This week I added some details of my education and my students to the open online academic genealogy: http://academictree.org/, and it got me thinking about my place in the history of vertebrate paleontology. Growing up, I heard a great deal about my family genealogy. One of my great uncles on my father’s side had undertaken the […]
Tag archives for T. rex
Science Writing Pet Peeves
Science writing is best when it is concise and precise. Good science writing is full of explicit details, devoid of vagueness, and strictly adheres to a narrative. In fact, a good scientific paper has a lot in common with a short story. Like Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “In the whole composition there should be no word written, […]
A Taxonomy of Paleontology Cranks
In science, we call non-expert people who push pseudoscientific ideas ‘cranks’. These folks are usually engaging in something Feynman insightfully labeled ‘cargo cult science’. The cargo cults of Pacific islands typically worship the military air transports that brought resources to the islands during WW2. The islanders have no context for the events that brought the planes, […]