Turning The Interwebs Blue

Fuck yeah!!

Thanks to Dinosaurs And The Bible: A Creationist's Fairy Tale, who's far more polite than I am...

Tech Tags: time-wasting swearing cussing

Full Of Black Sheep, But Not Bitter

I'm back. Castleton was, as always, great fun. Ironically, Paul was really disappointed with the bookshops and I was really disappointed with the garden centres. But we had excellent weather, considering we were told to expect heavy rain over the entire weekend. Apart from one unwelcome hail storm halfway down Jacob's Ladder (leaving us clinging to the fence for dear life for 10 minutes or so) we had sunshine, strong winds and the odd overnight dusting of snow.

On Friday we ascended Kinder Scout from Grindsbrook Clough, crossing west over the top and coming down the Pennine Way (and therefore Jacob's Ladder). Saturday we did the Castleton ridge walk, hiking up Winnats Pass (all the bloody ferns have died back for the winter and I couldn't see a chuffing thing!), across to Mam Tor (choosing to go over the crumpled remains of the road rather than over the top of the hill, given the high winds), then up to Back Tor and Lose Hill. And on Sunday we hit the bookshops before going on to Chatsworth House, which you may recognise as Mr Darcy's house Pemberley in the recent film version of "Pride And Prejudice".

Crucially all this was powered by a full English breakfast (with black and white pudding!), cooked by Alan and served by Jenny at the Four Seasons, dinner at a different pub every night (choice determined by the availability of meat pie) and many pints of Black Sheep and Moonshine. I also introduced Paul to the concept of Pot Noodles (it simply must be the beef and tomato flavour - no other one will do) as hiking food, and he was more than happy to carry the thermos.

Coming up over the next week, the fascinating geology of the area we visited, and fun and games with cycad seeds...

Tech Tags: Castleton High Peak Kinder Scout Jacob's Ladder Mam Tor holiday

I Need A Holiday

So it's just as well I'm going on one tomorrow. For four days the ethical husband and I will be yomping in the greatest national park in the UK. Please don't burgle our house. What's the weather forecast? Rain, sleet and snow. Deep joy. The thermal underwear is packed, and a ready supply of beer and pie money.

The plan to have 48 hours away from the interwebs and then get right back onto it didn't work out too well. I'm definitely burnt out. I've seen so many things I want to blog about but I simply do not have time or energy. Such as:

• Young women top unpaid work list - not impressed but not surprised.
• Parker's response to Spencer Lucas - Bill Parker, one of the plaintiffs in the Aetogate case, has published his response to Spencer Lucas' "defence". It's a good point-by-point reply, and if you've been following the case, you should check it out.
• The Grand Old Man of science fiction - Arthur C Clarke died yesterday, and my husband wonders who can possibly fill the gaping hole. We've lost Clarke, we lost Carl Sagan a while ago, and we lost Isaac Asimov before that. They were the science fiction writers that got our parents' generation interested in science. Most of my generation can claim to have been drawn in via these three men too. Who is worthy to take on the responsibility of bringing science to everyone?
• a Life well spent - my brother-in-law writes a very touching tribute to David Attenborough, who is at last retiring, and wonders who could replace him. I say Chris Packham. Or possibly Charlotte Uhlenbroek.
• Quite possibly the scariest research ever to hit the geosciences community - beer is bad for publishing papers. Fuck. Although according to a comment on Bayblab, the data set is 34 people and the r² is 0.55. So maybe it's not all bad news.

I bought myself two ferns yesterday. They were the same price as a tub of Haagen Dazs, and will make me happier for longer. A Woodwardia that will be huuuuuuge one day, and a Dryopteris sieboldii whose fronds look like theropod dinosaur footprints! I am most definitely now a pteridophile (watch all the Sun readers getting outraged because they think that means I'm a kiddy-fiddler...). I also now have a copy of the Chiltern Seeds catalogue (despite tai haku's advice - it came because Paul bought me the pack o' cycad seeds, so I'm now a customer).

I owe a lot of people e-mails. I'm sorry - it's not going to get sorted until I'm back from holiday. There's one task I absolutely have to do before we go away tomorrow, but I'm so tired I think I'll have to go to bed and attempt it tomorrow morning. Normal service should be resumed after Tuesday, but if you're suffering Ethical Palaeontologist withdrawal, tune in to High Peak Radio this Sunday between 2am and 3am to hear yours truly discussing the Great Earthquake.

