Meaghan here! I have been working for PBS Eons for a few months now as a writer. It has been amazing - I have learned so much about different organisms I never really looked into before, and about the whole process of scientific storytelling. Some personal moments of pride include a video about climate that went viral, and also slipping a 9 minute dick joke past the PBS censors. And one of the big things I've learned along the way are that there are certain things you can put in scientific papers that make me want to write love sonnets to the authors, and certain things you can omit that make me want to glitterbomb your office. So that's what this blog is about: what can you put in papers so that it's easier for science writers to read them and get the information they need to compose a good piece of science communication about it?
Or: please sweet Jesus help me out, mama needs to not have to read 60 papers and resort to Image-J when trying to figure out how tall a T-Rex was.
The title is all the context you get, because explanations are for fools.
Special thanks to Keilah, Spencer, and Eric for their patience and excellent modelling skills. A grateful apology to the leprechaun of a museum volunteer who had to lead us around after Meaghan had already consumed half a beer and was thus, basically wasted. And a tip of the hat to the lady who followed us around for much of this - we may not know you, but we appreciated the audience participation. That stalactite DID look like a poop.
Amy and Meaghan were in the same place for several consecutive days, and from the loins of their cohabitation sprung this glory - Basilosaurus vs Killer Whale. Turn on closed captions to see our witty witty lyrics.
This week, instead of WRITING about science stuff, we're going to show a video of us TALKING about science stuff. Specifically, Amy gave a great 15 minute talk on her Big Bend Summer internship that we belatedly blogged about like 5 minutes ago, and Meaghan gave a 45 minute talk about the poor sad oreodonts and how they spent their lives mutilating one another for fun or sex or something.
AMY'S TALK ABOUT MONKEYS* AND PARKS
MEAGHAN'S TALK ABOUT THE SAD SAD FACE BITES
Hope you enjoyed this brief diversion from our writing style to our talking style! Also, we love the sounds of our own voices so please invite us to talk more at your conferences, seminar series, house party, or nearby retirement home - trust us, we'll say yes.
A few months ago Meaghan and her fiance Logan went down to Texas to hang out and fossil
hunt with Amy. It was pretty great, and if Meaghan wasn't working real real hard on her dissertation and also job hunting, she'd totally have written about it before this moment. So we apologize for the 3 month delay, especially since she's now going to give a bunch of road-trip tips and the price of gas has started going back up so that kind of sucks for you.
Meaghan is now officially a published author, but if you go and read her paper you will probably immediately reel back from the computer in confusion and horror. We don't blame you, as dental terminology is not for the faint of heart. So for those of you who are curious about the stuff that Meaghan writes about in a more professional sense, but don't have time to google what a posterolingual conule is, don't worry: we have a blog post for you!
The most basic description of what this paper is about is that about 40 million years ago there was a species of oreodont that lived in Eastern Oregon. This species had claws, possibly for tree climbing, and it had a funny fat nose that made it look a little different from other oreodonts.
possibly it looked vaguely like this except for maybe more in the lines and less... ginger. yeah, prolly less ginger.
I (Meaghan) have spent a lot of time in R. Like, a LOT. Not really
accomplishing lots and lots, mind you, but just kind of fucking around
hopelessly most of the time. Meaghan of 3 months ago looked at R and thought
"is there any way I can avoid using that program?" while Meaghan of
today thinks "is there anything I can do with that program that will
permit me to feel useful while procrastinating on something else?" As it
turns out, there definitely is: Meaghan of today will now be presenting a
wonderful R tutorial on how to scatterplot some shit and then make it pretty
without getting entangled in ggplot2 (which is another code word for the bowels of hell).
One of the beautiful and fucking awful things about R is
that for any one way of doing something, there's about 60 others. I'm going to
tell you how to do things that you could probably do in other ways. These ways
make sense to me, but if they cognitively don't work for you I'm sure you could
find another 6+ ways of accomplishing the same goal. Also, everything I'm
reporting here comes from a place of necessity: I'm sure there are other useful
things we could talk about with scatterplots, but since I didn't have to think
about them…. I'm not going to talk about them!
