Come gawk at this weirdo in public! I’ll be signing copies of The Sauropod Dinosaurs: Life in the Age of Giants at regional events the next two weekends. This this coming Saturday, April 22, I’ll be at the Inland Empire Science Festival, which will run from 10 AM to 4 PM at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California. There will be a ton of other special exhibits and activities, too.

I was fortunate to get to visit some pretty cool places last year, and to photograph some awesome critters, many of which I had never seen so well before. Here are the best of the lot.

Back in 2012, in response to the Cost Of Knowledge declaration, Elsevier made all articles in “primary math journals” free to read, distribute and adapt after a four-year rolling window. Today, as David Roberts points out, it seems they have silently withdrawn some of those rights.

It’s baffled me for years that there is no open graph of scholarly citations — a set of machine-readable statements that (for example) Taylor et al. 2009 cites Stevens and Parrish 1999, which cites Alexander 1985 and Hatcher 1901.

This is very belated, but back in the summer of 2014 I was approached to write a bunch of sections — all of them to do with dinosaurs, naturally — in the book Evolution: The Whole Story.

The previous post (Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse) has been a surprise hit, and is now by far the most-read post in this blog’s nearly-ten-year history.

I’ve been on Twitter since April 2011 — nearly six years. A few weeks ago, for the first time, something I tweeted broke the thousand-retweets barrier. And I am really unhappy about it. For two reasons.

It’s been pretty quiet around here, huh? Why? It’s all just too awful to write about sauropod vertebrae at the moment. Trump. Brexit. Perverse incentives in academia. I can’t even get up enough enthusiasm to do the revisions for my own accepted-with-revisions manuscripts, let along write blog-posts. Oh, western civilisation.

I got an email this morning from Jim Kirkland, announcing: All of the lectures (with permission to be filmed) will be available on the NHMU YouTube channel. I just wrapped the edit of the 6th video which should be available later today. However, 5 of the lectures are now edited and already available for viewing.

TL;DR: if you know where I can get a notebook just like this one, or from the same manufacturer and made to the same specs, or have one of your own that I could buy off you (provided it’s mostly unused), please let me know in the comments.

It’s now been widely discussed that Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory and questionable open-access publishers — Beall’s List for short — has suddenly and abruptly gone away. No-one really knows why, but there are rumblings that he has been hit with a legal threat that he doesn’t want to defend.