Permission granted to go crazy

The worst part of writing a well-illustrated book is seeking and obtaining permissions to use various figures and images. It's a nightmare of details and paperwork. Scientific colleagues are the most cooperative, although there will be some drinks to buy. For profit scientific journals are the worst. To use one little figure from a paper published in a well known journal would cost me $93.75, which is $93.75 more than my entire illustration budget. There is such a thing as "fair usage" which is a wonderful morass for the ethically challenged. Looking at whole arrays of images accessible on line is such an amazing convenience, although you do get surprised sometime as the Phactor pointed out some time back. Then it was holly; today it was moss. But then you find the perfect image, and can't find the owner to ask their permission. The Wikimedia Creative Commons is proving a life-saver; good thing they aren't asking for drinks. Or you try to track down who owns the rights to something published 50 or more years ago, following the lineage of acquisitions, only to run into a dead end. So the day was spent redoing several figures to use alternative images from authors who provided them for my use. Oh, thank you! Progress is being made, but still many to go, lots of emails sent, awaiting many replies, and most of the remaining problems are more difficult. Need to get this done, but need some time off too. Getting to the point where fewer illustrations is looking better except then everything down stream would have to be renumbered. Ahhhhh! Time for a cocktail hour.

Botanical images - winners!

Every year the Botanical Society of America has a student image contest with winners receiving travel awards to attend the annual society meeting. Sometimes the images reflect the research interests of the students, and other times they just happened upon something cool and got a good picture. Take a look at the winners and see if you can identify the plant in the winning image. This plant's stunning seeds, whose seed coats probably mimic fleshy red arils to entice birds to ingest and disperse them. The plant is a vine and many years ago yours truly took a similar picture of this viny plant clambering over a small tree, which happened to be Strychnos nux-vomitoria making this the deadliest picture ever.