Just a bunch of stuff people said.

Undated

• "Practicing is the meaning of life..." - IO
• "I'm not gonna fuck it up this time." - Anon
• "Perceptions are conditioned by beliefs." - Anon
• "There's always time if you are prepared." - AK

2014/2015

Evolution

• "It's great because it adds complexity, but it's bad because it adds complexity." - AC Carnaval (9/17/14)
• "It's predictable, it's just stochastic!" - AC Carnaval 10/1/14
• "Selection isn't survival of the fittest, it's reproduction of the good enough" - AC Carnaval 10/1/14
• "Pattern doesn't equal process." "Time gives you diversity." "Go with feasible." "Natural selection is in your face!"
• "You can't expect drift to do anything, it's completely random." - AC Carnaval
• "There is no science without assumptions."
• "It goes from 'I'm gonna get the guy with the coolest call' to 'I'm gonna get the guy who's alive."

PopEcology

• "I'm not a wildlife manager. I eat wildlife, thats about it." RR (9/10/14)
• "It doesn't have to be a normal-ish distribution, it can be any kind of 'ish' that you want."
• "Significance doesn't actually mean much, which is part of the problem."
• "What's the death rate of 0 individuals." - Population ecology
• "Transience is the permanent state." RR Pop Ecology
• "We didn't sort this out until we started looking at duck poop."
• "Everyone wants an -omics now."
• "You don't exit age class 3. You just die." - RR Pop Ecology
• "You don't have to know things that are usually not knowable."
• "One of the things continuous time models rely on is continuous time."
• "We have this reality that we found, or fabricated..."
• "You can never prove that all swans are white."
• "I have not diapered a goose, and I don't intend to."
• "The average north american hunter acts as a passive sampler."
• "Density dependence only works if you don't cheat."
• "Graminoids have always been eaten by someone."

Systematics

• "You don't get anywhere in life doing cladistics."
• "If you're not wrong in science you're religious."
• "The things that are certain are obviously certain."
• "Like an old man getting into a warm bath." - How to put a gel into the electrophoresis chamber.
• "For me, March Madness is when the salamanders come out."

AnimalBehavior

• "A list of items is a terrible thing."
• "A lot of people say clams don't have behavior... but they do." - JBasil
• "This is a great time of year if you enjoy birding standing in the snow." - JBasil
• "Comfortable with uncertainty."
• "Slightly more perfect."
• "The best side is the one everbody else is on."
• "Optimization has historical constraints."
• "Edible & dangerous."
• "I don't know how long forever is"
• "Romantic aroma"
• "I'm chewing my brain off, but if we all chew it feels good."
• "Dance of honesty & cheating."
• "Selection is your friend."
• "There's a lot of evolution going on."
• "I always work with animals that eat more expensive food than I do."

Random

• "You can only evaporate water if it's actually there." - B Cook

• "We don't have any data from the future." J McLachlan

• "There are a lot of wrinkles to consider." - R Ree (11/25)

• "I don't believe anyone is guilty... ever, if you know the whole story." -MO

• "Take what data are generated and try to do something with it." - B Henn (12/1)

• "He was like a junkyard dog with a bone." M Hick (12/3)

• "Lots of things aren't in the first hundred, by definition..."

• "Luck happens when you have people who are prepared." - C Bustamante

• "Some people think it's creepy, I just think it's interesting." - C Mason

• "I would be very proud if I overestimated uncertainty." - M Tingley (1/30/15)

• "If you get it, you're gonna get it." - MHick (2/12/1)

• "I'm a historian, so I believe in history, right?" - GC Pres Robinson

• "For the moment, what we attend to is reality." - W James (5/6/15)

• "If it's not the imagination, it's not working." - 3/12/15

• "Appearance is a state of mind."

• "Models aren't evidence." - (5/27/15)

• "Free spirits believe in the oneness w/ god."

• "Search for charms."

• "The incarnation should teach contentment with the flesh."

• "Uniquely gifted for illuminations."

