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Local author book signing at the San Bernardino County Museum this Sunday
Remember how my better half, Dr. Vicki Wedel, edited a book about blunt force trauma, called Broken Bones? If you live in SoCal and you’d like to get a copy, or get your copy signed, then you’re in...
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Baby box turtles, and the ghost of editors past
We adopted a couple of 6-week-old box turtles today. They are Three-Toed Box Turtles, Terrapene carolina triunguis, and they are insanely adorable. This one seemed oddly familiar…had I encountered it...
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The central irony of life in academia
Hey, look, there goes my future! One thing that always bemuses me is the near-absolute serendipity of the academic job market. To get into research careers takes at least a decade of very deliberate,...
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Lookback time – my new article in Sky & Telescope
I’ve been writing for Sky & Telescope, the American astronomy magazine, for a year now. My first feature article was published last December (details here), my second came out this April (ditto),...
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My collection of sauropod-themed mugs (or at least five sixths of it)
Over the years, I’ve accumulated quite a few sauropod-themed mugs, most of them designed by myself and relating to papers that I’ve been involved with. Here are most of them (plus a bonus): From left...
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Off-topic: what will happen to my tungsten cube?
In her best-selling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo argues that you should get rid of everything in your life that doesn’t “spark joy”. I have accepted that I will never...
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Off-topic: your gonads are innervated by your cranial nerves
Amazing diagram of the path of the vagus nerve and its branches in the neck, thorax, and abdomen, from Wilson-Pauwels et al. (1988). The gonads aren’t drawn here, but they do receive vagal innervation....
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On the poignancy and intimacy of history
I’m currently working on a paper about the AMNH’s rearing Barosaurus mount. (That’s just one of the multiple reasons I am currently obsessed by Barosaurus.) It’s a fascinating process: more of a...
View ArticleThese new “artificial intelligence” programs don’t know what they’re talking...
I’m sure you’ve seen things like ChatGPT in the news: programs that can carry out pretty convincing conversations. They are known as Large Language Models (LLMs) and are frequently referred to as being...
View ArticleNo-one knows whether or not a neutral-tasting nutrient-sludge diet leads to...
I recently discovered the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, which is largely about the science of obesity — a matter of more than academic interest to me, and if I may say to, to Matt. I discovered SMTM...
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