what a computer comes up with.

Here are the formal rules for anyone who wants to take part:

1. Leave me a comment saying anything random, like [the food you hate most in all the world]. Something random. Whatever you like.
   
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
   
3. You will update your [blog] with the answers to the questions.
   
4. You will include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in the post.
   
5. When others comment asking to be asked, you will ask them five questions.

Carbon Offset

Tech Tags: carbon offset carbon footprint Al Gore NativeEnergy

I have just offset the carbon footprint of our flight and road-trip for SVP.

• For driving 1,651.48 miles, we will generate 0.404 tonnes of CO₂.
  
• For flying 9,506.99 miles, we will generate 3.803 tonnes of CO₂.

According to Native Energy, one of Al Gore's chosen companies, that costs $60.00 - $12.00 per tonne of CO₂ (rounded up). And, especially given the exchange rate, I was happy to pay £30 to offset the environmental cost of my journey. Paul and I will just have two fewer Papa John pizzas this month instead!

I'd like to see a move to make carbon offsetting contributions mandatory on all flights, and maybe even added onto car hire - the clerks check the mileage when you return the car, so why not do a quick calculation? We've just paid £700 for our flights, so that's only 4% on top of that. Is that really too much to ask of people?

The Eyes Of Texas Are Upon Us

Tech Tags: SVP Texas road trip Guadalupe Mountains National Park

We have booked our SVP flights. Unfortunately the American Airlines sale ended just before my salary made it into my bank account, but still, at 6:30am I had my laptop on my knees and I booked us in. We're flying to Dallas and hiring a car for a bit beforehand to go out to New Mexico. But me being the idiot that I am (or more likely not entirely awake at 6:30am) I booked the outbound flight for one day later than we had planned with our list of places to visit. So it's going to be a bit less relaxed, and if you see us in San Antonio in mid-October, please buy us lots of tequila as we'll have just finished the eight-hour journey from El Paso.

I've asked my friend ReBecca, a Texas Tech alum, if she can recommend any towns along I20 worth stopping in overnight (I really want to avoid any repeats of Gillette WY or Blanding UT - alcohol and food that won't turn our guts inside out are a must).

Now, I just need to remember where we went six and a half years ago. I vividly remember Williams Ranch, and we of course did the McKittrick Canyon Death March, neither of which we'll be doing this time. I really don't know how legal it is to just park and head up a hillside. While I'm sure we had the necessary permits in 2001 (not all our expeditions were on NPS land), I'd hate to be on the wrong piece of the BLM "chequerboard". Being shot by a rancher often offends.

I Am Appalled, Apparently...

Tech Tags: Guardian news blog

I made it into the Guardian's news blog today - ah, fame at last! You can see the link to me at 3:20pm.

But they spelt my name wrong!! Does that surname even exist?

No wonder Private Eye calls it the Grauniad...

What A Disgrace

Tech Tags: UK flooding natural disaster EU Solidarity Fund looting Gordon Brown is useless

It probably hasn't featured on non-British news programmes (if it had, I would have had at least one e-mail from a concerned American/Canadian/Australian friend hoping I hadn't been affected), but Britain is now suffering widespread flooding on the rivers Severn, Thames, Avon and Ouse. This is just over a month after floods in Yorkshire and East Anglia.

Thousands of people are suffering. New housing estates knowingly built on floodplains have been destroyed. Yet the Government is planning to build more houses on floodplains, with as yet no caveat that, perhaps, sacrificial ground floors (i.e. just a garage/carport and the front hall) will be created to minimise the loss. The city of Gloucester has no mains water, and many of the residents have no power. The emergency services are trying their best, but they are desperately overstretched.

There has been panic buying in the supermarkets. I have seen photographs in the press of people stacking up water bottles, filling the entire back seat and boot area of their estate cars and hatchbacks. One of my colleagues reported that her mother saw people selling these bottles of water on at a massive profit right outside the supermarket. Yesterday's Evening Standard instructed us THAMES FLOODS: PREPARE TO FLEE, which has no doubt induced panic buying in the supermarkets of Greater London.

But worst of all, are the bottom-feeders who are looting houses damaged by the floods. How utterly despicable. It makes one ashamed not just to be of the same nationality but to be of the same species. We desperately need martial law - this is a natural disaster on a massive scale, covering hundreds of square miles. We have an excellent reserve army, the Territorial Army. I knew a lad when we were graduate students at Imperial who was in the TA, and his unit were trained to restore communications and infrastructure in the event of a nuclear attack - they would be perfectly well-trained to help now. But most of our armed forces, including our reserves, are currently being shot at from all sides in Iraq, and being decimated in Afghanistan at the same rate as we lost men in the Second World War. We simply are running out of soldiers.

Still, we may not have the necessary military backup, and the civilian authorities may be stretched to breaking point, but at least there will be enough money and aid for the people affected, right? It would appear not. Yesterday's Metro reported that the Government has not asked for a single penny from the EU Solidarity Fund, which was set up precisely for disasters like this.