• Possession & witchcraft in 17th century France (3/19/15)

2015/2016

• "It's not awkward if you're used to it" - Anon 8/27/15
• "I wouldn't say it's from lack of trying. There is some lack of trying." (9/24)
• "You can't sample from things that don't exist." (9/24/15)
• "For some reason they like sex and sometimes they mate wrongly." - A Carvalho (9/30/15)
• "I don't use it, I just advertise it."
• "The opportunity to use fancy machines is very attractive to me." - JKass (10/19/15)
• "Feasibility shock." - 10/22/15
• "Hard uncertainty vs soft uncertainty." - 10/22/15 ???
• "The problem isn't that you don't have the ingredients, the problem is the cooking." - Jampack
• "There are no buffers in life!" - MHick 11/17/15
• "It changes less than it stays the same." - TDoyle 11/30/15
• "I'm not gonna shoot it if I'm not gonna eat it." - RR
• "Taxonomy is a little bit above my paygrade." - MHick 3/3/16
• "I don't care about what's cool, I care about what's closest to the truth." - ACarnav 2/9/16
• "Complex, heterogeneous, and thus effectively unknown." - JNov 2/16/16
• "Pi is classically robust to sample size." Mhick 2/16
• "Depends on which side of the bed you get out of." - Mhick
• "That's a process that comes about as a function of things happening." - WPearse 3/2/16
• "Lets model it, man!" - MBlair 3/4/16
• "I don't know if further science would help." - MBlair 3/4/16
• "It prevents you from exchanging heat with your drink." - Roberta 3/7/16
• "What makes a penguin a penguin?" - 3/30/16
• "To go from the sublime to the ridiculous." - LEckhardt - 5/17/16
• "Sort of out of sorts." - LEckh
• "Any model based approach you're gonna have to make some sacrifices." - MHick 5/18/16
• "I'm not drunk I'm just enthusiastic." - Anon 7/22/16

Human Evolutionary Genetics

• "Some description of reality that seems reasonable." - M.Prz 1/19/16
• "Admixture assumes isolated populations."
• "Ancestors and ancestry are different."
• "Finding our keys under the lamp post."
• "In science, the less data people have, the more they argue."
• "It's the sad thing in evolution.... The only equilibrium is for everything to go extinct." - YSimons 3/4/16
• "Asymptotically useless estimator." - JPritch
• "Obviously the best place to start is the beginning." - Ysim 2/16/16
• "And now I'm telling a story, but it's a plausible story."
• "Cheating is an extremely legitimate way of getting things done." - Ysim 2/26/16
• "Obviously within the factor of 'what the hell is the mutation rate." - Ysim 2/26
• "To get a better estimate than looking at the values and guessing." - Ysim
• "If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" - Ysim 3/4/16
• "You get some sort of 0 == 0, which is sensical but not very helpful." - GSella 3/8/16
• "What's magical about the diffusion is you can do a ton of stuff with it." - GSella 3/6/16
• "Everything that's possible also happens in biology." - GSella 3/29/16
• "A midparent is not an individual."
• "Interpretation is rarely assumption free." 3/22/16
• "Teaching cookies by reading recipes is not very interesting." 3/22/16
• "It's not exactly science." - GSella
• "Measuring a whale out of water can be problematic." - GSella 3/31/16
• "That's why god invented statistics." - GSella 4/5/16

2017

• "Most of what i use my computer for is a television" - Jesse 6/14
• "Can't put the genie back in the bottle" - Anon 7/21
• "Counting cats is not easy, even if they're big ones...." - LB 9/18

2018

Genetics Evolution Process

• "A gar is a better mouse than a zebra fish." - NShubin 4/20/18
• "Nothing ever begins at the time you think it did." - LHellman 4/20/18
• "It's almost like the transition to land was trivial."
• "It's kind of the same but different."
• "There's lots of species that breathe air, as you well know."
• "They stop ignoring them, or they stop killing them at least."
• "Zero huddling and zero licking."
• "Animals are just vessels for getting bacteria food and moving them around."
• "They all eat nectar and pollen, that's the diet of bees."
• "If you're a microbiologist you understand the names don't mean that much."
• "He's been getting the decapitated flies to survive."
• "I can tell you precisely about the genetics and kind of mumble about the archaeology." DReich

