Surviving In Britain #2: Eating Out

Oh you Americans. You have both the best and the worst restaurants on the planet. You will find most of them in Britain. You have probably heard it said (or maybe said yourself) that the British only had the Empire for the cuisine (totally failing to take into account the fact that American food without the immigrant influences is pretty dire). So here is my guide to eating in the UK.

Breakfast

The fundamental unit of breakfast is the Full English Breakfast. If you have booked a Bed & Breakfast room, this will be included in your rate. Otherwise I heartily recommend finding a café or "greasy spoon" which serves breakfast. You will receive, for about £3-4, eggs (fried, sunny side up - don't even contemplate asking for them any other way because we don't know what those other ways are), sausages (not frankfurters!), bacon (real bacon with actual meat on it rather than fried fat), baked beans (these are more like the beans in "Pork 'N' Beans" than your own baked beans), fried bread (hey, don't criticise - you put syrup on your sausage), possibly fried tomatoes or mushrooms, and if you're really lucky, black pudding. Black pudding is basically a blood sausage, and you'll get a couple of slices of it. Don't knock it until you've tried it. If you're a vegetarian, just have muesli or something - the Full English is not for you. The coffee will not be brilliant, and you will certainly not get free refills from anywhere unless explicitly stated. I suggest drinking tea for the week.

Lunch and Dinner

Since you'll probably be going to the same sort of places for each meal, let's combine the two. First up - soft drinks, soda, pop, whatever you want to call them. With a few exceptions (Pizza Hut, TGI Fridays, Subway) you will rarely get free refills on soft drinks. Some restaurants will charge an extortionate amount of money for non-alcoholic drinks. If you go to a Chinese restaurant, your best deal is to have green tea, as that is usually refilled for free. If you ask for water, make it clear that you want tap water, since restaurants have to provide you with free tap water if you want it. Our water does not taste of chlorine.

Our meal portions are generally smaller than yours, and more expensive for what you get. You will not have free chips and dip while you wait for your main course, or all you can eat salad. However, what you see on the menu is what you pay. Tax is included (and this applies to all prices for any goods or merchandise). Your only additional charge will be the waiting staff's tip (more on that with etiquette). If you're on a limited budget, try Wetherspoons pubs (if you can find one). They usually have two meals for £7-8, and they're filling. Wetherspoons also have real ales on tap (you will never go back to Budweiser), and they're often under £2 a pint, which is a price I haven't seen since my student days. If you are at a nicer restaurant though, you can usually get a doggy bag for your leftovers. It never hurts to ask.

What you won't be able to get

You will not be able to get Mountain Dew or root beer. You can get Dr Pepper though. You can buy lemonade and you can buy a Milky Way chocolate bar, but they will not be what you're expecting. You will be unlikely to find iced tea. Bread does not taste sweet over here. Our cheese is delicious. We're not big on items flavoured with peanut butter, although we're increasingly seeing Reese's products available. Kebabs are what British people eat at 3am when they're drunk and have the munchies. Do not consider going into a kebab shop prior to this point.

Surviving In Britain #1: Public Transport

It has been an exhausting few weeks, and I'm only just into my first week of teaching at a Popular Further Education College. But I promised myself and some fellow palaeontologists that I would do a short series of posts on how to survive in the UK.

The reason for this is that SVP is coming to Bristol next week - it's the first time the conference has ever been held outside North America, and this is to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin Of Species. The most popular question I've been fielding from American and Canadian friends has been sorting out our terminally bewildering public transport system, and mostly the trains.

Firstly, to prepare yourselves for travelling in the UK by train, read the guide at The Man In Seat Sixty-One. He can explain how our system works far better than I can, and to be honest I'd only be rehashing what he says. As a general rule, flexibility is inversely proportional to the cost of the ticket - if you get a very cheap ticket it is likely to only be valid on the specific train you want to book.

Monday to Friday before about 9:30am is peak travel time, and you probably won't be able to get discounted rates. Some companies also restrict travel between 4pm and 6pm as that's the afternoon commute. It is impossible for a train to sell out of tickets, but you may not be guaranteed a seat, and they really can pack you on like cattle on the way to the slaughterhouse. We used to have a lovely national railway system called British Rail, but then it all got privatised (this has made a lot of people very angry). This is why there are so many different companies, all calling their tickets different things, and with such variation on routes and prices.

However, if you're booking travel from London to Bristol, then this route is served by First Great Western from London Paddington station. You can book with non-UK credit cards, and you can collect your tickets from the self-service points at the major stations.

If you're planning on spending a week or so in London (and especially if you're planning to take buses around the city), you will find it cheaper to buy an Oyster card. This can be loaded with a weekly pass (or longer) or simply loaded with cash to pay as you go. It will save you 50p a day on a daily travel pass for whatever zones you travel in, and if you take the buses only it will cost £1 per journey rather than £2. This will make it well worth the £3 deposit you have to pay to load it.

Beware that the London Underground is not 24-hour, although it is only really shut for five hours tops overnight. We do have night buses, but they aren't frequent and unless you're a jammy sod like me and have a night bus stop at the bottom of your road, you'll have a long and increasingly sober walk from wherever the bus gets you to. Taxis are expensive, but a licensed black cab is trustworthy. We have had problems with unlicensed mini-cabs, and if you are a young woman on your own just get the black cab.

Most of the city of London is pretty safe, and applying the same common sense to London as you would to any American town or city is sensible. Don't go down dark alleys if you're on your own, don't flash your cash around or wear your very expensive DSLR round your neck, and keep alert for disturbances or fights. I personally would not go to Finsbury Park, Hoxton, Brixton or anywhere with a postcode beginning with an E alone after dark. But I have many friends who live in or near those areas who are similarly terrified of the area of London in which I live!

Coming up, eating out, the language barrier and etiquette.

Millennium Vulture

This is a brief post to celebrate International Vulture Appreciation Day 2009.


Back in March of this year, I spent 10 days in northern Spain as a driver for a UCL fieldtrip. The primary focus of the fieldwork was the brilliant sedimentology, structural geology and sequence stratigraphy of the area. I was also fascinated by the botany of the region, and some of the other drivers were keen birdwatchers. I deliberately hadn't brought my SLR camera with me, and rather regretted it, as I'd probably have been able to borrow the other guys' lenses and get some better shots than this one with my digicam:


I think these are griffon vultures (Gyps fulvus). But to be honest this was as close as we got to them! What I would have loved to see was a Lammergeier (Gypaetus barbatus), known locally as a quebrantahuesos, but we never went high enough into the Pyrenees to see them. On a free morning, I visited the Eco Museum in Ainsa Castle, home to the Fundación para la Conservación del Quebrantahuesos (the site was down when I visited just now - maybe it'll come back online later), where a skeleton was on display:


I bought a cuddly quebrantahuesos (I prefer the Spanish name - it rolls off the tongue), named it Billy, and stuck it in the front of my van so the students could spot our vehicle amid the other identical ones. And because I had a fair percentage of the UCL Sci-Fi Society in my van, by the end of the week the seven-seater Renault Espace had been renamed "The Millennium Vulture". Which beats "The Vomit Comet" and "Clutch Lady's Car", its previous incarnations...

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"...

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.

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?

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?