The British Government has really fucked this one up. And this is nothing to do with policies or manifestos (although I must say that I did not vote for this party). This is beyond policy - these are ad hoc decisions that should be made by the Cabinet or by Gordon Brown himself. But it looks as though he's shaping up to be as much of a lame duck as his predecessor - incapable of actually doing anything.

If the city of New Orleans would like to lend us Ray Nagin for a few weeks, I have a list of people I'd like him to bitchslap.

Idiots On Facebook

Tech Tags: Facebook MySpace Friends Reunited New Scientist economic foodchain idiots

I spotted this article in the New Scientist feed: How to spot false friends on Facebook. And I couldn't help thinking that this research should be considered yet another "No Shit Sherlock" study. But unfortunately it isn't, because people are fucking idiots.

I joined Facebook as a more sophisticated version of Friends Reunited with fewer noisy surprises than MySpace. I know everyone in my Facebook contacts list. I either know everyone or they are the official pages of bands I like on MySpace. Random requests for friendship on both Facebook and MySpace get denied. I do not wish to meet new people. With 97 Facebook friends and 25 MySpace friends, I think I'm good on that front without needing to add some randy teenage boy from Turkey. And I don't honestly have any friends who want to add random friends either.

Now, my Facebook profile is visible to some extent, to everyone (safe for a few specific people who aren't even allowed to see my status update). All my friends (that is, people to whom I would be happy to give my contact details in real life) have access to my full address and telephone number. All my friends and people in my networks can see my photos - they're photos I would happily put up on my blog.

But if you had a family, and had photos up of your children in your profile, why on earth would you let a random stranger be your "friend" and gain access to them? Would you go into a pub, if a man came up to you and said hi, would you immediately supply your full name, e-mail address, where you live, photos of your children and the fact that you are looking for "whatever I can get" or "random play"? Of course you wouldn't. Or if you would, then you're bloody stupid. Why do these people think that the internet is safe just because it's a social networking site? Frankly, spamming inboxes is the least of these idiots' worries.

My father has a saying - "There's always somebody at the bottom of the economic foodchain". People who are so stupid that they actually invite people to prey on them, to exploit them and to profit from the experience. And morons who allow complete strangers access to their personal details on social networking sites are, on the grand scheme of things, phytoplankton.

But other than that, the study sounds fun, designing software to look at the profiles of supposed spammers for personalisation, social versus promotional slants and the tightness of that person's network. Stuff that savvy web users have been doing on an individual case-by-case basis for ages.

The Boneyard

Tech Tags: The Boneyard Laelaps blog carnival palaeontology

Check out The Boneyard #1, over at Laelaps, with a couple of contributions from Yours Truly.

I've only been aware of blog carnivals for about a month or so (since I really started to be active in the palaeo-blogging community), and I'm delighted to see that Brian has created a palaeontology-specific carnival in The Boneyard. It's a great opportunity to catch up with what's going on in the palaeo-blogosphere if you don't have a lot of time to read individual blogs.

Cheers Brian!

Why Paul Is Blissfully Happy

Tech Tags: men happiness educated wives Australian National University

Found this linked from the Bayblab blog: Men happiest with smart wives.

Explains why Paul is so content with his lot, doesn't it? He's already doing quite well with a wife in possession of three masters degrees. I can only presume he will be in seventh heaven when I eventually get my PhD.

Although they do link it through to money: "It may be that an educated woman's earning power is her biggest asset", says Shane Mathew Worner. So perhaps Paul didn't do so well in his choice of life partner after all. No one goes into academic palaeontology to get rich.

Had to laugh at the guy who commented that "Nobody marries a woman because her brains bounce" though.

Real Dinosaurs In Northern New Mexico

Tech Tags: dinosaurimorphs dinosauriforms dinosaurs theropods New Mexico UC Berkeley

On the back of me finishing Tyrannosaur Canyon it was nice to see some real dinosaurs in the locality. The discovery in New Mexico of basal theropods, dinosaurs, dinosauriforms and dinosaurimorphs suggest that dinosaurs did not rapidly diversify and "take over the world" but rather coexisted with their more primitive relatives for a good 15 million years or so. Other bloggers have done a much better job of talking about this than I could have done, so rather than waste bloggy space with my own drivel, I'll just point you in the direction of recent posts from the writers on my blogroll:

Ask Doctor Vector: Undeserved self-promotion and the protracted rise of dinosaurs

Hairy Museum of Natural History: Dinosaur precursors found in New Mexico

Laelaps: If the dinosaurs could wait I guess I can too

And check out BBC News: Dinosaurs' slow rise to dominance for some nice soundbites from Richard Butler.

Who Says Natural Selection Doesn't Exist?

Tech Tags: Darwin natural selection Boyle's Law WD40

Spluch: Never Smash A WD40 Can!

