Posts
May 08, 2013
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12:34 AM | Lift a Glass in One-Degree Increments
Ray Harryhausen died today at the age of 92. He was to movies what Jack Kirby was to comics. He was treated somewhat better by his industry and his peers, and more power to him.
NPR sort of bemoaned the fact that CGI has displaced and surpassed stop-motion models. You know, the same artisanal argument they’re [...]
May 07, 2013
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New research demonstrates that male soldiers' faces may predict their military rank and how many children they ultimately fatherWhat role has aggression played in human evolution? Can scientists predict who might be more aggressive? And how might increased aggressiveness be linked to overall fitness? Previous research found that aggression in hockey players is correlated with their facial width to height ratio (fWHR), and a new study builds on this work by demonstrating that fWHR may also
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Carré J.M. & McCormick C.M. (2008). In your face: facial metrics predict aggressive behaviour in the laboratory and in varsity and professional hockey players, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 275 (1651) 2651-2656. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2008.0873
Wong E.M., Ormiston M.E. & Haselhuhn M.P. (2011). A Face Only an Investor Could Love: CEOs' Facial Structure Predicts Their Firms' Financial Performance, Psychological Science, 22 (12) 1478-1483. DOI: 10.1177/0956797611418838
Tsujimura H. & Banissy M.J. (2013). Human face structure correlates with professional baseball performance: insights from professional Japanese baseball players, Biology Letters, 9 (3) 20130140-20130140. DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2013.0140
Stirrat M., Stulp G. & Pollet T.V. (2012). Male facial width is associated with death by contact violence: narrow-faced males are more likely to die from contact violence, Evolution and Human Behavior, 33 (5) 551-556. DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2012.02.002
Stirrat M. & Perrett D.I. (2012). Face Structure Predicts Cooperation: Men With Wider Faces Are More Generous to Their In-Group When Out-Group Competition Is Salient, Psychological Science, 23 (7) 718-722. DOI: 10.1177/0956797611435133
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10:51 PM | The Last of the Rhinoceros Titans
In paleontology, size matters. The lifestyles of the large and charismatic often gain far more attention those of …
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Bleary-eyed and staggering, many of us partake in a morning coffee ritual before mustering the courage to face the daily workload. In addition to psychoactive chemicals (drugs, anyone?), the coffee routine provides structure and emotional support — rumours suggest it may be largely a placebo effect, but I won’t go into that debate. Instead, I [...]
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How did these embryo fossils come to exist? Are there other taxa out there? And to what extent do they conserve original biological features?
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5:47 PM | Just a little bit busy this spring
The end of the semester, the beginning of field season, a publishing deadline, and home gardening are all colliding here in May when the days just don't have enough hours. At the coffee shoppe this morning, at least 5 colleagues were sitting there with piles of papers. Only one of them was in a semi-good mood. What a terrific person she must be. Students want to know their grades, and TPP wants to provide them as soon as possible. However, a bit of patience is a
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I'm pleased and excited to announce that a project I've been working on for the last few months is finally ready to launch: A new, nationwide survey of queer folks working in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.Read more ...
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12:55 PM | More Galapágos Adventures
This year I joined Team Pinzon for the first (and hopefully not the last) time – and so it is time to do my first Galápagos post on this blog. Previous expeditions (sadly, without me) have done a number of posts about our work, including Suskewiet as a new statistical method for comparing beak size and shape, a five day re-cap of a field season that included posts on blood sucking maggots, people sleeping on the job, and adventures in 3-D. It's hard to beat that, though I suppose I should […]
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12:26 PM | Red and white retriever with partridge
This painting is by Edward Armfield (1817 – 1896), and the bird it is retrieving is a gray partridge, which in North America has the unfortunate name of “Hungarian partridge,” even though it is almost always called the “English partridge” in the United Kingdom. (Some Americans call it a “Hun,” a term that, as German-America, [...]
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12:23 PM | Nature TIMES Nurture
Saturday was a bit of a break from thinking about depression, what with the super-villains and all. Then the rain closed in again (though there’s a little sun breakthrough going on right this minute). It’s been gray for almost 10 days straight, something I’ve not often seen since I lived in Rochester, NY, just off [...]
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The focus has been getting the trapping research going. It is labor intensive because it requires the labor of setting it up. But as I stated before, the weather is not being my friend. But here is the recap of my second week in Tanzania. [View the story "#DispatchesDNLee Getting To Work" on Storify]
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When I started this blog a year ago – naive fool that I was – I thought it would be just like keeping a diary. Write the stuff, maybe add a picture, press the magic button, and voila. But as I … Continue reading →
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5:52 AM | How do Cicadas Keep Track of Time?
The east coast is about to get a little more crowded, and whole lot louder, as Brood II of the 17-year cicada (which is actually a synchronized cohort of three different species: Magicicada septendecim, Magicicada cassini, & Magicicada septendecula) prepares to make its first appearance since 1996. Conceived, laid and hatched while the Macarena was sweeping the globe, [...]
