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My sauroponderous birthday card from Brian Engh
Okay, so here on the Best Coast it’s not technically my birthday for another 3 hours, but SV-POW! runs on England time, and at the SV-POW! global headquarters bunker it’s already June 3. Oh, and...
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Shoebills lie (and it’s disgusting)
Heinrich Mallison sent me this amazing photo, which he found unattributed on Facebook: Infuriatingly, I’ve not been able to track down an original source for this: searching for the text just finds a...
View ArticleWhy do people publish in Scientific Reports?
In the last post, I catalogued some of the reasons why Scientific Reports, in its cargo-cult attempts to ape print journals such as its stablemate Nature, is an objectively bad journal that removes...
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How stupid was the neck of Camarasaurus?
What if I told you that when Matt was in BYU collections a while ago, he stumbled across a cervical vertebra — one labelled DM/90 CVR 3+4, say — that looked like this in anterior view? I think you...
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Amazing things are out there waiting to be noticed
It is said that, some time around 1590 AD, Galileo Galilei dropped two spheres of different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa[1], thereby demonstrating that they fell at the same rate. This was a...
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Seriously, though, what are we going to do about privately held specimens?
Matt and I are writing a paper about Barosaurus cervicals (yes, again). Regular readers will recall that the best Barosaurus cervical material we have ever seen was in a prep lab for Western Paleo...
View ArticleThese new “artificial intelligence” programs don’t know what they’re talking...
I’m sure you’ve seen things like ChatGPT in the news: programs that can carry out pretty convincing conversations. They are known as Large Language Models (LLMs) and are frequently referred to as being...
View ArticleNo-one knows whether or not a neutral-tasting nutrient-sludge diet leads to...
I recently discovered the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, which is largely about the science of obesity — a matter of more than academic interest to me, and if I may say to, to Matt. I discovered SMTM...
View ArticleMore on the disturbing plausibility of ChatGPT
Prompted by a post on Mastodon (which, like all Mastodon posts, I can no longer find), I asked ChatGPT to tell me about my own papers. The response started out well but quickly got much worse. I will...
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Another day, another catastrophic “AI” failure
I know this is hardly news any more, but here is a particularly spectacular example of a Large Language model (“artificial intelligence”) making mistake after mistake. My question: Who described...
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