Gizmodo: Why You Shouldn't Smash A Can of WD40 mentions the beauty of natural selection featured in this video, although I fear the idiot concerned has survived with enough of his genitals intact that he will be able to pass on the stupid genes to another generation.

Someone else who must have bunked off school when the science teacher was discussing Boyle's Law.

Tyrannosaur Canyon

Tech Tags: Tyrannosaur Canyon Douglas Preston Earthcore Scott Sigler summer reading book

I finished it this evening. Mainly because the hubster is working late and I've been mooching around at home. I'll get my "problems" with it out of the way first so I can get on with what I did enjoy, because it's actually a good plot.

My first impression was that it was going to be full of conspiracy. The first chapter was about the Apollo 17 moon landing, one of the main characters was monk who used to be in the CIA, and the Anasazi were mentioned frequently. I suspected the aliens were going to land, or that the T. rex would turn out to be an alien life form. I was quite glad that was an incorrect assumption!

And I actually found a few similarities in the setup of the plot to Scott Sigler's "Earthcore". Although Sigler's work is set in Utah and this is set in New Mexico, the scenery described is very similar, full of mines and canyons. Both stories open with prospectors finding the location of interest, although things work out very differently for Sonny McGuinness ("Earthcore") and Stem Weathers ("Tyrannosaur Canyon"). Yet Douglas Preston very much writes a classic heroes-and-villains story - there are good guys and bad guys, and there are even worse guys. Sigler blurs the lines a bit more, and I've warmed to that style of writing - it's more true to life.

The absolute biggest blooper in the whole thing, which had me (and Usch, when she read it) laughing my head off, is the thought that you can submit something online to Journal of Paleontology (althought it's later referred to as Journal of VP), where "they would be peer-reviewed and published electronically within three days". Pull the other one! Even if someone submitted a paper tomorrow with an actual fresh sauropod carcass or some other discovery that completely blew palaeontological theory out of the water, it would take more than three days to find the necessary reviewers, have them give their considered opinion, send the manuscript back for editing if necessary, format the images for online publication and then actually get the thing up online. I gather for JVP six months is a pretty good turnaround at the moment, and unless I've really lost touch with the community there is no online publication save for PDFs of the articles available to members only.

And you know, I can deal with fantastic plots, like finding a complete T. rex skeleton in a cave somewhere, and I can deal with rampant conspiracy theories (Paul used to be the living embodiment of Fox Mulder before he became very cynical about aliens, so I've been used to it), but I get annoyed when the process is distorted - really small things bother me. And the thought of this manuscript being published within 72 hours GOT ON MY NERVES.

There was just a touch too much back-story. Didn't need to know about Weed Maddox's "Hard Times" project, for example, and the repeated reference to the Anasazi was offputting, especially for someone who's had the conspiracy theory drilled into me. Yet unless there were pages missing, I would have really liked to have an explanation of what went down in Central America - a bit of Tom Broadbent's past that was never fully explained (although hinted at).

For all that though, I was drawn in by the story. It's never going to win the Booker Prize, but it's a good commuting/long-haul flight novel. The descriptions of T. rex when she was alive were fascinating and well-written. I haven't read "Raptor Red" by Bob Bakker, but Preston does acknowledge Bakker's "Dinosaur Heresies", so I should think there is some Bakker influence in there. I gather that the McRae Formation of New Mexico is equivalent to Hell Creek, so at least the plot was plausible. And the frustrated dealings with the BLM were spot on. On a related note, it was nice to see a nod to Sue, the T. rex at the Field Museum, even if Peter and Neil Larson were sadly missing from the brief description. I'm pretty sure the dinosaur dealer was based on a real person in Montana, but the guy's name escapes me.

Sadly, the ending is weak. If "Earthcore" is the roller-coaster ride that jolts to a stop leaving you breathless and your pulse racing, "Tyrannosaur Canyon" peters out a bit too early, leaving you time to recover. It's a neat ending, but perhaps a little too neat. I'd have liked to see more people die (which, let's face it, would happen if black ops were involved), and academia behaving more realistically. But as I said, it's a good summer read, and it's not intellectually taxing.

Brian, you'll like this one.

On This Day In 1983

Tech Tags: Baryonyx walkeri Natural History Museum

Today marks the 24th anniversary of the announcement of the discovery of Baryonyx walkeri, as the BBC reports in "Flesh-eating dinosaur resurrected". Have a look at Luis Rey's beautiful painting of the big bugger.

Now, on the whole, theropods don't excite me nearly as much as sauropods do. But I've always had a soft spot for Baryonyx. Since the restored dinosaur galleries opened (must have been 15+ years ago), Baryonyx has dominated one side of the hall - there's a great atmospheric image on Wikimedia here. I own a plaster replica of the "heavy claw" itself, and it and my 2lb geological hammer are close enough to my bed to give any prospective aggravated burglars a run for their money. And more recently, the DinoJaws exhibit had a full-sized animatronic Baryonyx hopelessly pursuing a bewildered looking fish.

