What good fun last night's Blogging Science event was. It was a pleasure to listen to Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science, Jennifer Rohn of Mind The Gap and Ben Goldacre of Bad Science talk about what blogging means for them, and why they do it. Afterwards, I met MissPrism (who's already commented on my blog - yay!) of A Somewhat Old, But Capacious Handbag (it's a little spooky - my best friend Usch has for many years had a really tatty but enormous bag which she carries around with her, containing her research, all manner of personal effects, and usually a multitool/screwdriver/spanner etc. MissPrism is Usch's doppelganger, down to appearance and mannerisms - I suspect collusion...), and we had some real ale (I had a pint of Sovereign bitter, and very nice it was too).

Things I picked up from the evening (either explicitly said or deduced from later conversations):

• Mini-blogging is a good way of enhancing your content (I've temporarily removed my Twitter widget, but it'll be back).
• We need more chemistry and physics blogs. I'm pretty sure there are just as many cool things happening in chemistry and physics as in biology and earth sciences!
• Excellent science bloggers with audiences in the hundreds, if not thousands, still get a bit freaked out talking out loud, and that's actually quite reassuring, especially to those of us who get a bit freaked out writing to an audience of 200.
• Palaeontology, and especially dinosaurs, are quite blatantly the easiest subject to blog about in the world ever. Especially if you blog about dinosaur sex.
• Doctors should wear a clean tie every day for work (you need to have been there to understand this...).

But most importantly, blog early and blog often, and you will gain a following. And if you're just starting off on the blogging scene, why not leave me and my other readers a comment here, and we'll go off and have a read of your blog and maybe link to you!

I made an appalling error yesterday, and I'm really embarrassed. While simultaneously being delighted to see a geological cartoon in the Mirror and appalled at the scientific inaccuracies, I cocked up myself.

I told you all that the Moho was the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary. And as Lab Lemming has quite rightly told me this is rubbish. It's the crust-mantle boundary.

I'll save my critics the trouble of putting finger to keyboard - it's inexcusable for me, as a science blogger who specialises in criticising wholly inaccurate science journalism, to make such a glaring error. Doubly so because I looked at the Wikipedia entry and even linked to it. Sloppy blogging on my part. I was trying to rush the post out before going off to the Blogging Science event last night - mmm, irony!!

So my dear readers, I am truly sorry for misleading you and for failing to apply basic research methods to my own posts while criticising someone else for the same thing. I shall try very hard not to do this again, and I won't rush out a blog post without thinking about it.

The cartoonist tried very hard to get it right didn't he?

But seriously, I think this is the first time I've even SEEN the word "lithosphere" written in the Daily Mirror. Hell, it's the first time I've seen it written in any tabloid newspaper.

Let me explain:

Most non-geologists know the division between the crust, mantle and core. However, the crust and the upper part of the mantle comprise the lithosphere, and the lower part of the mantle is the asthenosphere. The division between the lithosphere and asthenosphere is the Moho, and it's^[*] deeper than the crust-mantle boundary. Effectively it's two different ways of splitting up the various structures within the earth.

Suffice to say, it would be impossible to buy a house between the mantle and the lithosphere, even excluding the fact that it would be several hundred degrees Celsius. A for effort though!

As you know, I've been closely following Aetogate. And in response to my total annihilation of the contents of Norman Silberling's letter to the DCA, Allen Hazen posted the following comment:

One of the quoted remarks,

Martz' assertion that an interpretation in his masters thesis was "plagiarized" by Spielmann et al. (2006) is adequately explained as an oversight in Lucas' response. Spielmann et al. did indeed come to the same conclusion as that earlier stated by Martz, but as Lucas explains in his response in so doing they did not use Martz' wording or illustrations, and thus this does not constitute plagiarism,

seems to presuppose a VERY narrow definition of plagiarism: that if you aren't copying someone's exact words, you aren't plagiarizing! Now, in humanities and social sciences a number of recent plagiarism scandals HAVE involved people who have published work with paragraph-length chunks lifted from other people's earlier publications (and, as a colleague has pointed out to me, my own university's website statement for students on plagiarism emphasizes such copied-text examples), the notion IS broader. F.w.i.w., the Oxford English Dictionary's dictionary mentions theft of someone's ideas or "inventions" as kinds of plagiarism in its primary definition of the word.

An excellent point, and worthy of being highlighted in a main post. This has spawned lengthy discussions in the ethical household about intellectual property and what it constitutes. Hubster is a non-practising lawyer, and while he is not an expert on intellectual property, he knows a man who is. And we are pretty sure that, whether or not a thesis counts as being "published", and whether that affects the legal standing of the plaintiff in a copyright or plagiarism case, the plaintiff has the moral right to the ideas contained within the document.

Now, Paul and I, to protect our blog posts, restrict the reproduction of our work under a Creative Commons licence. This site and Paul's writing site are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License, meaning the work can be shared, but cannot be altered in any way, cannot be used for commercial purposes, and must be attributed. So we don't really mind our work springing up on odd link-farms from time to time, because there is at least a link-back to our original post. Paul is less concerned about his personal site, and licences that under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, which means it can be edited, but must still be attributed and non-commercial. This meant when a local paper picked up on Paul's blog, they were able to edit and splice together the juiciests parts of his recent posts. People who sign up for this display this button:

It links back to the terms of the licence, and if a user violates the terms of the licence, then we have grounds to sue for copyright infringement. Maybe we're all a little up ourselves if we think our work is good enough to steal and pass off as one's own, but my experience is that there's always someone at a higher trophic level...

Paul has also signed up with Copyscape, so he gets a nice big banner, and he can search for copies of his work on the internet:

Now, in the midst of all the kerfuffle on Bayblab yesterday, there were good points being made, and people genuinely engaging in the debate. One of the most interesting ones was on Laelaps, asking about the terms and conditions of being a User and sending Submissions to ScienceBlogs, but at the time of writing this, no one has responded.

