Poissonian Fish

After catching a fishy phrase — "fraction of failing breams", which I corrected to "fraction of failing beams" — in my manuscript draft (though Juan G. Restrepo has suggested the dystopian "fraction of failing dreams" as a possible correction), I noticed in a Google Scholar e-mail that my work was cited recently by a paper called The Contact Structure of Great Britain's Salmon and Trout Aquaculture Industry (which has nothing to do with any baseball players on the Angels). This made me think of "failed salmon" and "failed trout" and gives possible inspiration for writing a paper with a title like Percolation on Fish(y) Networks. My mind continued to descend in a fishy direction, so I decided to plot Poisson distributions of fish (as you can see in my tweet).

Here are some Poisson distributions of fish. pic.twitter.com/wZ367E4GVg

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) May 11, 2019

Googly Eyes, and Freshness of Fish

Well, this story is fishy. Wow. (And oy vey.)

The headline pretty much sums it up: Store shut down after owners caught sticking googly eyes on fish to look fresher

P.S. There are also other uses for googly eyes.

(Tip of the cap to Renée O'Rear Handley.)

Pattern-Forming Pufferfish

OK, pattern-formation-ophiles: Here is an "underwater crop circle" that was created by a single pufferfish. [What? Were you thinking about the pattern on the surface of its body or something when I brought this up? :)] An example of such a geometric structure was studied in this paper, so I hope some of the pattern-formation experts find it enticing.

(Tip of the cap to I Fucking Love Science.)

Tales from the arXiv: Mastication of Fish Sausage

Not only is this abstract "awesome", but I think that the authors might have an Ig Nobel prize in their future... In particular, I'd like to point out the last sentence: In order to explain this structure, we propose a mastication model for fish sausage based on stochastic processes.

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arXiv:1002.0404 (*cross-listing*)
Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 07:17:47 GMT (878kb)

Title: Fragmentation of a viscoelastic food by human mastication
Authors: Naoki Kobayashi, Kaoru Kohyama, Kouichi Shiozawa
Categories: physics.data-an cond-mat.stat-mech physics.bio-ph
Comments: JPSJ3, 4 pages, 8 figures
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Fragment-size distributions have been studied experimentally in masticated viscoelastic food (fish sausage).The mastication experiment in seven subjects was examined. We classified the obtained results into two groups, namely, a single lognormal distribution group and a lognormal distribution with exponential tail group. The facts suggest that the individual variability might affect the fragmentation pattern when the food sample has a much more complicated physical property. In particular, the latter result (lognormal distribution with exponential tail) indicates that the fragmentation pattern by human mastication for fish sausage is different from the fragmentation pattern for raw carrot shown in our previous study. The excellent data fitting by the lognormal distribution with exponential tail implies that the fragmentation process has a size-segregation-structure between large and small parts.In order
to explain this structure, we propose a mastication model for fish sausage based on stochastic processes.
\\ ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.0404 , 878kb)

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

OK, so that only makes four fish, but in this New York Times article by Steve Strogatz, one gets all the way up to 12 (count 'em) fish. Steve is writing a series of opinion pieces in the New York Times where he will take mathematics all the way from preschool to graduate school. This is the first article in the series.