More On London And Bristol

London is not Bristol. Both cities feel physically impossible, at least to me. However, whereas Bristol seems to violate physics with its steep and labyrinthine physical geography, London does so with its size.

The scale of London is intimidating. I don't mean that the city is geographically spread out, but that it feels big. The massive stone architecture of London, and streets which are far wider than those of Bristol, make the city feel about ten times larger than it ought to be. I have never had this impression of raw scale in Manhattan, or in any other other city. This stuck me most forcibly while visiting the Tower of London, the massive stone fortress infamous for being the place in England to go to get tortured or decapitated.

Standing with the Tower on one side, the enormous Thames River on the other side, and the massive Tower Bridge a half mile in the distance, I felt like an ant.


The international feel of London is striking, a reminder of how geographically close England is not only to continental Europe, but to the Asia, the Middle East, and even northern Africa. Foreign languages and ethnicities abound, seemingly even more than in the states. It is a weird felling for someone with a long time interest in Old World history born and raised in North America. Try this on for size, fellow Americans: I could hop in a car here and drive to Istanbul, and get there in less than a week.

For another thing thing, London is not as rough around the edges as Bristol, at least in the areas we were in. London feels like a center of civilization where the history is on display and tidily maintained. Bristol feels like a hard drinking port city it probably always has been, where the historical architecture is mixed in with bars, apartments, and messy day to day living. I found one little hole in the wall bar on a side street that seemed to be some kind of thespian hangout, with a bunch of signed photos from the likes of Alan Rickman and Ian McKellan. No bullshit.

The English can get highly entertaining and fucking demented when they drink. The very nice looking girls with short skirts are usually out and about by 10:00 pm. It wasn't too hard to find girlfriends screaming obscenities at their boyfriends (or vice versa), on any given evening, and fights were pretty common. I saw one mass of about ten people weaving back and forth across the street: a bunch of cops all trying to pull apart two guys with the help of some of their friends.

Here is one example to illustrate the difference: In London, public toilets charge 20-30 p. In Bristol, they have free public urinals to discourage people from pissing in stairwells and side streets. It doesn't work. I used one anyway, exercising the only legitimate excuse I may ever have to whip it out in public. It was the best day of my life.

What I am trying to say is that Bristol is a fun city.

Bill was trapped in the basement at the British Museum all day for the three days we spent in London, and our joint sightseeing was therefore restricted to the evenings, when most things were closed. This was fine, as most places we wanted to get inside charged a bit more than we could afford given how much we were spending on food, housing and transportation. Since this was mostly his visit for his dissertation project, I left him in the collections on Wednesday to wander around on my own.

In addition to visiting Burlington House, home of the Geological Society and an excellent copy of William Smith's first geologic map of England, I took a train to Crystal Palace Park to see Waterhouse Hawkins' dinosaurs. The sculptures are quite impressive, and in a really pretty corner of the park by a small lake, surrounded by dense vegetation that gives the spot a definite primeval forest vibe. If I lived in London, I would definitely spend the occasional quiet Sunday there just to chill out and read. Here is my first look at the dinosaur park. The icthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and crocodilians are closer, with the Megalosaurus and Iguanodon visible in the background:


Pretty sweet.

One final weird coincidence to relate. Bill and I stayed at a bed and breakfast in South Kensignton. The last couple days we were there, another guest came to visit, and sat down with us one morning at breakfast, a pleasant tall and thin fellow. He asked what we were doing in London, and I told him we were paleontologists looking at the collection at the British Museum of Natural History. He gave me what I interpreted as a blank look, so I explained that this means that were worked on fossils. However, he turned out be David Lindsay, a former preparator at the BMNH who published on procolophonids with Bob Carroll, and has since moved on to become an art conservator. It really is a small world.

LNJ

We Are Now In London

Consequence was not invited to the SVP after-hours party.

There is a very good reason why SVP is held in another city every year. We must flee every city we visit with nervous glances over our shoulder, and hope that word will not get around to hotels in other cities as to exactly what the fuck they are getting themselves into by hosting us. Now that we are running out of American cities that are wise to our shenanigans, SVP is expanding its horizons internationally. Yeah! This delightful exercise in annual nation-hopping will continue until Mike Getty is inevitably incarcerated and executed by the Chinese government during our visit to Beijing...or at least, it wont be quite the same after that. Someone please fit him out with a radio collar before we get to Vegas, or he may never be seen again.

Bill and I took the bus to London this morning, and are both pretty wiped. Tomorrow, we visit the British Museum collections, and also hope to get to Westminster Abbey and Burlington House to see William Smith's geologic map of England.

Bristol Has Been Fun

I didn’t sleep well the night before Bill and I left Holbrook at 5:00 am, and didn’t sleep more than a couple hours for the next 24. We plowed through the night far too rapidly at almost 600 miles an hour, and arrived in Bristol at 10:00 am (local time) the next day with our internal clocks well and truly fucked. Nonetheless, although I have noticed that my body has been exhausted, I haven’t really felt it. The journey and stay in England so far has been an absolute blast.

