@mike@sauropods.win
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

mike

@mike@sauropods.win

By day I am a computer programmer with Index Data, where I have been happily and gainfully employed for 20 years.

By night, I am a vertebrate palaeontologist with the University of Bristol, specialising in sauropods: the biggest and best of all dinosaurs.

I am an advocate for open access, open data and open source, and also for open peer-review though I'm beginning to think pre-publication peer-review might be a mistake. I support #LFC.

Email: dino@miketaylor.org.uk
ORCiD: 0000-0002-1003-5675

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TheDinosaurDave, (edited ) to random
@TheDinosaurDave@sauropods.win avatar

You are starting your own Jurassic Park, on your own private island.
You can snap your fingers and get 5 prehistoric life forms from any time period to be the first exhibits.
What animals do you choose?
Reply and let me know. Maybe some of those will become dinosaurs of the week... maybe :D

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@TheDinosaurDave
Xenoposeidon
Brontomerus
Apatosaurus louisae
Giraffatitan
Argentinosaurus

TheDinosaurDave, (edited ) to random
@TheDinosaurDave@sauropods.win avatar

REPLY TO - https://sauropods.win/@TheDinosaurDave/110340745934241222
(FACEDESK) When will they get this right? It seems like they are stuck on 65 and Hollywood cant get it through its head that non avian dinosaurs went extinct 66mya
5/X

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@TheDinosaurDave Also, what is the one species that has supposedly reigned for those 65 million years? Is it ... "mammals"? Humans? I think they mean T. rex, but ... Well.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@TheDinosaurDave I watched the first Meg expecting it to be terrible, and found myself enjoying it a lot. My fear is that if I go into this one expecting to enjoy it, I will have unwittingly set my mental bar too high, and I'll be disappointed.

TheDinosaurDave, to random
@TheDinosaurDave@sauropods.win avatar

Welcome to .Where we watch an episode of an old Documentary, TV show, trailer or movie with in it.
This weeks is the new trailer for "The Meg 2: The Trench Trailer #1"
You cant watch it yourself here.
And yes, for some reason there is dinosaurs in this trailer... well dinosaur haha
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkXLYE7Ht2E
1/X

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@TheDinosaurDave This trailer looks extremely cool, in that extremely stupid kind of way that we can sometimes overlook. But it does leave me feeling that I have pretty much seen the whole movie now.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@TheDinosaurDave For what it's worth, I assumed these were meant to be synapsids.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@TheDinosaurDave Who can even tell? 🙂

MarkRubin, to science
@MarkRubin@fediscience.org avatar

Open Science and Academic Workload

New article by Thomas Hostler in the Journal of Trial and Error:

“There is a high chance that without intervention, increased expectations to engage in open research practices may lead to unacceptable increases in demands on academics.”

Open access: https://doi.org/10.36850/mr5








@stsing
@academicchatter

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@MarkRubin @stsing @academicchatter the thing is, "open research practices" just means doing it right. If that entails MORE effort, then the researchers were cutting corners.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@writingmonicker @MarkRubin @stsing @academicchatter Sure. It's always effort to do a job properly.

As a scientist, I want to get beyond "How little can I get away with doing, and still early my shiny badge".

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@writingmonicker @MarkRubin @stsing @academicchatter I am afraid you and I may still be on different pages here. To me, open-science practices like depositing datasets, maintaining code in public repos and and publishing OA are the job of scientific research. I no more want a specialist to do this for me than I want one to look at fossils for me, or write my papers for me.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@writingmonicker @MarkRubin @stsing @academicchatter Fair enough. This one of those times where "agree to disagree" doesn't feel like just giving up :-)

TheDinosaurDave, (edited ) to random
@TheDinosaurDave@sauropods.win avatar

This weeks is

Found in 1821, and named "near to" "lizard" by Henry De la Beche and William Conybeare. This is because it more reptile like than Ichthyosaurus, another marine reptile that had been found only a couple years earlier.

Plesiosaurus was a 3 meter long marine reptile from the Early Jurassic.

An almost complete fossil was later discovered by the legendary in 1823. This fossil is still on display in the Natural History Museum London.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@AdamStuartSmith @TheDinosaurDave And yet the NHM's marine reptile display is still better than its dinosaur display.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@AdamStuartSmith @TheDinosaurDave I don't think do, but not 100% certain. I recently learned that the Triceratops is not even a cast, it's a sculpture based on Marsh's plate.

codinghorror, to random

In one study, a researcher tried to measure what she called the “standard maximum silence,” the longest lull people can typically tolerate before they begin to itch to say something. For most participants, that came after only one second. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/05/awkward-silence-in-conversation-zoom-video-chat/673937/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20230503&utm_term=The%20Atlantic%20Daily

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@grumpygamer @codinghorror I seem to remember seeing a cop show (irritatingly, I can't remember what it was) when the lead character's big thing was that he would be silent when interviewing suspects.

