Learning about Iron Age coins. I love that the person in charge is called “curator of hoards,” and I suspect that she is actually a dragon in disguise.

youtu.be/-4YC1VKLLP4

Just got home from the Y, and asked Pearl if she missed me.

Her response? “Meh.”

RUDE

and now a quick shoutout for Goth Style Icon Beatrice Arthur

now imagining Bea singing “Happy House” on a network TV special, and lamenting the World That Should’ve Been

Mrs Bear is out of state this week , so it’s just me and Miss Pearl.

Watching A Face in the Crowd while the little girl makes biscuits on my hip.

#backyardzoo #squirrel #cat #raccoon #roanokeva

Back, 40 years or so ago when I first got into computer stuff, I thought I was an elite hacker-nerd, I converted my first name from lowercase ASCII to hex ti use as a password.  (I have long ago abandoned it, natch.)

I still remember by heart that “scott” in hexadecimal is 73636F7474.

About a week later, I changed it to 53636F7474, which is “Scott”

Now, I can’t remember phone numbers without very active commitment or a device to help me.

I am also amazed that I bothered to code in FORTRAN 77.

The coding pad made for cool dungeon mapping grids, though.

1.  Network (1976)
2.  A Face in the Crowd (1957)
3.  They Live (1988)
4.  RoboCop (1987)
5.  Brazil (1985)
6.  Idiocracy (2006)
7.  Sorry to Bother You (2018)
8.  Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) 
9.  Wag the Dog (1997)
10. The Big Short (2015)
11. American Psycho (2000)
12. The Truman Show (1998)
13. Don’t Look Up (2021)
14. Thank You for Smoking (2005
15. Bulworth (1998)
16. Death Race 2000 (1975)
17. Idiocracy (2006)
18. Falling Down (1993)
19. Max Headroom (TV series, 1987-198
20. WALL-E (2008)

Today, I learned that biologists use cladistics rather than taxonomy

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8rLJcgY/

Taxonomy is a field of study: how should we classify things? Cladistics is a method using trees to classify things.  Hence the confusion, I think. They are not mutually exclusive but often overlap.

Phylogenetic trees tend to be based on similarities in either token sequences (as in ribosomal 16S rRNA for the first ones) or overall genomic similarity. This is in contrast to more traditional measurements (ask an entomologist how they know a beetle is species X versus Y, and they will usually describe a morphological key: if this leg segment is longer, it is in this branch; next, look at the number of spots, etc.).

Genetics is really tricky, though, because A) most organisms are unicellular and can share genes horizontally, making a stable tree really hard. And B) there are many ways to measure genetic distance, and no good way to know if one method is generally “better” than another. As a fun game, imagine how many sequences you could make from 10 heads and 10 tails.  Raw counts of all sequences are 10 and 10. But some sequences will be closer than others (10H 10T is close to 9H 1T, 9T 1H, but the two reverses are farther from each other). Each base position can be considered an independent dimension, and high-dimensional distance metrics become unusual.

Taxonomy is a broad term for sorting things into hierarchical categories. It is not just used in biology.

Phylogenetics is the study of evolutionary relationships. We sort organisms into categories based on their evolutionary relationships. Because we are sorting them into categories, it is taxonomy.

Cladistics is a specific approach to phylogenetics where organisms are grouped into “clades.” All organisms in a clade must have common ancestry, and a true clade would include every organism that shares that ancestry. Dolphins, dogs, and salmon are all part of the clade that includes all vertebrates. Dolphins and dogs are part of the mammal clade, but salmon are excluded from it, because the most recent common ancestor of dogs and dolphins is more recent. Salmon diverged much earlier on the tree.

When we create cladograms we do include genetic data

Lots of big liberal/”progressive” accounts right now talking about standing up for marginalized people and not including alt text.

Please use the alt-text on your images and video descriptions.

Alt text is important because it makes websites and digital content more accessible. It allows users, especially those with visual impairments, to access information conveyed through images via screen readers. (It also helps SEO!)

Our mama bear from a week or so ago brought her three cubs by! I’m glad to see them and that it isn’t trash day.

Drinking horn with gilded copper mounts, Europe, 15th century

A raccoon returns this morning