Steve Wang
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stevewang251.bsky.social
Steve Wang
@stevewang251.bsky.social
1.3K followers 410 following 510 posts
Professor of Statistics at Swarthmore College. I use statistics to study paleontology, evolution, and extinction. I also compose percussion music for fun.
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stevewang251.bsky.social
Steve Wang @stevewang251.bsky.social · Sep 16
Now that videos work on Bluesky, here's a snippet of my Sextet for Percussion, performed at @swarthmorecollege.bsky.social in 2016. Scored for marimba, vibraphone, xylophone, and two pianos.
#percussion #minimalism
stevewang251.bsky.social
Read the Bill James Baseball Abstract when I was 11 & decided I wanted to be a baseball statistician, long before that was an actual career. In college I discovered academic stats wasn't like baseball "stats", but I liked it & kept doing it. Got into statistical paleontology just by serendipity.
recursecenter.bsky.social Recurse Center @recursecenter.bsky.social · 15d
What’s the lore behind choosing your career path ?
November 23, 2025 at 2:17 PM
Reposted by Steve Wang
andrew.heiss.phd
I’ve long used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” to illustrate the idea of p-hacking when I teach statistics. But ABC/Disney killed the site earlier this month :(

So I made my own with #rstats and Observable and #QuartoPub ! stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/
Screenshot of the linked Quarto website, with input checkboxes to change different conditions for a regression model that predicts economic performance based on US political party, with a reported p-value
March 20, 2025 at 6:30 PM
Reposted by Steve Wang
alexandrejan.bsky.social
Happy Ctenophore Day!
These glowing ocean drifters look like jellyfish but aren’t! They’re comb jellies, shimmering creatures that light up the sea with rows of beating cilia 💙🌈
Which species can you identify? 👀 Most are raised in @pawelburkhardt.bsky.social lab
#CtenophoreDay #CombJelly #Ctenophore
October 4, 2025 at 6:21 PM
Reposted by Steve Wang
noncompliantcyborg.bsky.social
Happy Ctenophore Day!
🐙🦑🧪
A graphic that reads Happy Ctenophore Day in glowing pink text twice between three rows of different ctenophore species. The top row is lobate ctenophores including Bolinopsis microptera, Leucothea pulchra, Mnemiopsis leidy, and the bloody belly comb jelly Lampocteis. The second row has three different Beroe species. The lowest row has Pleurobrachia bachei, Dryodora glandiformis, red-x, and Euplokamis dunlapae.
October 4, 2025 at 7:36 AM
Reposted by Steve Wang
arctomet.bsky.social
Opinion: ‘Earth system engineers’ and the cumulative impact of organisms in deep time

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
‘Earth system engineers’ and the cumulative impact of organisms in deep time
Understanding the role of humans as ‘ecosystem engineers’ requires a deep-time perspective rooted in evolutionary history and the fossil record. Howev…
www.sciencedirect.com
September 23, 2025 at 6:58 PM
Reposted by Steve Wang
peterjwagner3.bsky.social
When does biology become geology? This is a fun paper for us (although I, myself, was just one more member of Band-Aid for this particular paper), and hopefully it helps clarify a lot of things that we sort of already knew but never really formally addressed.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
‘Earth system engineers’ and the cumulative impact of organisms in deep time
Understanding the role of humans as ‘ecosystem engineers’ requires a deep-time perspective rooted in evolutionary history and the fossil record. Howev…
www.sciencedirect.com
September 23, 2025 at 3:38 PM
stevewang251.bsky.social
The new Martin Hall at @swarthmorecollege.bsky.social is spectacular
facade of Martin Hall; one side is almost all a huge window lower lever of a lounge in Martin Hall, with 2-story windows overlooking a nicely landscaped area upper lever of a lounge in Martin Hall, with 2-story windows overlooking a nicely landscaped area lounge in Martin Hall with sofas, tables, chairs, and ottomans, overlooking the Crum Woods
August 28, 2025 at 12:37 PM
stevewang251.bsky.social
@kentremendous.bsky.social @joeposnanski.com
I'm a longtime Poscast listener (since 1957) and statistics professor. Re: solitaire win%: at 350 games, the SD is 2%. Meaning 68% of the time, your win% will be accurate to within ±2%, and 95% of the time, your win% will be accurate to within ±4%.
August 20, 2025 at 7:27 AM
Reposted by Steve Wang
stevewang251.bsky.social
I think we also get distracted because we tend to anthropomorphize the larval stage as the child and the adult stage as the real animal. In some cases (not necessarily holothurians, but perhaps e.g. butterflies), it would be more appropriate to think of them as the eating stage and the mating stage.
August 18, 2025 at 10:18 PM
Reposted by Steve Wang
willgearty.bsky.social
📢 deeptime: an R package that facilitates highly customizable and reproducible visualizations of data over geological time intervals

🔗 doi.org/10.1080/2096...

Fully #openaccess in @bigearthdata1.bsky.social with insight about deeptime📦 development and code examples!