It's not very palaeontological (I have no real knowledge of this dinosaur other than a vague idea of its location, age and probable diet), but I like Baryonyx. It's the only dinosaur in the Natural History Museum collection to be featured with another organism (it's just caught a fish), and it's a reminder that while Britain may be much smaller than the USA (being only a fraction of the size of Montana) and Mongolia, there were still some pretty evil carnivores kicking around over in Little Old England. Happy "birthday" Bazza!

A Plea To Parents

Tech Tags: Dinosaurs 3D Giants of Patagonia Mapusaurus IMAX

When you see an advert for Dinosaurs: Giants of Patagonia, and you decide it would be a spiffing idea to take your darling Tarquell and Jocasta to see it, don't assume that the big toothy thing on the posters is going to break into a rendition of "I love you, you love me". There is going to be blood. And guts. And said big toothy thing making a lot of loud noises. If your kids are too young and/or too wet to deal with dinosaurs, don't take them to see the bloody film. They'll only spoil it for the palaeontologists.

Other than the shrieks of the terrified spawn of sloaney yummy mummies, Paul and I thoroughly enjoyed the film. The science was sound (better explained and more balanced than most documentaries I've seen), although I had a couple of cringey grass+dinosaur moments (not good). The CGI was phenomenal, and the furry juvenile Mapusaurus was a nice touch. It was also funny - comic relief provided throughout by a bright blue Unenlagia doing really stupid things (falling off a cliff, popping up in the middle of a giganotosaur feeding frenzy). Breathtaking scenes followed first an Ornithocheirus, then a Quetzalcoatlus into the air. And of course the Argentinosaurus was a sight to behold. The sheer size of the thing! I must see if I can dig out a photo I have of the Patagonia exhibit when it was at the Field Museum. I have a brilliant photo of an Argentinosaurus vertebra with Jack Conrad for scale...

There weren't too many featured palaeontologists other than Rodolfo Coria (it really was his gig though), but José Bonaparte was briefly mentioned, and I don't know - a bandanna-wearing figure on top of a ridge bore a passing resemblance to Matt Lamanna (would be interested to know if he was filmed - I know he's done a lot of fieldwork in Patagonia).

Great fun - go see it.

This Week's Reading

Tech Tags: Tyrannosaur Canyon Douglas Preston Paul Anthony Anderson book

A care package arrived from my best friend Usch yesterday (will call her this evening to thank her for it). A couple of reprints on morphometrics and a book. One of her fellow students at Cornell gave her the book with the note:

Entertaining paleo-trash. Distribute as you like when you're done.

So she distributed it to someone she knew would go for this kind of thing.

Me.

At long last, I'm getting to read "Tyrannosaur Canyon" by Douglas Preston. I think it will take me about a week, only having time to read on the tube (15 minutes in the morning after I've done with the Metro and 35 minutes on the way home if I'm not packed in so tightly I can't get my arms up from by my sides). I've got as far as chapter 7 in the 15-20 minutes I had this morning.

It does look a bit trashy, but I think it will be fun. More to the point, with murder, corruption, moon-landing-conspiracies and "a monk who will redeem the world" (from the back cover blurb), it's precisely the sort of fucked up storyline my dear husband would come up with. Although Paul would always go with more despair, less trash.

I'll let you know what I think when I've finished it. I anticipate palaeontological incorrectness and pseudo-scientific bullshit. I can't wait.

Conspiracy

Tech Tags: Osterley Park wedding anniversary broadband

My computer is finally fixed, and running almost as new (except for the battery that only lasts 20 minutes). And I might be able to get a newer dinkier little laptop for very little money, but that's a way away just yet.

But now I'm finally back up at home, our broadband connection has gone on the blink. For some reason it's leapt back into life this evening, so Paul and I have jumped on to check e-mail and catch up on blogs and social networking sites. The engineer will be coming round on Wednesday morning, so Paul's staying home.

In the end it was a blessing, as we had nearly two days of being unable to use the computers, so we concentrated on the "real world" and enjoyed our wedding anniversary. Due to a car malfunction and some creative timetabling on the part of SouthWest Trains we didn't get into London for the television show, so we sat in the garden and chilled, and I did a bit of gardening. I'll update you on that when I get some photos. Last night we had our big anniversary dinner at Quaglino's in St James's. I was dead impressed that I could still fit into the bodice of my wedding dress, and because it was gold, it didn't look odd with my tuxedo suit. However, I have no idea how I managed to walk in the four-inch heels I wore on my wedding day, as my feet were in agony.

Today we had champagne, smoked salmon and croissants for breakfast, then walked to Osterley Park. With the weather forecast saying heavy rain, we decided to have a cream tea rather than packing a picnic. Just as well, as the heavens opened! We bought two little watercolour postcards of the front and back of Osterley Park House, and I'll frame them as a memento of our first wedding anniversary.

