Australian culinary secrets revealed!

Consider this my Frink Tank tribute:



For those who don’t get it:

If you don’t know what vegemite is, hang out with more Australians; it is a cultural subtlety not learnable from a book.

If you don’t know what meconium is, look it up on the web.

If you don’t know what the white soiled bit of fabric is, you need to spend less time in disposable, consumerist culture.

If you understand all of this, but still aren’t amused, that just means that you have taste. If that is the case, stay away from vegemite.

Our baby likes dinosaurs

Take a close look at the print on her jumpsuit. And that, my friends, is about as close as we are going to get to geology this week. I hope to post on the lead isotopic evolution of the Earth soon- it is timely, as lead isotopes are used for studying pregnancy and lactation.

But I need to review a paper and write my section of another and prepare a talk for next month. And then there’s the nappies and bellytime and snuggles.

LLLL is one week old today.

Say a prayer for Virginia Tech

I’ll try to keep this short, since I should really be sleeping, but I just wanted to mention that my heart goes out to the victims and the families of all the people wounded or killed in Blacksburg yesterday. I haven’t read what the rest of the blogosphere has said on this matter. Even before I was a dad I didn’t have time for political blogs, and people who spin tragedies for their own agendas piss me off. But I will say this:

There has been some questioning, at least in the Australian media, about the the shooter. In many of these cases, there is a lot of interest in the criminal- his motives, his upbringing, his personality. The media, and possibly the public, seems to have a lot of questions about these sorts of people.

These questions do not have interesting answers.

The short answer is that the people who commit murder are losers. People with emotional maturity and deep character- interesting people- adapt and survive instead of killing people. A few years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who is a professor of criminal law, and who researches murder cases for a living. He pointed out that in most of the cases he studied, the victims were more interesting than the perpetrators. But you don’t need to talk to professors to know this; a bestselling Australian author has reached the same conclusion.

Joe Cinque was the victim of the Australian National University’s most famous murder case. Back in the drug-addled good-old-days of the mid 90’s, a few bright, young, anti-conservative law students had a party where they discussed whether or not they were good enough at their chosen field to beat a murder rap. Two of these students proceeded to test the hypothetical, by drugging then poisoning one of their boyfriends.

Both students beat the murder charge; the girlfriend of the victim got manslaughter, and her accomplice walked out of court a free woman. Author Helen Garner spent 5 years researching the case and writing the book. In the process, she found that even though the murderers were some of the most ambitious, intelligent young minds the country had to offer, their emotional immaturity and selfishness actually made them far less interesting than the victim, Mr. Cinque. The book is Joe Cinque’s Consolation, and is available here.

So if the TV talking heads and radio chatbackers are incessantly speculating about the Va Tech murderer, simply turn it off and read Ms. Garner’s book. By the time you finish it, some of the bereaved from this latest tragedy may be wanting to share their stories, and the stories of the victims will almost certainly be more interesting and moving than those of the assailant.

The most beautiful girl in the universe

The universe contains something on the order of 10,000,000,000,000,000,0,00,000 stars. Around these stars orbit an mind-boggling number of planets, moons, dwarf planets, and other heavenly bodies. They must host innumerable life forms, exotic features. These surely include biomes and civilizations that dwarf our understanding and imagination. But in all that vast expanse of space, time, and complexity, there is nothing beautiful enough to hold a candle (standard or otherwise) to my daughter.



Little Lovely Lab Lemming was born so recently that her light cone has yet to reach Voyager 1. But when the rest of existence can detect her utter cuteness, I’m sure they’ll be as smitten as I am.

Life is beautiful.

Karri fire towers

Karri trees are the tallest species of Eucalypt native to Western Australia. As a valuable, fast-growing timber resource, they have been logged since at least the end of the 19th century. Despite growing in the wetter, cooler, more temperate regions of the state, Karri forests are fire prone. Prior to the invention of the airplane, fire spotting in Karri country was tricky. Since the trees can be more than 80 meters (250 feet) tall, you need a pretty big tower to see over them. Unless you build a treefort.