Random

• "Space has always been an enigma in population genetics."
• "We call land plants 'dry algae'" - R. Sleith
• "It works pretty well in terms of 'makes sense.'" - J. Patino on pragmatism.
• "It's not just chicken soup recipes." - M. Hick on genealogical inheritence beyond genetics.
• "It's not 'cabalistic symbols' it's calculus." - UMartin 4/18/18
• "Wildlife are lazy , if there's a trail theyll use it." -LBertola 7/13
• "Computationally, this is a nasty formula." - CAne 11/8/18
• "We're bad at seeing when it doesn't happen."
• "The poster child of the ever-wet Carboniferous."
• "I'm an ecologist, I don't do phylogenies."
• "I'm a scientist, I don't "believe" in things."
• "New age technology."
• "You know what it means to look at a really nice alignment." - SEdwards

Island biology 2019

• "Surely the moth is in the drivers seat."
• "Large mammal herbivores are on average bad dispersers.
• "Aliens are everywhere."
• "There's different ways to be different." - EEconomo 1/19
• "This is where it becomes super non-random."
• "A crucible for evolution." - Hamp Carsten
• "It's a parallel universe talking about how soil evolves."
• "We are very much Hippies." JMFernandez-Palacios
• "We don't know how much we are missing."
• "The people making the decisions aren't the decision makers."

NSF Program Officer

• "I think of geology as a hard science and systematics as somewhat iffy."
• "Dimensions proposals are notoriously bad."
• "Very few rules but lots of guidelines."
• "It is soo easy! Write a great proposal, send it in, and we'll fund it."
• "The other things you probably don't read are the solicitations."
• "Emerging frontiers... the mystery division."
• "Proposals have a relative fitness, not an absolute fitness."

NSF Proposal Advice

• Why is your project important? Knowing how to explain this is super important!
• By the bottom of page 1 it is already over!!
• Nothing is ever obvious. Connect your methods to your hypotheses.
• Justify Everything!
• How do you measure broader impacts?
• Never be afraid to ask for $ for broader impacts.
• A bunch of little things means they just weren't that into you. Page 1 failed.
• What are your dependent variables? That is the program you should submit to.
• The ecosystem that your proposal enters is different every round.
• Small grants are judged on bang for the buck.

2019

• "My ultimate desire is to become a student of other very kind intelligent life teacher." - Shin Kubota 1/19
• "All you do at workshops is drink with people and feel like you're being productive." - Anon 8/2
• "Plants are wild and crazy." - Mariana 8/19
• "Plants are wild, wild west." - Mariana 8/19
• "Big M is where it's at." - Mike "Mr low tide" H. 8/19
• "I find pigeons intimidating." - JieJie 9/20/19
• "You people need to get a hobby" - JC on ghost populations

2020

• "I'm one step away from opening a car wash and lemonade stand outside." -AK
• "Go take care of your wet duck." -AK -> Skip
• "I have never drank a martini and never spilled half of it on myself." -AK
• "My eggs are worth like $10 dollars right now." - AK
• "I haven't been unbearded since like 2001." - Sean
• "It's only limiting if that's what you allow yourself to believe." - IO (03/30)
• "Words! Words are like sex, and drugs, AND rock and roll!" - SS (Late winter)
• "I hate other animals for being not my dog." - AK (04/05)
• "I had an injured pigeon and the rat tried to kill it." - RJ (04/05)
• "If i could stop eating regular food and get nutrition from this I would do it." - AK (re: sour Mike and ikes)
• "Hey, don't rain on my parade of raining on your parade, ok?" - IO (04/16)
• "I don't even like these enough to eat them off the ground." - AK (5/19, re: sugarfree altoids)
• "All problems are rhetorical. - AK (6/23)
• "Sometimes we just have to not find solutions to our problems and just dwell in them." - AK (6/23)
• "Species delimitation. Why can't we just let god sort them out?" - AK (8/11)
• "i could fake an entire dissertation with figures." - AK (9/22)
• "Nothing is ever perfect you just have to make progress in the imperfection." - IO (10/13)
• "Nothing that comes from the hamster is ever in order." - AK (10/16)
• "There's no sense in trying to understand people's excentricities." - IO (10/17)
• On what might happen if you eat a tiger snake: "Wonder what it makes your butthole feel like on the way out. Like hotwings. only worse." (LV) "Chili poop. probably" (MS) - AMNH Herp Dept Chat (10/23)
• "The sun burns and it has a mind of its own." - Anon (11/30)
• "I earned my shine." - Anon