So here's the passage in question (from ScienceBlogs' T&C page):

Any Submissions submitted by you to the Site through the Venues or otherwise will be deemed non-proprietary and non-confidential, and may be used by Seed Media without restriction. Without limiting the foregoing, by offering any Submissions through the Site, you grant to Seed Media the worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, irrevocable, nonexclusive right and license to reproduce, modify, edit, publish, display, perform, adapt, distribute, sublicense and otherwise use and exploit such Submissions (and any and all proprietary rights therein that you may have) in any and all forms and media, now or hereafter discovered, without compensation or attribution to you.

Now, anyone submitting research to a journal hands over copyright to that publisher (I know, because I've just signed a copyright form for an extremely large science journal, although it's not for as exciting a reason as you think...). In fact, at least with this large journal, an author hands over intellectual property rights to the publisher too. Fair enough - I can see some definite advantages in having the publisher chase up copyright violations, image requests etc. But throughout, the author retains the moral right to be identified as the author.

But unless I (and indeed my husband) have completely and utterly failed to understand the language (and if a lawyer is able to reach an incorrect conclusion on this then I'm more inclined to think that means the contract isn't written in such a way that there is no scope for interpretation - a dangerous characteristic for a legally-binding document), the last section of this section ("without compensation or attribution to you") means you have waived your right to be identified as the author. So, members of ScienceBlogs - is this true? If not, does this apply solely to comments, for example? Are bloggers within the network subject to a different set of terms and conditions to the ones we're seeing on the site (doesn't look like it)? How does this work in practice for you? To reiterate Blake's question, what would happen if you wanted to turn your work into a book? Would you get any royalties, or would Seed Media claim them all?

ScienceBlog-gers - I want to know whether this IP part of the contract bothers you. And if it has affected the content of your blog (for better or for worse) - for example, if a photo you put on there can be copied and distributed by Seed Media without attribution, do you think twice about putting any photographs of friends or family up? Or have the benefits of being part of this particular platform far outweighed the relinquishment of your moral right? On the grand scheme of things is this really not worth worrying about, and if not, why not?

Any of you Lahn-dahn lot going to this tomorrow?

Blogging Science
Dr Ben Goldacre, Dr Jennifer Rohn, Ed Yong

What is it like to work in a lab? What's the latest science news? How can you tell good science from quackery? The answers to all these questions can be found in blogs, and in this event you'll meet the people who are writing them.

There are literally tens of millions of blogs online. Some read like personal diaries, while others are built round news or analysis, like reading a column in a newspaper. With so many blogs out there, it's no surprise that science is well-covered from lots of different angles. Ben Goldacre goes on the hunt for outrageous claims, dubious statistics and credulous science reporting in Bad Science, an extension of his popular column in the Guardian. Jennifer Rohn reveals the culture and everyday life of a jobbing scientist in her blog on Nature Network London, Mind the Gap. In Ed Yong's blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science, he converts plodding, jargon-heavy journal papers into nimble, accessible and entertaining blog posts on the freshest new research.

Join us as our bloggers talk about why they write, what makes a good post, and what blogging can do for science. You'll come out of it with three personal views of science and some good new reads, and best of all, the event is free!

It's at the Apple Store, starting at 7:00pm. Think I'll be leaving my husband downstairs to nerd out at iPhones and the like, while I go to the talk. It'd be great to see Ben Goldacre - I really enjoy his Bad Science blog and Grauniad column. Paul compares him to Richard Dawkins, which may or may not be considered a compliment (Paul certainly doesn't mean it as one!). And by the looks of things it may end with a beer or two.

Now I just have to get over the niggling feeling in the back of my mind that I'm a shit science blogger!

The UK was hit by a magnitude 5.2 earthquake in the early hours of this morning (which is probably peanuts to a Californian, but a big deal for those of us unaccustomed to earthquake drills). The epicentre was just east of the town of Market Rasen (the second word is pronounced as in "raisin"), in Lincolnshire:

The full press release is on the BGS website, so I don't see much point in going into great detail here (I'd probably only rehash the press release), but I'm a sucker for seismograms, so have a look at this one from the BGS document, and marvel at our P- and S-waves:

So I completely missed it, but a quick check of picture frames (I'm notoriously bad at hanging pictures - all it takes is some arsehole with a super-duper-mega-sub-woofer in his souped-up Citroen Saxo to drive past and everything goes skewed), flower pots and chimney stacks suggests that West London (160 miles away) didn't feel very much at all. My brother, in the grim north of the country (about 140 miles from the epicentre), according to his Facebook update, also slept through it. My poor mum though (a mere 50 miles away) sat bolt upright in bed wondering what the hell was going on. Dog was not impressed either. And she thinks she was woken by an aftershock at about 4am, but I've not seen any report of one online yet, which was reported on the BBC website - it was a magnitude 1.8.

Paul and I have a history of missing earthquakes. There was one in the Firth of Clyde in 1999-2000 or so, and even though Paul was at his parents' house outside of Glasgow, he felt nothing. I was returning to Cambridge from visiting my parents, and missed the Melton Mowbray earthquake of 2001 by only a couple of hours. And there's a possibility that I slept through this one. Maybe I'm tempting fate, but I feel incredibly cheated that, as a geologist, I am almost the only member of the family never to have experienced an earthquake, save for the amusing-when-drunk earthquake platform at the Natural History Museum.

Well, no doubt it was felt across my audience's listening area in the Buxton region too, so I shall have something to talk about during my next slot on High Peak Radio. I've already terrified them with supervolcanoes and tsunamis, and I think local earthquakes might be the last straw!

