Back To School #2: Alternative Lunchbox

Palaeontologically correct it may not be, but I thought the use of googly eyes made this superior to the lunchbox of a few weeks ago:

The Palaeontologist At The Airport

Over at Ask Doctor Vector, Matt has recounted his recent experience transporting a cow shinbone through an airport. It reminded me of an incident as I was returning home from SVP last year.

I loaded my bags onto the conveyor, did my usual striptease (since almost everything I own or wear has at some point set off the metal detector), and proceeded through to collect my bags. The Homeland Security officer was looking aghast at my bag's image on the screen, running it backwards and forwards, zooming in, flicking between different views.

Until she turned to me, looking extremely confused, and said "Ma'am, do you have a dinosaur in your bag?". When I replied in the affirmative, she just let it through with no further questions.


This was the dinosaur in question. Rather makes one wonder what the officer would have done if the answer had been "No"...

Science Online - Aftermath

As I said, yesterday I went to the Science Online London 2009 conference at the Royal Institution. Last year it was called Science Blogging, and the decision had been made to push the boundaries a bit further.

And it was bloomin' brilliant. The full programme is available online, and for me, the highlights were very much Blogging For Impact, Legal And Ethical Aspects Of Science Blogging and the live demo of Google Wave.

For starters, I was almost paralysed with awe as the blogging powerhouses Dr Petra and Jack Of Kent guided us through the legal and moral maze that is the blogosphere. Most of what they said would be applicable to any sort of blog, not just a science blog, but of course as it's legally sensitive information, if I told you what was discussed I would have to kill you.

Blogging For Impact swapped places with the legal talk, and the voice of Dave Munger, speaking through Second Life, boomed through the speakers - quite a religious experience. I hadn't really experienced the power of Second Life before, and found the fact that the slides advanced for us on the projector and for the Second Life "attendees" within the Second Life meeting place at the same time totally astonishing.

My dad said he realised a few years ago that he was getting old because he was starting to be bewildered by technology and fail to understand it. I feel exactly the same way about Google Wave, so I think this makes me officially old. But who knows - it might take off in such a way that in five years' time I'm using it like it's second nature. I know if, five years ago, you'd told me I would be using HTML tags seamlessly in my text I'd have laughed at you and attempted to get you to buy me a drink while you were clearly not in your right mind.

After a marathon booze-up with Chris and less than four hours' sleep the night before the conference, I didn't feel particularly perky by the time it had finished, so retreated home for a balti. By the looks of things the party continued for quite some time!

I won't be able to make it over to North Carolina for ScienceOnline 2010, but maybe given how easy it looks, I'll be able to join in via Second Life. My gratitude goes to the organisers - it was an excellent conference and the content and discussions more than made up for the surprise absence of breakfast...

Science Online - Blighty Edition

Righty-ho, I'm off to the Science Online London conference in a few minutes (once I've finished my cup of tea). I'll see some of you there, but for the rest of you, follow me on Twitter for the occasional sarcastic comment and the really occasional insightful comment.

Help Me Choose More OpenLab Posts

Submissions are flying in for OpenLab 2009. I could submit my own posts, but I've held off for now as I'm woefully bashful and awful at self-promotion, and I've been hoping that someone would actually think enough of my posts to submit one or two.

I was looking at the entries so far and was overjoyed to see that my post for a previous Accretionary Wedge, Back To The Jurassic, has been submitted by a very kind reader. Thank you whoever you are - you don't have to identify yourself, but just know it means an awful lot to me.

So I've wondered whether any of my other posts might be good enough to be considered, and I've come up with a list of eight that generated a fair bit of comment, got shared, reposted, retweeted etc, and that crucially weren't just a copy-and-paste job on a press-release with a pissy little one-liner comment:

• No-Brainers: Expanding Earth "Theory"
  
• Economically Beneficial Science
  
• How We Know
  
• Lost In Spain #2 (Suppl.) Parlilofograptus gen. et sp. nov.
  
• The Woman Who Looks Back At Me
  
• One Upon A Time In Keyworth
  
• Dropping The Hot Potato
  
• Interesting Science Quiz Results
  
• Scientists Not Involved In Policy

If any of you agree, I'd be really grateful if you'd click on the button below and submit one or two on my behalf:


And keep reading, because I'm sure I can manage at least one more half-decent post before the end of November...

You Owe Me, Bitch

My sister-in-law posted this to my Facebook profile yesterday evening.


It's from Kawaii Not, "the webcomic for cute gone bad". Which reminds me - have you hugged your gut flora today?

Sometimes Humanity Sucks

The Natural History Museum isn't just the South Kensington site - its bird collection, for example, is housed north of London in Tring, Hertfordshire. Many of the non-British readers might have been unaware of this; unfortunately the thieves who broke into the collection on 24th June and stole several rare bird skins were not ignorant of this fact.

