We live in stupid times. As I write this, Google Scholar’s front page is advertising “New! AI outlines in Scholar PDF Reader: skim per-section bullets, deep read what you need”. Yes: it’s using AI to provide a short summary of what’s in a paper. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of a profoundly fallible AI summary, we could read a summary written by the actual authors, who know the material inside out? We can, of course.
Nearly a year ago, I got an email from Liam Shen, who was interested in getting seriously involved in palaeontology. He asked for advice on doing a Ph.D part time, and I realised what what I had to say in reply might be of broader interest. Here’s Liam’s question, lightly edited: And my reply (which I did send to Liam the next day, but am only now getting around to posting here): I never set out to do a Ph.D really.
The world is full of wonderful animals, both extant and extinct, and they all have names. As a result, it’s fairly common for newly named animals to be given names already in use — as for example with the giant Miocene sperm whale “ Leviathan ” (now Livyatan ). BUt there are ways to avoid walking into this problem, and in a helpful post on the Dinosaur Mailing Group, Ben Creisler recently posted a summary.
I was struck by a Mastodon post where classic game developer Ron Gilbert quoted film critic Roger Ebert as follows: And Gilbert commented: In a reply, Gretchen Anderson said her favourite version of this is: I couldn’t find the original source for this, but as I was trying to track it down I ran into this, attributed to Pablo Picasso: When I mentioned these observations to Matt, he sent me a longer-form exposition of the same phenomenon,
Yes, we’ve touched on a similar subject in a previous tutorial, but today I want to make a really important point about writing anything of substance, whether it’s a scientific paper, a novel or the manual for a piece of software. It’s this: you have to actually do the work. And the way you do that is by first doing a bit of the work, then doing a bit more, and iterating until it’s all done.
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“And in conclusion, this new fossil/analysis shows that Lineageomorpha was more [here fill in the blank]: diverse morphologically varied widely distributed geographically widely distributed stratigraphically …than previously appreciated.“ Yes, congratulations, you’ve correctly identified that time moves forward linearly and that information accumulates.
When I gave the talk about vertebral orientation for the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress at the end of 2018, I had to prepare it as a video — so I saved it on YouTube so it would outlive the conference: Having figured out the practicalities of doing this, it made sense to similarly make a permanent record of my SVPCA 2019 talk, The Past, Present and Future of Jensen’s “Big Three” sauropods : I promised back then that I would put
I don’t know if this exists in the US, but here in Britain it’s common for kids in Year 11 at school (age 15 or 16) to have a week allocated where they find a position (usually unpaid) and do some work outside the school. It’s called “work experience”. A friend of a friend has a son that age, and he wants to be a palaeontologist. I was asked if I had any advice. Here’s what I wrote, lightly edited: I hope it’s useful to other enthusiastic kids.
As noted in the last post, Matt and I are off to spend a week at the Carnegie Museum from 11th-15th March. We expect to see many, many fascinating specimens there: far more than we’ll be able to do proper work on in the five days we have. So our main goal is to exhaustively document the most important specimens that we see, so we can work on them later after we’ve got home.