Over at EEB and Flow, Marc Cadotte suggests that we consider adding “aesthetically pleasing details“ to our figures. I’m a big fan of visually pleasing figures and the examples that Marc gives show how a little extra effort can really improve communication. The post made me think of one of the earliest examples of adding… a little something extra… to one’s figures – Stuart Hurlbert’s unicorn (Hurlbert 1990).

You can always count on Andrew Gelman for quality April Fools Day posts.

This picture and caption of a young linux developer-in-training is hillarious. At least if you’re a bit of a computer nerd like me. Via Ubuntu Linux Tips & Tricks.

Within the small community of ecologist bloggers much has been of the lack of blogging (and other odd pursuits like twittering) among ecologists (this is, afterall, EEB & Flow’s raison d’etre), and I recently read over at academHacK that “in the future [academics] can be online or be irrelevant”. So, this semester I did what I could to get some future ecologists blogging.

Today, I was watching a great episode of the History Channel show “The Universe”, which was exploring the concept of the nature of the universe. (On the off chance you are some type of physicist or astronomer who has stumbled on to this blog, you might want to skip to the next paragraph.

Last week, I enjoyed Marc Cadotte’s post over at EEB and Flow on learning that he had one of the worst jobs in science: Triage Biologist. I thought both the post was funny and also the fact that I would never have thought about the work he does as being one of the worst jobs in science. I mean, many of us can think of much much worse things to do with one’s time than to have Cadotte’s research career.

It seems that it was just time for ecologists to start blogging. We have recently come across two other ecology blogs: Ecotone (the official ESA News & Views blog) which has been kicking out a respectable 4-5 posts/week on a combination of interesting papers and policy. and The EEB and flow which looks a fair bit like NCEAS circa 2007 and was started because I think EEB and flow has this one right.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or are a new assistant professor), you are surely aware by now that Darwin’s 200th birthday is this week. However, unless you’re a certified blog-crawler, you may not be aware of Blogging the Origin.

Andrew Gelman over at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science posted a hilariously awful story about the interpretation of a non-significant result he saw at a recent talk (I particularly love the Grrrrrrr at the end). This and related misinterpretations crop up all the time in ecology.

I saw the first two paragraphs of this quote from an interview of Hal Varian by The McKinsey Quarterly over at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.