Around the web (week of 10 February)

Reading

• Searching for patterns, hunting for causes: Robert Macarthur, the mathematical naturalist, by Jay Odenbaugh

  Ecological patterns, about which we construct theories, are only interesting if they are repeated. They may be repeated in space or time, and they may be repeated from species to species. A pattern which has all of these kinds of repetition is of special interest because of its generality, and yet these very general events are only seen by ecologists with rather blurred vision. The very sharp-sighted always find discrepancies and are able to say that there is no generality, only a spectrum of special cases.

• A review of “Rediscovering our natural instinct” by M.R. O’Connor for Undark Magazine

• The roots of writing lie in hopes and dreams, not in accounting, by Michael Erard for Aeon.

• You’re probably using the wrong dictionary, by James Somers

Listening

• A brief lecture on Stylish Academic Writing by Helen Sword

• Mathematical Ecology: A Century of Progress, and Challenges for the Next Century, by Simon Levin

• Flor de Toloache is coming to the Levitt Pavilion concert series in LA this August!

Around the web (week of 9 December)

Reading

• Co-occurrence of linguistic and biological diversity in biodiversity hotspots and high biodiversity wilderness areas, by Gorenflo et al. in PNAS (2012)

  Languages in high biodiversity regions also often co-occur with one or more specific conservation priorities, here defined as endangered species and protected areas, marking particular localities important for maintaining both forms of diversity

• Who Was Ramanujan?, by Stephen Wolfram for his blog.

• Can Dirt Save the Earth?, by Moises Velasquez-Manoff for NY Times Magazine

• This ‘Equity’ picture is actually White Supremacy at work by Sippin the EquiTEA on Medium. A critique of the widely used “equity” diagram:

  Listening

• Good as Hell, by the incredible Lizzo. To belabor the goodness of this song, read In Praise Of ‘Good As Hell,’ The Song That Believes In You Even When You Don’t

• Is there a Jewish way of talking?, an episode of the entertaining Slate podcast Lexicon Valley

Around the web (week of 2 December)

Reading

• How Academics Survive the Writing Grind: Some Anecdotal Advice, by Helen Sword for Lit Hub. I thoroughly enjoyed Sword’s book on the same topic, Air and Light and Space and Time
• For the biology nerds- Our recent pre-print about Anacapa, a bioinformatics pipeline for assigning taxonomy to sequences in environmental DNA projects
• What is Complexity? - a summary by the Bristol Center for Complexity Science. I paired this with this introductory video from the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Explorer.
• Animals are riding an escalator to extinction, by Ed Yong for The Atlantic. Based on this paper.
• What is a University?- Reading associated with UCLA Arts “10 Questions” series.

Listening

• Interview with Harsha Bhogle about the past, present, and future of (Indian) cricket. Fantastic listening, I suspect especially so for fellow Indian expats.
• The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, from On Point
• Los Hacheros at the NPR Tiny Desk
• Anoushka Shankar’s performance of Land of Gold at Glastonbury. This music lifts me.