Lab Art

We have been sprucing up the lab in the last month. I say “we”. I mean Christine and Katie, who have found an awesome sofa for one side to read in, have cleaned and organized the lab fantastically, and have helped me brainstorm about ways to improve the comfort and efficiency of our little research home. But I contributed a little bit. The last two months I’ve been somewhat sidelined by a back injury that left me not sleeping well, and not able to ride my bike until recently. So what does one do with this insomnia?

Well, sometimes, I weld. Behold: the branch length correct output from an ms simulation for 7 branches. Geeky, yes. But it represents the gene tree work, phylogenetic work, multiple phyla we work on, well. And it gave me the chance to melt metal late at night! This has been installed outside of the lab, so maybe visitors can find us just a little bit more easily in this bizarre building.

Art

I may be lousy with a brush or pencil, but I do like making figures. Here is one I made today that uses R to plot data from the Scenic and Wild Rivers maps with state boundaries, along with the lat-longs of sample locations for the freshwater mussel Elliptio dariensis, and a Structure genotype plot to match the locations (prettied up with Adobe Illustrator):