5. Brian Kraatz, 2004 In the spring of 2004, I was killing time over in Tony Barnosky’s lab at Berekeley, talking to Brian Kraatz about something–mammals, probably. Brian told me that I should consider going to the International Congress of Zoology that was happening in Beijing that fall.

In discussion of Samuel Gershman’s rather good piece The Exploitative Economics Of Academic Publishing , I got into this discusson on Twitter with David Mainwaring (who is usually one of the more interesting legacy-publisher representatives on these issues) and Daniel Allingon (who I don’t know at all). I’ll need to give a bit of background before I reach the key part of that discussion, so here goes.

In a comment on the last post, Anonymous wrote: I was wondering, in the course of your career, have you ever gotten tired of studying sauropods?

(This is sort of a riff on the recent post, Tutorial 12: How to find problems to work on, which you might want to read first if you haven’t already.) Something that has been much on my mind lately is the idea that if you don’t go too far, you don’t know how far you should have gone.