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strangetruther.bsky.social
JoJaSciPo
@strangetruther.bsky.social
5.5K followers 8K following 4.7K posts
Science needs more than mutual back-slapping!
Scientific puzzles & chronic bullshitters sorted :-)
Won't vote Labour again
@[email protected]
[email protected] (dormant)
sciencepolice2010.wordpress.com

Antifa agent.
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strangetruther.bsky.social
He obligingly posed from another angle, showing his adult feathers growing over his baby set:
November 21, 2025 at 3:52 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
OK. Another black-headed gull, on guard at Caerphilly castle bus stop. 2 weeks ago.

["Rob Crank Photography @robcrank68.bsky.social‬

Today's #BirdOfTheDay theme is #GroundedGulls, that's any Gull not in flight. And the Alternative is #Singing, that's any bird with it's beak open."]
November 21, 2025 at 11:11 AM
strangetruther.bsky.social
I've commented on the use of stratigraphy to calibrate cladograms:

[contd.]
3.2. Rooting out the root One of the biggest problems with cladograms is finding the root. When a cladogram is produced it has an “artificial root” – just as a vase blown by a glassblower has a point where it was attached to the blowing tube (see fig. 3.1 below). In both cases this artifactual origin must be removed. In phylogenesis we then need to posit a real root to give direction to the lines of descent. (I just Googled “undirected cladogram”. Anyone working seriously on understanding cladograms would inevitably use that concept. For the related “undirected graph” (“graph” is the formal word for any symbolised network) there are nearly half a million hits. For “undirected cladogram” there are three. Not three million, just three as in Mother Caught A Flea. Cracraft mentioned it in 1985, but it seems it ‘didn’t catch on’. Just this absence on its own confirms the pseudoscientific status of cladism. For a comment on the impact of cladism on an essential related discipline, observe the absence of the fragment “clad” from the Wikipedia Graph Theory page.) Intuition suggests the correct place for the root should be near the earliest leaves of the tree, i.e. the oldest fossils. Making good use of this principle involves finding the minimum total time that must have been spent evolving by the creatures shown in the cladogram (see figs A1.2, A1.3, A1.4, A1.5 in appendix A1), and which varies with root position. Each timeline in the cladogram has a time cost, though in half of them it’s zero. Adding up the time in all these lines gives the total ghost lineage (or just total lineage: TL) of a rooted cladogram with timed leaves (much like the “ghost range” or “minimal cladistically implied gap” in (Benton 2005)). To select the root position giving the shortest total lineage, it’s useful to know that the root giving the smallest TL will always be a new one you make in the middle of the line (i.e. “arc”, “edge” or “branch” or maybe you prefer “stalk”) connecting the earliest leaf to the rest of the cladogram (see appendix A1), though we should prefer this root rather than insisting on it, because it won’t always be the true root – especially since it usually isn’t even the true tree in the first place! My simulations of character and species evolution and the cladograms that result suggest unsurprisingly that, all other things being equal, it is one of the more likely positions for the root. Also, you could veto certain root positions that give the larger ghost lineages, and though the exact judgement depends on details of the simulation strategy, size and shape of the tree, and many other factors which won’t be pursued here, it is very difficult to find a cladogram where the “best” root position, under any definition, lies outside the 40% or so of roots with smallest total lineage – unless the cladogram is too inaccurate to be of any value. 3.3. The right cladogram, never mind its root While bad rooting is a man-made difficulty, evolutionary parallelism is of natural origin but that doesn’t mean we need fall foul of it. As will be detailed below, it seems most likely that different lines arose from a common ancestral early flier, but each chose different ways to optimise flight via large strong wings and other parts. It’s no good throwing all these species and characters into one big cladogenesis program in the belief that pre-selecting data for programs is unscientific; this business requires a certain finesse. A cladogram isn’t an object of holy sanctity to be created under a pure and sacred, not to mention unthinking ritual; it’s a tool with annoying quirks, that cunning craftsmen might, with care, usefully exploit in their art of historical biological abduction. And there’s nothing pure in any of that, and there doesn’t have to be – this is historical evolutionary science. Characters must be considered carefully, and they and species must be selected after preliminary investigation since we know that if massive parallel evolution has occurred, an unthinking “tip everything in” approach probably will give the wrong answer. It’s often necessary for scientists to think; and biological historical science itself is never simple. Consideration must be given to the possibility that very short tails with fused vertebrae at the end (pygostyles), lack of teeth, and other non-independent characters related to flight and its loss are swamping more informative signals. The latter may include type of pygostyle, ribcage details, and the layout of the scapulo-coracoid joint in peg and socket, socket and peg, or fused form, etc. While descendants of different radiations from the first flier were probably perfecting flight in parallel, ex-flying grounded forms also seem likely to have been perfecting niches such as large, earth-bound, top/near-top predator independently, as in the tyrannos’ convergence on allosrs;
November 20, 2025 at 1:50 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
That's terrifically kind of you, Dr MS! There is one area I might fail on:
"would suit an enthusiastic and hard-working student".
I do get a lot of work done, but I take lot of time! 😂

Your website has teeth in it, and maybe my comments on claw use in dromaeosaurs might be of interest:

