I just read Mick Watson’s post Why I resigned as PLOS ONE academic editor on his blog [opiniomics](http://biomickwatson.wordpress.com/ “bioinformatics, genomes, biology etc.

You know how every time you point out a problem to legacy publishers — like when they’re caught misrepresenting their open-access offerings they explain that it’s very complicated and will take months to fix? Here’s how that should work: To summarise: I found a bug in the PeerJ system;

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Remember at the start of the year, Matt and I had a contest to design a cover for a random book in half an hour?

Back in 2008, Matt and I were at the Museum Für Naturkunde Berlin.

I recently handled the revisions on a paper that hopefully will be in press very soon. One of the review comments was “Be very careful not to make ad hominem attacks”. I was a bit surprised to see that — I wasn’t aware that I’d made any — so I went back over the manuscript, and sure enough, there were no ad hom s in there. There was criticism, though, and I think that’s what the reviewer meant.

I was recently bemoaning the lack of published diplodocid cervical illustrations in dorsal view. Subsequently I mentioned that Upchurch et al. (2005) had illustrated five cervicals of an Apatosaurus specimen. I was overlooking one other paper that contains such an illustration. Which is a bit embarrassing, as it’s one of ours. In fact, it’s our most recent paper, Wedel and Taylor (2013) on sauropod neural spine bifurcation.

Every year I invest many days’ effort into preparing a 20-minute talk for SVPCA. Then I deliver it to maybe 80 people, and that’s the end — it’s over.

Last time, I asked if anyone has dorsal-view photos of the cervical vertebrae of Diplodocus . No responses yet, and I do urge you to chip in if you have any ideas. But here’s something to keep us positive: Apatosaurus cervicals!