Introduction A navigation mesh is a data structure used to aid in pathfinding around obstacles. Originally used for video games and robotics, we can also apply the concept of this navigational mesh to the movement of...

Liz recently needed some shapefiles from an ArcGIS online map. Checking out the linked page, it’s immediately clear that there’s a lot of data, and no obvious way to get it from a download or share link anywhere on the app page. The desired solut...

A recent user bug report in my software TACT led me to look into how phylogenetic software varies in the way they determine whether a given phylogenetic tree is ultrametric (where the root-to-tip distance is equal among all tips). If you infer an...

In our recent publication (Rabosky et al. 2018) we assembled a huge phylogeny of ray-finned fishes: the most comprehensive to date! While all of our data are accessible via Dryad, we felt like we could go the extra mile to make it easy to repurpo...

If you work with datasets that are big enough in R you will eventually encounter situations where your plots are so complex that they do things like crash Preview.app on macOS. For me this happens a lot when I generate huge scatterplots with very dense overplotting. These don’t ...