Steve Wang

My department at CSU Northridge is hiring a vertebrate functional morphologist! We've got a great EEB group, and we're looking for someone to carry forward a tradition of enriching organismal courses and community-engaged research. App review starts March 15

csucareers.calstate.edu/mob/cw/en-us...

The two-stage quincunx can be used to show that a normal mixture of normal distributions is itself normal.

Amber Glenn did win a medal, a gold in the team skating event. And yes, the team event counts, just like a relay in track or swimming counts.

I would be very hesitant to try a sport called “skeleton”.

Also, respect to Ilia Malinin for his sportsmanship. What a contrast to the unfortunate ending of the women's free skate in the 2022 Olympics.

Alysa Liu (USA) hugging Ami Nakai (Japan) after the latter finished her free skate. Nakai was the last to skate, and when she completed her program, she clinched the bronze medal and Liu the gold.

For me, the best moment of the Olympics was Ami Nakai not realizing that she had won bronze in her first Olympics, then seeing her score, double-checking with Alysa Liu, and Alysa coming over to celebrate with her before Alysa had even celebrated her own win. So heartwarming.

Fossil with multiple parallel fissures inside. Embedded in a stone with lots of light-colored, smaller fossils.

Can anyone tell me what this might be? Found on the limestone base of a sculpture at the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia. #fossil #marine #limestone

an orange Velociraptor made out of pipe cleaners. credit: https://frugalfun4boys.com/easy-craft-kids-pipe-cleaner-animals/

Thanks! Wow, I did not know there are terrestrial ostracods. I'm hoping we will someday find terrestrial pycnogonids and discover that they are the sister group to pipe cleaner animals.

Do we know how many times arthropods left the sea for land? At least three times for insects, myriapods, and arachnids?

Love the thread! One nitpick: All life on earth is related! "Unrelated" really means "Less closely related than you might expect at first glance".

Yeah, a lame attempt at a love interest, and no chemistry with Jodie Foster at all. The character in the book was much better.

I loved the book, thought the movie was solid but not as good as the book. (I found the McConaghey character annoying.) Might depend on which one you see/read first.

NSF has (had?) a rule that you can’t request a no-cost extension if you’ve spent your entire budget. So I always leave a few dollars unspent in case I need to extend the grant.

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A fantastic string arrangement; I'd never heard this version before.
Here's a song with a cool string arrangement by Suzanne Vega and Philip Glass:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLtg...
(content warning: suicide)

Yes! All the Lego sets I see are for some very specific object like a Jurassic World dinosaur or the Millennium Falcon. I thought the whole point of Legos was that you get to decide what you want to build and figure out how to make it yourself, rather than following a set of instructions.

I like this idea. Maybe when they mature, they turn into Prototaxites, kind of like a tunicate life cycle but partly terrestrial.

Map of drought levels worldwide. Regions with more drought are shaded in orange, and regions with less drought are shaded in green, with the center being light gray.

This is a cool dataset. However, I think the visualization would be easier to understand with a two-color diverging color scale, similar to the one below, rather than a rainbow color scale (which is usually suboptimal).

Comic. [2x2 chart. Top left quadrant: seem like dinosaurs x are dinosaurs. Silhouettes of dinosaurs stegosaurus, triceratops, tyrannosaurus, velociraptor, and long-neck dinosaur. Top right quadrant: seem like dinosaurs x are not dinosaurs. Silhouettes of mosasaur, quetzalcoatlus, dimetrodon, plesiosaur, and pteranodon. Bottom left quadrant: don’t seem like dinosaurs x are dinosaurs. Silhouettes of penguin, egret, ostrich, pigeon, falcon. Bottom right: don’t seem like dinosaurs x are not dinosaurs. Silhouettes of squirrel, stapler, plant, person, and bicycle.]

Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs

xkcd.com/3204/

Empty produce section in a grocery store near Philadelphia

Super Bowl Sunday: the best time to… go grocery shopping

I remember watching this on broadcast TV when it first aired. This and the Rainbow Connection with Debbie Harry were my two favorite Muppet Show performances.

Notable that all the data are from one source except that ‘Human on Bicycle’ is from a different source. I wonder if they could have used different calculation methodologies?

Wow, super cool result and explanation.

I'd love to see this but don't know if I will be able to make it. Will the talk be recorded?

Congratulations!

Yes.

ie., What is causing Prototaxtes's axis 2 value to be so much higher than everything else? Was its 'outlierness' due to most variables being similar to fungi or animals or plants except a few variables being very different? Or is it just completely different in all variables?

Congrats, cool paper! If I understand correctly, you did PCA then CCA, showing that Proto. is distinct (fig 3). If you look at the raw data, can you tell if Proto. was more similar to Fung/Anim/Plants? eg, is it similar in many raw vars. to many of the groups? Or is it completely diff. in all vars?

www.paleosynthesis.nat.fau.de

Yes, the entries are binomial coefficients, which gives the connection to the Normal distribution.