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The week before last I was fortunate to be the Science Guest of Honor at Norwescon 41 in Seattle (as threatened back when). I had a fantastic time.

These have been in my collection for ages, I just hadn’t gotten around to posting pictures. I don’t remember where I got them, but they were definitely purchased rather than collected.

I was in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago to work with Liguo Li, of Yongjinglong fame, and I took a day to run up to New York for a quick day’s work at the American Museum of Natural History.

(they don't make them like they used to ... ) Cratons are anomalously-strong regions of the continents that have largely resisted tectonic forces for billions of years. How such strong zones could be forged in a hot, low-viscosity, low stress,  early-Earth has been a long-standing puzzle for geologists.

Cratons are anomalously-strong regions of the continents that have largely resisted tectonic forces for billions of years. How such strong zones could be forged in a hot, low-viscosity, low stress, early-Earth has been a long-standing puzzle for geologists. Adam Beall, Katie Cooper and Louis Moresi have recently proposed that cratons were made by the catastrophic switching on of plate tectonics.

I noticed a spike recently in people tweeting about the post Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse, and it made me wonder how it ranks among the most-viewed posts on this blog. Turns out it’s by far the most viewed.

Yesterday, Alex Holcome’s tweet drew my attention to Shahar Avin’s paper “Centralised Funding and Epistemic Exploration”, currently in press at The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science . You can read the accepted manuscript on PhilSci Archive. My colleague Filip Jakobsen asked me to explain in layman’s terms what the paper was saying. Here’s what I told him.

The opening remarks by the hosts of conferences are usually highly forgettable, a courtesy platform offered to a high-ranking academic who has nothing to say about the conference’s subject. NOT THIS TIME! This is the opening address of APE 2018, the Academic Publishing in Europe conference.

On Thursday an animatronic T. rex at the Royal Gorge Dinosaur Experience in Colorado caught fire and burned down to a stark metal endoskeleton. The story is all over the place – here’s the version from the Washington Post, with a couple of videos. Naturally people started making memes out of this arresting image.