Dave's Wibble, Rants and Stuff

Readers may have noticed that I have a bit of a thing for science communication. When its done well its beautiful to watch. Some scientists have a real flair for presentation (admittedly some don't- being an educator is hard.) But I haven't met a scientist yet who hasn't enjoyed talking to people about the research they do and why they do it.


Its one of the reasons I love UCL's "Lunch Hour Lectures" series (available on YouTube), the NHM's "Nature Live" programme of short talks,(which sadly aren't made available on the web these days), and the RI Christmas Lectures for the younger viewers.



The Vega Science Trust has put a whole load of science videos up on the web. There's lectures from the RI by Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, about how weird pulsars are (complete with the sort of demonstrations I recall from the RI Christmas Lectures of my youth), Richard Feynmann giving the Douglas Robb Lectures at the University of Auckland, and interviews with all sorts of Nobel Laureates and other scientists.



TV? Who needs one.

Given that there's a new one, and the price of the old one has dropped a bit on the second hand market I've decided to get a used Canon EOS 5D. Its a full-frame camera, so all my lenses do what they did on the old EOS-1 film body I have, rather than having a 1.6 crop as on the cheaper bodies. Also it won't be killed by the voltages from the flash kit I own too. It'll only work manually, but given the instant feedback that digital gives you that's not something I'm too unhappy about. I'll probably look out for a dedicated flashgun eventually, (and it looks like some of the modern flashguns will still work on a T90, which is a real bonus) but for now its all good, as they say.

I also finally found a hotshoe adaptor so I can use the long flash cable I have. Which is very useful, as you can see...


Now the only thing I need to look out for is one of these, an EOS to FD adaptor, without glass, so I can use bellows and fancy close-up lenses. Knowing there and then if the lighting or focussing are right is really helpful. Much as I'd love one, I just can't afford the MP-E65.

So am I abandoning film? Hell no. I'll still use it for lots of things- especially situations where I know what I'm doing with regards to lighting, etc. Plus I love the feel of the old cameras. I think the F-1 might see rather more use compared to the T90 now. With digital I shoot more, but think less. Which doesn't necessarily make for better photographs. With film I pay much more attention to what I'm seeing in the viewfinder.

But when it comes to experimentation? Digital is much more convenient.

Day 23 - A YouTube Video

Egosofts X-Series games are probably my favourite games out there right now. They're the closest anyone's come to Elite with modern graphics. And best of all, while it isn't open source by any means there is a very active mod community- fan-made scripts are regularly incorporated into offical bonus packs, and after one game got a particularly detailed and expansive mod they hired some of the people who produced one mod to work on the next game they made. A little while ago there was a competition to make videos using the game.





Yep. Space trading games that cost £20 can now be used to make films that look better (and are often better plotted, written and acted) than things in Doctor Who, Babylon 5, and plenty of other SciFi. My god this truly is The Future.

I am perhaps something of a luddite when it comes to technology. I still shoot film. With cameras 20 years old. My phone is a Nokia 3310. I listen to a Discman on the way in to work. (It plays MP3 CDs I'm not that far behind the times).

So I am, as you might expect, not excited by the iPad. And the first things I read confirmed my suspicions. It probably isn't for me. And I couldn't really see why anyone else would want one. You can't make calls, so its not as useful as a phone. No videoconferencing, no quick snapshots. So you won't leave the iPhone at home anyway. And virtually everything a laptop does, it does worse. You need an adapter to give you a USB port. And then it describes itself as being a "camera connector kit" Does that mean I can print from it? Or connect a scanner? I doubt it. Nothing other than proprietory software sounds bad to me. I've never used iPhoto. How does it compare with Photoshop CS2? Even if iits good, for anything other than basic tweaking I'd want to be able to use an external mouse or graphics tablet- its got bluetooth, so hopefully that's doable- but by the time you start adding these peripherals you're getting back into laptop territory.

There's certainly no support for Flash, so the only way to view embedded content would be with a trillion and one applicatons. Which seems crazy. I care nothing for a camera in something like that, but clearly several people do. It does however have support for all the iPhone/iPod apps. Which is very nice and gives you a massive ready-made suite of programs, like light-sabres, virtual beer glasses, and things that are actually useful like a word-processor. Tablets as a whole might have a wonderful variety of industrial applications, but I don't think the iPad will be exploiting them just yet. (Its only 2010 after all).

But then I read a bit more. And I can see how even I might get a use out of it. I do not own a laptop. I honestly haven't seen the point. Most of my computer use is either surfing the net, listening to music, watching videos (I recently sent the TV back home as I haven't turned it on in months), and playing music. All of this the iPad will do perfectly well. With one small exception. It does not multitask, other than, presumably allowing you to play music and do one other thing. I think I might be spoiled by Firefox here, as I've lost count of the add-ons I could install to control other software, check websites and suchlike without even switching tabs.

However the other thing I use my computer for that the iPad is photo manipulation. There is no way an iPad will replace my set up (extra monitor, scanners, graphics tablet, printer, card readers, etc). Once I've plugged all that in there is absolutely no value in me having a laptop, either, as I'm tied to the desk anyway. Better to have something with a big screen and a keyboard I can actually write on than something small and cramped. But as I say. This isn't what I do most of the time. I can see it being extremely useful to be able to throw something nice and light in the suitcase, and keep myself entertained in the evenings. No more working out which books to take with me- its an ebook reader, I'll have a small library thank-you. I can have a variety of films, and most of my music collection. That should keep me occupied through a wet weekend in Wales when the rain's horizontal, and you really don't want to leave the caravan (Yes I've been on holidays like that).

