iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 22/09/2026

Tyrannosaurus xkcd.com/3300/

Comic. [Person with long hair pointing to diagram with Tyrannosaurus Rex standing next to a person.] PERSON: We now believe the primary prey of Tyrannosaurus Rex was these humans who kept standing next to it for scale.

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The Onion @theonion.com · 16/09/2026

Biologists Announce There Absolutely Nothing We Can Learn From Clams theonion.com/biologists-announce-th…

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Swarthmore College is hiring a TT Assistant Professor in Mathematics, with a specialization in analysis. Friendly colleagues, excellent students, beautiful campus, convenient location (Philadelphia suburbs). Happy to answer any questions. www.mathjobs.org/jobs/list/28... #AcademicSky 🧪

aerial photo of the Swarthmore College campus in autumn, showing the main quad with fall foliage and the Philadelphia skyline in the distance

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

First day of class -- still a thrill after all these years (my 25th at Swarthmore)!

Swarthmore campus, with pink flowers in front of a bell tower
photo credit: college web page

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Casey Dunn @caseywdunn.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

My new book, Phylogenetic Biology, is now published. Available online for free at dunnlab.org/phylogenetic... . Physical copies can be purchased at shop.lightningsource.com/b/085?params... or your favorite bookstore.

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

The acknowledgements of the 2020 NEJM paper announcing the first results of the Moderna covid-19 vaccine: #Dolly

Title page of the paper, "An mRNA Vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 -- Preliminary Report" in the New England Journal of Medicine

acknowledgements of the paper, "An mRNA Vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 -- Preliminary Report" in the New England Journal of Medicine, listing "the Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund" as a supporter

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

The acknowledgements of the 2020 NEJM paper announcing the first results of the Moderna covid-19 vaccine: #Dolly

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

My students/collaborators and I came up with photorealistic Chernoff faces a few years ago and ran some experiments, but I haven't had time to write up a manuscript yet. Here's a sample: @bbolker.bsky.social @datavisfriendly.bsky.social #rstats #stats #dataviz #AcademicSky 🧪

sample of photorealistic Chernoff faces developed by Steve Wang, Heidi Wong, Sebastian Mintah, and Jessica Todd Harper of Swarthmore College. Figure shows 12 variations of a face with different hair, eyes, face shape, beard, etc. Facial features represent variables in a multivariate dataset. This builds on the idea of Herman Chernoff, but using photorealistic faces instead of cartoon-like faces.

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Michael Friendly @datavisfriendly.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊 🎂Jul 01, 1923 Herman Chernoff born in New York, USA 🇺🇸 1973: Cartoons of human face to represent multivariate data -- idea that people are sensitive to configural properties of faces. 'Chernoff face' displays: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernof...

en.wikipedia.org

Chernoff face - Wikipedia

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Post one (1) photo of a painting that you took with your very own hands. One of my favorites, from the National Gallery of Art two weeks ago.

Jackson Pollock: Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Questions about submitting a manuscript to a journal that requires including the data and code: 1) For public databases (eg, PBDB), do you submit the code w/ API calls to download the data, or the downloaded dataset itself? 2) What about datasets that don't allow sharing (eg,WoRMS)? #AcademicSky 🧪 ⚒️

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Springtime in New York (although given the humidity, it feels more like July). World’s slimmest skyscraper at left.

Skyscrapers overlooking Central Park in NYC, Billionaires Row

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Last day of work at the coolest sabbatical job ever. Thanks to the team for letting me fulfill a childhood dream.

Yankee Stadium showing field from top row

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

I'll be traveling from Penn Station or Grand Central Station NYC to Yankee Stadium. Is there a train that is above ground so I can see the city, or are they all subways?

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Eileen Straube @eileenstraube.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

📢 Paper alert! Excited to share the first publication of my PhD!😁 We analysed fossil occurrences of the last 23 Ma to understand how geographic range change relates to extinction risk.🌍🐚🪸🦈 Keen to learn more? Here is the paper: 👉 dx.doi.org/10.1111/geb....

dx.doi.org

The Extinction Risk–Range Change Relationship: Evidence From the Fossil Record

Aim Climate change is a major driver for the wave of species extinctions predicted for this century. Extinction risk assessments are often estimated from climate-driven reductions in the geographic .....