Tech Tags: holiday Peak District ferns Aetogate Arthur C Clarke David Attenborough

Happy Birthday "Ask A Biologist"!

Today is the anniversary of the founding of the Ask A Biologist website. If you haven't already made use of the website (and why not?) today is the perfect day to visit, have a look round and ask your burning biology question. Go on! Do it.

Tech Tags: Ask A Biologist biology Q & A forum education link love

Why We Need More Scientific Literacy #9

Fowl Colour
You heard it here first - Charles Darwin was wrong about evolution. Well, in chickens anyway. A study of the birds' legs has revealed they are not descended from one species, as the biologist thought. Yellow-skinned chickens have yellow legs because they lack a gene which breaks down pigment in cornfeed. But their white-skinned cousins do have the DNA, meaning the two do not share the same ancestor. The finding may also explain flamingos' pink hue, Swedish scientists said.

This greeted me in the so-called science column, "Minicosm", in the Metro early last week. I know it's a glorified comic, but the problem is that 4 million Londoners think it's a newspaper and read it as such. And the first sentence really bothers me, for obvious reasons. Creationists like to use any example of evolutionary biology/palaeobiology overturning an older conclusion as "proof" that evolution is fictional, and seriously - the Metro is not helping matters. Do they have creationists writing the Minicosm or just shit writers who know nothing about science?

Actually, I know it's just an attention-grabbing headline (and you may sit there with a wry smile on your face saying "well it worked, didn't it?"), and that the chicken evolution part is a grossly oversimplified but generally okay report of the journal article (or press release) itself. Evolution is complicated - interbreeding can happen. Chicken biologists have their work cut out for them trying to construct the molecular phylogeny of the domestic chicken (although I'd love to know what they do in situations where there has been interbreeding, and I'd love to know whether palaeontologists think it happened to any extent in dinosaurs or other extinct animals).

But my real issue with these sorts of headlines and sensationalist stories is that a depressingly large number of people have now selectively read it and processed the information that "Darwin was wrong about evolution, therefore evolution is wrong, I know this because I read it in the newspaper".

My only consolation is that most of these people have also stopped taking all their heart/liver/cholesterol/anti-depressant medication because the Daily Mail have told them it can kill them, so they'll be dead soon. There - natural selection in its purest form...

Tech Tags: scientific literacy media nobs evolution Charles Darwin chickens creationism Monday rant

What Happens When You Report Palaeontological Discoveries In Scotland

At least in the Scotsman and its associated papers, they're treated with indifference, and the conversation quickly comes back round to "fitba"... With thanks to Janet Vandenburgh, who sent this to the Dinosaur Mailing List, I've just been reading a short Edinburgh News article from 3 March on the discovery of a Triassic leaf fossil in Liaoning, China, one that had previously only been found in Gondwanan assemblages.

I've googled the hell out of this story and can't find any other links to a fuller story, or any kind of press release on the NMS website. How infuriating!!

What I've managed to glean from various web-based sources is that Dicroidium is a genus of seed-fern, similar to Glossopteris (which I remember from my Part II Palaeobotany class), and that Umkomasia is the name given to the female reproductive structures. So Nick Fraser has found both the leaf and the reproductive organs of an organism previously thought only to have existed in the southern hemisphere in the Triassic period.

What I don't remember from those lectures is what the flora of the northern hemisphere was like in the Triassic, and whether this is significant because this type of seed fern was found only in the southern hemisphere, or because seed ferns full stop were only found in the southern hemisphere. More googling needed...

Still, the article is well worth a look for the comments! Paul will be on hand to translate...

UPDATE: I now have the DOI for the paper and the full citation, courtesy of Brian Axsmith, the corresponding author. Thank you Brian!

Zan, S., B.J. Axsmith, N.C. Fraser, Liu F. & Xing D. 2007. New evidence for laurasian corystosperms: Umkomasia from the Upper Triassic of Northern China. Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology. DOI: 10.1016/j.revpalbo.2007.12.002.

