Tomos Potter

I haven’t personally seen Wolf Hall, but my dad (who has) confirms the accuracy of Mark Rylance’s expression described as “that of a ferret saddened by developments in France”

figure 1 from https://doi.org/10.1086/737588 describing (a) our conceptualisation of an evolutionary transition in individuality, (b) an interpretation of the traits that we consider in our mathematical model, and (c) a graphical representation of the population dynamics in the model.

Interested in host-symbiont interdependence, eukaryogenesis, and evolutionary transitions in individuality? my first paper just came out! With @gokhalecs.bsky.social and Pete Czuppon, we study when & how individuality emerges in a host-endosymbiont collective doi.org/10.1086/737588 a short thread🧵:

Do you like to think about temporal niches and coexistence theory? Or perhaps you want to hear some really quirky natural history of marine insects & the moon? Or both? Read on: a mystery & its potential solution in two papers!

Last fledge check of the season home in Norway today. Very low production this year, with most of the early broods failing. However, rather high density, with eggs in 137/186 boxes. Distribution:
Great tit 76
Blue tit 24
Pied flycatcher 27 (record high)
Coal tit 7
Nuthatch 2
Marsh tit 1

(Me, on meeting a sea hare)
- Aplysia?

(The sea hare, politely)
- No, no, the pleasure is all mine

Danger! Bipedal ants

The bar has been raised for data viz. Superb! I think the choice of a reverse-order y-axis is completely justified.

People knock pseudoscience, but remember: without pseudoscience, there would be no conservative economic theory.

I’ve read the same said of Haldane, albeit 250 years later: more impressive and/or less believable!

Permutation tests! I.e randomly simulate the null hypothesis then compare to observations. Non-parametric, but needs a bit of question-specific coding.

After Hours The Velvet Underground · The Velvet Underground (45th Anniversary) · Song · 1969

Late to the party here (by about 20 years) but this is surely the blueprint for all moldy peaches songs: open.spotify.com/track/6cA1us...

Every citation? To what extent? Sometimes I read on here about folks doing reviews in 1-2hours. I'd say it takes me 1-2 days. But I don't check that each citation is appropriate. If I'm skeptical, or if there is a major citation I'm not familiar with, then sure, I'll check. Genuinely curious!

Lucky you! I wish I was back there!

Oh man, asking my first (!?) question on stack overflow - I've got a reproducible example that demonstrates what I need to do, but how do I come up with a good title so that someone who knows the answer will read it?

Totally thought this Denisovan was giving the middle finger

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To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to be stabbed in the heart once may be regarded as a misfortune...

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Diolch am bostio! This CM album seemingly passed me by without me realising. Nice vibes.

Herman Melville predicting the Marvel Cinematic Universe back in 1851

Love the sketches btw!

I recently got a Remarkable Pro tablet through work- basically a kindle you can draw on - and it could be good for this type of thing. It can translate handwriting into text that you can export, and I think you can probably export drawings too…

i made a new framework for modelling stochastic eco-evolutionary dynamics of multivariate traits !!

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Cool!

Hot take. Brian Wilson was undoubtedly a songwriting genius, but perhaps his incredibly prolific output (9 albums in less than 3 years!) was because he rarely actually finished a song: all 13 tracks on Pet Sounds end with a fade out… the coward's finish!

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Mongers, ranked:

1. Cheese
2. Fish
3. Fear
4. War

Join the Evolution of Ageing workshop led by Dr. Edward Ivimey-Cook. More info: https://gutenberg-workshops.uni-mainz.de/evolution-ageing/ Interested in SORTEE? Contact Edward for details! #workshop

Neural ordinary differential equations for ecological and evolutionary time‐series analysis Inferring the functional shape of ecological and evolutionary processes from time-series data can be challenging because processes are often not describable with simple equations. The dynamical co...

I'll have to see how it differs from my old lab mate Willem's paper using neural networks to characterise the functions underlying ecological time-series data: besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Great to hear Tim chat about his path into biology and approach to figuring out how ecosystems work! I recommend a listen!