Deep thoughts and silliness

John Wilkins has managed to shake off his bevy of admiring science blogging groupies long enough to write a post on scientists as historians. I’ll read it later, but now I should be listening to Bill talking about spatial synchrony in extinctions. Anyway, These matters were kicked around a few weeks ago, and naturally I added my ha’peth worth then. John seems to be arguing that scientists are bad historians, which was one of the points I was stumbling towards.
Anyway, go and read, and can you report back, please.

The latest LHC webcam images show it’s a success.

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(Part 1, Part II, Part III, Part IV)
If I could work out how to get the photo I took last night off my phone, you could all see the monster nan we ate last night before the football.

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(Part 1, Part II, Part III)
I finally started doing some “real” work. Last night I got data on abundance of butterflies from some regularly surveyed transects. So, this morning I set to work, and by lunchtime I was totally confused about what I wanted to do.

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(Part 1, Part II)
This afternoon we have been talking about what we did in previous workshops. So far I’ve managed to avoid talking about the stuff I did, which is fortunate because I’ve largely forgotten what I did.

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(Part 1 on Monday)
This morning we got down to work. I helped Elizabeth on her phenology. Her idea is to use the numbers of butterflies counted on a site over a year to model how abundance changes over the season, i.e. to find the flight period(s). Some species only have one flight period in a summer, others have two (i.e. two generations per year). And these may change with latitude.

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All this week I am at a workshop in a wet, flooded York. In a fit of enthusiasm I decided to blog the discussions and work, to give the outside world an idea about what we are actually doing.

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This is just a quick update before I spend the day wandering the streets of London trying not to think of Ralf McTell. I’m alive, and so are those bloggers I’ve bumped into over the last couple of days. Some have even been having a good time.

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You know how it is, you read someone’s writings on the web, a few blog posts and comments, and then when you meet them in the flesh, they are totally different from how you imagine them. Well, meeting Prof. Steve Steve was exactly like that. I have read and admired his work, exposing the vacuousness of creationists, and supplying us with entertaining descriptions of the different parts of the world he has visited. But he is actually very different to the persona he portrays. In reality, he possesses all the decorum of a student in a room full of free food: Prof. Steve has been indulging in licentious behaviour. Not just like getting, but ending up laid nose first on the table. Or dragging innocent Grrlscientists into the toilets of distinguished societies, just so he can show off how high he can pee. To be honest, it’s a good job he’s a panda, otherwise we might have spent half our time looking for him in the red light district.

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