Andrew Kennard @askennard@qoto.org

Crazy idea: Coalition building in the House.

What if a handful of Republican mavericks picked a more moderate Speaker and got the Dems to vote for them?

Too bad Liz Cheney isn't in the House anymore...

@Dtl I'm using a waterproof box and an acrylic half dome sealed with silicone. A 2 port relay powers the dew heater in the dome and a fan in the enclosure, controlled by the PoE powered RPi3B+. The camera is a ZWO ASI178MC. Initially I had planned to use the fan/dew heater when needed, but after a month or so I just left them on continuously. The bearing on the fan failed this year, so the fan was replaced.

Happy new year! Another year means another year-long keogram! Every 15 seconds throughout 2022, my trusty all-sky camera took a picture of the sky above the Netherlands. Combining these 2.1 million images into a year-long keogram reveals this picture, which shows the length of the night change throughout the year (the hourglass shape), when the Moon was visible at night (diagonal bands), and the Sun higher in the sky during summer, as well as lots and lots of clouds passing overhead.

Happy New Year friends! 🎉

Do you rely on your social media feeds to discover research papers but wish you had more say in what shows up? Help us NLP/IR researchers at UMass Amherst study a ✨✨ controllable recommendations feed! ✨✨

✍ Please sign up here: https://bit.ly/CTRL_REC

This IRB-approved study will ⏱ take up to 1 hour of your time, 💸 come with a $25 payment as a token of appreciation, and 💻 will be run over Zoom!

#ThinSectionThursday Perhaps my favourite rock 😍 Sample U5A17 from my PhD fieldwork collected from Unit 5 of the Eastern Layered Intrusion in Rum a long time ago. Blue and green crystals of olivine enclosed in buff-coloured clinopyroxene, and striped plagioclase. Cross-polars illumination. Field of view 2mm across. #Microscopy #IsleOfRum #Geology #Igenous

@SpencrGreenberg In any case, I guess that since we both agree these phenomena indeed have names and an established literature, we both also can agree that what you're doing here is engaging in a bit of novelty hacking.

In your words, hacking novelty is "showing something that is already well-known but giving it a new name that leads people to think it is something new. "

I know I’m supposed to be nice here on mastodon but this CEO of a startup foundry

1) discovering that scientists sometimes oversell their results,

2) trying to coin a name “importance hacking”

3) deciding that no one talks about it, and then

4) pronouncing that is perhaps comparable to the replication crisis in scale….

It’s, how do I say this nicely? It’s importance hacking of the highest order.

Auto-snitch-tagging so the OP can respond if he wants to. @SpencerGreenberg@nerdculture.de

An elevator pitch but the elevator broke down so the person is stuck listening the details of your work for at least twenty minutes

RT @luismbat@birbsite

Who would have thought that adding a Sierpinski Triangle Fractal as musical notes would actually sound good!😅

@vicgrinberg One very beautiful one that I think is readable by nonexperts but it takes a great deal of time (I would read and savor and have to work through every page because I am not a math whiz, but it was some of the most interesting reading I have ever done) is Art Winfree's "The Geometry of Biological Time" (as recommended by @stevenstrogatz ). Lovely set of ideas about biological dynamics that really changed the way I think about, well, a lot of things from biology to politics

So, why is it that (as I mentioned earlier), when you draw a line that turns left at every nontrivial zero of the Riemann zeta function (it actually works for just about any turn angle), it coils up into these lovely whimsical curlicues resembling Euler spirals? I think I have a general understanding of it now.

New preprint for the lab! We introduce GelMap, a method enabling intrinsic calibration and deformation mapping for expansion microscopy.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.21.521394v1

The bit about a lawyer being stopped from entering a music hall in the US because its facial recognition system picked up that she's part of a law company that's suing them is even crazier than I thought.

The law company isn't suing the music hall - it's suing a restaurant, in another state, which is owned by the hall's parent company MSG Entertainment. MSG gone ahead and harvested photos of all the lawyers in the firm and fed it to an image recognition system to ban them from every MSG Entertainment owned location.

People always tell me that if you've got nothing to hide then you've got nothing to fear. She's got nothing to hide and they still went after her.

If this doesn't start making people worried about facial recognition then there's serious trouble coming.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/facial-recognition-flags-girl-scout-mom-as-security-risk-at-rockettes-show/

A glimpse of the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA)?

In any case, this is a stunning and important finding in evolutionary cell biology.

Article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05550-y

Commentary: https://www.science.org/content/article/strange-tentacled-microbe-may-resemble-ancestor-complex-life#.Y6RNp_EyL-c.twitter

📣 The Intercept newsroom is pleased to join you all on the fediverse to share our journalism, and to help support a decentralized platform that aims to be a better place to be. Please consider boosting this post so more readers know we’re here.

Yo faculty who were hiring this season: Are all of your interviewees prospective homogeneity hires? If so, what are you doing to change that next hiring season? The time to do the research on that is now.

A common retort is "there weren't enough qualified underrepresented people in the applicant pool". That is a crap excuse, but even so, what are you doing now to change that within your graduate program? Current grad students will be applicants in a few years.

Sharing this in case it's useful: I find that students often have a hard time conceptualizing quantitative parameters in genomics and popgen.

Here is a draft version of a cheat-sheet that I put together for my winter-quarter human genetics class. It's also part of a book that I am slowly writing on human popgen.

Corrections and other comments very welcome

This is absolutely insane. A mom was prevented from taking her daughter to a Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall because she works for a law firm litigating against the venue's parent company. They spotted her with facial recognition technology according to this report: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/face-recognition-tech-gets-girl-scout-mom-booted-from-rockettes-show-due-to-her-employer/4004677/

Some of you may have seen Elon Musk's endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s crazy antivax conspiracy theories today.

Over at post.news, I just posted a long-form piece about this, and about how science education needs to adapt to online disinformation.

Please a look. If you like it, boost it there or here or — if you dare — over on the birdsite.

https://post.news/article/2J7VEapSIpNWsrC0EawD8CopYqo

The asteroid that ended the dinosaurs was technically the highest ratio of killing birds to one stone.