Bristol is an old city, and consequently it has a layout which has grown organically, rather than having been planned. Moreover, the city sits in an extremely hilly region of England, and as a result is a bewildering maze of streets that seem to defy the laws of physics. One may pass a street curving steeply uphill, then another curving parallel to it no more than 50 feet away, which impossibly goes downhill. The buildings lining these insane streets are tall and narrow, and are built in a bewildering variety of styles going back centuries.

It is an easy city to get lost in, which is how I like it, especially when wandering around drunk and alone at 1:00 am. There is a lot of beer and ale in Bristol, and I have already drunk most of it. Despite Britain’s reputation for shitty food, I have no complaints about anything I have eaten since arriving, which has included some excellent curry and an honest-to-Christ East Coast-style pizza. Bristol is also packed full of very attractive and classy women with beguiling accents who wear short skirts and black stockings.

The traffic is intense but curiously well ordered. The cars race through the streets a lot faster than seems safe, and the crosswalks and their signals are strictly advisory. People confidently but cautiously scurry across the streets like nervous raccoons. However, unlike in the states, the pedestrians and drivers are not out to kill or piss each other off, and cars will courteously slow down to let people across without incident.

I could spend a bit of time making interesting observations on the city and its inhabitants. However, I must instead relate the following scene which took place in a bar not far from the campus on the night of the 24th of September, 2009.

The bar was packed full of paleontologists. I was sitting in one corner of the bar talking to Sarah Werning and Matt Brown. Sitting unattended on one of the tables was a box containing a novelty do-it-yourself kit called “Stuff Your Own Beaver.” The outside of the box alleged to contain all that was necessary for stuffing a beaver (the kind with large teeth and a flat tail). The ownership of the box was not established at this time.

A paleontologist of our acquaintance, we will call him Carl, wandered over very drunk. He noticed the box and decided to open it, even though it did not belong to him, and found that it did indeed contain the components necessary for stuffing one (1) beaver: an empty beaver skin and a large bag of cotton. Carl tore open the bag and proceeded to stuff the beaver. Although he proceeded very slowly and methodically, he experienced difficulties getting small handfuls of cotton into the small opening on the beaver skin.

“I’ve never had this problem before” he remarked.

A second paleontologist, we will call her Anita, came over at this point. She was filled with indignation.

“That is my beaver!” she protested, and it was. I don't think he even apologized.

They Really Should Spit Instead...

Parker and I are on our way to SVP in Bristol. I'm just sitting in Phoenix Sky Harbour waiting for our flight to Newark, but I had to share the following from Pharyngula.

"Yes, yes," the pastor told his congregation, "swallow for me..." Heh heh.

LNJ

The Open Dinosaur Project

Andy Farke, Matt Wedel, and Mike Taylor have pioneered quite an intriguing experiment in online scientific collaboration, and Mike has requested the assistance of his fellow bloggers in advertising for the project. Since I owe Mike and Matt one of my testicles each for their unsolicited collaboration in Aetogate, and for keeping the archive of that sorry-ass losing struggle against bullshit and ethical cowardice alive, I have added the Open Dinosaur Project to my list of permanent links. As an alternative to literally giving them my balls. I'm sure you understand.

I would, however, like to make the same suggestion that Kevin Padian did on the VP-list: the project needs clear standardization in how the measurements are taken. Providing such standards is somewhat problematic given that they are mostly accepting published measurements. However, I would STRONGLY recommend providing some clear guidelines for new measurements at this early stage in the game.

As anyone who has measured a three-dimensional fossil knows, there are many ways to measure even a relatively simple shape (I would speculate that this is why the SV-POW crew did not start with vertebrae, which are about as three-dimensional as you can get). Length may be relatively straightforward for a long bone, but other dimensions might be more subjective. For example, something like "mid-shaft diameter" might be measured in a couple different ways. If it is not made exactly clear how, how is someone using the database to be certain that measurements for two different bones, especially from two different published sources, are really talking about the same thing? This isn't just me being nit-picky; I can envision the issue coming up during the review process for any manuscript incorporating this data.

I would recommend providing clearly labelled drawings of limb elements showing exactly how measurements should be taken. Here is a figure from my thesis to illustrate what I mean.

Providing clear measurement standards can help this database be improved and refined over time. For published limb measurements that are crappy or unclear, the standards could be used to eventually replace them with better ones. Through a slow process of replacement, we could have a standardized and continuously updated database of morphological data on dinosaurs. Wouldn't that be nice?

Another possible help might be photographs of the individual limb elements, or at least comments on the condition of the elements. Since vertebrate fossils tend to be a little fucked-up, it would be useful to any individual using the database to be able to evaluate the condition of an individual bone, and how distortion that occurred during fossilization, or preparation, might be impacting the measurement. One tibia I measured for my thesis was actually missing a big section of the midshaft, and the incomplete ends had been glued together. It was therefore a bit more compact than when it was in the animal's leg. Good to know, if you are interested in, say, limb bone allometry for a group of animals.

Just my two cents.

LNJ

Wow. I Mean, Wow.

Her husband looks a bit uncomfortable.

LNJ