R: the very basics
It's free and available on the internet, and very powerful.
It isn't user-friendly, unless your user is the Lorax of computer programming.
We've been talking about it for a year, and it's finally here: the horse evolution rap battle that you didn't even know you were waiting for featuring Equus (aka the modern horse, aka Amy) versus Eohippus (aka the Equid Ewok, aka Meaghan). This video is probably about PG, for that time Amy rides the tiki torch and also mentions "Flipping the Bird." Full lyrics below. Enjoy!
Whenever I (Meaghan) tell other people that I'm a paleontologist, people tend to get really excited and ask one or both of the following two things:
First they ask if I've heard about the newest dinosaur fossil, which I never have but usually can bluff my way through with the sentence "oh right, isn't it the biggest one they've ever found, and it's from some country in South America or Asia or Africa or something?" because 90% of what dinosaur paleontologists in the media do is basically a prolonged, scientific dick-size competition that occurs in a foreign country my American friends consider jungle-ish.
The second thing they ask is if I get to do much field work, to which I throw back my head and cackle maniacally until the happy, excited gleam in their eye fades away and leaves nothing behind but the shallow husk of their dying inner seven-year-old.
Because no, I don't, and it's totally way better that way.
I know - it seems like it doesn't get much better than this right?*
Well the Vengeance Team has something to admit, we forgot our own blog's birthday... HOW EMBARRASSING! So instead we are gonna make a big effing deal about recently breaking 100,000 page views!!!!
Celebrating for science! Or prehensile penises.....
We know many of our views come from those perverts googling "Prehensile Penis" or "Does your butt swell when..." but we are grateful and definitely still celebrating! To commemorate our big news, we want to look back on our 5 favorite blog posts, each representing a different perspective of Mary Anning's Revenge:
Last year, Meaghan made epic personalized nerd mugs and fake tattoos for her lab mates. It was a great Christmas - she got to not be poor AND be smug, which is a difficult combination to come by. Naturally this year, she wanted to outdo her previous year's efforts and come up with something crafty and sciencey that could solidify her position as the Martha Stewart of Science. Fortunately for Meaghan, there exists such a thing as "Non-Toxic Food-Grade Silicone Paste."
This is a little different from the typical casting supplies that paleontologists work with, in that it is meant for eating and is incredibly easy to use. Select or make the item you would like to mold, mix equal qualities of blue and white, and smoosh the mixture all over the item for about an hour. Boom. Silicon molds.
Initially Meaghan had grand plans of using the new 3D printer at University of Oregon to print out mini replicas, but they have some daft rule about "academic intentions" and she couldn't figure out how to bullshit her way through it. Instead Meaghan made small sculpey clay replicas of an oreodont skull, and a flat medallion of a Dunkleosteus head, and a flat giant ground sloth. She also grabbed a bear skull that was just lying around (long story).
GSA was full of its fair share of tummy aches, talks where squinting was the only option, and hilarious, fabulous geology. First off, I finally physically met my mentor, Kate Zeigler!
Amy, Kate, and their Paleozoic pal eurypterid!
Our meeting in person was almost more than the geology gods could handle, but we fortunately weren't struck down and made into fulgurites (heh) as we dined on burgers and milkshakes. I could finally ask some questions that are hard to phrase over email ("Erm soo paleomagnitude... that's like, yeah, basalt points north? Poles switch and it blows my mind?") I also got a chance to grill her on some hard hitting paleo-questions which will be featured in an upcoming Vengeance Team interview (Meaghan guest stars and wow, what a guest she makes...).
