A fully resolved, and perfectly misleading, species tree

The ultimate promise of phylogenomics is to get a fully resolved species tree: a tree, where the individuals finely sort per species, and where all branches, especially the deepest ones, have high or, better, unambiguous support. A look behind such a tree, Jiang et al.'s (2021) Tree of Beeches.

Die Wahl der Qual

In meinem Heimatland steht mal wieder das 4-jährliche Abnicken der Legislative an: die Bundestagswahl 2021. Wieder mal Zeit, den Wahl-O-Mat der bpb zu visualisieren, und in allgemeineren Kontext zu stellen.

Wahl der (H)Ampelmännchen

Diesen Sonntag wird in meinen beiden Heimatländern gewählt: Rheinland-Pfalz (meinem Geburtsland) und Baden-Württemberg (meinem Zweitland, bevor die DFG mich ins schwedische Exil schickte). Zeit die Wahl-O-Maten der Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung zu vernetzen.

Where have all the Mondays gone

Who likes Mondays? Probably no-one, really. Thus, inspired by a tweet of a fellow Monday-victim and two great classics, a songtext.

Caesar's EU, Hitler's EU, EU, future Xi's EU – all the same?

I got a comment to my Fare well Brittania! post drawing that line, which got me thinking. A reflection and response.

How to pimp up a palaeobotanical monograph

I got a request via ResearchGate to give feedback to a recently published palaeobotanical monograph. I'd love to, but I can't, really; I'm simply not qualified. But I can give some tips how to enrich a description of a palaeoflora to put palaeobotany in a better light.

Palynology from A to Z: People

Five of my palynology advertising tweets (have/will) introduce(d) researchers pushing forward the importance of palynology in contemporary organismal science. With four, I worked, and we published a good deal of papers including some pretty unique ones, which hopefully will provide templates for future cross-disciplinary research.

Palynology from A to Z: A as in Aponogeton

One thing, full-blood scientists usually forget, is to advertise their work. Usually because they lack the time. I have plenty and started a series of daily threads on Twitter advertising palynological research. But my reach there is miniscule and the half-life of tweets is extremely short. Hence, this post series.

Are complete plastome trees always better? Maples, for instance.

With the advances in sequencing, it has become easy to compile complete chloroplast genomes (plastomes) for plants. Given you have the money and workforce. The People's Republic of China is rich in both; hence, gene banks fill up with complete plastomes of tree genera, otherwise ignored by the scientific world. Such as maples (Acer). Beware the fully resolved trees.

The stag cracked the 30

One of my favourite hobbies as a tax-paid scientist was to check and groom, once in a while, my "impact". I still check, out of curiosity and vanity, and just noticed that my stag cracked the thirty. A little reflection of self-inflating impact with some tips for the game.

Inferring a ML tree with 12000 (or more) virus genomes

Somebody on the RAxML group posted this as a bold question, asking for tips how to speed up the analysis. Since I recently looked at virus genomes (infamous SARS group) myself, I have some ideas for this.

Now that RAxML includes all models – a practical tip

The new, faster and (meanwhile) very option-rich version of RAxML, RAxML-NG provides the full plethora of nucleotide substitution models, which can be confusing to the normal user. Hence, a practical tip based on my experiences with very different sets of nucleotide data (and from very different organisms).

Why I never published a "total evidence" tree

Triggered by a support question on the RAxML google group, I pondered the question whether it makes sense (anymore) to use the total evidence approach to place fossils.

The Easter Egg featuring Earth, live

For this Eastern, I'll advertise something colourful to turn our eyes back from ourselves to the planet we inhabit: a live simulation/representation of Earth's dynamic surface and atmosphere.

Scientists = surveyed customers? Bite me.

Science is good business. Especially since the public hand pays for most of it, via salaries and research grants, library conscriptions ensuring high profits for science publishers, providing infrastructure and – at least in western welfare states – students. An invitation for a customer survey.

Surviving parsimonists: just tree-naive or tree-blindfolded?

A generation ago, an epic battle took place, largely unnoticed outside mathematical and biological sciences: the Phylogenetic Wars. By the mid-1990s, the war was over and probabilistic methods for tree-inference replaced traditional parsimony. But there is a small, quite dusty realm that still pretends nothing happened: palaeontology. A long read about undervalued data and stubborn old white men.

Lernen mit Lindner – die Geometrie der Mitte

Nach dem PR-Fiasko in Thüringen, macht die FDP wieder ganz auf Mitte. Zeit für eine paar Bildchen.

Tempolimit? Nein, danke! Realsatire? Bitte mehr!

Dank Trumpelchen, des First Toddlers of the United States, Bojos Mojo und ähnlicher Gestalten ist es schwierig geworden, Satire und Realpolitik auseinanderzuhalten. Und die CSU ist wie immer vorne mit dabei bei dem neuen Trend.

And the laughter dies

Germans are generally not known for their sense of humour (although this is a gross-generalisation, German humour can be quite diverse, and differs from region to region). But there are exceptions. However, these days, it's the audience who gets at you.

A Wikipedia list everyone should know

Wikipedia has changed the world how we access knowledge. And despite recent (and fair) criticism, it's still an invaluable social project because it provides easy entry portals and an enormous wealth of quick-to-access data. Approaching Christmas, the Feast of Love and Peace, I'd like to point towards a Wikipedia page dealing with something, we tend to quickly forget about: Wikipedia's List of ongoing armed conflicts.