Peter Macinnis, Australian science writer

I went to school at Manly West Primary, Manly Boys' High on Sydney's northern beaches, and took many years to get a Bachelor of Science at the University of Sydney, majoring in botany and zoology. I later took even longer to get a slow but amusing Master's degree in obscure statistical jiggery-pokery. You don't really want to know more than that. Manly is the municipality where I have lived for most of my life, and this is why I commonly use the handle McManly on social networking sites.

My joys include wilderness walking where you can't find cars, reading, writing, debating and arguing, invertebrates of the leaf litter and the sea, red wine, classical music, wood working and creative computing. I derive a special kind of joy from placing my hand on an unconformity on a cliff, knowing that in that single hand-span, I can cover a time span of 100 million years.

I am rather good at nailing down fraud and while a lot of the work I have done remains confidential, I blocked a massive attempt by Control Data Corporation staff to sell the PLATO computer-based education system to the NSW government in the early 1980s, using fraudulent data, I was the first to detect a piece of fraudulent chemistry, 166 years after it was published and I once displayed two savages in a golden cage (good fraud investigators need also to be good hoaxers). That is relevant when you read my account of the Ugly Islands, created originally for a public examination in New South Wales, now extensively revised and presented as true (the details aren't, but they were convincing enough for Encyclopaedia Britannica to have repeated them at one stage). My page on Cootaburra's giant dung beetle was created as a gentle amusement, but it seems to have taken in quite a few people, so obviously I am good at convincing people. As you may realise from some of the fraud links above, I can also be heard on radio.

I spent much of my working life in education of one sort or another, but these days I mainly write, and mostly, I write books. That said, I care about science for young people, and science projects. I am passionate about my home town, Sydney, but I am also fond of Lord Howe Island. My main expertise lies in Bayesian statistics, educational measurement, science things, word herding and telling tales, short or tall. I try not to use them all at once, but they often get tangled up. I want to know more about most things, but I especially wish to be expert in distinguishing Guinness from the hands of different master brewers. It's dreadful stuff, and I wouldn't normally touch it, but for the assistance it gives in raising the tall tales.