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Fri, 16 Aug 2024 19:46:22 GMT

Back on contract, which means I am now officially a Full Professor. Yay me I guess. These 12 years have gone by really fast.

Reflection: I've been exceptionally lucky to work with great people and great students. I've also had the privilege to avoid "playing the game" and just work on things I'm interested in.

That's meant my lab has been smaller and less productive than it might have been but I think we've still done good work and I'm especially proud of how students in the lab developed as scientists. And, more importantly, they're all kind people.

Professionally interesting, my favorite paper of my own came out my 1st year as faculty (Syndromes as constraints. Behav. Ecol. 2013). My last year as an assoc. prof we finally got out my new favorite (Holey landscapes. PNAS. 2023). Both, I think, highlight neat questions.

We'll keep working on what we think is interesting, hopefully others will think so too.

Bracketing (kind of) 12 fun and fast years: Dochtermann & Dingemanse (2013. Behav. Ecol.) https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/24/4/806/219028 ; Dochtermann et al. (2023. PNAS) https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2313282120

Thu, 02 May 2024 21:50:07 GMT

We're going on an adventure! It's now about a decade since the debut novel but for all my fellow biologists/evolutionary ecologists/whatevers that like science fiction, check out the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The series incorporates (and credits) uplift ideas from D. Brin but does so in a creative and--from what I've read--really unique way. I've mainly been reading fantasy for the last few years because a lot of SF seemed rather stale. This book is creative & thought-provoking.

The books, the 2nd in particular, really stretch thoughts about intelligence (and sentience) in a way that's likely really fun to other biologists. All three touch on de Waal's question of "are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?"

The second book has a surprise possible reference to J. Pruitt's work. Apparently records of data fabrication don't survive to the far, far future (the book was written in 2019 so not the fault of the book's author).

If you're gearing up for any summer travel, I strongly recommend these books especially for those who study animal behavior. If you're a spider biologist, you'll love the first book in particular. If you've ever wondered if you can run Doom on ants, the answer is yes.

Thu, 02 May 2024 21:48:21 GMT

As you're gearing up for any summer travel, I strongly recommend these books especially for those who study animal behavior. If you're a spider biologist, you'll love the first book in particular. If you've ever wondered if you can run Doom on ants, the answer is yes.