So it's been about seven years since I did structural geology and geophysics, and I'm a bit rusty. Maybe Chris or Kim can help out. Firstly, my parents live in an old coal-mining area, and there are mines underneath the property. How would this affect their house if there was a closer earthquake? My thoughts are that they would suffer no more minor damage than the average house on less-mined bedrock, but if the earthquake was bigger there could be a cave-in. Pretty much two extremes - hardly anything or full-on garden collapse possibly taking the house with it. Too simplistic? Secondly, Mum remembers the chartered surveyor saying that they were on a different kind of rock to the rest of the town. I understand that soft ground, like the reclaimed bay area of San Francisco, can result in terrible structural damage, but I have no clue about the effect of different bedrock. Is a limestone more safe or less safe than a sandstone? To what extent do the rheological properties of the bedrock affect how severely the earthquake is felt on the surface?

Shocking really, how much I've forgotten since I bid a tearful farewell to all rocks that didn't contain beasties...

If you've been following the hoo-haa over Norman Silberling's letter to the Department of Cultural Affairs, you have got to get yourselves one of these! ReBecca, from Dinochick Blogs has been busy designing new t-shirts for y'all on her Cafepress site. And they're available in styles for both young bucks and young does (and in other designs)! She tells me she's marked the price down on them so she's not making any profit - she's just doing this for the cause. I'm going to get me a pink one!

Not even that - basic arithmetic!

Every gossip site (but strangely not the PETA website itself) has a story along the lines of:

PETA rats out Stone for hideous Oscar jewelry

Now, this is not a debate about whether it is ethical to wear fur or animal-based products. For what it's worth, I own one of those brooches. It has been in the family for many years, probably since before my grandmother was born, and I have no intention of throwing it away. No one who thinks they might like to have a pro-/anti-fur debate on here should take that as any indication of my position on the matter, and any attempts to start such a debate in the comments will be blocked.

But back to the point of my post. The thing is, it's not a rat's foot. It's not even a mammal. It's a grouse's foot. Have a look at this radiograph of a rat's foot:

How many digits? Five. How many digits on Sharon Stone's brooch? Three (the fourth might be attached underneath). Does Stone's brooch really look like a rodent's foot? If you don't have much experience of rats or grouse, then I can see how you might be confused (although some of the commenters on the above story have twigged that it's not a rat).

But PETA are "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals". They have campaigned solidly (and mostly admirably) against the fur industry for many years. But if you have a press officer or officially sanctioned spokesperson who can't tell the difference between a rat and a grouse, or who knows so little about the fur industry that they are unaware that Scottish people don't tend to run around wearing rodents for good luck, then you instantly lose a little bit of credibility as far as I'm concerned.

I'm prepared to give PETA the benefit of the doubt - there is no official statement on their website. I can't find the original source of the quote TMZ uses, so there is always a possibility that this has been quoted from a blogger who just happens to be a member of PETA. But it would be nice to know if that was the case. It can't help PETA's campaign to have ill-informed people making proclamations in their name.

I was shaking with rage by the time I'd finished reading it. The ethical husband was almost shedding tears of anger at just how little regard for justice and due process there was. And we're not even involved!

I'm talking about the letter sent by Norman Silberling, one of the outside participants in the "Aetogate" inquiry set up by the Department of Cultural Affairs, to Stuart Ashman, cabinet secretary of the same. But let's rewind a little bit. Evidently in the light of the huge public outcry, the DCA decided that maybe they should have an inquiry into the allegations made by Bill Parker, Jeff Martz and others (see Mike Taylor's page for the full details). It was reported in the Albuquerque Journal last Thursday. Which was how Bill, Jeff, Mike, Darren, Matt etc all found out about it. And the DCA for some reason deigned not to ask any of the "plaintiffs" (it's just easier to refer to them in judicial terms) for statements, or to actually interview them.

But that's okay, because they selected two independent professionals who knew the sector well and could fairly come to a conclusion based on the facts, right? Right?

Well, both outside experts have co-authored 39 scientific papers with Spencer Lucas (one of the "defendants"), according to Mike, who looked it up on GeoRef. And in the letter Norman Silberling wrote (above), one of the first things he says is:

I regard myself as a professional friend and admirer of Spencer Lucas [...] I am indeed indebted to Spencer [...] for dedicating NMMNH&S Bull. 41 (the "Global Triassic" symposium volume) to Tim Tozer and me.

I don't know whether Anderson speaks of Lucas in such glowing terms, but Mary Kirkaldy kindly provided the dedications for the Dinosaur Mailing List, saying:

With all due respect, it would be hard to be impartial when the accused has dedicated a book to you.

Absolutely. This is immediately a conflict of interests, and regardless of whether or not Anderson and Silberling are capable of setting aside their personal friendships with Lucas and reaching a fair conclusion, if this was a legal procedure, there would be grounds for a mistrial before the hearing reached its conclusion, and definitely grounds for an appeal afterwards. Judges and juries recuse themselves if they are known to either plaintiff or defendant. It has serious consequences if they don't. I'm sure I remember a rape/assault trial a few years ago, where it turned out the judge was a family friend: while the evidence for the attacker's guilt was overwhelming, it was either thrown out or successfully appealed. This is one of the means by which people "get off on a technicality".

Now, I know the vertebrate palaeontology community is small, but even though Lucas has published over 500 articles (it says so on his website), I'm reasonably sure there are plenty of vertebrate palaeontologists who have not met him and who have not co-authored papers with him. I'm also reasonably sure that there are plenty of vertebrate palaeontologists who don't know the "plaintiffs" either. Could one of them not have been called in? And surely it was just plain daft to just go to the state next door. Palaeontology is incestuous, and with good reason - there is a lot of collaboration over field areas, so it makes sense, especially if you're in a dinosaur-rich area of the country. Get someone who works on fish from the north-east, and then we'll consider neutrality. Even better, get a Canadian biologist, an Australian geophysicist, a British botanist. Anyone but a long-time co-author and friend of the "defendant", for pity's sake!

