Is the name "Sea Star" more accurate than "Starfish"?

It has become common in recent popularizations to suggest that echinoderms of the family Asteroidea should be given the common name "sea star" rather than the traditional "starfish". The complaint is understandable -- starfish aren't fish. In fact, humans are more closely related to fish, as they both are vertebrates while starfish are not. But is "sea star" actually a better supported name? A taxonomic analysis suggests not.

Let's consider stars, the sea, fish, and starfish.  How can we compare such diverse entities? Obviously not by molecular means. But we can return to the traditional means of cladistic characters. In this analysis I used:  1) Living 2) Primarily water 3) Non-trivial concentration of dissolved NaCl, and 4) presence of backbone.

These characters can be encoded in a PHYLIP matrix in the following manner.

    4    4
Star      0000
Fish      1111
Sea       0110
Starfish  1110

By standard parsimony this yields the following midpoint-rooted tree

So, while "starfish" is inaccurate, "sea star" is even worse!

The Bloody Olive

Not really typical material for my blog, but here's a thriller even more convoluted than "Nobel Son" -- and only ten minutes long! It's a Belgian-made short film from 1996, given new life thanks to Youtube. Excellent reproduction/parody of 1940s film-noir.

RIP Karlin (1924-2007) & Carlin (1937-2008)

Within a span of about six months we have lost two greats with homophonic surnames -- Sam Karlin, the national academy belonging statistician whose pioneering work in computational biology lead to the statistics behind BLAST (as well as more obscure programs), and now the great comedian George Carlin. Many people may think that besides their name, these two people had nothing in common. Not true.

For example, Carlin as well as Karlin has contributed to statistics. Who can forget his great insight "Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!"? And before you object that he should have used "median" in that sentence, be aware that the statistical use of "average" need not mean "mean" (in the arithmetic sense) -- the median can legitimately be called an average as well.

And Karlin was a master of the pithy one-liner himself: "The purpose of models is not to fit the data but to sharpen the questions". Well, maybe it didn't bring down the house when he said it, but it's something worth always keeping in mind.

Greatest BBC Headline ever

"FBI tries to fight zombie hordes". Okay, I know the author knows he's being clever, and probably the people who actually have to deal with compromised Windows machines are already sick of the slang term "zombie", but still, I never expected to read such a Romero-esque headline at the BBC except maybe on April Fool's day.

Not that the zombies in the article affect me other than sending me more spam -- I'm a Linux and OS X user...