This is a good read & probably very useful for teaching about punc eq as well as understanding what people really mean by it. (Some of the goofy caricatures of PuncEq that some of the molecular types had in the '90s were downright Trumpian...)

Not only did the Cubs and Sox win, but so did the Tigers! I was never a major Tigers fan despite growing up in Michigan, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the team.

The problem is that forced birthers consider anti-choice bigots to be the lesser evil relative to pro-choice humanists.

This view is, in my opinion, nowhere near extreme enough.

What is a day ending in “y” in the USA?

If the Democrats had refused to seat any of the J6 Congress members, then there would have been even more hell to pay in subsequent elections.

Sadly, this makes Trump very much a man of the people in this country.

I don’t hate them quite as much as I hate the Yankees, but…

This is a rite of passage for most young men, and probably a lot of young women, too.

So, it's my birthday. If you'd like to do something in honor of that, then consider voicing an opinion save my department! eas.unl.edu/save-earth-a... I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve, etc...

Here’s funky data. As the baseball season ends, there is endless chatter about homefield advantage for the first playoff round. And yet under the latest system, home teams are 8-18 in those games, which is like a month of horrible baseball. I doubt that there is a disadvantage of playing at home…

My Catholic parents held that Southern Baptists & other Evangelicals represented the worst(and very much not-Christian) religion around. And yet because of abortion, they threw out all of their not-horrible principles to support the same agenda.

Too late...

Hi! We need lice for our diversity and adaptation project. Specifically, we need lice from zebras, camelids (camels, llamas, alpacas, vicuñas, guanacos) & aardvarks. If you or someone you know might have lice, I'm happy to discuss our inclusive collaboration plans! sites.google.com/nhm.org/anop...

When does biology become geology? This is a fun paper for us (although I, myself, was just one more member of Band-Aid for this particular paper), and hopefully it helps clarify a lot of things that we sort of already knew but never really formally addressed. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Oh, and Happy The Birthday to those hardcores that celebrate. (And, yes, the ultra-hardcores know that it's actually next week...)

When I started, page proofs involved looking at a giant photocopy of an article. As people became Internet savvy, it graduated to editable PDFs. And that was probably the peak. Now I'm using some hellspawn program to edit "proofs" that aren't even in journal format and which feels the need to…

Hitting with Runners in Scoring position is for most baseball announcers (and many baseball fans) what immigrants are to conservative politicians: blamed for everything that goes wrong while being responsible for almost nothing that is actually wrong.

HARDEST PHOTO OF 2025 JUST DROPPED

Does anyone know of R-functions to access the html source code from websites? Everything I can find accesses on the resulting page that we view in browsers. (The fact that “source” and “code” also apply to every R function is hindering my searches.)

This makes me almost long for the days in which royalty snubbed capitalists as jumped-up peasants with lots of ill-gotten pounds…

Baseball announcers: "It's hard to play the noncontenders in September; they're relaxed and 'loosey-goosey' and usually playing their best ball of the year." Same announcers 5 minutes later: "It's really hard for players on noncontenders to get up for these games; it's their job but they're human."

All this needs is a small boulder the size of a large boulder...

My jazz musician brother just pointed out to me that today's date fits the Pythagorean theorem: 16-09-25! I think this general date is the only time it happens each century. You may now resume doomscrolling...

I had a Texan transplant who told us that we fought on the wrong side during WWII. That's when I first learned that this point of view was more prevalent in the former Confederacy than the Wall Street "We should have kept going east from Berlin" view.

If? It's been happening for years. We need to find ways to keep the expertise we're losing, while providing a future for the students we've been training. We need to build a better system than the one we inherited. We need a system that serves people, not <waves hands> THIS.

A few people have asked if there is anything that they can do about UNL's decision to cut its Earth & Atmospheric Sciences Department. There is a public feedback from that one can submit to UNL that you can access here: apc.unl.edu/fall-2025-bu... Clint Rowe (our dept. chair) has asked to get…

Snails need to step it up!

Siri, play a fantasy story for me…

Or “I wish…”?

Ok, I wouldn’t be here without paraphyletic species AND the LOME.

Weird: my Catholic parents always insisted that you to just not think about it.

"But that is the spirit of Mordor, Sam..."

Well, none of us would be here without paraphyletic species...

So cute, but also: so bitey. I mean, the adults can take a finger. (And enjoy it.) But... SO CUTE!

I hate it when Duncan MacLeod decapitates another immortal on my flight...

I am recruiting a PhD student this application cycle to explore questions on the evolution of morphological variation and phylogenetics. I'm especially seeking folks interested in fossil marine inverts. Please reach out to me if interested! Portal opens Nov. 1 eeb.utoronto.ca/education/gr...

Is there a “most violent cover graphics in the area of sciences” award anywhere?

Sadly, a modern Sesame Street would probably have to include “a right wing hate podcaster is a person in your neighborhood… your neighborhood…”

I’ll bet that went over like a lead balloon…

I am torn between thinking that this level of apparent happiness should be either illegal or legally mandated.

Unsubscribing can be tough. I wound up having to get Discover to stop payments because the NYT made it impossible to actually do it online. (I was able to cancel my Washington Post subscription easily enough…)

But… Murc’s Law?

😢😢😢 youtu.be/9aykOwwRf-Q?...

I’ll go a step further: if you are a tenured professor in a red state who assumes that your job will still exist in 36 months, then I’m torn between admiring your optimism and scorning your naïveté. At this point, I would not bet on blue staters being safe!

Age verification I saw R.E.M. in a bar…

Nice, but hardly too surprising: most of NoVa would need a Democratic candidate as awful as Trump to not vote for the Dem. (I do sort of miss living there, although I'm very glad that I don't!)

Anyone know of remote paleo/bio/geo volunteer research opportunities? I met a student from a country with no paleontology who wants to do research.

Siri, show me a rhetorical question.

I just finished my favorite lecture of the year, in which I give my 105 students their first homework assignment (that I stole from Dave Jablonski): present the history of the Earth scaled to something with a distinct beginning, middle, end, etc. I made an example using Bohemian Rhapsody. There are…