Here's to the next year, and many many more to follow.

Evolution Takes Six Years

Tech Tags: tropical blue moon butterfly Wolbachia science evolution creationists natural selection

The BBC News has reported that Butterfly shows evolution at work. You can read the abstract (and the full text if you're a subscriber) of "Extraordinary flux in sex ratio" on the Science magazine website. Sadly, I'm not a subscriber.

But according to BBC News (and other articles in today's press) the bacterium concerned infects male butterflies before they hatch. Evidently, over the natural course of mutation during gamete production, a gene that confers immunity to the bacterium on the butterfly has been produced. A male butterfly with the gene now survives long enough to reproduce, and because few males have survived, the immune males are the ones that supply their genetic information to the next generation. Even if the gene is dominant, on average only 50% of the embryos will have the immunity gene, but still a new population can be established where the males are resistant to the bacterial infection.

I'm delighted and excited at this. It won't convince the creationists that evolution happens, because they'll just say "we accept microevolution but not macroevolution" *cough*shiftinggoalposts*cough*, but it's more evidence. It reminds me of a Doonesbury cartoon about a creationist being offered a choice of TB drugs.

My one complaint (I always have a complaint don't I?) is the use of a narrative style of describing evolution. I've seen it before - "Archaeopteryx evolved wings so it could fly" (albeit in a very old dinosaur book before we had all the ancestral feathered theropods). In this case it's "butterflies had evolved a gene to keep the bacteria in check". It's all semantics, but these examples imply that the organism concerned made some kind of conscious decision to "grow" a gene or feathers. Or worse, that there was some design at work.

We need to ram home the fact that these are random mutations. Mutations occur all the time in every population. Some are deleterious - the organism dies. Some are disabling in other ways. Occasionally some are advantageous, as in this case. The sooner we emphasise the chance aspect of natural selection and evolution, the sooner we can get back to ignoring creationists.

10,000 B.C.

Tech Tags: 10,000 B.C. movie mammoths Mammoth Site Larry Agenbroad

Michael Barton on the Dinosaur Mailing List has just alerted readers to a film out early next year - 10,000 B.C.. Now you all know I am going to see it. This is precisely the sort of action movie that I enjoy, and also it has mammoths in it. And, as Jade from ANTM said:

Shooting with an elephant reminds me of ancient dinosaurs. Because they are in the dinosaur family.

Well that just clinches it for me. Anyway, I've had a look at the teaser trailer. I think the whole turning-the-lights-off all over the world is a little bit superfluous, but there will inevitably be some slack-jawed yokels wondering why they don't just get guns and shoot the Smilodon so I guess they need to be as explicit as they can.

But the thing that is bothering me, and it's bothering me a lot, is the presence of quite well-designed buildings. The towers appear to be strong constructions, with many storeys, and that just seems to be a millennium or two too early. I seriously am no expert in archaeology, and I rely heavily on articles like Wikipedia, but it does strike me that if the first settlement is known from Jericho, some 500 years after the time of this movie, then sophisticated towers are unlikely to have been kicking around at that point. Although I am sure that, as with the fossil evidence, the archaeological evidence merely shows the latest possible time at which an entity or artefact appeared, 500-1000 years seems a bit of a large gap.

I didn't get much of a look at the animals, as the trailer moves very quickly, but I had a feeling the mammoths in Eurasia pretty much died out around the time of the last Ice Age, which was about 12,000 years ago, if I recall correctly. Mammoths did survive, but only in isolated and island populations. So that bothers me, but as with the buildings issue, it's a niggle rather than something so appalling that I can't bear to watch the movie.

For some reason I can't get the link to the trailer to work on the official site, but Yahoo Movies fortunately has a version. I saw it twice today - once on my office computer which runs IE7, and once on the reception computer which runs IE6. It looks better in IE7.

On the subject of mammoths, I was delighted to see Baby mammoth discovery unveiled on the BBC news website, and even happier to read some soundbites from Dr Larry Agenbroad of the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, South Dakota. The Mammoth Site was my first real lab experience, and I lived on-site for two months. I was in the first wave of their very successful intern programme, and had an amazing summer. I doubt I would have achieved half of what I've done since 2002 without the opportunities I had at the Mammoth Site. I met Larry two years later at SVP in Denver, and had a lovely long chat to him.

I hope the Mammoth Site have been able to have some scientific input to "10,000 B.C.", or that at least the presence of a big movie about the beasts will encourage more and more visitors to stop off in the Black Hills.

Happy Lacertilian

Tech Tags: leopard gecko happy

This really made me smile. If an animal with no lips can look so truly delighted to be on this earth, then I think I should be able to crack a grin from time to time:

I've shown my ignorance of extant squamates, however, as I have no clue what it is. It looks like a gecko - probably Eublepharis macularius, the leopard gecko. And I think even the most mammal-centric bunny-lover (i.e. Paul) would have their heart melted by the little fellow.

