This will be a short and mostly navel-gaze-y collection of links. Back in November, 2016, I posted here about my “Twelve Steps to Infinity” article in Sky & Telescope magazine. That one covered 12 objects in the winter sky and corresponding events in Earth history when the light we see now left those objects.

Saw this gem back in the herpetology collections at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and thought, “Someone up and Beauchened a turtle head.” (My inner monologue is a tennis match between an arch language pedant and an unreconstructed hick with a penchant for folksy archaisms.) What a sweet mount – there should be […]

So, here’s a cool thing that happened at Norwescon. On Saturday afternoon, there was an autograph signing session.

At the 2011 sauropod gigantism symposium in Bonn, John Hutchinson gave a talk on biomechanics of large animals. At the end he showed a short video of a rhino running full-tilt, tripping, and literally flipping end over end. After the wipeout, the rhino got up and trotted off, apparently unhurt.

Here at SV-POW!, we’re just not having it. Photo by Liguo Li, at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Also, because it’s only fair: Giant Irish Matt, to go with Giant Irish Mike.

If you are within striking distance of Claremont, come watch me cross the streams of my amateur and professional careers as I talk about the intersection of astronomy and paleontology. And if you can’t make it in person, check out the livestream on the Raymond M. Alf Museum page on Facebook.

Norwescon 41 Guests of Honor: Ken Liu, Galen Dara, and, er, me. Mike would like to remind you that you can get your own ‘Kylo Stabbed First’ t-shirt here. The week before last I was fortunate to be the Science Guest of Honor at Norwescon 41 in Seattle (as threatened back when). I had a fantastic time.

Marten skull on top, opossum on bottom. Internal (medial) view of the right half of each skull. These have been in my collection for ages, I just hadn’t gotten around to posting pictures. I don’t remember where I got them, but they were definitely purchased rather than collected. It’s funny, I remember the origin story of almost every bone and skull I’ve collected myself, but stuff I’ve bought tends to slide out of recollection.

Click to titanosaurize. Trust me. I was in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago to work with Liguo Li, of Yongjinglong fame, and I took a day to run up to New York for a quick day’s work at the American Museum of Natural History.

I noticed a spike recently in people tweeting about the post Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse, and it made me wonder how it ranks among the most-viewed posts on this blog. Turns out it’s by far the most viewed.

Yesterday, Alex Holcome’s tweet drew my attention to Shahar Avin’s paper “Centralised Funding and Epistemic Exploration”, currently in press at The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. You can read the accepted manuscript on PhilSci Archive. My colleague Filip Jakobsen asked me to explain in layman’s terms what the paper was saying.