TheDinosaurDave, to random
@TheDinosaurDave@sauropods.win avatar

Welcome to .Where we watch an episode of an old Documentary, TV show, or movie with in it.
This week we are looking at .
It was a TV show from 2011. The basic premise is that in the not so distant future, Earth has become uninhabitable. And they find a way to create a portal back in time 85m years or so.
The main characters go back to this prehistoric time, have adventures and live there with other people.
1/X

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@TheDinosaurDave Nope, this level of neck elevation is just fine. You're probably thinking of Stevens and Parrish's (1999) DInoMorph paper in the that scurrilous rag Science, but that study was flaws in many different respects. For counter arguments, see among others https://www.app.pan.pl/archive/published/app54/app54-213.pdf and https://peerj.com/articles/712/

ct_bergstrom, to random
@ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org avatar

For the entire span of my life, people have tried to develop AI systems and anticipated a day when those systems can pass the Turing Test.

Now that day has arrived, and no one seems to care about Turing Tests anymore. Why not?

Is it that

  1. We're not actually there? It would take more than a few simple patches (google the answer to arithmetic questions!) on top of ChatGPT to pass a turing test?

  2. Arriving there makes it clear that the Turing Test never was the right metric?

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@ct_bergstrom my vote is #2. The idea of the Turing Test is 73 years old, and creaking badly. There was a time when it made sense, but that time is not now. With computers many magnitudes more powerful that Turing even imagined, it's possible to brute-force the problem of faking the ability to converse.

codinghorror, to random

no worries, it's alcohol, one of the three most dangerous addictive drugs in the world, we should have no problems, totes legal 🤯

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@codinghorror [citation needed]

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@codinghorror Interesting. Half a dozen different articles give wildly different lists, but it's true that alcohol keeps cropping up in most of them.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@codinghorror I guess my question is this (and it really is a question, not a rhetorical gambit). When people use alcohol and end up in hospital, it's because they drank a straight one-litrel bottle of vodka instead of having a couple of beers. When people who take, say, LSD end up in hospital, is it because they look the LSD equivalent of a bottle of vodka?

mike, to random
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

Patton Oswalt: "Germany teaches its kids about the Holocaust. We’re trying not to teach our kids about slavery. That really tells you where we are on the insecurity scale."
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jan/19/patton-oswalt-id-rather-be-doctor-who-than-james-bond-less-having-to-take-your-shirt-off

nicolaromano, to Pubtips
@nicolaromano@qoto.org avatar

I have been considering publishing my next article in
I was not very convinced by their new method, but the more I think about it, the more I like it.

What convinced me is that I think of the way I review papers myself. I won't ever reject a paper unless there is something majorly wrong e.g. from an ethical point of view. Instead, I would rather spend time and give constructive and realistic feedback to improve the study.

This is because of two reasons:

  1. If the study idea/methodology etc, is good but maybe is missing some key experiment, I think that the authors must have put a lot of effort, time and money into producing this. I have been through the "your work is not fancy enough for our prestigious journal" crap enough times that I will not engage in that. Ever. There is no reason your paper should not publish negative results if the study is well done.
    Also, people's jobs and mental health depend on that, which is way more important.
    Also, there are plenty of papers in "fancy journals" that are just piles of bs, so I really won't buy into shiny names (I have just spent an entire day trying to run code from several papers published in high-IF journals to no avail...).

  2. If the study is poor, it is easy to say: "This is cr*p, straight reject". This just means the authors will submit elsewhere, hoping the next reviewer won't be bothered reading the paper in depth and will let it through. Even worse, this plays into the hands of journals. I would rather say this can be accepted after all of these major revisions.
    The authors get useful feedback on how to improve their study; they might choose not to act on it, but at least I have made my part.

I would be interested in hearing other views on this.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@nicolaromano Strongly agree! Journal "prestige" is a racket, pure and simple.

FranckLeroy, to random

Exactly 14 years ago , Satoshi Nakamoto designed the most pathetic / inefficient system ever invented by humankind : the blockchain.

Today, it weights 60 000 tons, wastes constantly 10 gigawatts (more than Belgium or Chile) to process less than 7 transactions per second :

Less than a 33 bps modem from 1990.

This could be a joke if it didn't have such gigantic environmental impact, wasn't enabling billion dollars ransomware industry and was not crushing thousands of lives in the process.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@FranckLeroy That is horrifying indeed. What is the source for your numbers?

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