Numbers

I never thought I'd see myself writing this, but the highlight of today was doing statistics. I don't mean that today was a bad day: I seriously enjoyed the statistical activity we did. Something must be wrong with me. I should point out that I had to do little to no actual math, which probably explains why it was so interesting. Our assignment for the "Research Methods" practical session was to take a published paper, get data from it, plug them into a matrix, and generate dendrograms (along the lines of evolutionary trees). I chose a topic near and dear to my heart: Triassic dinosaurs. I compiled a list of all named dinosaur genera from North American Triassic formations, and the two dendrograms I got as a result allow me to compare similarities between sites and between genera. It's nothing groundbreaking by any stretch of the imagination, but I enjoyed it (I think I was in the minority on that, though; many of my classmates haven't done much statistical work in the past). It fascinates me that you can just plug in a series of 0s and 1s and get back a meaningful, graphic result. On top of that, it's nice to see an emphasis put on making paleontology as much of a "hard science" as possible, a side of the field that is often overwhelmed by higher-profile but less important descriptive work.
Statistics aside, today was none too thrilling. We continued our series of lectures and practicals on the use of images in scientific publishing (useful, I'm sure, but painfully boring). I learned that once I'm done with my current presentation, I will have another staring me in the face for "Global Change" (for which it makes up 75% of the grade!?!). I'm vey glad I opted to get this current one (worth only a measly 50% of my "Controversies" grade) out of the way early. I've spent much of the afternoon and evening reading up on early birds, though as far as my actual presentation prep is concerned, I've only gotten as far as Archaeopteryx (meaning I still have a long way to go, but at least I'm through the mountain of papers on feathered dinosaurs). This is all very thrilling, I know, but drudgery looks to be the order of the day for the next couple of weeks. Ah, the non-stop thrill ride that is academia!