For a palaeontology blog, we don’t talk a lot about geology. Time to fix that, courtesy of my middle son Matthew, currently 13 years old, who made this helpful guide to the rock cycle as Geology homework.

As the conference season heaves into view again, I thought it was worth gathering all four parts of the old Tutorial 16 (“giving good talks”) into one place, so it’s easy to link to. So here they are: Part 1: Planning: finding a narrative Make us care about your project. Tell us a story. You won’t be able to talk about everything you’ve done this year. Omit much that is relevant. Pick a single narrative. Ruthlessly prune.

It turns out that G. K. Chesterton conveniently summarised all of my advice on slide preparation more than a century ago: (Inscribed in the front of a child’s picture book, around 1906.)

It’s five to ten on Saturday night. Matt and I are in New York City. We could be at the all-you-can-eat sushi buffet a couple of blocks down from our hotel, or watching a film, or doing all sorts of cool stuff. Instead, we’re in our hotel room. Matt is reformatting the bibliography of our neck-elongation manuscript, and I am tweaking the format of the citations. Just sayin’.

I am finalising an article for submission to Palaeontologia Electronica . Regarding the acknowledgements, the Contributor Instructions say: “Initials are used rather than given names.” WHY?! What on earth is gained by forcing authors to thank R. Cifelli instead of Rich Cifelli for access to specimens? And of course this is the tiniest tip of the pointless-reformatting iceberg.

Question. I am supposed to be meeting up with Mike Taylor at the conference, but we’ve not met before and I won’t recognise him.  Do you know what he looks like? Candidate Answer #1. He’s a bit overweight and has white hair. Candidate Answer #2. He exhibits mild to moderate abdominal hypertrophy and accelerated ontogenetic degradation in the pigmentation of the cranial integument.

Folks, you should all stop reading this blog right now, and get yourselves across to What’s In John’s Freezer? , the awesome new blog of biomechanics wizard and brachiosaur-cervical scan facilitator John Hutchinson.

In among all the open-access discussion and ostrich-herding, we at SV-POW! Towers do still try to get some actual science done.  As we all know all too well, the unit of scientific communication is the published paper , and getting a submission ready involves a lot more than just the research itself.

Folks, just a short post to let you know that, together with my colleagues in the @access Working Group, I have just launched a new web-site. One of the problems we have in promoting Open Access is getting non-scholars involved.  So the whole enterprise can feel like an ivory-tower issue, one that just doesn’t affect the great majority of people.  But that’s not true. The new site is called Who needs access?

An interesting conversation arose in the comments to Matt’s last post — interesting to me, at least, but then since I wrote much of it, I am biased.  I think it merits promotion to its own post, though.  Paul Graham, among many others, has written about how one of the most important reasons to write about a subject is that the process of doing so helps you work through exactly what you think about it.