2021-01-31, 09:00, Sunday
This month I am trying analog bullet journaling as opposed to last year's heavily digital planning. It works surprisingly well for me, I've been posting here consistently for a while, and other habits I am trying to build seem to work better, too. We'll see how it holds once the semester starts, of course.
The most important benefit has been the fact that I detach from my screens (PC, laptop, phone) more often, both to plan and/or journal and for other things too. Slowly breaking an addiction, one could say, although there is a long way to come.
Also, a screw has just fallen out of my chair. Gotta fix it before It breaks apart.
#bulletjournal #bujo #journalling #thoughts #planning

I am going through the process of creating my first video on youtube. This will probably be a series about thermodynamic modelling, which is a subject I am interested in. The question is: should I make it in matlab (which is easier for me and very fast) or in python (which is way too slow for anything serious but which more people know)? People of QOTO, what are your thoughts on the subject?
#STEM #help #question #thermodynamics #programming #matlab #python

2021-01-30, 10:57, Saturday
I am now on the train, going home from countryhouse. It's snowing outside, the view is great for once. On the subject of views - it's amazing how ugly winter gets in the city, snow of the road turns into slit and snow off the road turns gray and black. Most of the time winter in the city leaves nothing but disgust and piles of trash after the snow is molten.
Looks ike tomorrow there will be more protests in the city centre. A few metro stations will be blocked officially, in advance, and god knows what will happen. This wont be peaceful, I'm afraid. Probably should stay away from the center.
#Moscow #winter #thoughts #journalling

2021-01-09, 08:06, Friday.
I can't have my cup of coffee early in the morning because my sister is still asleep and the grinder is very loud. Oh well, I probably shouldn't whine about it. Coffee can wait.
What amazes me in the modern society is how people point out the problemn and expect it to solve itself somehow. So there was a viral tiktok recently about how google knows everything about you. Seemingly, there is not much to talk about - yes, it does, if you don't like it - degoogle, spend a weekend hosting a mailserver, nextcloud instance, switch your browser to brave (since mozilla isn't really an option anymore) with duckduckgo or other as a primary search engine. Yes, there is also your phone, but there are ways to partially de-google it. You don't even have to invent the solution, it exists. Not enough for you? Install linux, get a librem (or try to boot your phone with free OS), and stop hyping the non-existent problem.

2021-01-28, 11:50, Thursday
I am a programmer and a scientist, and my work as such mostly consists of fighting with frustration. And this is a surprisingly accurate description for everythiog that involves building things, especially for ones with fixed variables, like experiment results or required features for code. No matter how much you yell at the screen, the numbers won't change, and it's your job to build a somewhat decent model to approximate them, or rather use the existing model and tweak statictical weights until it works well enough.
Apart from beung frustrated most of the time, the experience of getting it right after numerous iterations is worth it.

2021-01-27, 06:17
I am currently on the train, going to meet my gf on the railway. Had little (or rather not enough) sleep but it's okay. Realized what is this that I want to do as a hobby yesterday. Challenging endeavor, but not impossible. Stay tuned for news on that.
Also, I sometimes forget how big my country is. It took my girlfriend 17 hours on train to return here and it's not that far for this place.
#life #Russia #thoughts #earlymorning

Just to clarify - I am NOT an anti-vaccine person. I know that vaccines are necessary and useful. My main concern is the lack of data and the massive propaganda around the subject. Actually, this includes a bunch of bloggers posting themselves getting a vaccine. Be sensible, consult your doctor, read up, do a research and then maybe, if the risks are low enough, take a vaccine. It is an important thing to do but it's not a "no-brainer". Nothing is.

2021-01-26, 06:50, Tuesday.
No coffee today since I'll need to do a blood test.
I am deeply concerned about the situation with COVID19 vaccine in my country. One of them is being used countrywide already, and this is an adenovirus-based vaccine. Some pharmacy companies has interrupted their trials of adenovirus based vaccines because of the side effects like polyneuropathy or cardyomyopathy.
But these are commercial companies that are interested in their own well-being. If they cell a vaccine and it kills or injures people, they will suffer consequences. Now, sputnik is a vaccine that is pushed a lot by the government that has a very long story of avoiding consequences of it's actions and ignoring the harm it caused.
So, today I'm doing this blood test to see if I even can take the vaccine because I am allergic to some things. And when the time comes I'd like to make an informed choice about which caccine to use and when.
#Russia #thoughts #vaccine #covid19 #vaccination #life

2021-01-25, 14:30, Monday.
Today I was doing a bunch of C++ programming and fixing linker issues caused by my ignorance and lack of attention to details. The thing I want to share is a stream I randomly stumbled across, from George Hotz/GeoHot (link below), which starts with casual computer architecture axplanation and proceeds to deconstruct a bunch of things from software engineer's and scientist's perspective. I rarely see things like getting a girlfriend or, say, earning $1m deconstructed using input-model-output approach, although it is a very good way to think about some things. I hope this is helpful.