But it gets better. I read the whole letter twice - once to myself, and then once out loud to my husband. And I must say, regardless of the content of the letter, how very unprofessional to essentially publish one's findings three days before the hearing took place! A judge saying three days before a trial "Well the defendant's blatantly not guilty" would get booted off the bench! But then I had a problem with the content too. There are arguments that are simply rubbish:

Enlarging on Lucas's responses, if any unethical behavior took place, it was by Parker who based his 2007 paper on specimens collected and prepared by the Museum and who did this without approval by Lucas, the Museum's collections curator.

Well, as many people already have pointed out, does this not immediately mean that Lucas behaved unethically when he scooped the Polish specimens? You can't have it both ways - Lucas cannot be exonerated from Parker's allegations and the Polish allegations (I note that the Polish case is not mentioned, but I gather that they haven't made an official complaint - I'm sure someone will update via the comments on this).

Martz' assertion that an interpretation in his masters thesis was "plagiarized" by Spielmann et al. (2006) is adequately explained as an oversight in Lucas' response. Spielmann et al. did indeed come to the same conclusion as that earlier stated by Martz, but as Lucas explains in his response in so doing they did not use Martz' wording or illustrations, and thus this does not constitute plagiarism. Instead, Martz should be pleased that other authorities changed their position to agree with his.

Oh wow. So lowly grad students should think of this as flattery? Grad students should think it a great honour if an academic powerhouse thinks their ideas are good enough to pass off as their own, without the merest acknowledgement? Now, I know my primary school teacher used to try to avoid having to punish children by telling us that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. Yeah, right.

It's difficult to believe that Parker and/or Martz or their associates didn't prime Naish to initiate his accusatory blog site knowing that all sorts of slanderous, unsubstantiated bile would result. From this, it's apparent that an interconnected group of mainly young, un- or under-employed workers (including both Parker and Martz) has for whatever reasons a strong grudge against Lucas and the NMMNH&S. But that's just the way it is. They are not apt to stop, and arguing with them, especially on-line, probably would be a wasted effort and just strengthen their sense of righteousness.

Because no blogger ever hears of something outrageous and decides of their own free will to write about it (note to Norman Silberling - I have not been coerced to write this). I assume Silberling is including all of us who have taken this case to heart on our blogs, but primarily Jeff, Bill, Mike, Darren and Matt. So we're young (so don't bother listening to us because what do we know?). We're unemployed (and who gives a shit about students?). Or we're under-employed (so even if we've managed to heave our lazy fat arses into gainful employment we clearly don't have enough to do with ourselves so we're just making trouble?). Please, members of the vertebrate palaeontology community, please say you don't agree with that. Please reassure us (as I know some of you have) that tenured professors do care whether there are any students left to carry on the science.

You know something? Before this kicked off, I had a wholly neutral opinion of Spencer Lucas. And while I have been reminded that the majority of the NMMNH&S staff are in no way involved in this (and that it's unfair to tar them with the same brush), this is doing nothing for my opinion of the museum's executive committee, or the state government of the fine state of New Mexico.

This strikes me as the real target of the complaints by Parker, Martz, and the other young bucks (and at least one doe) associated with them.

*rolls eyes* I think that is incredibly insulting. Call them young men and women. "Buck" and "doe" are patronising. Singling out one "doe" (or one "woman", as I like to call them) could be deemed sexist too.

Moreover, using in-house reviewers for articles by qualified in-house staff members, is not necessarily a bad thing, because by and large a reviewer who is an associate and friend of the author(s) will not want to see the author(s) do something dumb.

What, like (allegedly) plagiarise students?

This does invite barbs from disgruntled people seeking a target.

So much inflammatory language, so little time.

As a final suggestion to the Museum Board, I think it would be useful for you or the Board to send whatever final public report is prompted by this Executive Committee discussion to Parker's supervisor at the Petrified Forest National Park. That person should be interested in how his or her employee is serving the scientific community and the public.

What. The. Fuck. Now, maybe I'm mis-interpreting this, but it sure looks to me as though Silberling is suggesting that the management at PEFO fire Bill. This is precisely why so many other "early stage academics" have been afraid to come forward. This is why students and postdocs don't speak out when offences are committed against them. Because they have so much to lose.

Now, this was quite obviously a letter, not a press release. And perhaps if it had been leaked to the press, I could give Silberling some leeway for having private comments inadvertently made public. However, downloading the PDF and looking at the properties, I see that Norman Silberling was the author, and it was made a PDF through OpenOffice on 22 February. If I'm putting two and two together and making 80, please tell me so, but I conclude that Silberling made the PDF of his letter, and gave it to the Albuquerque Journal. So he was perfectly happy for all those ad hominem attacks to be made public (I could be so bold as to say there is a case for some of those things to be libellous, but I leave that to the lawyers).

The Albuquerque Journal carried out a telephone interview with Silberling on Friday, during which he said:

This was in no way a jury trial, so there's no way friends of Spencer and people who have been with him shouldn't comment.

No, this wasn't a jury trial. Which is why I've referred to "defendants" and "plaintiffs" in inverted commas. Lucas' friends and colleagues have every right to comment. But Lucas' friends and colleagues should not be on the committee deciding whether or not he has committed an offence! Inquiries, tribunals and informal investigations have to maintain similar standards to higher courts, otherwise they have no authority. I used to administer informal tribunal hearings for a professional organisation. Notice of hearings were issued to complainant and respondant well in advance. The tribunal itself would often be held behind closed doors, and sometimes without either party present - just relying on statements, skeleton arguments and the facts laid before the panel. A decision was made, and promulgated. The respondent had a set period of time in which to appeal if necessary, after which the decision was published and any fine or suspension enforced. If the tribunals I administered had carried on the way this is being run, we would have been the laughing stock of the profession.

If a wholly fair investigation of the allegations of plagiarism, with neutral adjudicators, had been carried out, with all the evidence presented and an opportunity for both sides to ask and answer questions of the other, then if the conclusion reached was that there was no plagiarism, it would truly suck. It would be horrible for Bill and Jeff, and they would have every right to feel very miserable for a very long time. But it would have been fair. This is not fair. This is cronyism.