(If this is your photograph erroneously uploaded onto I'm Really Sad, please let me know - I'll remove the link if you like, although I'd be happier putting up a properly copyrighted image and giving you some free advertising.)

Galaxy Zoo

Tech Tags: Galaxy Zoo Digital Automated Identification System

I heard this on Radio 4 this morning - Galaxy Zoo has opened. Because the human brain is far more sophisticated than any machine could possibly be, the researchers have recruited members of the public to identify galaxies. All the images are uploaded and ready to go. I've just registered, and passed the initial test to see if I'm a good galaxy taxonomist, so I'll be doing my part when I'm sitting in front of the television or on my lunch break.

I know it's not palaeontology, but all science is fascinating, and astronomy conjures up the same sense of adventure and the unknown (and incredible coolness) that dinosaur science does. When I used to leave my computer on all day I took part in the SETI and anti-cancer screensaver experiments (many years ago - not really possible now I have a computer that automatically logs itself off!), and it's great being part of a bigger study. Of course I'd be delighted if I could persuade the public to run my data for me, but I will never have as big a data set as an astronomer.

I do wonder whether DAISY would be suited to a study like this though. I used DAISY for one of my MRes theses in summer 2003, on Iguanodon teeth, and due to a small data set I obtained results that were almost nothing but noise, but on large sets it works very well and is highly accurate. Reading the 2005 article (I am so out of the loop!) I'm quite intrigued by the studies using XYZ coordinates, and wondering if three-dimensional morphometric studies could, in the future, incorporate DAISY studies to assess the similarity between organisms on many different levels.

But I digress. Go sign up for Galaxy Zoo.

Nearly Fixed

Tech Tags: PC Service Pack 2 Norton Ghost reinstallation Blaster worm Windows XP laptop Kylie

Day 12 of the dead computer saga. I'd probably have got it fixed over the weekend if I hadn't been away at my sister-in-law's birthday party, but it was much healthier for me to be out enjoying the sights and sounds of Manchester than being stuck in front of the screen (incidentally, the Kylie exhibition is absolutely fascinating - I'm not a big fan of her, but in the same way that no one can deny that Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" is a masterpiece even if they don't care for flowers, the dresses and the photographs are stunning).

So Fi sent me the Windows XP disk. That initially didn't work. So the computer guy at work, Raj, gave me a copy of Norton Ghosts, which I was able to use to get everything of importance off my C and D drives, especially my research. That's all saved, rather scarily, on pen drives at the moment, and I'm a bit freaked out knowing that the only "live" copy of the Cetiosauriscus paper I have is round my neck right now, but by tonight it will all be on my laptop again. With everything saved, I attempted a full reinstallation of Windows XP from the disk on Thursday night. That worked, but absolutely none of the drivers for ANYTHING worked - it wouldn't even acknowledge that I was capable of connecting to the internet. Paul fiddled with a few bits over the weekend, but on Monday night we realised that it was time to restore factory settings. In went the Toshiba restore disks.

One restored (and amazingly fast!) laptop later, I put in my anti-virus and anti-spyware software, and set about installing Service Pack 2. Unbeknownst to me, at this point the Blaster Worm hopped on for the ride and took over my system. My computer kept shutting down and restarting before Paul could perform any of the tasks that had been suggested online for stopping the worm. So we had no choice but to go back to the Toshiba disks and start again. This time, Paul found a website that had a piece of software that would disinfect and protect against Blaster, and that also stored Service Pack 2 as a downloadable file (irony of ironies, SP2 has anti-Blaster protection and the Windows firewall, but you can only get it from Microsoft through their website, and the moment you get on the internet you're exposed to the worm!). So I was very grateful to Paul for having a Mac which is pretty much immune to everything going online and for giving up precious smurfing time to help me out.

Service Pack 2 is installed, as is my anti-virus software (Paul downloaded the setup files onto the pen drive so I could install them without being online too). Next up was Internet Explorer 7, Adobe Reader, the obligatory Flash update and the Google software. Microsoft Office is going in this evening, and then I will have my e-mails to download again. Once that's in, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator can go too - I can download my website back onto my hard drive. And then I'll have to trawl for my morphometrics and cladistics software.

The only problem I have is that the installation replaced my C and D drives (of equal size) with just one C drive. So I'm after some partitioning software which will NOT wipe my entire drive. It's out there, and there are some decent free versions. Once I have that, I'll be storing programmes on C and documents on D. I have toyed with the idea of making three partitions so I can have one drive wholly devoted to research. I know more partitions make for a more stable and faster system, but I don't want to be a dick about it. I'd be really interested to hear from science or home-working types who have done this with their computers. How did you end up dividing your drives, and did you find an "optimal" number of drives?

So it looks *touch wood* as though the computer is good to go. I'm really grateful to Fi (for Windows XP), Raj (for Norton Ghosts), Ben (for pointing me in the direction of almost fool-proof partitioning advice) and of course my wonderful husband, who now knows more about PCs than he ever needed or wanted to know.