[contd.]
From Chapter 5 of "TheSecret Dinobird Story": “Grab and Stab” cannot be fully appreciated without a detailed understanding of what happens when flesh is stabbed. As I’ve already spent over sixty quid on meat for this investigation (all of which had to be thrown away afterwards) I’m going to ask you to just imagine a 10 cm cube of fresh fat-free beef, say, on the marble slab in your kitchen. What happens if you poke your finger down onto it? “Poke”, a word relating to its old meaning, pocket, is the clue. You make a dent or pocket, which without too much pressure could go right down to where the original centre of the cube was. (Few will doubt this of course, but one can squeeze one’s own thigh, even without bruising, and see how much the flesh squishes. In humans, fat increases the effect but it clearly applies to some extent to any soft tissues.) If you press down with a knife instead, and hit the top of the handle with a mallet, the tip of the knife could go right through to the work-top – yet miraculously, only a fraction of the first 10 cms of the knife would actually touch the meat. A thin swathe of meat though will have been cut all the way through the 10 cm. In this way, a knife can produce a wound much deeper than the total length of its blade. It seems this effect has been known for some time. From forensicmed (2012): “Compressible body parts, such as the chest wall or abdomen can indent during a knife attack, and structures deep within that area can be damaged at a depth that at first indications seems to be beyond the reach of the suspect weapon.” Continuing in Chap 5 of The Secret Dinobird Story: A stab eventually incorporating a movement in the direction of the edge, could, on completion, easily cut a cross-sectional area of tissue equivalent to the square of multiples of the length of the blade. If the target muscles were tensed, the effect would be lessened but would still occur; a harder blow would be required for any given effect. Even if some force of the impact were imparted by for example the knuckles of digits three and four, they could still contribute to the indentation. The position of these digits in the fighting pair fossil is consistent with such a contribution. The firmer the stab or kick, the more multiples of the blade length could be squished and then cut on the way in, while still quite possibly leaving just a small puncture wound showing in the skin.
November 20, 2025 at 1:38 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
Post a book you love from the 80s. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
November 19, 2025 at 5:44 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
"justified" is doing a lot of work there
And "true" shouldn't be there at all
November 18, 2025 at 10:09 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
Oh! I just found out Vettriano died in March!
November 18, 2025 at 9:46 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
I'm finding too much sharp jam makes my teeth throb.

But anyway, I recently opened some homemade jam I bought 6 months ago...
...and it had a half inch circle of mould on it.
But it slid off when I touched it, so I binned the mould and the top centimetre of jam, and will eat the rest 👍
November 18, 2025 at 9:18 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
November 18, 2025 at 9:00 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
Book looks great!

[Eric L - please ignore this post - it's for coders in general but not really for you 😁]

Took me months, on and off, to find this bug:
Amazing that this module can EVER output a -ve!!:
But only some compilers🤬
November 18, 2025 at 8:37 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
Far too late, I know, but:
November 18, 2025 at 4:26 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
November 18, 2025 at 3:37 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
But now we need to know WHAT happened just before 2000 to make so many people D H...
November 18, 2025 at 3:24 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
November 18, 2025 at 3:00 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
An early effort of mine: 214 colours based on the fullest 16x16x16 minicubes of the colour cube, + few remaining pixels that weren't in those small minicubes, in bigger 42x42x42 minicubes. (BS doesn't display bmp OR gif!!🤬)

Last frame of my 1st gif movie:

Invaluable guide to GIF file structure:
November 17, 2025 at 5:32 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
Sorry to get on your case again Kevin, but "it was decided" dogs came from wolves long before any modern scientific justification.
After that it was classic Dogma You Daren't Deny.

Hard to square this graphic with "Dogs from Wolves".

From end of:
sciencepolice2010.wordpress.com/2014/02/21/h...
November 17, 2025 at 4:34 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
Accurate enough to identify the species:

Also, after 45 years of frying eggs or poaching them on the hotplate, I microwave them now. (Bit of a learning curve involved, mind you😏.)

Also2, as you've mentioned dinosaurs a couple of times in the few posts I've read...
Try this:
youtu.be/ikFUIzCHzq4
November 17, 2025 at 4:25 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
Relying on microwaves and hot air fryers, toaster and kettle, might be a wrench, but will avoid burnt pots and pans!

(Air-fryers can be cleaned using Steradent, I learned last week!)
A picture of the Tower Hobbies BM140001 air fryer.
November 17, 2025 at 4:12 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
Read my lips:
THE BEST THEORY BEST EXPLAINS THE OBSERVATIONS.

There is NO SPECIFIC MARGIN by which it has to be the best; NOVELTY DOES NOT COME INTO IT.

That "extraordinary claims" crap is a device to excuse established theoreticians' smug inertia.

sciencepolice2010.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/e...
November 15, 2025 at 3:56 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
YIPPEE!!! Mastodon now has quote retweets!!!

Also, it now tells you when you don't add Alt Text to images you post🙄
November 12, 2025 at 1:04 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
I'm allergic to a lot of things I hear said in the name of science.

That's said in sympathy with what you've said😁

But I'd also say facts don't equal facts. See #9:
November 10, 2025 at 5:18 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
Aha! Fascinating! Thanks! I had a feeling the overall accuracy (made more fascinating by the roughness of the strokes) was based on photos.
Nice piece of IT to do that!!

(My leaping Bambiraptor was commissioned by me from Greg Paul. The book title IS the book but it's not a penguin classic😂 - yet🤣)
November 10, 2025 at 3:50 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
On the whole, I don't think I NEED to!😆
But the sketch GIF is absolutely excellent, and I'm wondering if it was drawn by a human or computer-generated.
I'm aso interested in how animals, especialy volant dinobirds, jump into take-offs 😁
November 10, 2025 at 3:38 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
Click here 4 hey ya:
youtu.be/PWgvGjAhvIw
November 9, 2025 at 2:00 PM
strangetruther.bsky.social
Here's my reply to the OP:
bsky.app/profile/jack...

also here, adding an earlier frame from the GIF:
November 9, 2025 at 1:17 PM