Whipped Cream Difficulties

A prominent dinosaur “hobbyist” is claiming “’serious errors and irregularities’ in dinosaur research involving some of the world’s top paleontologists”.

[The hobbyist’s] article, published by the journal PLoS One, says Dr. Erickson’s papers contain major mistakes, including graphs that do not match the data and curves that do not match the reported equations. And [his] revised estimates put the maximum growth rate of Apatosaurus at about a tenth of what Dr. Erickson and his colleagues had reported.

Why is this interesting? Well, scientific disputes of this sort are a topic for coverage on this blog. After all, we do have “Retraction Watch” on our blog roll.

But there’s another good reason: the “hobbyist” in question is Microsoft millionaire, Modernist Cuisine author, and notorious patent troll Dr. Nathan P. Myhrvold.

Dr. Myhrvold said he contacted Dr. Erickson, asking for the original data. While Dr. Erickson answered some questions, he said the data was on a computer he had gotten rid of and later that he did not have time to answer more questions, Dr. Myhrvold said.

I’m not a big fan of Dr. Myhrvold, but that kind of answer…well…it stinks.

And now that I have it stuck in your head:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 17th, 2013 at 8:49 am and is filed under Clippings, Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.