Jesse Wolfhagen

@uncertainarch.bsky.social

4064 Followers 1737 Following

Bayesian Zooarchaeologist, studying animal domestication and philosophical questions like "how many cows were in this pit?" GitHub: https://github.com/wolfhagenj OSF: https://osf.io/va7ye/

Text from a college football newsletter from the Athletic (https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/tag/until-saturday/) by @jasonkirk.fyi discussing Texas Tech and the situation with their quarterback Brendan Sorsby, which starts: "If you're a really rich person in just about any decade, but especially this one, observing the world has taught you one consistent lesson: You are apparently allowed to get away with whatever you want. If anyone tries to cite things like "rules" and "laws" at you, you can ignore them, based on how other people in your class operate. Consequences seem to be for regular people, not people like you."
coffee mug with the phrase "Don't Talk to Me Until I've Had My F*CKIN' BALLS"
SimCity 2000 message: "YOU CAN'T CUT BACK ON FUNDING! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!"
"First Edition" Iliad given to a teacher in a weird 2015 movie boy next door. I don't know anything about the plot except for this and that it's probably creepy/cringey
screenshot for the Amazon page of "A Good Walkthrough Spoiled" by Mike Tanier, which for whatever reason wants you to know the physical dimensions of the paperback book, in case that's a dealbreaker for you. https://www.amazon.com/Good-Walkthrough-Spoiled-Football-Outsiders/dp/1499321503 It appears to be too big to fit in your pocket, but also too small to be effective body armor.
Image of a fragment of an aurochs scapula spine that has obsidian embedded in it (close-up of the obsidian fragment is on the right). This bone was found at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, located in central Anatolia and occupied from roughly 7200-5900 cal BCE. This bone was found in the fill of Building 79, which near the end of the site's densest human occupation. Figure 8.7 from Faunal Chapter (Macromammals of Çatalhöyük: new practices and durable traditions) of the "Peopling the Landscape of Çatalhöyük. Çatalhöyük 13.: Reports from the 2009–2017 Seasons" https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.18866/jj.31971227
xkcd comic #3213: Dental Formulas (Transcript from explainxkcd): [Cueball and Megan are standing in front of a whiteboard, on which is written 3.1.3.1 3.1.2.1 along with a drawing of a tooth and some other scribbles.] Cueball: Do mammologists think these are hard? Cueball: I mean, this one just evaluates to 3/2. [Caption below the panel:] Mathematicians encounter dental formulas [Alt text: I mean, half of these are undefined. And your multiplication dots are too low; they look like decimal points.] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3213:_Dental_Formulas https://xkcd.com/3213/
Waow (based based based) but make it Mariners
Waow "based" meme but Mariner'd (saying GOMS instead of based)
Part of the article linked above (https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/16/trump-promised-farmers-help-its-complicated-00610757) that states: Administration officials have not finalized how much money to include in the first tranche of aid, how to pay for it and how to deploy it.
Final score of a "football" game between the Chicago Cardinals and Moline Universal Tractors on October 17, 1920. Score is listed as the Cardinals beating the (Universal) Tractors 33-3 (https://www.pro-football-reference.com/boxscores/192010170crd.htm). In Part 1 of Secret Base's SCORIGAMI series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHNwUiu_8Eg), Jon Bois notices that the score is listed as 33-0 by pro-football-records but local papers listed the final score as 33-3. Jon yells at the NFL Headquarters building to hopefully reach someone who could update the score but seems skeptical that he'd succeed.
Text from the article https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-the-offsprings-lead-singer-went-from-punk-to-phd/, an interview with lead singer of The Offspring Dexter Holland: “I was preparing gelatin—they call it agarose for Petri dishes—and it’s very thick and viscous,” Holland said, remembering what would become a historic day in the laboratory. “And to sterilize it, you have to put it in a pressurized oven called an autoclave. I was making a lot, like gallons, in Erlenmeyer flasks. So after an hour, it was hot as shit, and you have to wear oven mitts and you take it out and you can’t pour it because it’s practically boiling. I was waiting for it to cool down and it’s taking forever, and you go back and touch it an hour later. If it’s still hot, you put it under the hood where it sucks air. And three hours later, I have these flasks next to each other. It’s not cool enough.” At this point, Holland stops and laughs and shakes his head. “This sounds so ridiculous telling this story, but in that moment I spoke to myself and I said, ‘These flasks are never going to cool off. I gotta keep ’em separated,’” he remembered. “I swear to God, this is a true story. And it was like a light bulb went off. I said, ‘Whoa, I need to remember that line.’”