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

I drove through my old college town last week, and I'm happy to report that despite the gray skies, Ithaca is still gorges.

Ithaca Falls, a 150-foot tall waterfall in Ithaca, NY. The view is from a bridge downstream.

Taughannock Falls, a 215-foot tall waterfall near Ithaca, NY. The photo is taken from an overlook about half a mile downstream.

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

I don't understand why we ever used "citizen science". I've always preferred "community science".

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

For me, the best moment of the Olympics was Ami Nakai not realizing that she had won bronze in her first Olympics, then seeing her score, double-checking with Alysa Liu, and Alysa coming over to celebrate with her before Alysa had even celebrated her own win. So heartwarming.

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Colin Purrington @colinpurrington.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

Can anyone tell me what this might be? Found on the limestone base of a sculpture at the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia. #fossil #marine #limestone

Fossil with multiple parallel fissures inside. Embedded in a stone with lots of light-colored, smaller fossils.

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 09/02/2026

Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs xkcd.com/3204/

Comic. [2x2 chart. Top left quadrant: seem like dinosaurs x are dinosaurs. Silhouettes of dinosaurs stegosaurus, triceratops, tyrannosaurus, velociraptor, and long-neck dinosaur. Top right quadrant: seem like dinosaurs x are not dinosaurs. Silhouettes of mosasaur, quetzalcoatlus, dimetrodon, plesiosaur, and pteranodon. Bottom left quadrant: don’t seem like dinosaurs x are dinosaurs. Silhouettes of penguin, egret, ostrich, pigeon, falcon. Bottom right: don’t seem like dinosaurs x are not dinosaurs. Silhouettes of squirrel, stapler, plant, person, and bicycle.]

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

Super Bowl Sunday: the best time to… go grocery shopping

Empty produce section in a grocery store near Philadelphia

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

Swarthmore College is hiring a 3-year Visiting Assistant Professor in Mathematics. We're a Math+Stat dept. with ~23 faculty. Friendly colleagues, excellent students, beautiful campus, convenient location (Philly suburbs). Happy to answer any questions. www.mathjobs.org/jobs/list/27... #AcademicSky 🧪

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Dr. Brendan Anderson @fossilsndcoffee.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

ACTUAL GOOD NEWS EVERYONE: The Paleontological Research Institution and the Museum of the Earth have made it through the crisis! Thanks to everyone who shared or donated-every donation mattered! Please share the good news just as widely!⚒️🧪🦑 Together we did #savePRI www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/...

ithaca.com

‘Every Single Dollar Mattered’: Donations Save Museum of the Earth From Foreclosure

Just days before a year-end foreclosure deadline, the Museum of the Earth has paid off its mortgage following a wide fundraising campaign that rescued the Ithaca area landmark.

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

I found a new example for my collection of False Sepkoski Curves: the S&P 500 over the last 35 years. This one is the best yet. You can see the Cambrian explosion, the Ordovician diversification, the Paleozoic plateau, the Devonian, Permian, and Cretaceous mass extinctions, and Cenozoic radiation.

Graph of the S&P 500 index from 1990 to 2025, from the New York Times of 12/08/2025. The graph looks remarkably like the Sepkoski curve of the number of genera over the history of animal life.

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Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham @paulgp.com · 08/12/2025

This is what I get for not taking @stevewang251.bsky.social ‘s class.

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

I learned about these because Swarthmore prof Steve Wang used these for baseball stats. www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/s...

nytimes.com

Professor Puts a Face on the Performance of Baseball Managers (Published 2008)

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

Read the Bill James Baseball Abstract when I was 11 & decided I wanted to be a baseball statistician, long before that was an actual career. In college I discovered academic stats wasn't like baseball "stats", but I liked it & kept doing it. Got into statistical paleontology just by serendipity.

