Fiona Went to Natural History Museum today. Disappointed like a seven year old when realised the new ANIMATRONIC DINOSAURS weren’t on show until the weekend. Was also annoyed by the dustiness and not-working lihgts in the gemstone collection. Consoled self with the zen of watching the leaf-cutter ants. Now you can too.
A non-biologist friend of mine, on proofreading bits of the thesis-in-progress, got terribly excited about the program Mr Bayes. "Mr Bayes!" she exclaimed. "That's the perfect name for a tabby cat!" Her comments on the section where I actually described Bayesian methods in phylogenetics consisted mainly of 🙁 and >.< faces. "The words seem to … Read more
Presentation Zen has a great post on the rule of thirds in slide composition. FrinkTank linked the site for Danny Boyle's new film Sunshine, which I will not embarrass myself by going OMGICANNOTWAITLKJSHDFALKJFSDA except how I totally just did. Am following with interest the reponse to Nature's piece commenting on PLoS's "rocky" financial position, here. … Read more
Wired has a nice little article on the molecular clock model being used by antiquarians to date prints/books etc. The original paper is here, describing how the properties of copperplate and woodblock degeneration (and the corresponding print quality features) can be used in a clock model to help date manuscrips. Nifty. Also, via Afarensis (who … Read more
… you all knew that. Pigeon Blog makes me cry with laughter. This is no exception.
Continuing my trend of providing free advertising to people who make science cool and accessible: Made With Molecules. ThinkGeek already did the t-shirt thing with their caffeine molecules, but the jewellery is very lovely, especially the earrings and simple necklaces (I loathe charm bracelets). Putting on my once-was-jewellery-designer hat, I'm all for putting a premium … Read more
(Pretentious latin post title for the win!) The tension in academia–especially science–between communication and discretion fascinates me. On the one hand, you want to be able to discuss your ideas with as many people as possible; on the other, those ideas are your intellectual currency and you don't want them stolen or misappropriated. The publishing … Read more
The Guardian reports they ordered a chunk of the smallpox virus DNA sequence online from a molecular biology supply company. It's not as dire as it might sound: you gotta have graduate-level expertise and more than a kitchen sink to recombine DNA sequences. What was interesting was that there is no across-the-board screening of all … Read more
Eagleton, C. & Spencer, M. 2006. Copying and conflation in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the astrolabe : a stemmatic analysis using phylogenetic software. Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A [link] Chaucer’s works seem to be the focus of what one might call literary phylogenetics. This new paper uses network methods to try … Read more
Cultural evolution really is a growing field. So there. Fiona Jordan Anthropology, UCL It is extremely useful to be able to preface one’s grant application or paper introduction with a reference to the vibrant state of research in the field of cultural evolution. Of course, the truth of that sentiment has, until now, been more … Read more