A statement from the Museum is online here. Professor Richard Lane, the Director of Science at the NHM, said:

"The birds that were stolen formed part of the nation's natural history collection, painstakingly assembled over the last 350 years. The 70 million specimens looked after by the Natural History Museum are a resource of international importance in the development of scientific knowledge. Our ornithological collections are amongst our most heavily used and are consulted by researchers throughout the world, who either visit Tring or request loans from us. The knowledge gleaned from these collections can help protect endangered species and answer questions about the biodiversity of the world around us."

In this technologically advanced age, Hertfordshire Police now have an official YouTube channel, and released this video:


I didn't know we had a National Wildlife Crime Unit, but I'm pleased they exist and are involved in the investigation. One thing is clear - this is not the sort of thing that opportunistic burglars steal. These bird skins haven't been nicked in order to fund a crack habit. To my mind (uneducated as it is in criminology) this is far more organised - stealing to order, for rich private collectors perhaps. If that is the case, then perhaps there will be more leads than one gets with the average house burglary (although as I discovered, not even the irrefutable DNA of the burglar left in our house could make up for the incompetence of Ealing Police - ask me about that sometime...). I'm sure we'll all be hoping to hear shortly that the birds have been found and the thieves caught.

Happy Left-Handers Day, Fellow Southpaws!

Today, 13th August, is a cool day for me. It's my "half-birthday", meaning I am now just six short months from the big 3-0. It is also International Left-Handers Day, where (if you choose to celebrate) the 10% of us who have to exist in a right-handed world can turn the tables and designate a "Lefty Zone" (don't worry Paul, given this morning's smoothie incident you have enough trouble coping with ambidextrous and right-handed equipment, let alone stuff designed for a lefty, so consider yourself spared!).

So here's a list of everyday equipment that I have to struggle to use, use with my non-dominant hand or try to find a left-handed version:

• Pens (we need quick-drying ink or a pen that will adapt to the different way a lefty has to hold a pen to see what they've written, and the nib has to be able to cope with a lefty pushing rather than pulling the pen across the page - biros saved our lives!)
  
• Rulers (I have a left-handed ruler now, where the "0" is on the right hand side)
  
• Scissors (using a right-handed pair makes it very difficult to see the line that needs to be cut)
  
• Cake forks (never any point in giving me a righty cake fork because I won't use the "blade")
  
• Kettles (the level indicator is almost always set up so the handle is on the right hand side - I've adapted to using it right-handed)
  
• Computer mice (once upon a time there wasn't an option to swap over the buttons, or spend ages in computing classes switching the mouse to the other side of the keyboard so I learned to use it right-handed)
  
• Microwaves (all the buttons are on the right hand side)
  
• Can openers (thank goodness most of the plastic ones out now are ambidextrous)
  
• Ticket barriers (I still have a fumble at the ticket barriers as I remember to swap hands or cross my left arm over my body)
  
• Hockey sticks (despite an average of three lefty students per class my school had no lefty hockey sticks, so I played with a right-handed one and sucked badly at hockey)
  
• Computer keyboard (the sodding number keys are always on the right hand side, making fast data entry difficult for the lefty)

However, while these things are an annoyance (and probably much more so for people who cannot use their right hand for anything - I'm at least moderately ambidextrous with some things), I wouldn't be so foolish as to expect massive design changes in things like ticket barriers and microwaves. I'm sure if it bothered me enough I could get a left-handed keyboard, and stationery and kitchen equipment is well catered for at Anything Left-Handed.

A couple of years ago I mentioned research on the LRRTM1 gene, which may go some way to explaining why three members of my family were or are left-handed (out of 10 of my grandfather's descendants plus himself). It'll be interesting to see which hand Grandpa's great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren use, and whether the world will be a little less frustrating for them to live in.

Newsflash

Paul found my lost handlens. It wasn't in Norfolk after all but in our magazine rack in the living room.

Palaeontology Benefitting The World

As I have frequently ranted about on here, palaeontology is often seen as a frivolous pastime of no real benefit to the rest of science, let alone the world at large. Some people feel the same way about the Space Race, teflon frying pans notwithstanding. But here's an example, in New Scientist today:

How to digitally iron out chewed-up photos
A sophisticated imaging technique used to enhance fossils and ancient engravings may soon help you erase rips and creases from old photographs, using just an ordinary flatbed scanner. Tom Malzbender of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, and his colleagues pioneered a method of taking scores of digital photographs of a textured object from slightly different angles to create a computer model of the object's bumps and ridges.

There you go, a technique developed in the course of palaeontological and archaeological research could be a mainstream feature of flatbed scanner software in years to come.