2021

• "this is my punishment for letting this data and these scripts sit around for months. they age like fresh produce." -AK (1/14)
• "Lets not start solving problems we don't have yet." - IO (2/21)
• "I do that every day with neutral nets" - Anon
• "Kidney beans are the peanuts of the bean world. no body’s favorite, but omnipresent." - IO
• "Programs are puppies. Every puppy should have its own crate" - IO
• "Nothing that comes from the hamster is ever in order." - IO
• "Well that was an adventure in boringness" - IO
• "Nah, I don’t care about RNA, I just assume it doesn’t exist" - SH
• "If we looked at the difference between when anyone thinks a paper will be submitted and when it actually is submitted. Its exponentially distributed with a mean of infinity" - IO
• "Nothing is ever perfect you just have to make progress in the imperfection." -IO
• "always use conda for everything" - IO
• "Would be cool in the future for the hamster not to threaten to throw herself out the window and burn down the department in the face of adversity" - IO
• "And then you can move to Canada and.spend time in the mountains and have money" - SH
• "Going over the time limit is a cardinal sin" - on giving talks
• "I fucking love gene flow in secondary contact" - SH
• "It’s ALWAYS reviewer 2" - IO
• "The intangible benefit of one pot cooking is there’s one pot to clean up at the end" -IO
• "everything works well when you know literally as much about a system as possible and have more money than god" - SH on Heliconius studies
• "Tiny chameleon exists" is much easier to understand for the average jerk than "patterns of genetic diversity within and among populations are driven by a mixture of geographic and environmental distances that varies depending on the analytical scale" - SH
• Too much fancy talk is not always the best thing anyway. keep it simple" - IO on writing a paper
• Every analysis I run takes eternity, nothing in my life has a sense of real time except going pee or drinking a cup of water" - FB
• The draw polygon function in R, man I use that every fucking day" - FB
• "Instead of all models are wrong some are useful, they give us “What does the best of a narrow set of bad models tell us about biology?" - MH
• "I’m gonna make the list on paper because my head is unreliable" - IO
• "Nobody hates things like skip hates things." -SR
• "Time to simulate some baby data" - IO
• "People say you can't run from your problems, but as long as your problems aren't the police hunting you down or something, you totally can" - SH
• "Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be." - Reviewer 2
• "…showed poor scholarship and the analyses run seemed to include everything in the kitchen sink" - Reviewer 2
• "Glad you hopped on the codemographic train, let’s hope there won’t be too many crashes" - MH
• "I don't like being root for a long time, it's like holding a gun but not using it." - LO 7/23
• "Never underestimate the power of paying attention to shit" - IO 4/31
• "I love trash snakes because they make for great phylogeographic sampling." - Unattributed 5/1 (but probably SH or AK)
• "I'm letting my brain catch up with my ambition." - Anon 5/30
• "I honestly don't think that far past breakfast." - FB 5/30
• "I was in the seadoo gulag of his mind." - SS
• The novelty conceals the uphillness." -IO
• "Give it more time and they will all become extinct." - 10/11 FB
• "I don't think we have any reason to believe that the truth is piecewise, right?" & "I don't know what we know about the truth." - 10/20 FHartig
• "If there's nothing invariant you don't have data." - 11/2 BMenard
• "Every back burner I have has a backburner of it's own and I don't know how far it goes." - IO 11/19
• "Well grants are annoying, that's why they aren't free" - IO
• "Every back burner I have has a backburner of it's own and I don't know how far it goes." - IO

2022

• "I did not present that data because it is too fresh." - Anon 1/12
• "Context, intention, the byproduct of it on your emotional state." - Anon 2/15
• "It's amazing how informative pi can be!" - A.Pop. 3/?
• "If you're really into eating pigeons, falconry is a great sport." - E.Stan. UF 4/14
• "Go 'machine learning' your way out of that one." - R.G. UF 4/15
• "The more I learn about aquatic invertebrates the less I want to swim." - Z.W. 4/18
• "'I have to pick up and move and I'm not coming home' dispersal." - B.M. 4/18, describing a new dispersal syndrome
• "The uterus of a snake is the least interesting thing i can think of besides maybe the uterus of a human." - A.K. 5/6
• "Theres no 5 second rule for buffalo chicken" - I.O. 5/13
• "Nobody is a prophet in their own land." - L.A. 11/24, sEnigmas Mtg
• "The DNA remembers" - AH 12/23
• "You don't want to see the reaction current you want to see the dynamic." / "time is a huge factor in this" / "What you want is a sense of the middle." - AH 12/23
• "I like studying species that I can work on in shorts and a tank top." - A.K. 12/29