An excellent anonymous leader in the Albuquerque Journal on Sunday says:

That seems about as far south of scientific rigor as the choice of these particular outside scientists falls short of due diligence. Both have collaborated with Lucas on research; both are named in dedications of Lucas books. The objective perspective of one of the quasi-judges was called into doubt by his declaring a not-guilty verdict several days before reviewers convened their closed-door hearing.

The irony is, I am sure this inquiry is being held in a desperate attempt to shut the community up. We've been complaining like buggery, so I rather imagine some eye-rolling has gone on at DCA headquarters and an official has said "Oh give them what they want then". But so many corners have been cut, and so much has been carried out poorly (nothing that's happened in the organisation of this inquiry could be deemed to be "best practice", or even "good practice"), that regardless of the outcome, there will be a shitstorm over the New Mexico authorities for a very long time.

I know the US government ditched the right to a fair trial, and I know habeas corpus has been suspended, but really, you'd think both could apply to a state investigation of an alleged act of plagiarism, wouldn't you?

Oh here's a very welcome addition to my "ego massage" wall over to the left. And when I've been feeling that, while more productive than I have been in some time on here, I haven't really been hitting the mark on the posts (although the merest mention of dinosaur sex seems to bring the commenters out of the woodwork and do wonders for my daily hits...), not to mention the fact that I'm still feeling moderately depressed that not a single one of my last year's posts was considered good enough for The Open Laboratory 2007, it's really nice to be given a bit of a boost. Maybe I'll be good enough for consideration this year.

So thank you to Chris (who knows how to pronounce "laboratory" properly), for his nomination:

I need to keep Julia sweet because she knows me from my undergraduate days, and I don't want her to tell you all what a slacker I was. Fortunately, it's easy enough to recommend her blog, because (i) she writes very knowledgably about all things dinosaurian; (ii) being British, she has a proper sense of humour; and (iii) she is a valuable comrade in the struggle to make people spell 'palaeo' properly.

The feeling is wholly mutual! And so to nominate five more. Of course it goes without saying that if you appear on my blogroll I think you're pretty damn special (and after a while, Paul, it does really look like nepotism...), but I thought I'd give a bit of love to some of the blogs I don't talk about that frequently:

• The Osterley Times - Kel is our upstairs neighbour. We think he gets up at about the same time as we do. In the time it takes us to get showered, dressed, breakfasted and on the train, he pops out three or four incredibly well thought out commentaries on current affairs. The man is a blogging machine!
• All Of My Faults Are Stress Related - this has to be one of the cleverest names for a blog ever, and Kim showcases her knack for a good geo-pun in this post for Valentine's Day. I really enjoy her posts, and she's been so involved with commenting on my blog too. It's much appreciated.
• Todger Talk - it's about time men started being more open about sex, especially with other men. For top-notch medical, psychological and relationship advice, it deserves more recognition than it's getting at the moment. Best post so far? An excellent article on urinary tract infections.
• Sauropod Vertebra Picture Of The Week - aka SV-POW!, this is perhaps the narrowest blog topic I know of, but it works really well. Highly informative, especially as I'm the "Sauropod Arse Girl" so am lost if it's any further forward than the sacrum. At the risk of annoying the other two authors, recently I really enjoyed Mike's post on how weedy humans are and how freakin' awesome sauropods are (although that description could equally apply to most of the SV-POW! stuff).
• The Open Source Paleontologist - okay, I'll let him off the extra "a", this time. Andy has recently entered the blogosphere, filling a good niche, investigating and advising on open source software. Thanks to him, I no longer need to try to persuade my husband to illegally download versions of PhotoShop - I just use GIMP instead. And since he posted about it, I've thought about maybe giving LaTeX a try...

I have lost track of the number of times I go to bed, leaving Paul in the lounge, typing furiously. I have also lost track of the number of times the first thing I say in the morning is "Oh, hi, what time did you come to bed last night then?". I cannot remember the last time he was in bed before me...

Back from conference. Line manager has given me the afternoon off as I sacrificed two evenings, including having to share a significant portion of my journey home with a load of excitable Spurs fans. So I will be buying goujons^[*] of compost this afternoon, for the planting of all the plants I suddenly possess.

^[*]French for "shitloads". 100% of fact.

Clearly the designer of this quiz has never seen me on a non-fat-almond-latte craze, nor has he seen how excited my workmate and I get when Starbucks get their eggnog lattes in for the winter.

Incidentally, the way to win me over is with said non-fat almond latte. I will accept any size. Thanks to Clastic Detritus for the hat-tip. Yes I'm still at the conference. I set up the TechTags and complicated HTML codez beforehand, and through the wonders of the Nokia N95, I can publish from anywhere in the whole wide world! Or I can get a life...

You are the moment when the last bell rings and school lets out for the day. You are resistant to schedules and obligations, so you love feeling like you're in control of your life again. You are the very moment when the second hand hits the 12, and the halls fill with noise and motion. Even if your after-school time is packed with activities, lessons, or a job, somehow, you just feel freer in the late afternoon than you do earlier in the day. Maybe it's all that blue sky and afternoon sunshine? Nah -- even on rainy days, 3:15 is always a beautiful time.

What does it say for me, that I'm posting this remotely on my way to a work conference for 24 hours? Don't feel very 3:15pm!!

My birthday present from the in-laws arrived yesterday, in a mahoosive box (I'm going to get home from my conference tomorrow night to find that Paul's been pretending it's a car and scooting around the lounge in it). So, I have a myrtle (Myrtus communis), a Chusan palm (Trachycarpus fortunei), a shuttlecock or ostrich fern (Matteucia struthiopteris) and a monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana). And you know how I sometimes name the plants? For example, Bastard is my Cycas revoluta, Sideshow Bob is my Nephrolepis exaltata, Matildus is my Wollemia nobilis and Karma is my Camellia x williamsii. Well, I picked up the monkey puzzle, and saw how it was tied to the cane, with its branches sticking straight out at right angles and said "It looks like it's being crucified!". So Jesus it is. My Catholic husband has approved, saying "It's not blasphemous. It's irreverent, but not blasphemous". Then I threatened to name the Chusan palm Mohammad, but apparently that is blasphemous...!