Link: https://youtu.be/N2bXEUSAiTI

2021-01-24, 12:52, Sunday.
Well, today I'm writing in the afternoon, since the morning was preoccupied with some work. Yesterday's events in Moscow led my thoughts to an interesting conclusion: convenience usually leads to cavpivity. Here in Moscow the majority of transportation (some trains, subway, buses and trams) works with so called "troika" cards which you can top up. Each card is unique and they are usually bought and topped up using your card. So you are identified by these cards; more so, if you choose to buy a ticket, it is also identified with a number and there are more than enough cameras to identify you. But they can't store this footage indefenitely, right? But these tickets expire very soon,m my guess - as soon as the data is purged, a few months I believe.
Actually, think China, these guys dont need to use tickets! Facial recognition and virtual wallet tied to your ID. Oh, how convenient, right?
#survelliance #thoughts #Russia #Moscow #life #privacy

2021-01-23, 17:51, Moscow: protests are still going on, I really hope the city center won't get too ruined. Approx. 1.5k arrested, according to unofficial sources. I hope no bodies hit the floor today, but in reality it's very unlikely.
#Moscow #Russia #politics #protests

This is supposed to be phi over lambda: \( \frac{\phi}{\lambda} \)
This is e=mc^2: \( e=mc^2 \)
And now with []:
This is supposed to be phi over lambda: \[ \frac{\phi}{\lambda} \]
This is e=mc^2: \[ e=mc^2 \]

@freemo, looks like I broke something...

Good morning.
2021-01-23, 08:45, Saturday. Coffee with cinnamon. Yum.
So I happen to live in Moscow. Today there will be some protests for an opposition politic, he is arrested for no reason other than being, well, in opposition. It seems to be his hobby. On a serious note though, there is one leader in this country and one opposing group. No political variety, you can choose whether your group wins or loses the fight waaay ahead. It's obvious who loses.

#life #coffee #politics #russia #protests #whining

Also, I want to test qoto's inline latex.
Which I did and it breaks every time. Sad.

Good morning.

2021-01-21, 08:22, Thursday. Drinking my morning coffee (cezve with some cinnamon) and preparing for my report. I'll probably make a separate post about it since it's an opportunity to tell about my scientific research. For now I'm in a mood to write some more "tips".

STEM tips №2: build your foundation. There is a very good reason for all textbooks on the same subject to convey material in the same order. It is not tradition, it is crucial for understanding concepts. The only exception in basic sciences I am familiar with is organic chemistry: Clayden's textbook is wildly diffirent from standart approach, but I'm not sure how it feels to actually use it for studying without prior knowledge of organic chemistry.

I digress. The particular order most textbooks follow builds new concepts on top of previous ones, and this principle applies throughout your academic career. Let's say you skipped a trigonometry introduction in high school. You crammed for the test and did fine, memorizing all your pi-over-2/3/4/6, but there is no solid understanding of the concept. Now you will struggle in your further math classes. Not only that, in mechanics knowledge of trigonometry is implied, the same applies for calculus, most of the physics and a bunch of other disciplines.

So the takeaway is: don't skip basic topics and make sure you know them very well. Otherwise your ignorance will backfire, usually sooner than later.

#stem #stemtips #student #uni #science #life #lifesyle #qotojournal

Good morning.

2021-01-22, 08:20, Friday. Plain black coffee with very high ratio, almost 10:1. I like it, though.

Yesterday I finished my fifth semester with science work report. Might as well write about my work here. So there are a lot of thermodynamic models of liquids. Modern ones are quite precise, but complicated and have a lot of maths involved. They are very useful to predict the reaction equilibrium or solution's properties, but because of their complexity you need to run them through computer. So people tend to create their own implementations of these models and use them, but diffirent implementations perform calculations slightly diffirently and this can affect results of the study.
The idea is to create a more or less versatile program with GUI, that would be easy to use by anyone and make results reproducible. I now managed to make a prototype with saving, loading and calculating quilibria. The core code of implementation is not mine, however, I use pre-coded model (my colleague made it) to create GUI and more or less intuitive logic around it. The entire thing is in C/C++ and runs quite smootly on binary systems.

#stem #stemtips #student #uni #science #life #lifesyle #qotojournal #coffee #thermodynamics #programming

Good morning.

2021-01-09, 07:30, Wednesday. Today I'll share some random thoughts on studying STEM related subjects. Might do somthing like this every once in a while.

STEM tips №1: there are no shortcuts. The original quote is attributed to Euclid: there are no royal roads to geometry, he said to king Ptolemey. This my point: you have to put in the hours and effort. A lot of them.
A decent problem in calculus or physics will take you a solid hour even if you have all the notes from your lectures. And there are these problems in every chapter of your textbook and they won't get easier, so cramming this kind of thing gets impossible. Unless your end goal is to pass the test and not to learn something.
I'm in the middle of my third year of bachelorship and there hasn't been a semester where I'd have more than a day off, unless I was ill. It doesn't mean that I always spend the whole day studying, although sometimes I do, but 1-2 hours of studying every morning are a part of my routine now.

#stem #stemtips #student #uni #science #life #lifesyle

Good morning.

2021-01-19, 09:00, Tuesday. Got 4 for my exam (out of 5), which is good enough for me. I'm done with exams for this semester. And since I'm a nerd I'll tell you what the exam was about.

Solid Phase Thermodynamics. It is a separate course from thermodynamics in my uni, and for a good reason. Studying thermal properties in solid phase reactions is usually impossible (because thermal effects are small and the reactions themselves are slow), so there are a few tricks to do it.
The most important and versatile method is the EMF method, which allows to calculate Gibbs energy of the reaction using its' electrochemical properties. So we learned how to use it (how to compose electrochemical cells) and the thormodynamics specific for solid phases, like x-lg(pO2) diagrams.

Good morning.

2021-01-18, 06:40, Monday. Back home, the exam is in three and a half hours. Solid phase thermodynamics, very weird course that barely lasted for two months. Not sure how it goes, slightly anxious. But at least I had a good rest on Sunday.
My best exam tip - apart from actually studying the subject - is to not break the routine. Even if you have to wake up slightly earlier, do so and drink your usual cup of coffee and write a note in the journal. This will eliminate at least some of the anxiety.

I meant 2021-01-17, Sunday, but whatever. Should've finished that cup before writing.