Jesse Wolfhagen
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uncertainarch.bsky.social
Jesse Wolfhagen
@uncertainarch.bsky.social
3.7K followers 1.5K following 510 posts
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/
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uncertainarch.bsky.social
Thanks for being part of such a great community of writers about this silly baseball team!
Waow (based based based) but make it Mariners
October 20, 2025 at 10:06 PM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
Mariners playoff baseball today! Catch the queasiness of hope!
Waow "based" meme but Mariner'd (saying GOMS instead of based)
October 20, 2025 at 6:55 PM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
I mean, yikes. If even the administration is admitting that they're stuck on minor detail such as "how much, from where, and how to get it to people", folks are in trouble.
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.
October 16, 2025 at 5:26 PM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
not sure if @secretbase.bsky.social already knows this, but... Jon's yelling is more effective than he thought
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.
September 16, 2025 at 2:42 PM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
You're never going to finish your PhD that way

www.vice.com/en/article/h...
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.’”
August 8, 2025 at 5:27 PM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
xkcd.com/3081/
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.
April 25, 2025 at 6:05 PM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
Rowdy Tellez is built like an NFL lineman and he's out here trying to hit triples. The Mariners rock
April 13, 2025 at 5:14 PM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
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
April 7, 2025 at 3:35 PM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
Some scenes from the #HandsOff Boston protest
Scene of the #handsoff Boston protest in Boston Commons. Several signs, closest one reads "I've seen smarter cabinets @ IKEA" Scenes of the #handsoff Boston protest. Start of the march from Boston Commons towards City Hall (Park Street Church in the background). The entire sidewalk and Tremont street are full of protestors Scene of the #handsoff Boston protest at City Hall. Several US flags, a Trans flag, and a sign that reads "Congress, your job: stop enabling Trump and Musk"
April 5, 2025 at 10:50 PM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
Sorry, this is the first thing that sprang to mind
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.
March 19, 2025 at 1:32 PM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
Repping my favorite part of atomic clocks
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)
March 10, 2025 at 3:15 PM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
Real-time debunking of misinformation here on Bluesky!
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."
March 9, 2025 at 8:52 PM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
I'm sorry, I'll take anything that warns against abuse of presidential powers, but this feels like maybe the silliest thing to frame the issue or to get mad over
(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)
January 22, 2025 at 2:58 PM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
A bottle of "Vodka of the Gods" from Trader Joe's
December 6, 2024 at 3:35 PM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
Image of the print edition fo the Onion (dated January 10, 1998) entitled "Drugs Win Drug War"
November 14, 2024 at 2:57 PM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
Not in the first 2 million, but still impressive growth for within a year! Also good to have a new go-to random seed number
Bluesky notification telling me that was user #2,253,663 in celebration of reaching #10,000,000 users. I joined on November 30, 2023
September 16, 2024 at 11:05 PM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
Calling on the Brooklyn parenting hivemind, lost lovey! We lost my son's "blue kitty" yesterday somewhere between the Parkside station and our cousin's house in Windsor Terrace (we walked through the Parade Ground). His mom made it for him when he was an infant, we're devastated. Anyone seen it?
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.
September 9, 2024 at 10:17 AM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
This feels very much like one of those "did a brain-invading parasite write this?" situations. And who knows, maybe they did!

Article here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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
July 30, 2024 at 2:53 PM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
...so, the prophecy has been fulfilled

(I finally updated R/cmdstan and now I need to update all of my array syntax)

I do have to say, they gave a very informative error message even after I ignored all of their warnings telling me to do this before it became code-breaking
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
June 15, 2024 at 7:05 AM
uncertainarch.bsky.social
Under-explained and in-progress work:
Why your default should be to "partially" pool (over "completely" or "no pooling"):

Comparing absolute error from different pooling strategies for simulated data: error increases as variability across clusters increases; partial pooling (multilevel) shines
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).
December 21, 2023 at 4:42 PM