A couple of the leaves of the monkey puzzle are a bit brown, but I'll keep an eye on them to make sure it's nothing that's spreading. I'm really looking forward to the first encounter Bubba the Squirrel has with it. I hope I'm there to witness it. The myrtle smells gorgeous - almost the same sort of smell as a box hedge. Can't wait to see it flower (see, Sarah, I DO sometimes get flowering plants in my garden, they just have to be basal angiosperms!).

And as I mentioned on Monday, the Metasequoia arrived. Somehow I got it home, although it seemed every twat on the delayed South West Trains service to darkest Surrey wanted to stamp on the root ball (except the twat who decided that being crammed onto a train meant he could grope my arse and pass it off as an accident). But anyway, this is it yesterday morning:

It's the straggly twig to the left of the Wollemia nobilis. I've been advised to cut it back by about half, which is a terrifying prospect, but will help thicken it out. To quote Granny Weatherwax, it aten't dead - there are little green buds all the way up the stem (I hesitate to call it a trunk!). This will be a challenge, but one I'm looking forward to.

Well that's got everyone who normally just looks at the title interested... But it's just an excuse to show you a hilarious video I took yesterday at Kew Gardens. This was another birthday treat, this time courtesy of my friend Sarah. We were walking through the pinetum and had just passed the giant redwoods, when we spotted a crowd gathered around a pair of golden pheasants. The male was obviously trying to court the female, and on this occasion at least, she was wholly uninterested:

And for those of you who have never heard me speak before, it's an opportunity to listen to a snippet of my plummy English accent. The rest of the photos are up online in the old Picasa album:

Be warned - there are a LOT of photos of cycads. So if they're not really your thing you might want to pass this time. I was dead impressed with the Evolution House, charting the 3.5 billion years of plant evolution. All Barry Rickards' Part II Palaeobiology classes came flooding back to us.

I reckon I might be able to keep some horsetails alive, even though we don't have a pond. I inherited a really nice ceramic pot from the previous tenant (sadly I managed to kill the lavender he'd left in it...) which has no drainage holes. So I'd be able to have an extremely boggy soil. And if it got too much, I am quite sure there are some neighbourhood children who would like a treat for their rabbits. That's probably in the future though. My big challenge for the next few weeks is the Metasequoia. It arrived today. In a POSTER TUBE. Updates to follow.

Saw this summary on the New Scientist feed: Conservation laws threaten rare orchids. Haven't seen either the full New Scientist report or the full Proceedings B article (I know I'd like to see open access as the norm rather than an exception, but seriously - if you base a press release around it, it's incredibly annoying not to make the article available for at least a week around the publication of said press release!).

But the abstract of the paper is available from here. You might be luckier on the getting-the-paper front.

It appears that the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the legislation that's supposed to help preserve vulnerable and endangered organisms, has had the opposite effect on orchids. It makes sense - it's so difficult for academic institutions to jump through the hoops to be able to collect specimens that many are giving up. Without research on a particular species, how can botanists possibly learn how to protect them?

Seeds can be collected without destroying the plant. Flowers can be collected without destroying the plant. Seeds and captive plants can be traded between institutions without any impact on the habitat whatsoever. In contrast to the Japanese government's perverse definition of "scientific research", which involves killing as many Minke whales as possible, botanical research can very legitimately be carried out without destroying wild populations.

I think the CITES legislation is excellent, but is it categorically always worth it if it prevents researchers from helping in the conservation effort? It would be very sad if it hindered efforts to preserve the endangered orchid species concerned.

Roberts, D.L. & A.R. Solow. 2008. The effect of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species on scientific collections. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B. Firstcite. doi:10.1098/rspb.2007.1683.

I'm rather bewildered by this. In under 48 hours, my laptop has been repaired and returned to me. PC World replaced the hard drive, and gave me the old one back as well so I can retrieve data (this is good - I have a hard drive casing so I can just copy everything back over, and hopefully with it Christopher's Linnaeus' Legacy banner). Even more amazingly, they replaced my AC adaptor and power cord. The bit going into the laptop has been held together by electricians' tape for well over a year, and I figured that was a "perishable" that wasn't covered by the policy (since batteries aren't). So, while I'm not prepared to say categorically that the service on PC World's "PC Performance" plan is stellar (if it was, I'd have had a new hard drive by Christmas), I have no complaints on this occasion and it has been a pleasure doing business with them.

Of course I have yet to switch on my laptop, and because I am incredibly pessimistic I cannot exclude the possibility that it might explode upon startup... But assuming it doesn't, I shall be in a position to get my software reinstalled, including my website publishing software. Which means I can update the blogroll, among other things.

So, if you link to me but I haven't reciprocated, leave me a comment (would be great to know how you found me and how long you've been a reader) and I'll bung your blog on there. I will maintain my discretion (I am unlikely to link to C*******ist websites for example...), but other than that, go for it! And if you've changed your website at all (I know both Dinochick and Green Gabbro have moved), let me know.

And if you know of any good open source web editing software (Andy?), please let me know. I've been using PageBreeze for a bit, but I'd prefer to be able to publish directly rather than having to save the local file and then open up my FTP and copy and paste, which is what I have to do with the free version of the above. Being able to see the code is preferable to WYSIWYG, because I'm a control freak.

America - do you like having European visitors? Do you welcome our tourist dollars? Do you want to keep being able to invite your European colleagues and clients over for meetings and conferences? Do you enjoy international collaboration with businesses and educational establishments on the other side of the Atlantic?

