Administrative
evolvingthoughts | July 23, 2008
I've been uncommonly productive in the last few days - first the book went off (and then I find that one chapter needs a complete rewrite, but hey), then I sent off a paper based on the talk I gave a couple of weeks ago in Melbourne, then today I find that my and Gary Nelson's article on Pierre Trémaux has been accepted (without a single editorial revision!) for HPLS and then the production people at Springer send me the proof of my latest foray into a general theory of science, for Biol. Phil. And I teach starting tomorrow.
All the while a very patient (and I suspect rather fatalistic)…
laelaps | July 22, 2008Writing a post about feathered dinosaurs yesterday gave me the shot in the arm I needed to jump back into my book project. I've spent so much time reading old papers and concerning myself with the thoughts of Victorian scientists that I had almost forgotten that I needed to bring the chapter up to date with the latest information. Sifting through the literature on dinosaurs like Dilong and Sinosauropteryx allowed me to set up the end-point that I want the birds/dinosaurs chapter to reach (it does help to know where you're going). I will have to do a little more research on Mesozoic birds as I…
evolvingthoughts | July 21, 2008
Today I got my manuscript off to the publisher. Heaven knows what the editors will do with it; I expect a sympathetic treatment as the publisher's editorial board are quite keen. But it's like having a ten year boil lanced. And seeing a favourite child graduate. All at once.
So it remains for me to thank the enormous number of people who have helped me do this book. Nobody could have done it alone. I am amazed and heartened by the fact that no matter how much disagreement I may have with the various people involved in the species debate, they are all hell of a nice lot of guys and gals.…
evolvingthoughts | July 20, 2008
John Hawks has an excellent essay up (I don't know how correct it is, never having been on a tenure track) on the merits and problems of being an academic blogger. Do read it.
evolvingthoughts | July 14, 2008Not the Simon and Garfunkel song, this:
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Just seeing if it works.
pharyngula | July 14, 2008So I have this new policy of posting email that threatens violence with full identifying information. I may have to retract that, since it looks like it's getting abused. The idea was that I would have a public record of the threat, and that the smart people commenting here would be able to do a little sleuthing for me.
It is most definitely not intended to incite harassment. I do not want you to be dunning these people with email, threatening them back, signing them up for spam, or otherwise being a jerk. For one thing, we can't be certain that an innocent's account hasn't been hijacked; for…
pharyngula | July 14, 2008Yeesh, not only am I busy at this meeting, but two factors are conspiring to keep me away from the web.
The internet service in this hotel is abominable — I've tried both the wireless and wired access, and it's like trying to read the 21st century internet over a 300 baud modem. I tried to edit a few trolls' comments, and while I waited to load the page, I took a shower, walked a mile down the street, got breakfast and coffee, came back, found the maid service had cleaned up the suite (nice!), sat down to the computer, and just then it finished. I suspect the fact that the hotel is packed to…
pharyngula | July 13, 2008Please STOP SENDING EMAIL TO THESE INDIVIDUALS. There are too many of you, the over-reaction is excessive, and you are not doing our reputation any favor. See this message for more.
Some of you may have noticed the little promise over in the left sidebar.
I reserve the right to publicly post, with full identifying information about the source, any email sent to me that contains threats of violence.
I'm posting without comment the worst of today's crop of email threats. Formatting will be little wacky since it is just a raw dump of the mail with headers.
From: mkroll@1800FLOWERS.com
Subject…
pharyngula | July 12, 2008By their actions you will know them. We have had a number of raving angry Catholics in various threads here…or have we? I've had a moment to clean up a few threads and post some of the stuff that was held in comment moderation, and discovered that Naz, k8, promo, baker, PZ is a fool, Burns, rumrunner, Dobbs, NYTs, KKKAthiest, Andy, CDV, BradJ, Brett, b7, PCD, NVFU, Your daddy, facebock, baker and several other loud-mouthed asses who have been braying here are all one and the same person.
This is called sock puppetry. It is trying to generate the illusion of a consensus on one side of an issue…
evolvingthoughts | July 11, 2008
My paper in TREE is now available as an in-press corrected proof. It is titled "The roles, reasons and restrictions of science blogs", so thanks to you guys (and Bob O'Hara in particular) for the raw material and opportunities.
pharyngula | July 11, 2008Aaargh, you keep filling up threads! I'm closing this one, you can continue the discussion here, if necessary.
pharyngula | July 10, 2008Because performance all over scienceblogs starts to suffer when a comment thread gets too long, I'm closing the thread in which I grievously insult a cracker…but if you must, you can continue here.
evolvingthoughts | July 10, 2008
Well I have done my talk at the AAP conference, and survived with ego intact (as if there was any doubt). All I need to do now is sleep for eight straight days.
Sorry but I don't have the time free to do a meet up in Melbourne, so back to Mornington Crescent.
evolvingthoughts | July 2, 2008
Hi folks. It's conference time again, and of course we have organised to have the Australasian Association of Philosophy/Australasian Association for the History Philosophy and Social Studies of Science (AAP/AAHPSSS) conferences in the coldest place on the mainland - my home town Melbourne, at the depths of winter. At least it's not Vancouver. So I'm going to be a bit quiet for a while. Play Mornington Crescent amongst yourselves until I get back (not you, Grossman. You're supposed to be fully engaged at the conference. If I see you in the comments after Sunday, I shall refuse to buy you a…
pharyngula | July 1, 2008This month, we have two new people who can append an OM to their names: windy and Bride of Shrek.
Remember to salute when they walk by!
pharyngula | June 29, 2008Like the title says, this is your thread to tell me who deserves the Molly award for June. I'll aim to announce the winner on 1 July.
jrosenhouse | June 12, 2008I'm going to be hitting the road this weekend for one of my periodical tours of some of the great highways in the Northeast. I'll be visiting the 'rents at my New Jersey office, will jaunt on up to Brooklyn to see big bro and the niece and nephew, and will probably putter around Princeton for an afternoon or two, being sure to take advantage of their most excellent math library. Regular blogging will resume at the end of next week.
evolvingthoughts | June 9, 2008
Few things make me very angry: injustices perpetrated by the powerful against the weak, good science fiction series being canned by network executives, and people who think they can say whatever they like without regard for their audience. I find it disgusting that some people think it's okay to be aggressive, rude and swear blindly in front of children, for instance, which matches two of my aversions. So when a communal forum that I spend a lot of time in, and which includes many of my friends, turns into that sort of street scene, I want to leave it. Am I being an old fogey?
It's not…
laelaps | June 8, 2008Even though T.H. Huxley proposed that whales had evolved from terrestrial carnivores as late as 1870, the origins of whales was exceedingly problematic until the 1980's. For about a century Basilosaurus, Dorudon, and Protocetus represented the oldest known stage of whale evolution, and the general lack of fossil evidence for the origins of whales and the common ancestor for modern baleen & toothed whales caused some to propose that the living cetaceans had separate origins. All of this makes the recent explosion of information about whale origins all the more exciting.
Like some of the…
laelaps | June 7, 2008As I sat on the beach reading Ann Gibbons' The First Human this morning, I couldn't help think of the summer that could have been. For months I had a professor and some friends tell me "You really need to come out to Kenya" (specifically the Koobi Fora Field School). I attempted to stay positive, trying to figure out some way to put together the money to go, but as the spring semester got underway it soon became clear that I was not going to make it to Africa.
Being that I did not have the money or opportunity to go to Kenya I thought that I would try to start up my own research project…