Karban R., Black C.A. & Weinbaum S.A. (2000). How 17-year cicadas keep track of time, Ecology Letters, 3 (4) 253-256. DOI: 10.1046/j.1461-0248.2000.00164.x
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5:43 AM | SNL parody of Google Glass
In some quarters it is now “conventional wisdom” that Google Glass is going to seem dorky and laughable at first. But it’s probably just the pre-alpha version of the type of technology which seems inevitable (and is familiar to anyone who has read cyberpunk science fiction).
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TPP's 1st day of flowering log provides some interesting data. On May 5th, the 100th different plant in our gardens flowered. This is considerably later than a typical year, if such a thing exists. In 2010 the 100th flowering event was reached on April 21st, and in 2011 it came on April 27th. So 2013 is 8 to 16 days behind. However last year was just much abnormal. The 100th flowering event took place on March 25th! It was ridiculous! The 100th
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May 06, 2013
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10:37 PM | Dinosaurs in the Dark
Truly, as Weird Al Yankovic once sang, “Jurassic Park is frightening in the dark.” Stumbling around after nightfall …
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10:05 PM | The Largest Living Systems
Are there evolutionary patterns related to the evolution of size? If so, how do we make sense of these patterns? And what are the largest living systems that have ever existed?
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Français We are pleased to announce that we will be co-locating our 2016 annual meeting with the International Congress of Entomology (ICE) hosted by the Entomological Society of America (ESA) in Orlando, Florida (see http://ice2016orlando.org/)! The ESC Governing Board has voted to accept the ESA’s invitation to join them and other national entomological societies at [...]
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My granddad, in the lat 80s, bought a 1967 Mustang convertible. He drove it until he died in 2004. When asked why he didn’t want a car with decent air conditioning*, power brakes, or some real power (it had the 289 engine), he just said, “More stuff to go wrong.” In a way, it was [...]
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7:40 PM | Fern poetry
Just played again with a random poetry generator. Made it for ferns. Made my moment. First try is not bad: Sporophytic Food Horticulture bugs with actual fossile record. Shall not a taxonomist radiate with Carboniferous phenotypes? Direct sunlight is used as the ferns of plenty of families, But the study of ferns ponders many taxa. [...]
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7:37 PM | Eugenie Scott to retire from NCSE
Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, has announced that she will retire by the end of this year.
"It's a good time to retire, with our new climate change initiative off to a strong start and with the staff energized and excited by the new challenges ahead," she commented. "The person who replaces me will find a strong staff, a strong set of programs, and a strong board of directors."
The NCSE has been central to defending the teaching of evolution in
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12:52 PM | Impatience and aggregate risk
Imagine two populations of asexually reproducing people. In the first population, each person has a 50 per cent chance of having no children, and a 50 per cent chance of having two children. If there is no relationship between the outcomes for each person (i.e. they face idiosyncratic risk) and the population is large, we [...]The post Impatience and aggregate risk appeared first on Evolving Economics.
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Written by Chris Buddle and Paul Manning. Spending time talking to kids about Entomology is ALWAYS worth it. If ever invited to speak at an elementary school about insects, always say “yes”, and in this post, we’ll expand on why it’s worth your time. In a second post on this topic, we’ll provide some tips on [...]
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11:33 AM | Scenes from the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival
Over the last few days, I and my friends and colleagues from the University of Southampton’s vertebrate palaeontology research group visited Lyme Regis for the 2013 Fossil Festival, a big, fun event attended by 1000s of people and by most palaeontologically- and geologically-oriented people in the southern half of the UK. There are stalls and [...]
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9:24 AM | #DispatchesDNLee: Rain and Field Work
It’s the Rainy Season now in Tanzania. I’ve been told that it should be coming to a close soon. I clearly underestimated how wet it would be. The vegetation is so much more green and lush from before. The roads are bumpier, rocky and fill with large gaping crevices. Streets I’ve traveled dozens of times [...]
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Howard V. Cornell, 2013. Biological Reviews 88(1): 140-165. DOI:10.1111/j.1469-185X.2012.00245.x. Is regional species diversity bounded or unbounded? This post is PEGE’s contribution to the first PEGE/EvoBio journal clubs crossover. Add your comments to the bottom of this post and then come and join us with the guys over at EB-JC (evobiojournalclub.wordpress.com) next Monday (May 13th, 4:30p ET) [...]
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3:31 AM | Civic allometry
An interesting article from Smithsonian magazine, about the mathematical study of cities: "Life in the city is essentially one giant math problem".
Here's a passage quoting Geoffrey West, about the ways that different measures of a city exhibit allometry with population size:
Remarkably, this phenomenon applies to cities all over the world, of different sizes, regardless of their particular history, culture or geography. Mumbai is different from Shanghai is different from Houston, obviously,
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