Except the memory is tiny. The cheap one is 16GB. The expensive ones are 64GB Most people with digital SLRs have 4-8GB sitting in their cameras, and another two or three to spare. This is not the relatively portable storage for anyone moderately snap-happy that even a cheap laptop would be. Anyone serious would use a notebook- Still a market for the Airbook then.

However, as I've said most of what I do most of the time could very easily be done on the iPad. The portability would be quite nice- though I'm not sure how ubiquitous free wifi is in the UK compared with the states. My inbuilt pessimism tells me I'd need the 3G version if I took it out of the house. And the keyboard looks horrible to use. I have tried using the one on an iPhone briefly. I didn't like it much. Then again, I like the tactile feel I get from typing.

So for me it would be a toy. For the people who find computers strange and bewildering beasts it will be very nice. Until they want to do two things at once, or print a document, or... And then there's all the fans who'd buy a turd if you polished it and stuck the Apple logo on it. So I'm sure it will sell well enough, and then maybe when you get to the 3rd or 4th generation we'll have a product I'd actually be interested in.

But frankly the real kicker for me is this quote: "Closed devices are the future of computing." It is probably true. And that is something I am truly afraid of.

From XKCD- Break-ups are better with junior synonyms.



Brontosaurus excelsus was named in 1879, two years after Apatosaurus ajax. in 1903 Elmer Riggs decided that the two species were close enough to belong to the same genus, and by the laws governing zoological nomenclature Brontosaurus had to be sunk. The "mistaken combination" comes not from work done re-evaluating bones mistakenly assigned to A. excelsus, but the mount at the Peabody Museum that used skull material from the more distantly related Camarasaurus to restore the missing pieces. Later it was realised that Apatosaurus would have had a lower, more delicate skull, similar to that of its relative Diplodocus. But even then the name carried on, although given textbooks (especially children's textbooks) habit of copying from one another, they were still copying Knight's restorations, long after they should have known better.

By this time everyone not involved in actual science was using the name "Brontosaurus". Wikipedia blames the Peabody mount, I can see why, even now it still takes a while to update labels to reflect changes in taxonomy to pick a recent example close to home, Bob Bakker named the plesiosaur genus Attenborosaurus in 1993, but it took several years for the display at the NHM to be updated. I can see the same thing happenning at Yale, and by the time they did change the name on the label, everyone who people listen to (so not the scientists) is calling it "Brontosaurus".

I'd quite like to see Transformers Revenge of the Fallen, because a film about giant robots smashing the crap out of each other sounds like it should be an awful lot of fun. I don't have to worry about complex plot twists, I don't have to worry about following the dialogue minutely, it should be a perfect summer movie. Don't get me wrong I love cerebral films with character depth, and plot-twists galore, just not when its too hot to think. Sometimes its nice to just switch my brain off and enjoy the explosions for a couple of hours.

And then I read reviews like this, this and this. And I wonder if I should bother. I should, of course, have expected this. The first one had problems with objectification of women and racial stereotypes, so I'm not sure why I thought the new one would be any different.

Its sad really, this is 2009, not 1959. I can excuse this kind of thing in the 50's B-movies I love, because they're a product of their time, made before the Civil Rights movement, Women's Lib, and Stonewall. I should feel guilty for wanting to see it because its big, brash, and dumb. Not because its an example of some of the worst aspects of Hollywood's continuing attitudes to race.

The following is adapted from a dissertation I wrote several years ago.

Fossils have been recognised as the remains of living organisms since the time of Leonardo da Vinci and before. At the close of the 18th century the French anatomist George Cuvier developed the idea of extinction, demonstrating that many fossils are not those of modern species. Erasmus Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck formulated some of the first ideas suggesting that species were not immutable. At the same time James Hutton was formulating his theory of the earth, and demonstrated that the earth was much older than the ages biblical chronologies allowed (Bowler 1989). These three ideas were to become important questions and discussed much through the following century.

( A (very) brief history of collecting )

Agassiz (1835) described osteostracean remains in his works on fossil fishes, creating the genus Cephalaspis for four species, C. lyelli, C. lewisii, C. lloydii, and C. rostrata. These species were not initially recognised as jawless. Of these four, Thomas Henry Huxley restricted Cephalaspis to C. lyelli, and created the genus Pteraspis for Agassiz’s other species in the genus (Huxley 1858). E. Ray Lankester separated heterostraceans and osteostraceans into separate groups in his 1868 monograph.

( Ostracoderms. Some of the best fish ever... )

Revolutions in science are not instantaneous. New theories and ways of thinking take time to spread and gain respectability. The paradigms influencing the work of the second period, the work of Cope, William Patten, and others are the result of the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, thirty years before, and the successful spread of evolutionary thinking in the latter half of the 19th century. Similarly, while Løvtrup produced one of the first cladograms of modern vertebrates in 1977, the cladistic method began with the entomologist Willi Hennig’s influential 1969 book Insect Phylogenetics where the principles of cladistics were first established.

( References. )