Back To School #1: Kit

Lunchboxes ain't what they used to be. 25 years ago, when I started school, I had a plastic Peanuts lunchbox with a thermos inside. Now look at what you can buy:


And on the back is a load of NHM-sanctioned trivia:


Here's the question. Can a respectable biology lecturer at a further education college get away with having her sandwiches in this?

Survey On Women Geoscientists And Blogs

I'm sure I share most, if not all, the same readers as Kim at All Of My Faults Are Stress Related, but in case any have slipped through...

Kim and colleagues are running a survey to investigate how blogs and blogging might help women geoscientists. There is a full statement over at ...Stress Related, and while female and minority geoscientists are the subjects of the survey, they need a control, so as they say, anyone is welcome to participate.

The Daily Show Does Physical Anthropology

Does "interesting" mean something different in a scientific field than it does in normal life?

I saw this bandied about the interwebs a bit today (thanks to everyone who posted it), and laughed and laughed. This was a segment on yesterday's Daily Show, which I was able to watch this evening.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Human's Closest Relative
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance

Now, there was a teeny tiny bit of me that wondered if the people featured on John Oliver's interviews were actors. Well, that teeny tiny bit of me has been shut up once and for all, because here is Professor Jeffrey Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh, and here is Professor Todd Disotell of NYU.

The disagreement itself is out of my field, and I am sure it's been extensively covered elsewhere (can't find more than rehashed press releases though). But here's something I'm wondering: there can scarcely be an educated American who has not heard of Jon Stewart and the Daily Show. Are the interviewees genuinely under the impression that they're being interviewed for a serious (i.e. non-satirical) news report, or do they know that this will be gently mocked on a late-night cable show?

And do NYU have a rule that faculty must wear an NYU polo shirt when giving television interviews, or is it a personal choice by Prof. Disotell? That's quite a nice touch.

Neither anthropologist is portrayed in a particularly flattering light, although no interviewee of John Oliver ever is. I feel as though I should be pissed off with this, not least because I rail against tabloid mockery of scientists as "boffins". But I'm not. I wonder if it's because Oliver sends himself up as an interviewer too.

Exposure To Science In Magazines

Just under two weeks ago, I posted about a quiz testing the science knowledge of the average American, with results broken down by demographic. I noted that the only questions where women scored more highly than men were the life/health science stories, and we got a nice bit of discussion going as to why this might be. KJHaxton hit the nail on the head:

I wonder if it is to do with they types of media each gender is exposed to - women's magazines may be more likely to carry health information, programs (esp in the US) pitched at men focus on more physical things.

So I was tickled to see an example of this in action today.


Fellow palaeo-blogger and far-too-occasional drinking buddy Dave Hone is having a busy week, partly caused by this article. I've only just asked Dave for a PDF (and he might not even have a copy himself yet!), but here's the gist. Adult dinosaur bones are not commonly found with predator tooth marks, nor are adult bone fragments found in the stomach contents of predatory dinosaurs. Add in a distinct lack of juveniles preserved in the fossil record (along with the caveat that a fair bit of this may be attributed to taphonomic bias) and observations of extant predators tending to go for juvenile prey as an easier target than a sick or elderly adult and certainly easier than a healthy adult, and one can hypothesise that adult theropods were preying on predominantly juveniles.

Dave's got a comprehensive post on the paper on his blog, and he says himself it's almost as long as the paper, so I recommend going over and having a good read. But this is the bit that tickled me: it got picked up by GQ Magazine!

I don't know how many countries GQ has reached, but (originally short for Gentlemen's Quarterly) it is at the higher end of the spectrum of men's glossy magazines. It has the articles that all you boys say you read Playboy for. It has fairly intellectual (for a glossy) journalism, and a low tits quotient. The article itself is pretty good - there is no mention of the word "boffin", they've spelled "palaeontologist" correctly, remembered to capitalise the genus name of the dinosaurs concerned, and pretty much explained the journal article for non-scientists. This may be the very first time the word Lethaia has featured on any men's magazine website, but let's hope it's not the last.

Here's the kicker though - there is no way, if I go to the Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan or Glamour websites, that I would see this article or anything like it. I searched for the word "dinosaur" on each website, and all I got was a designer's fashion show where he/she had been "inspired" by One Million Years BC.

*facepalm*

It really does seem as though women are only allowed to be interested in science that directly affects them as wives and mothers and consumers of expensive cosmetics. It's okay to inform men about cool science that (sorry Dave) won't have any impact on their daily lives, because men like cool stuff. Maybe dinosaurs would make it into the women's glossies if they were suddenly found to have been bright pink.

Your thoughts, oh loyal readership?

Fifteen Books

Sucked in (I blame Christopher)...

Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

Oh man. Let's go for some kind of chronological order here then - order in which I read them.

1. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
My mum read me my bedtime stories when I was young. The Hobbit is one of the first I remember her reading to me. Mum is not the biggest reader of the family - for a good 20 years she worked so hard keeping our family going that she didn't have time to read books for her own pleasure. But she put on such amazing voices and accents, and I still maintain her Gollum is better than Andy Serkis'.

2. Hocus Pocus Diplodocus by Tom Stanier
I think this book really sealed my fate as a palaeontologist. I memorised every single poem here, and can still recite on demand the ones about trilobites and about Diplodocus, usually after a few drinks.

3. Down With Skool by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle
While my dad didn't often read to me, he would make up stories (often ending, surprisingly early in the plot, with all the protagonists being run over by a truck), and he would supply books for me to read. This is just the first of many books thrust into my sticky hands. Anyone who has read Private Eye will be familiar with classic phrases such as "chiz chiz" and "as any fule kno". Written from the perspective of a cynical schoolboy over 50 years ago, it's still astoundingly fresh, and probably compulsory reading for anyone entering the teaching profession.

4. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
I cowered behind the couch when I first saw a Vogon on the television, but found the book much more to my tastes by the age of about 10. Technically I should have put this right at the top, as Dad read the first two chapters over and over again while Mum was in labour with me, making it the first book read to me.

5. Carrie by Stephen King
There is no overweight teenage girl who does not wish that she could exact her revenge on her tormentors in a particularly gruesome manner. I was an overweight teenage girl and I was no exception. I read Carrie repeatedly, even studying it for GCSE English as an example of an antiheroine.

6. Contact by Carl Sagan
Almost at the same time as I was plotting the demise of my classmates, Dad handed me another book, and gave me a better female role model in the form of Ellie Arroway. She had to develop a "physics voice" - to be louder and more piercing than her male colleagues. Sound familiar?

7. Soul Music by Terry Pratchett
And thus began my love affair with the Discworld. It's probably one of the easiest to start on, with plenty of pop culture references. But after that you should start at the beginning and read every single book through in chronological order.

8. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Truly haunting. It has one of the most famous opening lines of any novel: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again". Rebecca, the first Mrs de Winter, overshadows the narrator (the second Mrs de Winter) so much, not only in the story but in the writing of the book itself, for we never discover the narrator's name.

9. Being Dead by Jim Crace
In 1997, Jim Crace, a confirmed atheist, appeared on the BBC Radio 2 show "Good Morning Sunday" (known as the Sunday morning God slot in our household), having won the Whitbread Novel Award for Quarantine, a book about Jesus' 40 days and nights in the wilderness. My mother and grandmother searched high and low for the book, and I think in the end Grannie spoke to her bookshop-owning friend, who ordered it direct from the publisher. Being Dead was a later book, discussing death. It's sometimes uncomfortable reading, but written with sensitivity.

10. The Dinosaur Heresies by Robert Bakker
I bought this at the AMNH in July 1997, on a trip to New York, and I'd pretty much read it before I came home. Twelve years on, many of the "heresies" are now well-supported mainstream science, but I fell in love with the pen-and-ink illustrations, and the vivid way Bob Bakker defended his theories.

11. The Making Of The Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
Required reading for my "History and Philosophy of Science" course at Cambridge, and one of the most detailed (and thickest) accounts of scientific discovery I have read.

12. The Dinosauria by David Weishampel, Peter Dodson and Halszka Osmólska
This was my 21st birthday present from my parents - the first edition in paperback. It was the first real dinosaur textbook I owned. Given the expense of textbooks, I'd been forced to stick with simply the course textbooks, but this was the first degree-level book I'd bought for fun. And even though the second edition is out, there is no way I'll pass with my first edition.

13. An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore
I saw the film before I read the book. And I fell asleep at the lowest, most depressing point of the film. When I woke, I wondered what on earth the point was of doing anything myself to "save the world", knowing that the big industries would cancel out manyfold whatever I did in my own little way. Fortunately the last 15-20 minutes is more uplifting. The book has the same message - but if you get about halfway through, don't stop until the end!

14. The Devil Within by Stephanie Merritt
This time last year I needed to know I was not alone. I read the back cover blurb and something struck a chord. Stephanie Merritt's honest account of her battle with bipolar disorder may not be for everyone. Churchill had a black dog; she had "pterodactyls". I think I had pterodactyls too.

15. Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham
I mentioned this book in my Summer Reading post a few weeks ago. This is my favourite of the Wyndham books, and one that I'm sure I'm going to return to again and again. Paul is reading it at the moment, and finds absolutely no sympathy with either of the main characters, which I think is an important thing with this book. I, however, do have sympathy for Diana, the scientific, aloof, bloody-minded, self-serving, lonely heroine...

I ain't tagging any of you. This is already one of the longest posts I've written - it took less than 15 minutes to think of the 15 books, but one helluva lot longer to write about why, stick in a nice link so you can buy the book if you like and format the post nicely. Which means this is tequila time.