XKCD 3081: PhD Timeline (https://xkcd.com/3081/) US Ph.D. Program Timeline Enrollment -> Research Proposal -> Qualifying Exams -> Propose Dissertation -> Research and Write Dissertation -> Submit Dissertation -> Defend Dissertation. BUT: Submit and Defend have been crossed out and replaced with: Get Grabbed Off The Sidewalk Outside Your Home By Masked Government Agents -> Be Whisked Out Of The State Before A Judge Has Time To Intervene -> ???? Alt-text says: Rümeysa Öztürk was grabbed off the street in my town one month ago.
Rowdy Tellez hitting a double (April 12, 2025) and being thrown out trying to stretch it into a triple. He does an incredible slide at the end but gets thrown out, sadly. Also, he is listed as being 6 ft 4 in, 270 pounds. So it's similar to a somewhat-underweight NFL offensive lineman trying to hit a triple.
Modified figure from Brain (1970): New Finds at the Swarktrans Australopithecine Site in Nature (Figure 6). The figure is a reconstruction of a leopard carrying away the body of a small juvenile australopithecine (there were specific ways the skull is damaged). I added in the australopithecine saying "But I voted for you!" and "You're not hurting the right people!" as it is being dragged away
Scene of the #handsoff Boston protest in Boston Commons. Several signs, closest one reads "I've seen smarter cabinets @ IKEA"
Figure 6 of C. K. Brain's (1970) article "New Finds at the Swartkrans Australopithecine Site", which shows a leopard dragging away a dead hominin. I added speech bubbles of the hominin saying "But I voted for you!" and "You're not hurting the right people!" as it is being dragged away. The original figure caption reads: Reconstruction showing how the observed damage to the skull of a Swartkrans Paranthropus child could have been caused by a leopard. The leopard's lower canines are thought to have penetrated the parietals of the dead child while it was being dragged to a feeding place.
Baseball cap of a new design for the Seattle Mariners. The text has "Mariners" with an "S" (for Seattle) on top of it, obscuring some letter so it reads "Masers" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser)
A skeet by @kenwhite.bsky.social asking "Earthquake?" followed by a skeet by @slothropsmap@bsky.social saying "That wasn't an earthquake, I just dropped the weights. Sorry."
(Text from a Wall Street Journal newsletter) Opinion: Trump's TikTok order shows a Biden-like disdain for limits on his power that doesn't bode well for the next four years. The snippet links to an Editorial Board article entitled "Trump Gives TitkTok an Illegal Amnesty" (Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-tiktok-executive-order-bytedance-china-congress-46a66e50?st=PFVFhf&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink)
A bottle of "Vodka of the Gods" from Trader Joe's
Image of the print edition fo the Onion (dated January 10, 1998) entitled "Drugs Win Drug War"
Bluesky notification telling me that was user #2,253,663 in celebration of reaching #10,000,000 users. I joined on November 30, 2023
My son's lost lovey, answers to "blue kitty". A blue hand knit cat with a purple sweater. He's had it since he was an infant, we last definitely saw it when we got off the Q at Parkside Sunday afternoon (Sept 8). We walked from there through the Parade Ground to our cousins in Windsor Terrace, walking down Caton.
Headline of a research briefing about an article: "Brain-invading parasites could be friends, not foes" The article describes a way of engineering Toxoplasma gondii (a common parasite that can invade human central nervous systems) to deliver therapeutics. Article is open access, available here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-024-01750-6?et_rid=51738834&et_cid=5298944
Screenshot of an RStudio error message from using old Stan code telling me "It looks like you are trying ot use the old array syntax. Please use the new syntax: array[N_Element_Portions] real<lower=0, upper=1> Immature_Proportion I like this error message because it tells me what the issue is and how to fix it (and even uses the variable names I had used in my code!). I am impressed with its clarity, but also bummed I need to update all of the various arrays (I use a lot) throughout my various Stan codes
A figure comparing the "average absolute error" of a simulation with the amount of variability in the parameter value of (sigma_mu), stratified by pooling strategy (multilevel modeling, complete pooling, or no pooling). The "complete pooling" regression line is lower than the other two strategies at very low values of sigma_mu, but quickly produces inflated errors as variability between regions increases. The "no pooling" and "multilevel" lines have much shallower slopes, though the "multilevel" line tends to have less absolute error for any given amount of variability than the "unpooled" line, suggesting that adopting a "multilevel" pooling strategy is the best default option to accurately estimate data that are in multiple analytical clusters (in this case, regions).