Daniel Dvorkin / is on Nostr

Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.

Last Notes

2024-08-06 16:17:24

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@npub1e2e…0xnw they’re so weird. 😛

2024-01-11 20:12:14

It’s a good time to be alive for those of us fascinated by things that no longer are. 🙂 Big #paleontology news today:
A new #Tyrannosaurus species. Unlike most of the other proposed new T. whateveri of the last few years, this one looks quite well-supported. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-47011-0 The earliest skin impressions ever found from any #amniote. Amniotes are #reptiles and #mammals, basically: animals which can lay eggs on land (or give live birth, in more derived forms) because the #embryo is protected from dessication. This is in contrast to #amphibians, the first #vertebrates to live on land, which absolutely require a long-term water source for reproduction. In that sense amniotes are the first true terrestrial vertebrates, and we wouldn’t be here without those distant ancestors. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)01663-9
The first will no doubt get about a million times more attention, because Tyrannosaurus, but the second is at least as big a deal IMO. Links via Thomas Holtz. I’ll try to have my own relatively insignificant thoughts when I get time.

2023-12-29 15:02:28

One common feature of various anti-science ideologies is that their adherents lack a sense of scale. #FlatEarthers don’t understand distance, #creationists don’t understand time, #climate change #denialists don’t understand levels of emissions or rate of temperature change, #antivaxers don’t understand population morbidity and mortality. Probably other types of looniness with which I’m less familiar have the same underlying problem.
In a way I sympathize with this, because the numbers are so far outside normal human experience. But learn the #math and suddenly everything makes a lot more sense. We’re not talking about anything particularly advanced. Just grasp that intution breaks down when measuring something very large or very small.