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I have been fed up for some time with the inconvenient features of e-books owned by my university library. Now they are turning out to be anti-scholarly. In this post I will just vent about this a bit; there are some suggestions to more systematic (and better-informed) online posts below. EMAIL #1, to my university library    ------------------------------------------------------------  This is my venting about some things that really bug me about digital books. First, I dislike digital books. For most books, I would MUCH rather have a physical book in my hands. I skim library books more than I read them completely, and skimming is much easier with a physical book than with a digital book. Perhaps if the software were better, this would be less of an irritation. Second, E-brary is one of the worst programs I know of. First, it doesn’t work with Firefox. Second, when I use it with IE, it either stops working in a benign way (giving cryptic error messages), or else it hang...

The earliest bird? Or the latest looting scandal? Does that sound bizarre and unlikely? That is what paleontologists are doing increasingly, according to a news story in a recent issue of Science ( "Authenticity of China's Fabulous Fossils gets new Scrutiny," by Michael Balter, Science 340 (June 7, 2013), pp. 1153-54) . A recent paper in Nature announced the discovery of Aurornis, a new species that supposedly resolves many issues about the origins of birds from dinosaurs. *** Godefroit, Pascal, Andrea Cau, Hu Dong-Yu, Francois Escuillie, Wu Wenhao, and Gareth Dyke,  2013,  "A Jurassic avialan dinosaur from China resolves the early phylogenetic history of birds." Nature advance online publication . *** The article itself doesn't mention exactly where the fossil was found or how it was excavated. But in the Supplemental Materials the authors admit that it was purchased from a fossil dealer. Oh, and perhaps the proposed dating is off by 35 million years beca...