Tech Tags: National Museums of Scotland Nick Fraser Brian Axsmith Umkomasia Dicroidium Liaoning Triassic palaeobotany

Creationism Infiltrates Nasty Cheap High Street Fashion

I saw this while out shopping on Saturday afternoon. I'm trying to work out what is more offensive:

1. The anti-evolution sentiment
2. The fact that the image is of a chimpanzee, which is an ape not a monkey
3. The needless diamante "bling" on the t-shirt, or
4. The fact that they're charging £60 for the jacket over the top

Or indeed all of the above? But for the fact that the t-shirt is probably grossly overpriced, I'd be tempted to get that for Paul so he can wear it at SVP at the same time that he does his traditional name badge defacement. SVP probably aren't aware that a "professor" from the Kansas City Community College of Bible Studies and Jeebus attends each year...

Tech Tags: evolution creationism monkeys really silly non-scientific post

Trouble Brewing

Just saw this on my New Scientist feed: Grand Canyon flushing experiment criticised. I knew that this was happening, but am only just starting to sit down and consider the implications. And I shall try not to tread on the toes of any sedimentologists. I know that when a river forms a meander (most people in the UK at least, when they think of a river, are thinking of a meandering river), sediment is eroded from the outside of the meander and deposited on the inside of the meander as a point bar. Sediment travels downstream. And it stands to reason that if you stop the sediment from travelling (say, by shoving a great big dam in the way), there will be more deposition than erosion directly upstream of the dam, and more erosion than deposition for quite some way downstream of the dam.

So I understand why it was deemed necessary to try to restore the balance within the Grand Canyon ecosystem. CNN have reported that the flood has already taken place, and it's hoped that the sediment carried downstream will restore the sand banks, but of course this will only be temporary.

According to CNN, four fish species have become extinct since the Glen Canyon dam was built, and a further two pushed to the brink of extinction. And on a more selfish human level, half the camping space in the canyon has been lost (I'd say this was more likely to get people to sit up and take notice, but I suspect the people who would care about a campsite in the canyon floor are pretty environmentally conscious anyway). I appreciate the need for renewable energy. Hydroelectric dams have always seemed the most invasive and least environmentally neutral, given the sheer area of habitat that has to be destroyed to create the reservoir behind the dam, and the rapid decrease in water flow downstream.

The superintendent of GRCA has suggested that the flooding really should be carried out every spring, and that's not a bad idea. Ideally it should be more frequently, I'd have thought, but I can see the logistical problems of clearing the camp grounds and warning visitors on a frequent basis. I am also aware of the possible problems associated with taking a power station offline or reducing output to zero, and can see that somewhere along the spectrum, a balance needs to be struck.

The canyon has been flooded before, in 1996 and 2004. It's flooded yesterday and today, and it'll flood again in 2013. So, river ecologists - how well do rivers respond to massive flooding every four years or so, versus milder flooding every year? Surely the latter is better? And while the dam was built long before (((Billy))) was born, I'd be interested to hear his views as he grew up at GRCA (or at least as many of his views as he is allowed to give!).

Tech Tags: Grand Canyon National Park Colorado River Glen Canyon dam hydro-electric power sand banks river ecology

Whitewash

Well we saw that one coming didn't we? The ABQ Journal has just broken the news - "Review finds museum scientist innocent". The full gory details are available in a PDF on the ABQ Journal website too. If you can make it through the 23 pages of Spencer Lucas' wide-eyed butter-wouldn't-melt-in-his-mouth defence, you can enjoy the toe-curling arslikhan investigation which reads more as though Lucas is winning the Romer Simpson Medal than undergoing an investigation of his alleged unethical behaviour.

I'll summarise - Lucas accuses Darren Naish of defamation, he says it was all Bill Parker's fault and that he didn't tell them that he was planning to rename the specimen, and that it was one innocent mistake for them not to acknowledge Jeff Martz's thesis. Now, as Chris said in his post "Napalm is not a good fire extinguisher", there would have been a right way and a wrong way to go about certainly the problem with Jeff's thesis. Wouldn't a conscientious researcher have apologised for the simple mistake, and since it was an in-house publication, tagged on an addendum to a later edition? I know I would have done, but then I'm a young, un- or under-employed worker, so what do I know?

