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.

Inspired by Bob Nicholl’s brilliant sketch Failed Ambush , my son Matthew reinterpreted it in this video — also titled Failed Ambush. NOTE: this video is officially endorsed by Dr. Mathew J. Wedel, who testifies as follows: “it’s awesome”.

Are you a lover of sauropod necks? Do you long to demonstrate to your friends and family how much better[1] they are than the necks of other long-necked critters? Are you crazy for the Taylor and Wedel (2013a) paper on why sauropods had long necks; and why giraffes have short necks , but disappointed that it’s not, until now, been obtainable in T-shirt form?

In a comment on the last post, Anonymous wrote: I am going to answer first for myself, and then invite Mike and Darren and everyone else to share their thoughts. For me, two things. First, I don’t always work on sauropods–I have a human anatomy paper in press, and two different projects on mammal skull osteology struggling toward publication, and a couple of bird things.

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I hate to keep flogging a dead horse, but since this issue won’t go away I guess I can’t, either. 1. Two years ago, I wrote about how you have to pay to download Elsevier’s “open access” articles.

Although it would be nice to think that our site views have octupled in the last day because of Mike’s fine and funny posts about what search terms bring people to SV-POW!, the real reason is that we were blessed by incoming links from both pages of this Cracked.com article.

As I noted last time, I had a reason for going through the SV-POW! search logs. Inspired by a feature at Math with Bad Drawings , I’m going to interpret unusual or interesting search terms as questions, and answer them here. brachiosaurus vs brontosaurus. Brachiosaurus wins on mass, height, not being a junior synonym, general awesomeness and probably length. Brontosaurus wins on date of naming.

A while back, Matt mentioned some of the surprising search-terms that lead people to SV-POW!. For reasons that will shortly become clear, I was checking out what’s being searched for now, and I thought I may as well issue this update.

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