melannen | (no subject)

(no subject)

So I am back from con.txt! It was fun. If you would like to hear about con.txt, give me a letter A-Z and I will talk about stuff. (Hey, it worked for Iceland last summer...)

Since then I have been busily teaching myself how to use the phylip suite of cladistics programs. Why, you ask? Because MCU Rolling Remix went live, and I have two more days to attempt to reconstruct the phylogeny from scratch. (Well, okay, I know which one I remixed and which one is mine, and that's it.)

(Rolling Remix is a new kind of fest where one person writes a story and then it gets remixed and then that gets remixed so on down the chain. There were three chains starting from the first story resulting in 22 total stories - the original and three chains of seven.)

Phylip using just characters as charactesr got me a good starting place; now I am actually reading the stories, in the order suggested by the cladograms, to extract other characters that might improve the analysis (so far: churros).

(You might ask: did you really need to relearn cladistics just to make guess for a fic fest? To which I answer: did I *not* need to relearn cladistics?)

anyway I will not be trying to guess authors because that would require me to, like, be able to tell people apart, which is unlikely at the best of time (hello undifferentiated mass of con.txt people who were all amazing!) If you want to try to guess mine, I did not try particularly hard to disguise it, and also I hinted at my very favorite vanishingly-rare ship in the background.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

>> (You might ask: did you really need to relearn cladistics just to make guess for a fic fest? To which I answer: did I *not* need to relearn cladistics?) <<

YESSSSS. Cladistics is cool.

Isn't it??? I was kind of depressed by how many of the phylogenetic analysis packages assumed you were only ever working with protein sequences, though, it's much harder to do protein sequences when you're working with speculative biology.

I can certainly see how that would be the case. :)

Hmmm... maybe send the company a bunch of the Shakespeare and folktale scholarship that's been done using statistical techniques for constructing viable trees, to gently suggest some variety to them? And on the biological side ... personally, as cool as genetics is, I find an example of positively heroic science when I contemplate the work of the people who examined and recorded BY HAND the presence and absence of endless phenotypical traits in fancy pigeons or cruciferous vegetables or whatever in order to try to guess at *those* family trees.

Do you have rec's for a good introductory book/course of ... information theory, I guess, but really any field (I can see statistics, computer programming, linguistics, biology, etc including this) ... that includes cladistics, by the way? My limited knowledge is basically all absorbed via general nerditude, so imprecise and disorganized.

Well, they're mostly some scientist coding an open-source tool in their spare time, so, I guess they're coding what they want to code, but it sort of implies how much of the current research is also 100% molecular-bio based. which makes me sad. Because! yes! all that measuring butterfly genitals is also important science! (Especially in paleontology were we still often don't have much in the way of molecule sample to work from.) (Using it unmodified for linguistics and folklore and fanfic is a little bit iffier because the descent doesn't work quite the same way, but it's still *fun*.)

Alas, I don't have any particular recs - I'm working off of memories of evo bio classes back in college (and I flunked advanced stats) & years of being a tetzoo fan. And bioinformatics textbooks get really dense and really far beyond what I ever did. If you google around for intro to phylogenetic analysis a lot of profs have their course notes online, though. And once you have the basics, phylip is free to download and has really good documentation.

For a pop-sci intro to cladistics, I recently read "Naming Nature" which did a pretty good job of explaining the basic and the history behind them

Thanks. That's a pretty decent set of starter recs, actually. Now I just have to figure out if/when I will have time...

Also, I am now falling directly into a wiki walk labyrinth guided by the thread of tetzoo, which is EXACTLY my kind of thing...

Thanks.

Sounds about right!

If you get through tetzoo you will probably have a good working knowledge of modern biological taxonomy! Then you can try John Hawks Weblog; he does paleoanthropology, and a lot with molecular phylogenies.

Yay!

You asked for letters, and thus ye shall receive: X.

You know, it's interesting that given there are three large classic slash fandoms that start with X, and con.txt is really into classic fandoms, I don't have much to say about any of those three regarding this con.

