Thursday, June 28, 2007

Hello from California


Life is hard. As hinted at by John in a previous post, he, myself, and Graeme are currently residing in Santa Barbara, taking part in the Paleobiology Database summer course. So far, we've been confused by the philosophy of statistics, and befuddled by the basics of programming. Tomorrow, we will blunder headlong into the quagmire of geometric morphometrics.

Anyway, today was a day off, and, amongst other things, we went to have a look at the Santa Barbara mission (as Saint Barbara is the patron saint of geologists, it's of course very appropriate that we're here). Here's a photo of the three of us outside of said mission, with the Santa Ynez mountains in the background.

As I say, life is hard.

Right then, must be off. I dare say either John or I will put in an update when something exciting happens.

P.S. We saw a skunk the other day!

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Linneus 300th bash

Hello all

I trust that you are all well and engaged in interesting activities. I thought I might post a quick update on the most recent conference attended by paleopadwans (myself and Emma), since we're not really using this site for much palaeo talk (owing, of course, to having better sites to vist, like facebook for example). Anyway, the Royal Society held a tercentenary evolution themed extravaganza earlier this week for good old Linneus and these were the main events: Dick Jeffries (whom some of you may know) got arsy with a lot of people, there was a mass debate about whether we should refer to one half of the Protostomia as lophotrochozoans or spiralians (joy!) and I may have inadvertantly let slip that I thought some aspects of the MSc were a load of poo to Paddy Orr, Nic Butterfield and Mat Wills over lunch in Pizza Hut (the pepperoni had really gone to my head). And that was about it. Oh, there were some interesting advances being talked about too but these mainly involved gene expression experiments and loads of pictures of embryos with supernumary limbs etc, there wasn't much talk of fossils. Anyway, for those of you attending Paris in a few weeks, good luck! Who's going to Palass and what are we all doing with our grant money? I am rotting thiomargarita (I got bored of embryos) and contemplating lophotrochozoan (not spiralian) decay paths and planning to make Briggs' mineralization experiments look like kindergarten projects. Them there's fightin' words!
But enough about me......what about you????

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Photos

I was going through my photo collection the other day and came across a bunch of pictures from Bristol. They're mostly from early in the year, and I'm afraid they're not all the most flattering shots in the world, but given that a) it was decided that my photo looked like Beavis and b) that a shot of me gawking at the walls of the Avon Gorge (actually, I'll admit that I'm a bit perversely proud of that), I don't think any of you have anything to complain about. The last shot may not make much sense to most of you, but I'm sure Koen remembers it...