I hadn't realized how much I had in common with Kate, who has been my mentor through the Huffington Post Girls in STEM program from afar for a few months. We have plans to rock climb in New Mexico whenever my skin becomes so pale that the SW sun is the only cure to my vitD deficiency.
For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the Old Boy's Club (OBC) is comprised of the old (and typically white) men who dominate the top tiers of many industries. This phenomenon is pretty apparent in most fields, but especially so in academia wherefemale presence at high levels caps out at 35% at most.
Now, we could shout about that endlessly in bitter, bitchy terms, but we’ve taken a dose of the considerate pills today (V.T. South’s roomie made pumpkin cake, V.T. North has a job again, all is awesome in the world) and decided to give the benefit of the doubt to members of the OBC: maybe they just don’t know about ladies’ struggles! Also, they probably don’t know about all the awesome ladies they could be hiring, because OBC members don’t network with ladies, they network with dudes.
A common misconception is that most scientists get paid to do science, where in actuality most scientists get paid to teach, but only get hired or promoted or respected because they do science. In fact, despite the fact that academic scientists are largely paid for their teaching time, that is taken into almost zero consideration when they are being hired... but that is a topic for another blog post. Today we are talking about GAF(C??), those magical beasts that allows researchers to sort of, sometimes, get paid to do their science... or at least get the costs of their science paid for. That's right, Grants, Awards, Fellowships and (Crowdfunding??), the last of which is a new and fancy addition to the triumvirate of other people's money that scientists spend so much time begging for.
Fake it 'til you make it baby.
2013-2014 GAF(C??) application season is almost upon us, which
means Meaghan and Amy are getting ready for another round of talking
ourselves up and finding ways to make their research sound important to people who don't know anything about it. And in a surprising* twist of fate, Meaghan and Amy have to work harder to get these than their penis-posessing** counterparts. We've talked about some of the disparity in hiring processes before, but now let's delve deep into the sad topic of GAF(C??) discrimination.
The summer is stuttering to a premature end as it always seems to do. In Oregon, everything is still smoking from fire east of the mountains and the leaves are all turning west of them. In Alaska it's snowing and they've begun to experience the phenomenon known as "nighttime." With school looming on the horizon for Meaghan, and 30 Days of Night coming for Amy, it's time to prepare: Winter is Coming.
But if you've been climbingin a cave or out on the mountains all summer like the Vengeance Team, you may need a quick catch-er-up on all the important goings-ons that went-ons while you were out of cell service. No, not that stuff about the hiccuping murderer or the fact that Bill Nye is busting a move on Dancing with the Stars. No, we're talking the really important stuff: Paleontology. Because what's more news-worthy than things that have been dead and stagnant for millions of years, right???
Wait. Science was happening and we weren't there??
So, it's wedding season, as well as our annual celebration of the consequences of the midwinter doldrums (aka, summer birthdays) which means that everyone is walking that fine social line between not looking like a cheap asshole, and abject poverty. While we can't say that we have a DIY nerd!gift for everyone, here are a couple of Meaghan and Amy's favorites!
You're probably not, though, because this blog post contains scientific sketches of cupcakes and there ain't nobody prepped to handle that shit. Let's delve deep into the world of paleopedology baked goods, a sentence that by all rights should never have entered this universe but is somehow here anyway.
CUPCAKE #1: MOLLISOL
Mollisols
are grassland soils. Because grass forms a thick blanket of vegetation
on the ground, it creates a lot of organic material (chocolate cake and
white cake mixed together). Mollisols often have calcareous nodules
("pearl" sprinkles) and gypsum layers (silver sprinkles), but also have
crumb peds which are basically small lumps of dirt inside the overall
dirt. Here we have a well-drained mollisol - the
small Bt horizon wasn't constantly soaked with water, so instead of turning
green it oxidized (rusted) into a reddish layer, or in this case, red velvet
cake.
This one comes with a super epic cooking video, in which Meaghan pronounces 'calcareous' the Canadian way (aka... incorrectly).