There was an XF zine on the swap table, though! So I shall instead talk about Xerography, the revolution in zine technology!

Con.txt was the first place I ever saw an actual slash zine, and there are at least a few dozen hanging around every year, and bravo for that, keeping history alive. (some times there are even some that are mimeographed or ditto rather than xerox.) I never bought one until this year because most of them were either not my fandoms or not my pairings, but finally! this year! there was an Old Who zine focusing on the Master, which is 100% my pairing! It is The Faces of Time #3. I have not read it yet but I am excited.

I think it is xerography but I'm not 100% sure; it might actually be pro-printed. It is a very high-class gen zine with lots of contributions from canon-connected people.

I also ended up taking all the unclaimed swap table items to dispose of, which included several other zines of various ages. The plan was to donate them via Open Doors if I could but I am still in communications trying to figure out the best way to do that, if it's even possible. (I am at this point tempted to just keep them, because there will inevitably come a year when there are other people at a slash con who have never seen a 'zine, and nobody else to bring some for show and tell, which would be sad.

How's this going, anyway?

I'm really glad people are having fun with the guessing period. I was worried it would just be a week's worth of tepid silence.

I had to go help a friend last night so I didn't get a final version ready but I still want to try (if you post the answers to DW, will you spoiler-cut them? :D)

Basically, in some ways it worked pretty well - even just using the character tags as phylogenetic characters got me three pretty stable sets of five and some good guesses for the others, and then actually reading the stories in the order suggested by the consensus tree got me some other "characters" to add (like Churros and Chitauri) which I could weight more heavily, and that got me two pretty good sets of seven and one pretty good set of six with two left over.

Putting the stories in order within the sets is a lot harder? I have what I think are *pretty* good sequences for two of the three and most of the third but I keep changing my mind on which *direction* they go.

Unfortunately I still haven't figured out the starting story, which you'd think would be pretty easy! But I am stumped. One of the two left over in my best tree so far might work pretty well, except it has "Remix" in the title, and if that's the only non-remix in the fest then you're just evil :P I've been using a story with no shared characters as the outgroup, but if I could properly root the tree with the starting story I think the rest would mostly fall into place.

I think I am going to have to sit down with index cards to figure out the starting story, because at this point that's gotta be doable as a logic puzzle, and then re-run the computer calculations one more time with a root.

Also yes trying to figure it out has been the MOST FUN, there need to be a lot more of these so I can get more data sets! (I wish we could confer with each other and share strategies, but since we all know which fic we wrote and which one we remixed, there would be too much chance of contaminated information.)

(hey I don't suppose you could tell me if stories came in on schedule every two weeks starting Apr 4 with the starter fic or if there were gaps, could you? that would help lots.)

You've got about an hour and a half, anyway.

One person dropped out, so there was one two-week gap, quite few people handed in early, and towards the end there, a couple people requested extensions.

:D

..helpful. :P ETA: It was 3 streams of seven despite the dropout, right...? Or can I not rely on all the streams being the same length///

Yeah, I won't make it because I'm at work until after the deadline, but I will try to finish tonight unspoiled anyway 'cause I got this far. (Next time, make story reveals not the first day of a slash con, so I don't lose three days!)

(or make it the first day of a slash con again so I can propose a group 'untangle the remixes' activity at the con...)

Edited 2016-08-05 18:35 (UTC)

No, we would have had an extra person, but the drop out made it three even streams.

I will submit the letter H.

H is for Hats! So I have this red fedora that I really like because it's the first fedora I've owned that's actually big enough for my head, plus, bright red. I wore it to con-txt 2014 and had a lot of people asking me if I was in cosplay and I had to just go, no, not really, I just like this hat.

So this year I swapped it out for the red-and-blue hatband on another one of my hats, and suddenly everyone knew immediately I was cosplaying as Peggy Carter! It's so great when characters appear who match your existing wardobe.

Oh, hooray! That's delightful.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only