2023

• "You care about Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium every day, you just don't know it." - A.K. 1/7
• "I write a 2013 dissertation a day." - F.B. 1/14
• "The internet is an ascertainment bias machine." - I.O. 1/28
• "I'm updating my prior." "On what?" "Pyjamas." - A.K. 2/2, fully talking in sleep.
• "We gotta talk about taxonomy." - A.R. 2/21
• "I'm haunted by deadlines." - H. Krehn 2/28
• "The best person to do favors for is yourself in the future." - I.O. 3/4
• "Even to do nothing is a lot of work." - I.O. 4/12
• "That's the problem with stray dogs, they bite!" - I.O. 4/26
• "I must have really active big toes." - L.Sheinberg 4/27
• "Per unit of branch length, owls are the coolest birds." - I.O. 7/7
• "I love a one locus study, those were the good old days." - SR 7/13
• "Old fashioned is the new fashion." - JKuja 7/26
• "When it's too big it's dumb, and when it's too small it's unsafe." - AK 9/27, what's the context???
• "Maybe it's just statistical noise, but it's very powerful noise!" - AS 11/8
• "If it's not for your dissertation it's a vacation." - SR 11/28
• "I haven't vomited since 1994." - FB 11/28

2024

• "Time isn't our friend, but that's just the way it is." - 3/11
• "The cats are going to herd themselves, inevitably." - IO 3/22, re: working group behavior
• "If you cant find what you're looking for, look for what you're finding." - Anon 5/4
• "The less you type the less you mess up." - CF 6/4
• "Trees have genes too." - Anon 6/24
• "it's not about time, it's about timing." - MO 7/6

AK

• "People can't get enough of hemipenes." - 9/24/15
• "I think if I stopped freaking out my entire personality would disintigrate." - 10/8/15
• "Sometimes you have to close the tabs and accept the fact that you're never going back to those tabs."
• "I'm 99% sure I have a pretty lumpy head." - 10/22/15
• "You pick your own misery." - 1/12/22
• "If I had a mind palace it would be burned to the ground by now." - 3/6/23
• "I was trying to help a turtle cross the road and it peed on my glasses!" - 6/30/23
• "I can't stop smelling farts." - Arianna Kuhn 7/2/23
• "Americana Joe & The Pleebee-Weebees" - AK 7/8/23, A good name for a band
• "That's why the only pictures that are worth looking at on the internet are of animals, because if they are fabricated I don't care." - AK 7/11/23
• "I get henna tattoos every time I go to the Renaissance festival." - 7/4/23
• "Do you realize with chatgpt I'm as smart as everybody else?" - 7/4/23
• "I'm enough of a doctor to know when I see a real mushroom." - 10/2/23
• "Perspective is complicated." - 10/14/23
• "I have the memory of someone who's done LSD their whole life, but that's not what happened to me." - 10/16/23
• "The last thing you want in an emergency is me as your emergency contact." - 10/21/23
• "I can't be motivated enough by beauty, but I can be motivated enough by dysentery." - 11/21/2023
• "I hate every species of reptile and amphibian that I don't already like." - 12/21/2023
• "Id rather have ten hermit crabs then a bald cat." - 2/7/2024
• "I have a whole dissertation in my fridge." - 3/17/2024

From other sources

"Brevity exposes a writers attitudes; selection and emphasis are everything."

• Andrea Barrett, nyt book review

"Moreover, the Louvain and simulated-annealing algorithms are much more popular than spectral algorithms in investigations of community structure [14] (and life is short), so we only compare results using the Louvain and simulated annealing algorithms for the remainder of this appendix."

• Onnela, Jukka-Pekka, et al. "Taxonomies of networks from community structure." Physical Review E 86.3 (2012): 036104.

"12. When the air is pure breathe all of it you can - breathe deeply."

• Soper, A. "The Lessons of the Pandemic." Science (1919): VOL. XLIX No. 1274

"Of course I don't believe in it, but I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it."

• Attributed to Neils Bohr, but perhaps apocryphal (through Slavoj Žižek

"Maximum predictability and anything of interest are incompatible."

• Julian Barbour; from the email sig of a colleague

• James Baldwin