Season's Greetings

If you look at last year's Yule greeting, you'll note that we have lost a few at the Keesey-Havens household. The mighty Monstro now swims alone in his aquarium, his fellow goldfish Cousteau and his pet minnow Fido having passed away. Young Half-Pint died rather unexpectedly, leaving his chinchilla family in mourning (father Bernard, mother Lillian, sister Hyzenthlay). (I might be posting on him again, though....)

The family tree, as of Yuletide 2010.

But, in brighter news, we have a new addition! Lucy, the little human pictured above with our Christmas tree. And so it comes time to sadly trim but joyfully decorate our household's phylogenetic tree:

Updated for 2011.

EDIT: Whoops, misspelled "silvestris" in the 2011 version.

Lucy Gwyn Havens

Last Saturday our first child was born: a daughter, Lucy Gwyn Havens.

We've made our own contribution to the phylogenetic tree!

Lucy.—There are many famous Lucys. Here's one relevant to the blog:

And of course, that one is named after this one:

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
by Julian Lennon

Gwyn.—Gwyn is an old Welsh family name on my side. More recently it was spelled "Guinn", but we decided to use the older spelling.

Havens.—You'll notice her surname is from her mother, not me. We decided early on that boys would be Keeseys and girls would be Havenses. If this becomes a tradition, it would link patrilineal names to the Y chromosome (something the dominant English system already does) and matrilineal names to the mitochondrial chromosome (a feature sorely lacking in the English system).

We love you, li'l Lulu!

Silence

So I was busily and excitedly writing about my new site, PhyloPic, back in February and early March, and then this blog went silent. What happened?


Something terrible.


—


My father, Timothy Alan Keesey, passed away on March 10th. He had gone into the hospital the previous day. He didn't last the night.


Dad was known as a "gentle giant"—a towering, athletic man of great patience. He was a pleasant man, very well-liked.


He instilled an appreciation of nature in his children, my sister and me. Our most common family pastime was hiking. We frequented the Billy Goat Trail, between the Potomac River and the C&O Canal, where he showed me how to catch reptiles, and how to tell a broad-headed skink from a five-lined skink. He'd been a biology major, and I owe my interest in biology in large part to him (by both genetic and memetic transmission).


I also owe my interest in programming to him. Not that he was a programmer (apart from taking one course back in the punch-card days), but he bought the family a TI-99/4A back during a time when it was pretty rare to have a home computer. We never got any software for it, so the only way to use it was to learn BASIC. I became pretty much the sole user, teaching myself how to program from the BASIC manual. No other single act has contributed so much to my ultimate career.


Dad's obituary is here. It doesn't tell much about him as a person—his quiet demeanor, his keen intellect, his skill with cars, sports, and animals.


Goodbye, Dad, and thanks.

—

But this year has not been entirely without good news.


I'm comforted by the fact that, before he passed away, Dad knew he'd be getting another grandchild. (My sister already has a daughter.) My wife, Susan, is expecting our first child.


My dad was a wonderful father. I have both a good model to follow and a high standard to live up to.


By strange coincidence, our daughter's due date is October 14th—Dad's birthday.

What I Do For A Living: TRONiverse

We recently launched a Flash app for the upcoming film TRON: Legacy:

TRONiverse

It pulls posts from Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr and displays them orbiting a 3D globe. You can click on the globe to find posts near that area. Post about TRON and your post might appear, too!

Also, we added a neat little Easter egg: click on the globe and then hold down the "M", "C", and "P" keys. (People who've seen the original film might have an idea what to expect....)

Online NEXUS File Viewer

It's been a month since my last post, but I have a very good reason for the hiatus. Namely, I was busy getting married to this woman (at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History) and going on our honeymoon (in Sydney, Australia).

Now that I'm back in California, time to get back to work on Names on Nodes! I've just put together a small demo of two key parts of its functionality: the reading of NEXUS files and the displaying of phylogenetic networks. Click here to see the NEXUS Viewer demo. This application opens NEXUS files and displays the trees in them as a combined phylogenetic network.

Things you need to know:

1. You must have a NEXUS file stored locally on your computer to use this.
2. That file should have a TREES section. (If not, the viewer should just display a list of operational taxonomic units.)
3. This could get messy for NEXUS files with lots of trees. (Although it's kind of neat-looking.)
4. You can move the nodes around by clicking on them, or click anywhere else to move the entire diagram.
5. I would dearly love to know if, for some reason, it does not work for a given file.

Enjoy!

Avuncularized

Quick personal note: my sister Charlotte just gave birth today to Eva Keesey Hipolito, 8 lbs. 5 oz. I'm an uncle!