“The methodological and philosophical revolution brought forth by cladistics introduced unprecedented rigor to paleobiology but also left deep scars” This is a great line from a great paper! 😎

heh, Republicans have been running on "let Corporations run America, not Government" at least since I became politically cognizant ~1980. (And I think that they were doing it before then, too.)

🎶On the 12th day of XMas, Climate Change gave to me, ♬ Bike to work in 55 degrees! (It's "bike to work in 13 degrees!" in the international release...)

Obviously we missed the point that Trump felt that Harris would not start *enough* wars. So, our collective bad, right?

How did Murdoch let that get through?

Really excited to have the new issue of Paleobiology @paleosoc.bsky.social out celebrating the 50th anniversary of #punctuatedequilibria #macroevolution #paleobiology #palaeontology #paleontology @nilese.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Well, I didn’t expect it to take only 3 days. Oduks…

If I ever get around to getting my UNL headshot (and after 9 years, I probably won’t!), then I’m totally plagiarizing the espresso accessory!

How to SHOUT that you know nothing about academia without explicitly saying it…

Because I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve…

Ok, this isn’t quite “only in NYC”: but it’s definitely a “NYC is one of the few places…” thing. I wish that more of the US was like this.

I confess to a morbid curiosity as to how 2026 will manage to (absolutely) top 2025 as the worst year ever…

Wow, that’s tough. We first got it towards the end of my senior year in high school. Music videos had been a “thing” for a while, but opportunities to see them were few & far between before MTV. The Red Queen was very apparent: videos quickly became very polished and productions in their own…

Insert the Simpson's meme here. You know which one...

Baby dinosaurs are butt ugly…

Siri: show me a rhetorical question.

Trump’s entire presidency is a (cartoon) book taken from the Confederacy.

Sauron used bad priors, as Gandalf explained.

Just wait to he hits “I just shampooed reading glasses out of my hair” years old…

The only appropriate thing to do with Faulkner’s knife is to cut yourself badly while futilely trying to improve your life.

Kids, don't do acid...

The Sugar Fit Bowl will follow 10 minutes later…

But not fast enough!

It cannot be worse than my "Highlander Christmas Special" script, with the infamous "There can be only one, Kringle..." line. (I mean, seriously, nothing could be worse, at least for scripts.)

And here’s the whole tree: finished with 13 hours to go! We vary which Solstice Holiday to celebrate each year, but we’re going back to a traditional FuckTrumpanalia.

What does one do with a childhood’s worth of Yule stuffties at childhood’s end? Turn them into seasonal decorations!

Oft evil will shall evil mar…

Lol, we used to argue about this when I was a kid. Most of my friends were lucky enough to have non-religious parents, so they didn’t know about Advent or Epiphany or that the latter was called 12th Night for a reason. (Or, at all!) My parents claimed that when they were young, people had XMas…

Well, I turned in grades for GEOL 105 for the last time today. I have Concorde Effect nostalgia: 7 years ago, I put in more all-nighters in one-term to put the class together than I put in during my entire undergrad career! I never really enjoyed teaching it, but I hate losing the effort.

why, oh why, does nobody do expedited shipping anymore? I realized on Friday that two XMas gifts that I ordered weeks before are not going to get here this week. Now I cannot find anything comparable that will let me pay for overnight shipping. (And I'll happily pay! Just GIVE ME THE OPTION!!!!)

It’s hard to get a better name for a Trump administration member than “Blanche.” Weis and Gwynn really should be there, too…

Another nickel! That’s a lot of them now…

Weird. I know that I cite incorrectly sometimes, mostly due to my misremembering a key point as coming from paper X rather than paper Y. But I cite purely through my extensive 33 year old EndNote file! But it wouldn’t occur to me to use a source other than my cluttered memory!

No, it did not: this is exactly what it was intended to do when it started 44+ years ago.

In fairness, most of his followers probably cannot.

I would dope up on Benadryl before going to bars in the late '80s. When I got home, I'd spray a primitive version of Febreze all over my clothes. If I didn't, then I'd wake up with a raging headache regardless of how much I drank! (And if I did, then I usually woke up feeling fine.) 80sUxed...

Sadly, that is a winning argument. A huge chunk of Americans (and probably an overwhelming majority) truly believe that government jobs are sinecures and that all Trump really has done is get government employees off of very lucrative welfare.

Well, in “good” news, UNL moves faster than I expected and I’m officially moving to the School of Biological Sciences full time (I’m already 40% there) in January 2026. That said, I will *never* forgive the university for what it did. I probably won’t be able to do much more than put up flags for…

The most brutal way of telling someone they’re a few sandwiches short of a picnic that I’ve heard in French is t’es pas la truite la plus oxygénée de la rivière. It means “you’re not the most oxygenated trout in the river.” * read on for similar insults from around the world (a thread)…

Lol, this could be “every right to BLANK” and “tries to change BLANK back…” Wait, now I’m sad…

It seems that the spirit of Mordor is raging tonight among American orcs.

I know these authors! 😎

There has been one general ironic rule of American politics in my political life (~84 - present.) With the exception of Reagan’s policies, nothing turns the American public opinion so much as the party in power actually enacting (or even trying to enact) the policies on which they campaigned!

Heh, I remember the AMNHers saying that to & about us that did actual quantitive hypothesis testing. But we’re still around, and they’re a bunch of historical footnotes.

Re-reading 1984 for the first time since 1980 in order to help my kid for a school assignment. The old jokes about how 1984 & Brave New World meld in your mind really are true! And, man: the Life of Brian effect is huge here. Orwell fought for the Marxists in the Spanish Civil War: and that it was…

“It’s rubbish.” A+

Canadians are so not evil…

Could he look more like a Hut?

Trump knows the word “sycophant”?!?!?

Hanlon’s Razor cuts itself!