What Does Moderation Bring?

Rather than discuss the pros and cons of the moderation process on this blog, I will just note that I, personally, enjoy the environment of free form, no consequence speech. Despite this, I prefer to have some handle on the constraint towards the topics or direction this speech has on a blog. Unless, of course, that blog were about such things as being able to discuss … anything. In the last 30 days, my open [non] moderation and open thread produces very little in the way of new traffic, new comments, or new interest. Without revealing numbers, IPAs, or commenter anonyms and the emails associated with them (on occasion), the traffic has been lessened relative to regular traffic on the site. I’ve been holding at a relative steady views-per-day rate over this period, with the only spikes following my one actual post during this open moderation period. Reduced traffic may and likely is a consequence of the lack of new content, for which I cannot apologize due to personal issues. This is also why this post is two days late.

In answer then, moderation brings some “sense” and purpose towards how I can respond to my critics or those who might otherwise praise or comment for their own sake on this blog. But it can also be tyrannical. I hope that this process itself can be reviewed by my readers, and that perusers of the blog take the opportunity to weight in and voice their own interests as far as how this blog operates and its content is produced.

I will be leaving the commenting process completely open for the foreseeable future, until such a time as I feel it needs to change. Any reasoning on this change will be explained at the time. Pardon for the lack of content, and enjoy!

Turtle Beaks And Dinosaurs

It’s interesting to note that that beaks of animals come in all sorts of strange shapes, including hooks and serrations. Sometimes, none of this matches the underlying bone structure.

Open Thread

This is an open thread. You may post anything you wish, including discussion of the blog and its author. You may use ad hominems. No person will be blocked, banned from use, nor will any post be removed save that it is actual spam. I look forward to seeing what effect this post will have, if any.

Moderation Review

Mike Taylor at SV-POW! has a post up describing his intentions and perspective on moderation for blogs, a feature that is useful to discuss. I suggest it be read, because Mike suggests something worth considering: removing moderation from the blog.

“You Keep Using That Word”

Behold another rant on nomenclature, posted on the Dinosaur Mailing List recently. I am slightly modifying it for consumption here.

Gripe

Eventually, when I finish my current projects, I will get around to discussing conodonts, and their jaw-like … things. But for the moment, I’d like to call out to the various sources on the latest paper (not yet published in print in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society, B: Biological Sciences, but available online, here) that has been receiving attention [Taylor Reint's consideration, a Nature blog, and a Scientific American blog treatment] due to the results of finite element analysis (FEA) on one of the posterior P elements of conodonts.

Qilong’s Tutorial

Hexinlusaurus multidens is the name given to a skeleton of a not-quite fully mature animal from the famous Dashanpu dinosaur quarry in Zigong City, in the Ziliujing District of Sichuan Province, China. The animal was originally given the name Yandusaurus multidens (He & Cai, 1983) but later transferred to Agilisaurus as Agilisaurus multidens because it was determined to be “not that similar” (Peng, 1992). Later, the same treatment was given in regard to Agilisaurus, and it was transferred to a new name, Hexinlusaurus, to honor one of the species’ original descriptors, Dr. He Xin-lu (Barrett et al., 2005).

The name will eventually be changed, but this really is Hexinlusaurus multidens, I swear!

The Thing I Like About “Toroceratops”

Let me first apologize for using “Toroceratops.” There is no such taxon, but the name is being used to describe the debate that is now raging through the dinosaur paleontological circuit, and it’s too catchy not to use. Now, on with the show.

The Devil, Hairier

As an update to my previous post, Rendering Unto Nature What is Nature’s Due, I’ve taken the opportunity to create another careful skeletal diagram for the purposes of creating silhouettes for Mike Keesey’s Phylo Pic. I’ve already rendered one for Pterorhynchus wellnhoferi, which as it turned out is the 600th image submitted! This time, however, I decided to render my Sordes pilosus Sharov, 1971 (you know, the “hairy devil”), which proved a bit more challenging.

Canadian Amber, Fin-Tailed Dinosaurs, and a Despairing Blogger

Science, as a process, promotes an adversarial system. A scientist poses an hypothesis from an observation, then attempts to refute this hypothesis through further observations arrived at from experimentation and testing, and poses a further hypothesis from the results; if it stands, he can make a claim that a thing is, or isn’t. Another scientist comes along and attempts to refute that finding, and so on and so forth. We can presume that scientist A and scientist B are both using the same data or are merely increasing the data used to make observations, and that the same data is included by further authors, thus merely expanding the perspective. But it seems there are adversaries, and there are enemies. Some scientists, against seeming logic, will not even regard the same datasets offered, and use this as refutation of previous datasets or observations. Science, we presume, is not served when workers talk past one another, or make claims that a thing simply is, without any substantiation for why.