Raptor's Nest

I've been preparing this humongous post on this but decided in the end to postpone it and just put up a short and easy one instead. I wanted to for some time to voice my opinion regarding biomechanical modelling. And in particular the subject of complexity versus simplicity. Biological systems are frequently very complex, the details of which are often poorly understood. The musculoskeletal system is no exception. I shan't linger on how complex the musculoskeletal system is, but I will comment on the approaches in which we try and model this complexity, or approximate it. With the advent of affordable computers, it has become expected for biomechanicists to perform high-complexity analyses with many parameters. I'm all for development of sophisticated models and analyses. It helps identify elements of the musculoskeletal system that are otherwise difficult if not impossible to determine. But herein lies the problem; a lot of the complexity, be it the actual values of...

I'm going to comment on Star Wars again, this time on a series of books I recently read; Republic Commando and Imperial Commando by Karen Traviss. This series is supposed to be an official tie-in to the game Republic Commando , which I really liked (although I thought it could be longer; only three stages?!). I was hesitant to read this because I was scared that I would be disappointed by the novels (which I tend to more and more these days) so I had put off reading until Order 66 had just come out. Now being a fan of stormtroopers and clone troopers, I had to read Order 66 ; that was a requirement for me. But because it was the newest book in a series, I had to first read the other three books, Hard Contact , Triple Zero and True Colours . So I decided to buy these books and started reading. Hard Contact I found was kind of interesting, not bad at all. Although I found it a bit boring and not at all like the game I was so used to - you know, working as a unit and blasti...

I'll ramble on about calipers today, just because I like calipers. In my line of business I use calipers very frequently. And not just a normal handy 150mm caliper, but a larger 300mm caliper or an even larger 600mm calliper. So I'll just list my callipers in size order. 150mm glass fibre dial calliper I really like this one, despite the fact that I bought it at a local hardware shop - if it's good enough to refurbish your kitchen or build a bed, then it's good enough for me. So far I've trusted my life with the works of carpenters/engineers so I don't see why I can't trust my measurements using their tools. To begin with, craniometrics are not the most precisely defined measurements and taking these at the precision of 0.01 mm is absurd - rounding to the closest mm is fine, at least it's accurate to the mm or maybe 0.1mm. Anyway, I digressed. I like this dial calliper because first of all it is very easy to read. Unlike vernier calipers dial call...

A while back I attempted to introduce my recent publication . But of course as always I think I got carried away with the phylogenetic aspect of it. So unless I hear otherwise I shall suspend my fascination with phylogenetic signals and here discuss a bit about another interesting aspect of my paper on cat bite forces. I've discussed bite force a lot in the past so I need not introduce it any more. One idea that is fairly widespread is that bite force is somewhat correlated with ecology and in particular prey preference. This can include dietary categories (hypercarnivorous, omnivorous, etc) or prey size categories (small prey hunter, large prey hunter). Previous studies have indicated that relative bite force (after adjusted for size) seem to have a correlation with prey size categories (Wroe et al., 2005; Christiansen & Wroe, 2007). Other craniodental morphofunctional characters also seem to have some correlation with prey size (Meachen-Samuels & van Valkenburgh, 20...

"Is there a doctor on board?" This is one of those lines you hear in movies, dramas, cartoons, etc. but you never expect to hear in real life. But recently I actually heard this announcement on an airplane, though unfortunately I don’t know what the situation was, nor did I have the chance to find out if there really was a doctor on board, if he/she came forwards, and what happened afterwards. So no story there… But I did have a thought: “What if they wanted a PhD instead of an MD? And what kind of emergency situation would require the services of a PhD in palaeobiology?” Perhaps the following: Announcement: Is there a doctor in palaeobiology on board? Palaeobiologist (PB): Why yes, I happen to have a PhD in palaeobiology. Flight attendant: Thank goodness. Please follow me to the cockpit. PB: Certainly. - IN THE COCKPIT PB: What seems to be the problem? Pilot: We have a terrorist situation here and we need your ex...

I have been too busy lately. Firstly because I started a postdoc and settling down etc takes up some time. But also, I've been revising a manuscript on dinosaur jaw biomechanics that came back from review; I am currently struggling with a method new to me that one of the reviewers suggested I use. But before all this happened, I was pretty much occupied by this single paper that finally came out online: Phylogenetically structured variance in felid bite force: the role of phylogeny in the evolution of biting performance. I checked the dates on this submission and it was received by the Journal of Evolutionary Biology on 22 January 2009, and accepted 30 November 2009, but didn't become available on EarlyView until 14 January 2010. The actual print date is March 2010. So a year since submission. And three rounds of review in between. Phew. This was based on a chapter from my thesis that I thought was fairly robust and well-written that it would be the easiest chapter to conv...

I am going to veer off from my usual (but infrequent) blog posts on palaeontology and blog about another geeky subject. Star Wars. I've been a big fan of Star Wars ever since I was a little boy - Return of the Jedi must be the first film I remember seeing at the cinema; my dad took me to see it when I was three but all I remember was being freaked out by Jabba the Hutt and I went through the rest of the film asleep as a sort of a defensive mechanism. When I was a teenager, I read Kevin J. Anderson's "Jedi Academy Trilogy" then went on to read Timothy Zhan's "Thrawn Trilogy", and from there, I pretty much read every single Star Wars related novel - until I got bored after the story arc reached a time period around 20-25 years since the events of R eturn of the Jedi (by this point I thought it became pointless to continue reading...). Anyway, there is one thing that has been bugging me since I was a teenager: when reading through Star Wars materials, I f...