Then for the love of God make sure that whoever you elect in November is going to nip this in the bud:

Bush orders clampdown on flights to US^[*]

I'm fairly indifferent to the concept of air marshals on flights, although I am not sure of the effects of a bullet through the fuselage, and I'm a little concerned that all it takes is one nutjob to infiltrate the corps. I think it's taking the piss a bit for EU airlines to have to supply information to the US for passengers travelling from Europe to Central America (since the grand circle of their flight would take them over US airspace). Hey, US government, why not just demand that all 6 billion of us carry biometric identity cards? That'd wipe out terrorism for sure.

No, this is the one that clinched it for me - the final proof that the US government is really a bunch of hysterical megalomaniacs:

And within months the US department of homeland security is to impose a new permit system for Europeans travelling to the US, compelling all travellers to apply online for permission to enter the country before booking or buying a ticket, a procedure that will take several days.

Wow. What a wonderful idea. A permit that we apply for in advance, giving us permission to enter the US. Hey, you know, "permit" is such an ugly word. How about taking inspiration from the Latin? There's a great phrase - carta visa, meaning "the document has been examined". You could shorten it to "visa". Doesn't that look better than "permit"? And you could have different types of "visas" (see the pluralisation I ascribed there - that's the anglicisation of the orginal Latin, dontcha know). You could have short-term ones for people wanting holidays, mid-term ones for students or exchange workers, and long-term ones for migrant workers. And to make things easier you could put the "visa" on a sticker about passport-sized, so it can be stuck inside our passports. That would make the immigration officers' jobs simpler as they'd simply need to see that one document.

But seriously. For fuck's sake, Department of Homeland Security. If you are so paranoid, just ditch the visa waiver programme. Don't kid on that you welcome us Europeans when really there is no "special relationship" left. And if you do that, let's hope that Gordon Brown grows a pair and repays the favour.

If you thought the barnacle penis discussion was popular, check out Olivia Judson's article in the New York Times about Tyrannosaurus rex's penis (hat-tip to John Bois on the DML, who just e-mailed this through).

I'm just reminded of a greeting card I saw once in a local newsagents, featuring Tyrannosaurus rex looking worriedly towards his groin (yes, he was in "kangaroo pose"...), captioned "Animals who couldn't masturbate #16". It's all in the tiny forelimbs apparently.

Normal service may be resumed, but readers of a nervous disposition may wish to avoid the comments section, given the barnacle incident...

It's 28 years since I made my appearance on this Earth, on a snowy day in Shrewsbury, Charles Darwin's home town, some 171 years and one day after he was born. And what better way to celebrate than the announcement of a new genus and species of dinosaur? Velafrons coahuilensis is a new hadrosaur from the Late Cretaceous. I am particularly excited to see the marvellous reconstructed skull (my first thoughts when I see a new ornithopod discovery are to see if it a) has a nasal and b) has a jugal!), and I'm looking forward to adding that to the morphometrics data set when the laptop is back in my sweaty little hands (once I've checked that they're complete original bones).

So, my parents and my brother and his fiancée have bought me an Arc'teryx hiking top. It's red and really warm with good wicking action, so hopefully I won't smell like the First XV changing room when I get back from a yomp in the hills (the fact that it has a rendition of an opisthotonic theropod skeleton on the sleeve is an added bonus and not by any means the reason I asked for it, oh no...). It didn't cost as much as we thought it was going to, so I've been able to ask for some more exotic plants for my garden!

The hubster is buying me the Metasequoia glyptostroboides I won on eBay last night, and to go with it he's buying me a nice big terracotta pot to put it in, so he can point to it in the garden and say "I bought her this". Paul's grandparents are buying me an Araucaria araucana (yay monkey puzzle tree!), and his parents are buying me a shuttlecock fern (Matteucia struthiopteris), a myrtle (Myrtus communis tarentina) and a Chusan palm (Trachycarpus fortunei). I can't wait to get them all planted up. I'm really excited about the myrtle, because everything else I have is winter- or spring-flowering, and I don't want the bees and butterflies to have a mass exodus around April.

So what am I doing for my birthday then? Well, last Saturday we went to Chelsea Physic Garden, the second oldest botanical garden in England. It's only open to the public for six months or so a year, but they do have a Snowdrop Weekend in early February, and it's well worth a visit:

There are systematic beds, laid out by dicotyledon family (Paul was tickled by the fact that they were initially classified on the basis of their sexual organs):

They have tropical greenhouses and a cold fernery (which was a very pleasant surprise to me!):

And the crocuses were out in force too:

But the highlight for me was spotting a monkey puzzle tree or two in the corner of the garden. I love this photo, I've set it as my desktop, and if anyone knows of an amateur photography contest I can send it to, please let me know:

All other photos can be found here for your viewing pleasure.

This Saturday I will be at Kew Gardens. There's a Wollemia nobilis I want to see...

Back from oop norf and in a position to deal with a battle, I called PC World on Saturday to get them to sort out my laptop. Things I did this time were:

• First question I asked after I explained that my computer was starting to boot, then I was getting a BSOD then a restart, was to ask what key I had to press to get it to stop automatic rebooting, as I'd forgotten. This instantly alerted the guy on the end of the phone to the fact that I was not a silly little girlie. It also had the advantageous effect of enabling me to read the BSOD error message to him without having to go through the "Have you tried switching it off and switching it on again" crap I did last time.
• Second thing was to casually drop into conversation when he asked if my data were backed up that I was a PhD student, and as such all my work was backed up on various discs and servers. At which point he stopped trying to get me to reformat the hard drive and decided to just book me in for a repair.