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Alexandre Jan @alexandrejan.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

Happy Ctenophore Day! These glowing ocean drifters look like jellyfish but aren’t! They’re comb jellies, shimmering creatures that light up the sea with rows of beating cilia 💙🌈 Which species can you identify? 👀 Most are raised in @pawelburkhardt.bsky.social lab #CtenophoreDay #CombJelly #Ctenophore

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JA Fields | NonCompliantCyborg @noncompliantcyborg.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

Happy Ctenophore Day! 🐙🦑🧪

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Peter Wagner (a Real Dr., not a surgeon-barber/body-tech/golfer) @peterjwagner3.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

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...

sciencedirect.com

‘Earth system engineers’ and the cumulative impact of organisms in deep time

Understanding the role of humans as ‘ecosystem engineers’ requires a deep-time perspective rooted in evolutionary history and the fossil record. Howev…

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

I think we also get distracted because we tend to anthropomorphize the larval stage as the child and the adult stage as the real animal. In some cases (not necessarily holothurians, but perhaps e.g. butterflies), it would be more appropriate to think of them as the eating stage and the mating stage.

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Will Gearty @willgearty.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

📢 deeptime: an R package that facilitates highly customizable and reproducible visualizations of data over geological time intervals 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/2096... Fully #openaccess in @bigearthdata1.bsky.social with insight about deeptime📦 development and code examples! #rstats #geology #paleontology

Plot of global benthic δ18O data for 0 – 5.3 Ma (Lisiecki & Raymo, 2005) with geomagnetic polarity subchrons displayed on the top x-axis and planktic foraminiferal primary biozones plotted on the bottom x-axis using the deeptime package.

A mammal phylogeny (Garland et al., 1992) plotted in the fan layout using the ggtree and deeptime packages. The greyscale concentric circles in the background indicate geological stages, whereas the linear colored timescale indicates geological epochs.

Early tetrapod occurrence data (Jones et al., 2023) plotted as a taxonomic/biostratigraphic range plot using the geom_points_range() function from the deeptime package.

A stratigraphic column of Cretaceous lithostratigraphic units from the San Juan Basin, USA. The deeptime package has been used to add pattern fill which indicate the primary lithologies of the units as reported by the Macrostrat API (Peters et al., 2018) via the rmacrostrat R package (Jones et al., 2024).

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Bring Me The Head of Ramona Garcia @razorgirl1984.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

This was my favorite King of the Hill joke with Chuck Mangione. RIP, king.

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

Chuck Mangione was a musical hero to me. He was from my hometown, where he was a legend. My mom took me to see him in concert when I was 13, and it was a life-changing moment — he made me love music. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/a...

nytimes.com

Chuck Mangione, a ‘Smooth Jazz’ Hitmaker With a Fluegelhorn, Dies at 84

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

So surreal being here when the stadium is empty

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

Home plate at the old Yankee Stadium, now a public park. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle stood here.

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Seth Finnegan @sethf.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

Another of the greats leaving us. Dick was a huge influence on me when I was a graduate student, and wrote papers that completely changed the way I thought about the history of life. A gracious and good-humored man, and a kind and supportive mentor.

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Peter Wagner (a Real Dr., not a surgeon-barber/body-tech/golfer) @peterjwagner3.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

This makes me really sad: Richard was a great guy. Some of my best memories from my Smithsonian are from interacting with him.

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Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

Richard Bambach, 1934-2025. A warm and generous man, and a titan of paleontology. www.regerfuneralhome.com/obituaries/r...

Richard Bambach sitting in a office with stacks of papers piled on his desk. He's wearing a grayish jacket with a string tie.

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Dr. Advait M Jukar, FLS @amjukar.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

Very sad to hear of the passing of Richard Bambach, one of the key paleontologists who ushered in the paleobiological revolution, and an incredibly kind and generous person. It was a pleasure learning from him at the Smithsonian’s paleo journal club over the last decade or so.

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

Richard Bambach will always be remembered as a champion of functional-ecological way of thinking in macroevolution. Way before the modern trend in analyzing functional diversity. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #Geology #EvoBio

A Bambachian model of eco-space of marine animals.

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Dr. Davey F. Wright ⛏️🦕🧬 @daveyfwright.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

Very sad to learn Richard Bambach has passed away. In addition to his significant contributions to science and the 'paleobiological revolution', I will mostly remember him as a warm and wonderful presence in our paleobiology journal club when I was a postdoc at the Smithsonian

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