One Year On

Tech Tags: Dinosaurs 3D Giants Of Patagonia Osterley Park wedding anniversary Elaine Mayson SVP

It's our first wedding anniversary on Sunday, and I can honestly say I am as blissfully happy with Paul as I was the day I married him. We've lived in "interesting times", but the past 12 months have been the happiest of my life, without a doubt.

We have a fair bit planned for the weekend. On Saturday afternoon, we're going to watch the filming of the final programme in the Iraq Commission series. I was phoned up this morning and offered tickets, so I jumped at the chance to get all hot and bothered about politics, and Paul did too.

Then on Sunday we're off to Osterley Park, where we got married. The wedding photos are still up on Elaine Mayson's website. There's a fair on, and we're going to take a picnic. I hope the weather is good, otherwise we may be having the picnic in our lounge, then donning waterproofs to go and get an ice cream from the National Trust cafe!

Finally, I was lucky enough to win tickets to see Dinosaurs 3D: Giants of Patagonia at IMAX, so we're going to that a week tomorrow. I shall be back to offer my review, although I suspect it will all be summed up in the two words "freakin' awesome!". And yes, Paul does want to come with me.

Our present to each other is our five-day holiday before SVP this year. I have happily agreed to put more city break stuff in - so we have two days of wilderness in New Mexico, in between a day in Dallas and a day in San Antonio. We figured that tickets and e-bookings were a pretty good paper anniversary present.

They're Over Here

While looking for pictures of a granophyre (see earlier post) I found something quite distressing.

Biblical Creation Society 2006 Geology Workshop

I had always hoped that creationists and intelligent design proponents were very much in the minority in the UK, that most nutjobs were concentrated in the USA and that on the whole we were a sensible bunch who quite rightly considered the Bible to be at best a poorly-translated collection of nomadic folk tales (at least for the best part of the Old Testament).

But here's a "geological" fieldtrip that, while it does at least mention ages in terms of millions of years, it talks about the Palaeozoic era as being "diluvian", mentions the entire mid-Ordovician period lasting no more than 10 years and says that graptolites do not show evolutionary processes. This all just looks wrong. I'm upset that they're using the beautiful geology of Shropshire, where Sedgwick and Darwin formulated many of their theories, and where many of the geological periods of the Palaeozoic were defined. I feel as though those rocks should only be used "for good".

There's a whole section on scientific issues, and I don't know if I have the strength to read them all. I did sneak a look at their article Are birds feathered dinosaurs?, and choked at the final paragraph:

Scripture teaches us that birds had a separate origin from other animals. We are on firmer ground if we build our scientific hypotheses on biblical revelation rather than "shoe-horning" the data to fit evolution.

Although I had to laugh at the previous paragraph:

Perhaps the most crucial problem for the theropod hypothesis is that theropods are saurischian ("lizard-hipped") dinosaurs. If the theory of evolution is true birds ought to have evolved from the ornithischian ("bird-hipped") dinosaurs. This anatomical difference is so fundamental that it forms the basis for all dinosaur phylogenies (family trees), yet it is so often ignored in discussions of the evolutionary ancestry of birds.

If you're going to follow that route, then it follows that theropod dinosaurs ("beast-foot") gave rise to mammals, sauropod dinosaurs ("lizard-foot") gave rise to lizards and ornithopod dinosaurs ("bird-foot") gave rise to birds. So I'm not even going to try to explain it in scientific terms - the concept above is just silly. Bloody ridiculous.

Chemists Can Be Puerile Too

When I did geology, we got an awful lot of mileage out of perfectly reasonable geological terms. Part 1A Geology was forever punctuated with sniggers as we learned about cleavage, bedding planes, jointing, sheeted dykes etc. The highlight was of course the discovery of the existence of the mineral cummingtonite.

So I was delighted to find a wealth of molecules with silly or unusual names, linked from the Angry For A Reason blog. I've had a delightful lunch break, giggling like a naughty schoolgirl at some of these names.

I remember being told in either 1A or 1B Geology, that someone had discovered a mineral that exhibited red-amber-green pleochroism and was desperate to name the mineral "trafficlite", but they weren't allowed. I'd love to know what it was eventually named. And when we were on our Part II mapping projects, we ascended Carrock Fell, only to stumble across an outcrop the likes of which we had never seen before. The cry from Dave (first to hammer a bit off) was "what the fuck?!", and the rock became known as whatthefuckite. I honestly can't remember what it was anymore though, as Carrock Fell wasn't in my mapping area in the end - I did the western edge of the Uldale Fells. It might have been a granophyre. Freaking huge plagioclase feldspar crystals though.

Irrepressible Info

This morning, Radio 4 reported that the EU is planning to bring in legislation to make posting instructions on how to make a bomb on the internet a criminal offence. Apparently ISPs will be charged if they fail to block bomb-making websites from anywhere in the world. I had to laugh (if I hadn't I'd have cried) at an EU official saying he wouldn't let freedom of expression get in the way of increased security measures.

