Spent much of yesterday at BAPG XI. Props to the Coop lab for putting it on. And speaking of which, want to give a special shout out to Gideon Bradburd, who presented his “SpaceMix” method. The preprint will be out soon, but I think the best way to understand it is what TreeMix is to standard phylogenetic trees, SpaceMix is to standard PCA. SpaceMix attempts to fit pulse admixture events against a landscape defined by geographic isolation by distance dynamics.

Also, big shout out to Dmitri Petrov for starting the BAPG meetings over four years ago (along with sponsors, such as Ancestry.com and CPB at Davis). From what I’m to understand the various regional meetings took their inspiration from BAPG, so it’s kind of a big deal. Though no doubt BAPG benefits from the high density of research universities from UCSC to UCD south to north, with Stanford and UCB anchoring in the middle, all in a small commutable area.

Note: In case readers aren’t clear, “open thread” means you can talk about/ask about anything (within reason).