#rstats #geology #paleontology
Plot of global benthic δ18O data for 0 – 5.3 Ma (Lisiecki & Raymo, 2005) with geomagnetic polarity subchrons displayed on the top x-axis and planktic foraminiferal primary biozones plotted on the bottom x-axis using the deeptime package. A mammal phylogeny (Garland et al., 1992) plotted in the fan layout using the ggtree and deeptime packages. The greyscale concentric circles in the background indicate geological stages, whereas the linear colored timescale indicates geological epochs. Early tetrapod occurrence data (Jones et al., 2023) plotted as a taxonomic/biostratigraphic range plot using the geom_points_range() function from the deeptime package. A stratigraphic column of Cretaceous lithostratigraphic units from the San Juan Basin, USA. The deeptime package has been used to add pattern fill which indicate the primary lithologies of the units as reported by the Macrostrat API (Peters et al., 2018) via the rmacrostrat R package (Jones et al., 2024).
August 6, 2025 at 1:06 PM
Reposted by Steve Wang
razorgirl1984.bsky.social
This was my favorite King of the Hill joke with Chuck Mangione. RIP, king.
July 24, 2025 at 9:13 PM
stevewang251.bsky.social
Chuck Mangione was a musical hero to me. He was from my hometown, where he was a legend. My mom took me to see him in concert when I was 13, and it was a life-changing moment — he made me love music.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/a...
Chuck Mangione, a ‘Smooth Jazz’ Hitmaker With a Fluegelhorn, Dies at 84
www.nytimes.com
July 25, 2025 at 1:25 PM
stevewang251.bsky.social
So surreal being here when the stadium is empty
July 11, 2025 at 4:54 PM
stevewang251.bsky.social
Home plate at the old Yankee Stadium, now a public park. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle stood here.
July 11, 2025 at 4:41 PM
stevewang251.bsky.social
July 11, 2025 at 2:27 PM
stevewang251.bsky.social
Back in the office today
July 11, 2025 at 2:12 PM
Reposted by Steve Wang
sethf.bsky.social
Another of the greats leaving us. Dick was a huge influence on me when I was a graduate student, and wrote papers that completely changed the way I thought about the history of life. A gracious and good-humored man, and a kind and supportive mentor.
kiessl.bsky.social Wolfgang Kiessling @kiessl.bsky.social · Jun 26
A great loss to paleontology. Bambach‘s work was in many ways foundational.
June 27, 2025 at 2:50 AM
Reposted by Steve Wang
peterjwagner3.bsky.social
This makes me really sad: Richard was a great guy. Some of my best memories from my Smithsonian are from interacting with him.
June 25, 2025 at 9:49 PM
stevewang251.bsky.social
Richard Bambach, 1934-2025. A warm and generous man, and a titan of paleontology.
www.regerfuneralhome.com/obituaries/r...
Richard Bambach sitting in a office with stacks of papers piled on his desk. He's wearing a grayish jacket with a string tie.
June 25, 2025 at 10:04 AM
Reposted by Steve Wang
amjukar.bsky.social
Very sad to hear of the passing of Richard Bambach, one of the key paleontologists who ushered in the paleobiological revolution, and an incredibly kind and generous person. It was a pleasure learning from him at the Smithsonian’s paleo journal club over the last decade or so.
June 25, 2025 at 3:36 AM
Reposted by Steve Wang
andrejpaleo.bsky.social
Richard Bambach will always be remembered as a champion of functional-ecological way of thinking in macroevolution. Way before the modern trend in analyzing functional diversity.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #Geology #EvoBio
A Bambachian model of eco-space of marine animals.
June 24, 2025 at 10:01 PM
Reposted by Steve Wang
daveyfwright.bsky.social
Very sad to learn Richard Bambach has passed away. In addition to his significant contributions to science and the 'paleobiological revolution', I will mostly remember him as a warm and wonderful presence in our paleobiology journal club when I was a postdoc at the Smithsonian
June 24, 2025 at 9:16 PM
stevewang251.bsky.social
First day at my summer job
June 16, 2025 at 2:20 PM
stevewang251.bsky.social
Swarthmore College has a teaching collection of fossil plants that has probably not been used in decades, recently re-discovered when we moved into a new building. We are hoping to catalog/digitize them. Can anyone ID any of these specimens beyond the brief descriptions on the cards? (1/2)
A wooden box of plant fossils. Note card says, "Cannel coal, made up of flattened Lepidodendron spores" (referring to some of the specimens; not sure what the others are). A wooden box of plant fossils. Note card says, "Fern fronds from St. Clair PA. Carboniferous." A wooden box of plant fossils. Note card says, "Vaguely relevant but interesting..."
June 16, 2025 at 9:53 AM
Reposted by Steve Wang
barankarapunar.bsky.social
🦕🐚"Prediction and Identification of Mass Extinctions" workshop has ended after many fruitful discussions. ⚒️🦤Watch this space for the outcome 😎
www.paleosynthesis.nat.fau.de/index.php/pr...

@bethanyjallen.bsky.social
@danijeladim.bsky.social
@thefairestfowl.bsky.social
paleosynth.bsky.social PaleoSynthesis @paleosynth.bsky.social · May 9
After a week of hard work and discussions the PRIME workshops ends today in the late afternoon. Fruitful discussions and breakout groups made good progress and we are looking forward to the outcomes to be published.
May 9, 2025 at 9:18 PM