Disappointingly, Meaghan's camera battery died soon after that video was filmed. The rest of these cupcakes shall have to stand without explicit, Star-Wars-style cooking directions.
Yes, dear readers, we are still alive despite the pit of Carkoon known as "editing a rap song when you know nothing about rapping." Resting gracefully on the event horizon of total musical despair, we decided to take a break to fill you in a little bit on what's new in the Vengeance Household!
First and foremost, science. Meaghan and Amy recently(ish) went to Berkeley to collect data on oreodonts and omomyids. Meaghan has been doing a lot of preliminary research on character variation in oreodonts and in camelids, so spent most of her time measuring skull after skull after skull, as well as taking pictures to do some geometric morphometric analyses. Amy spent some time measuring itty bitty adorable primate teeth fossils, but mostly was finishing up her thesis so spent most of her time crumpled over her computer cursing at Mesquite, a phylogenetic software program.
We managed to also get some climbing in, heading to Smith Rock, Yosemite, and Indian Rock State Parks for Meaghan's first multi-pitch and some awesome bouldering. Meaghan and Amy shared a tandem rapel, which was made even more special by the lovely song that Amy serenaded Meaghan with the whole way down.
Meaghan is the milk in Amy's cocoa puffs, apparently
Meaghan just won prizes at the 3 Minute Thesis competition and the Graduate Student Research Forum, while Amy passed her Honors College thesis with distinction (ahem, the highest honor) and moved to Denali National Park, where she will be working for the Park Service finding and mapping Cretaceous dinosaur trackways. This summer Meaghan will be working as a field biologist, but will be interspersing that with a trip to the Chicago Field Museum as well as a trip to the American Museum of Natural History, courtesy of the Teddy Roosevelt Grant she's received. So while Vengeance Team North tracks dinosaurs, Vengeance Team South going to molest oreodonts.
But don't fret, dear readers - the blog will not be abandoned. Not even for fossils. Meaghan is still hard at work on editing the sloth rap into something that is funny and not just horribly, horribly cringe-worthy (RAPPING IS REALLY HARD GUYS!), and Amy is working on a few posts about the sequester suckitude and how she hasn't yet gotten eaten by bears in Alaska. We're also working on figuring out google chat to schedule a few more interviews, compiling all the worst possible scientific concepts you can google with your safe search filter off, and drawing ancient fish carrying basketballs (it will make sense, just trust us).
But in the meantime, here is an excellent youtube video you should all enjoy about a cat experiencing ennui.
And if you liked the Sloth Rap Battle trailer before, imagine how much you'll love the extended version! Hint: you'll love it a lot. Like... a whole hell of a lot.
That's right. Not only are we intelligent, witty, beautiful young ladies, we're also rappers. Hardcore, straight-up science rappers. Our current masterpiece is being heavily mixed for release later this week month, but to get everyone pumped up we've created a trailer for it.
We don't want to get you too excited, but this is about to be the best thing you've ever seen.
Hey guys, just a short sweet post to whet your appetite for the sloth-nanigans that are gonna be going down this week. Shit's about to get real. And real slothy.
Didn't get it? Well, here's the nerd breakdown so you can see Meaghan and Amy's true comedic genius. On the left is a mylagaulid, or "Horned Gopher." Most rodents are r-selected - they make lots and lots of babies and hope that some of them survive - as anyone who has ever owned a couple of hamsters or rats can tell you. So technically speaking, yeah - all rodents are horny, even if mylagaulids got a lot more heat for it (because they have horns).
Didn't get it? Well, you've clearly missed out on some very critical parts of pop culture. Also that's a Dunkleosteus, and they're straight up terrifying.
All drawings were made by Meaghan with Artist's Loft Watercolor pencils and outlined in Uni Superink, then edited and cropped in GiMP with the blessed, wonderful pathway tool. They were then put on mugs using the magic of Target, and given as Christmas presents.