The Times Online appears to be one of the only news sources running with it at the moment.

I have problems with this on many, many levels. Firstly, I believe very strongly in freedom of speech and freedom of expression. It's why the little forum I founded is called Article 10. It is why I am left-wing. It is why I cry when I watch "V For Vendetta", and it is why I am against increased security measures to the detriment of our liberty. My husband and my brother both have Amnesty International's Irrepressible Info fragments on their sites. I used to, but just haven't got round to it since I got a new template. We in Western society like to look down on the countries targeted by Irrepressible Info, as uncivilised oppressive regimes. We are appalled when Google and Yahoo allow filters onto their China-specific search engines, and when pages are blocked by governments. Now, you may say that websites detailing how to make a bomb pose a threat to national security and to our Government. Well, that's precisely what the Chinese, Syrian, Saudi and Iranian Governments think about the sites they ban. How far down we have sunk if the UK may be featured on Amnesty's website.

Secondly, this really isn't going to work. For the simple reason that I know at least 650 people who did Part 1A Chemistry at Cambridge University in 1998 alone who could probably put together a bomb. In theory, we all know how to do it. An easily combustible fuel, preferably one for which oxidation is a highly exothermic reaction, and some means of detonating the fuel. Thanks to the newspapers, anyone in any doubt knows that chapatti flour is not so good as a fuel, but Calor Gas is excellent. From seeing the pictures in the tabloids and on the news websites, pretty much everyone knows that for maximum devastation you need nails and razor-blades strapped to the outside, and as of this morning the Mirror proudly proclaimed that we could buy all the ingredients from B&Q. So really, is it going to have any effect? Removing the websites will only make it ever so slightly more tedious a process for would-be bombers. Plus, these websites have been going for years and years. We were looking at all sorts of stuff in the computer room at uni. Not because us posh middle-class nancy-boys and -girls had designs on blowing up the Senate House, but because the internet was there, and it was a brave new world. Everyone in the world knows how to kill someone, whether or not the internet gives a step-by-step guide. But the fact that we're not all murderers is testament to the fact that there is sufficient deterrent, whether it be a moral view that it is wrong, a lack of desire to kill, or fear of being caught.

Finally, as a scientist, I wonder where the censorship will end. For example, take the Thermite Reaction. It was one of my favourite experiments in my A-level inorganic chemistry class, not least because my poor teacher was so nervous about it. It's a highly exothermic reaction, producing heat and light energy. It's used still, to weld railway lines together. Yet, if you do a quick google search, you get a complete step-by-step guide to the reaction. Now this is an exothermic reaction but not a fast one - the demo lab says:

Although a reaction may be "spontaneous" in the thermodynamic sense, it need not be so in the kinetic sense.

An explosion is nothing more than a kinetically spontaneous exothermic reaction. A bomb is a device that creates an explosion. So where do you draw the line? Are we actually going to have precise scientific definitions of what is legal to publish and what is not? Of course not. What politician actually ever takes notice of a scientific definition? No, we will have blanket bans all over the place. We will probably find that any website that mentions certain bomb-related keywords will be censored. Is this going to affect publications such as the Journal of Chemical Thermodynamics? Certainly. It screws over the "Materials & Methods" section of any good scientific paper. Anyone can subscribe to a scientific journal - it may cost £500 a year, but if a nice man in a cave in Pakistan is giving you the money then what have you got to lose?

So I worry for thermodynamicists, and I worry about where it's going to end. And I worry that sooner or later we will become the oppressed people of "V For Vendetta", and that we will be afraid of our Government. I'm a tiny bit scared that confessing to having a pretty good idea of the theory behind bomb-making will result in a fieldtrip to Paddington Green Police Station, but as Paul's PhD topic probably stuck us on a watchlist, I expect the authorities know exactly how dangerous I may or may not be.




I will sign off with a quote from Amnesty's website:

Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. It is one of the most precious of all rights. We should fight to protect it.

Dead Computer

My computer died on Saturday. All it needs is a simple reboot of the Windows XP installation disk, to update one teeny-weeny corrupt file. But the world's unfriendliest and possibly most incompetent technician at PC World told me the only option available to me (a holder of the PC Performance plan) was to buy Windows XP - BUY the whole thing to fix ONE file? I don't think so. But then he also couldn't read the terms and conditions of the plan and told me I was wrong when I was reading out the list of things that were and were not covered.

Suffice to say, I am unimpressed with PC World and their service, and I am wondering why I spent however much money it was on the PC Performance plan when it doesn't actually appear to cover anything that could go wrong with the computer. My friend Fi suggested I try to make my computer meet with an "untimely accident", but knowing my luck I wouldn't be covered for that either.

So for now it's all blogging from work, and the number of posts will be inversely proportional to the number of hours my boss is out of the office. Be advised.