Author: Luke Miller
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R plotmath functions combined with variable values
Getting certain special symbols into R plots, combined with values that are currently stored in variables, has been an ongoing headache of mine. In particular, plotmath symbols such as the plus-minus sign (±), for which the plotmath command is %+-%, had always caused problems due to my inability to parse the R help documentation. For…
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Conference live tweets revisited
Having just returned from the 100th Anniversary meeting of the Western Society of Naturalists meeting in Monterey, it seems like a fine time to generate some new summary data of trends in live-tweeting meetings. I originally addressed this some time last year in this original post: https://lukemiller.org/index.php/2016/01/is-live-tweeting-meetings-losing-steam-scicomm/. Since that time, there’s been new iterations of…
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Student poster presentation at WSN 2016
It was the 100th anniversary of the formation of the Western Society of Naturalists this year. While WSN was originally a society with fairly broad interests in the terrestrial and marine realms, in the last few decades it has very much become focused on marine habitats, with the occasional estuarine or terrestrial presentations popping up.…
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“Robomussels” in the New York Times
For several years, starting first at UC Santa Barbara around 1999/2000, and then in the mid 2000’s and early teens at Hopkins Marine Station, I would spend one or two low tides per year going out to the seashore and gluing fake plastic mussels into the middle of real mussel beds (as shown above). These…
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rtide: a R package for predicting tide heights (US locations only currently)
Joe Thorley at Poisson Consulting has released a new R package, rtide, (on which I am listed as a co-author) that provides the ability to predict future (and past) tide heights for 637 different tide stations in the United States and associated territories. The underlying data, consisting of tide harmonic constituents, are collected and released…
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My work as a snail whisperer and professional killjoy
The New York Times online Science section published a short piece earlier this month by Joanna Klein about humming to periwinkles. Joanna contacted me for some background on this story, which has a simple premise: People who grew up in coastal New England know this trick: To coax a periwinkle snail out of its shell,…
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Tidal datums and shifting baselines
I recently dredged up an old poster on tide heights and tidal datums that several of us put together back in graduate school and presented at the Western Society of Naturalists meeting in either 2003 or 2004. This was a hot topic (for 5 or so people) at the time, since the national tidal datums…
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Open Wave Height Logger revision C
The Open Wave Height Logger (OWHL) project has reached another minor milestone with the release of a new hardware revision, RevC. This is a redesign of the three printed circuit boards, breaking physical compatibility with the older revisions, but it maintains software compatibility with the existing OWHL code (hardware designs and code available at the…
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Our new paper on limpets grazing microscopic algae
We recently had a new paper come out in Marine Ecology Progress Series, titled Quantifying the top-down effects of grazers on a rocky shore: selective grazing and the potential for competition (open access link at MEPS) (permanent doi link). This project involved putting a series of round aluminum plates out in the high intertidal zone…
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Things you see with a camera trap
I had the time lapse camera described in this post set out in the rocky intertidal zone in Monterey. Late one afternoon it caught these images of a ground squirrel venturing down into the mussel zone and picking small mussels (Mytilus californianus) off the rocks and eating them. If you replay the video a few…