In the early 20th century, almost a dozen fire towers were built in the tops of high standing karri trees for fire spotting. Two of these towers still exist, and are open to the public. One of them is still functional. In addition, during the bicentennial (1988), a replica tree tower was built in Warren National Park. At 74 meters, this is not only the highest tree tower, it is the tallest fire tower of any kind (if Wikipedia can be trusted) currently standing. From the top, you can see lots of other really tall trees, and the roof of the visitor’s center far below.

Unlike the original towers, this new tree has a rest platform a third of the way up. This gave me a steady location from which to photograph the patient and lovely Mrs. Lemming, who scampered down in a fraction of the time of her acrophobic husband.

Tip for would-be tree climbers: Don’t wear sandals. Any slight nervousness can combine with warm summer temperatures to cause the soles of the feet to sweat. This reduces the coefficient of friction on the foot/sandal interface, reducing stability and increasing the anxiety that generates this perspiration. I think climate guys call that positive feedback. I just found it to be unnerving.

Happy Easter

May the holidays rejuvenate the kinder aspects of everyone's humanity.

New Australian polar science blog

By Dr. Dan Zwartz.
Polar Passport.

What to do about reviews?

A while back AmI, Dr. Shellie, James and CJ commented on various problems with the review system, and more recently Yami McMoots had a complaint about reviews of funding applications. All are worth a read. However, I disagree with the suggestion by Yami and AmI (I really need a better handle for her, BTW) that a double blind process would solve some of these problems. I think double blinding would make abusive reviews easier, and a fully attributable review system would be preferable.

The first problem with a double-blind system is that for many geology and planetary applications, the anonymity of the authors is laughably fragile. Suppose, for example, that I were to write a paper using SHRIMP or laser ICPMS results (those are the instruments that consume 90% of my time). Assuming my methods section adequately describes these unique systems, then the anonymous reviewers will be able to determine which research group I am a part of. Combining that with the subject matter and/or field area will give them a pretty good idea of who the authors are likely to be.

For planetary science, the situation is even worse. Suppose a reviewer gets a paper on recent UV spectrometry results from Jupiter. The only UV spectrometer within 500 million km of Jupiter is on the New Horizons spacecraft, and the science team for that mission is posted on the internet. Double blind quickly becomes single blind if the reviewers decide they want to know whose paper they have. At least with a fully attributable system, everybody has the same level of transparency.

Finally, the most common complaint about “bad” reviews is not the amount of criticism. Rather, it is generally the lack of science on which that criticism is based. Most people get over fair but harsh reviews; rather it is the inane, mean-spirited (and always anonymous) reviews that are really frustrating. If reviews were signed, and included in supplementary material archives, then the cost to one’s reputation for writing such reviews would be substantially higher than it would be under a partially or totally blind system.

Of course, it’s easy for pudknockers like us me to complain about this sort of behavior and suggest theoretical fixes. I have absolutely no power to implement such suggestions. We can swamp Google’s hard drives with quibblings about the best sort of review system, but it won’t mean diddlysquat until a statistically meaningful number of journal editors switch to various systems and compare the results. And they aren’t likely to change.

After all, the powers-that-be have spent considerable time and effort schmoozing in smoke-filled rooms in order to make the connections and handshakes necessary to game the review process. It is only natural for them to want to preserve the advantage bought with Cuban tobacco and intellectual kickbacks. But there is a change that would open the process without making life difficult for the kingpins of the scientific establishment.

Department heads could require tenure applicants to include a collection of signed reviews as part of their tenure portfolio. This would illuminate the applicant’s standing in his or her field of research, and more importantly, it would cost the Haupt-professors nothing- the work and risk would be borne by the associate professors and lecturers. And it would actually make life easier for editors, as many fields are currently suffering from a shortage of willing reviewers. Of course, the follow-on effect would be to decrease the proportion of anonymous reviews, in a way that benefits science as a whole. So everybody wins.