I just got off a chat with Matt. Here is the whole thing, all but unedited, for your enjoyment. All you need to know is that my wife, Fiona, built a symphony, which Matt refers to as a boxomophone in tribute to Homer Simpson refering to Lisa’s instrument as a saxomophone. Mathew: Hey, how is Fiona’s boxomophone working out? me: O HAI.
I’ve been reading The Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats (Wood 1982) again. Here’s what he says on pages 98-99 about the strength of crocodiles, and what happens when they bite off more than they can chew.
Last night, I submitted a paper for publication — for the first time since April 2013. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like.
Actually we had the Jurassic talks today, but I can’t show you any of the slides*, so instead you’re getting some brief, sauropod-centric highlighs from the museum. * I had originally written that the technical content of the talks is embargoed, but that’s not true–as ReBecca Hunt-Foster pointed out in a comment, the conference guidebook with all of the abstracts is freely available online here.
When Fiona checked her email this morning, she found this note from our next-door neighbour Jenny: What a delightful surprise!
Christine Argot of the MNHN, Paris, drew our attention to this wonderful old photo (from here, original caption reproduced below): [{.size-full .wp-image-9874 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-9874” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“9874” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/03/01/the-case-of-the-bandy-legged-diplodocus/1-7_diplodocus_2_l/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/1-7_diplodocus_2_l.jpg” orig-size=“2362,1772”
From the files of J. K. Rowling. Publisher #1 Dear Ms. Rowling, Thank you for submitting your manuscript Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We will be happy to consider it for publication. However we have some concerns about the excessive length of this manuscript. We usually handle works of 5-20 pages, sometimes as much as 30 pages. Your 1337-page manuscript exceeds these limits, and requires some trimming.
The Scholarly Kitchen is the blog of the Society of Scholarly Publishers, and as such discusses lots of issues that are of interest to us. But a while back, I gave up commenting there two reasons. First, it seemed rare that fruitful discussions emerged, rather than mere echo-chamberism;
As we all know, University libraries have to pay expensive subscription fees to scholarly publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and Informa, so that their researchers can read articles written by their colleagues and donated to those publishers.
Reading the Government’s comments on the recent BIS hearing on open access, I see this: Following the link provided, I read: I’m completely, completely baffled by this.