So I've just bid a tearful farewell to my laptop (complete with Apatosaurus sticker on the lid). I was told it would be collected in the morning, but clearly the courier is working on Eastern Standard Time, as 2.30pm is by no means an "a.m." collection. It'll be two weeks. I can blog (I'll type on my lunchbreak and probably publish via my phone) but I doubt I'll be able to get away with much in the way of paper-writing or note-making. The husband will let me borrow his laptop to check my e-mail from time to time, but three hours of solid paper-writing is probably not fair. I'll be letting my supervisors know this, and in the meantime I can get on with some reading. God knows I should have been doing more of it. And by the time the laptop is back, I'll be champing at the bit to get going again.

Hopefully PC World will give me a new (or guaranteed reconditioned) hard drive. It'd be really nice if it worked out cheaper for them to just give me a new laptop, as I bought it before Service Pack 2 for Windows XP came out, and it's a pain in the arse having to install the Blaster patch, then SP2, then go through three years of Windows updates (which means a week of my laptop running slow and borking our network).

We shall see.

Tiny dinosaur discovered

Please can I smack everyone at ITN round the head with a hardback copy of Weishampel et al.? In fairness to Alexander Kellner, he's not mentioned the D-word at all, but the window-licking idiots at ITN couldn't resist the urge to say that Nemicolopterus crypticus was a dinosaur. The moron doing the video voiceover (sadly you have to sit through an awful advert that will make America glad it did that thing with the tea a few years ago) is no better (and probably the same one who wrote the article).

Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs (although some people on the Dinosaur Mailing List seem to repeatedly forget that). Okay?

Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs.

Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs!

Today is the internationally celebrated Darwin Day, a "celebration of science and humanity" held on the anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. I'm not going to any of the organised events (they're either sold out or too far away), but I am wearing my Darwin's Pub (the 6th Street Evolution...) top under my work cardigan today. And I did drive into work proudly displaying my Darwin fish on my bumper (I love looking in my rear-view mirror at traffic lights and seeing utter confusion on the faces of the drivers behind me).

Like many of you, I've been watching David Attenborough's "Life In Cold Blood", and I've really enjoyed it. Last night's episode dealt with amphibians, and it touched on the fish-tetrapod transition. Now, in fairness to the researchers and production staff, the script was not bad, but it certainly wasn't great. A big beef of mine is that journalists (and often scientists trying to communicate with the public) put a narrative slant onto a particular evolutionary "event". For example (it wasn't this exact phrase used - I can't remember the entirety of that - but it was close to one of the things they got Sir Dave to say):

The fish evolved legs so it could catch the insects that were already on the land.

This is narrative. And it sucks. This implies that a fish made a conscious effort to grow digits out of its fins (I have an image of a fish squeezing its eyes shut and puffing out its cheeks, and of five little fingers going *pop*-*pop*-*pop*-*pop*-*pop* out of the ends of its fins), because it looked through the murky pond to the bright lights above and saw loads of insects buzzing around and thought "I'm going to have me some of those!". Which is so unbelievably wrong I don't quite know where to start.

Well, okay. As far as I'm aware, "legs" came before "land". I understood that purely aquatic forms (gaah, I can't remember which one it was - Ichthyostega or Acanthostega - and I sat in on Jenny Clack's Zoology lectures!!!) were discovered with limbs as we would recognise them (albeit with many more digits than tetrapods have now), and the hypothesis put forward was that these were advantageous when dealing with reed-choked ponds and swamps. Food on land had nothing to do with the evolution of limbs, but could well have helped the radiation of "successful" organisms.

So it would be more accurate to say:

Within the scope of random mutations and variation within a population, those individuals with sturdier fins that could be used to push reeds aside had an advantage over those with flimsier fins, since they were better able to negotiate their habitat in search of food. Those sturdy-finned individuals were more likely to survive reproductive maturity, and the frequency of sturdy fins in the population increased successively with each generation.

But it's clunky, inelegant, and even that doesn't quite explain the complexities. But it does at least remove any kind of decision-making on the part of the individuals concerned. I'm sure there's a journalistic award and the love and respect of all evolutionary biologists and palaeontologists in it for anyone who manages to convey to the general populus how evolution "works" without making it sound excessively narrative.

Organisms cannot control when they "evolve" - they cannot make a conscious or unconscious decision to grow limbs or do anything for that matter (for a change in an organism during its lifetime to be reflected in its progeny would be Lamarckism and that's a whole other kettle of fish-like tetrapods). Organisms do not evolve. Populations evolve. And it's for that reason that on one level C*******ists are correct - we can't show them true "missing links" because missing links are fiction. We can point to intermediates. On a micro-evolution level we can show them Drosophila melanogaster generations in successive stages of winglessness. On a macro-evolution level we can show them Eusthenopteron, Panderichthys, Acanthostega and Tulerpeton. But the fact that if you take many small changes you can get a large change is lost on them, as though they don't understand that 100 pennies make a pound. They accept the existence of pennies, but deny that there has ever been an example of a pound...
But if you're at a loss for something to do to honour Darwin, why not head over to the Understanding Evolution site at Berkeley, and have a look at all the examples they've listed? This website is a great resource, and does a far better job of explaining macroevolution than I can.

Happy Darwin Day - have a good one and try not to remove yourself from the gene pool.

There's trouble brewing. It's been brewing for a while, and although I jumped the gun (and later apologised for this), on this occasion there is definitely cause for concern.

ReBecca, over at Dinochick Blogs is keeping track of the communication going on. Here are links to her posts:

Help Save Paleontology At Dinosaur National Monument!!
Dinosaur National Monument Correction
More From The DINO Front
Additional Facts About The Changes At Dinosaur National Monument

Dinosaur National Monument means a lot to me. Sadly, the visitors' centre closed just before we visited on honeymoon, and I was rather upset about that. It's such a beautiful, peaceful part of northern Utah and Colorado, and it's a shame to see its very reason for existing being cut back:

I don't know how much notice the National Parks Service will take of my complaint (although I've been to enough national parks that I think I deserve to be taken notice of), but I'll try. And if you feel strongly enough to write to the Director of the NPS, please do so too. All the details are on ReBecca's site.