The whole thing stinks to high heaven, and is in my opinion what would be known in the UK as "getting off on a technicality". And I think it's particularly telling that there is a poll on Lounge of the Lab Lemming and at the time of writing, 12 people would rather work with Marcus Ross than with Lucas. How damning is that? We'd rather collaborate with a creationist!!

Ugh. I'm going to have dinner now, but I shall be updating this post throughout the evening as more and more links come in. Feel free to add your own links to the comment form here, and anyone subscribing via RSS check back regularly as I don't think amendments come up on a feed.

Update: The ethical husband has offered his views on the legal aspects of the case, at On with my life....

Tech Tags: Aetogate Spencer Lucas Department of Cultural Affairs New Mexico whitewash miscarriage of justice palaeontology ethics plagiarism

Waiting

The palaeontological community is holding its collective breath, waiting for the outcome of the DCA's investigation into the allegations of plagiarism. I'm periodically checking Mike Taylor's website, as I'm sure he'll have the news up as soon as he hears. As of the time of writing, it's 1:40pm here, so what, about 6:40am in New Mexico? We'll not hear anything for a couple of hours at least.

There's an article in the ABQ Journal (free access after a short advert) discussing "Who controls access to research on fossils". It makes for eye-opening reading. Now, I've worked for two private museums in South Dakota, and both of them have a more open policy about fossil access than is being reported here. I'm particularly concerned that the fossil in question was found on public land. It's not a discussion I want to have just now (maybe someday), but Paul and I have been interested for a while in a project on the law of fossil discovery, ownership and movement. Suffice to say this has all been duly noted!

I don't normally dedicate songs, but this one's been going round and round my head. It's one of my Desert Island Discs (hey, one day I might be famous enough to be invited on the show!), and I love the sentiment behind it. I defy you not to feel a little shiver when the strings come in towards the end of the song. So this is for everyone else who's waiting today.

Tech Tags: ABQ Journal New Mexico Spencer Lucas plagiarism Department of Cultural Affairs ethics palaeontology fossils public land Dixie Chicks

What Have You Forgotten?

The Declaration of Independence
Think I could tell you that first sentence but then I'm lost

I can't begin to count the theories
I've had pounded in my head that I forgot

I don't remember all that Spanish or the Gettysburg address
But there is one speech from high school I'll never forget

"Cleaning This Gun (Come On In Boy)" by Rodney Atkins

My mistake earlier in the week got me thinking. I graduated in June 2002. The last time I sat a full-on geophysics exam was May 2001. I haven't done any classes in palaeoenvironments since May 2004 (not examined). I last sat a sedimentology exam (albeit one that was poorly-written and quite blatantly wrong in many places) in December 2003. I have not even thought about using cross-polars to look at a thin section since December 2000.

I have forgotten an awful lot of geology.

I can remember the geological periods (handy really), largely down to Simon Conway Morris telling us that "China Owls Seldom Devour Clay Pigeons, They Just Chase Past Each Other Making Preposterous Puns" (to be honest, when nothing I study was around before the Triassic, nor did it make it past the end of the Cretaceous, the Cenozoic era passes me by...). But I can't remember the approximate ages of each period (except the Mesozoic). I can remember what quartz, garnet and plagioclase feldspar look like in thin section, but amphiboles and pyroxenes would be a mystery to me now (incidentally, Union College has some awesome thin-section photographs!). I evidently can't remember some basic geophysics, and I even forgot some rather obvious sedimentological observations when I attempted to climb up the lee side of a sand dune at Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park...

I've even forgotten some palaeontology! I don't know how, but I'm having to relearn sauropod osteology. Fortunately SV-POW! is the greatest online resource for this EVER (coupled with some very thick textbooks and review papers), and the three blokes have been very helpful, not to mention patient.

But all this got me wondering. What have you already forgotten? Geophysicists - do you still remember which phylum segmented worms are in, or how old the first land plants are? Sedimentologists - do you still remember what metamorphic facies you see at a certain pressure and temperature? People who left scientific fields for other professions - do you still remember your science, or is it incredibly rusty?

And pretty much anyone - do you remember what you learned at school/college/university? What subjects did you study and when did you realise you'd forgotten some of it? And is there one really odd snippet of information that you'll never ever forget?

Tech Tags: navel-gazing geology academia Rodney Atkins teaching university