I recently handled the revisions on a paper that hopefully will be in press very soon. One of the review comments was “Be very careful not to make ad hominem attacks”. I was a bit surprised to see that — I wasn’t aware that I’d made any — so I went back over the manuscript, and sure enough, there were no ad hom s in there. There was criticism, though, and I think that’s what the reviewer meant.

Robin Osborne, professor of ancient history at King’s College, Cambridge, had an article in the Guardian yesterday entitled “Why open access makes no sense“. It was described by Peter Coles as “a spectacularly insular and arrogant argument”, by Peter Webster as an “Amazingly wrong-headed piece” and  by Glyn Moody as “easily the most arrogant &

In the last few weeks, it’s been my pleasure and privilege to give invited talks on open access to both UCL and the University of Ulster. (Both of them went well, thanks for asking.) Now they come to process expenses, and both universities have asked for scans of my passport. I explained to UCL that I was only expecting expenses, not a fee, and they backed down;

It’s well worth reading this story about Thomas Herndon, a graduate student who as part of his training set out to replicate a well-known study in his field. The work he chose, Growth in a Time of Debt by Reinhart and Rogoff, claims to show that “median growth rates for countries with public debt over roughly 90 percent of GDP are about one percent lower than otherwise;

I was cruising the monographs the other night, looking for new ideas, when the humerus of Opisthocoelicaudia stopped me dead in my tracks. I think you’ll agree it is an arresting sight: Opisthocoelicaudia right humerus in medial, anterior, lateral, and posterior views, from Borsuk-Bialynicka (1977: figure 7) I’d seen it before, but somehow I had never grokked its grotesque fatness.