Leo Betschart @betschart@qoto.org

It is surprising how often, when I say "Hey, I'm reading this really interesting book..." people immediately respond with "Oh, you have TIME to read?! I don't even..."

Like... what is that?
What makes people jump right to that?

It bugs me for a bunch of reasons.

1. Yes, I am busy too. I make time because it relaxes me.

2. No, I don't care how much you read and I'm not judging you. You don't need to defend yourself.

3. I wanted to share something I found fun, geez.

#reading

Whenever a scientific paper mentions Indigenous people or issues, my first check is for an Indigenous co-author. It shows me how closely the researchers worked with native people, and more importantly, it's a metric of trust put in the research by an Indigenous partner.

This may be the first time I've ever seen an entire Indigenous nation cited as a co-author of a paper. Not an individual, not even an office. The entire St'uxwtéws First Nation.

#SciComm #fire #ecology

https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ecs2.4795

"The male midlife crisis is well-documented and parodied, but we have no concept of what a deep reckoning with the female self looks like."

I wrote a deeply personal essay for a new website for Gen X and elder Millennial women

This one is a little scary to put out there! Hope you enjoy it.
https://jennymag.com/2024/03/27/what-is-a-female-midlife-crisis/

Mastodon is my primary social media, and there’s a lot I dig about it. But if there’s one thing I’d like to change, it’s the way people say THIS IS A CRISIS RIGHT NOW AND IT’S THE MAIN CRISIS AND IF YOU DON’T DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT RIGHT NOW YOU’RE BAD AND WRONG!!!

Know what? It’s *your* crisis. Do what you think is right. Stop judging others for having different priorities, political or otherwise. Quit putting everything in black and white, absolute terms. It’s exhausting, and nobody can live like that.

I just took an #Elsevier survey on "how the research community views and uses different #SocialMedia platforms for professional and personal purposes."
https://confm.it/r/bYedqfc

One question asked which social-media platforms I use. It offered a list of platforms with checkboxes. The list included #GooglePlus, and excluded #Mastodon and #Bluesky.

IT IS HAPPENING! Today, Signal launches phone number privacy & usernames! These features let you use Signal w/o sharing your phone number with the people you talk to

Proud to add more privacy to Signal, & proud of the smart, careful work the team did to make this happen ♥️

You can read more here: https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/

#QOTO is back after a long migration in the first stage of our upgrade. Now that we are on a new home we will give it 24 horus to see if the move was bug free (As it seems to be) and then we will start upgrading versions one at a time day by day.. The upgrades are prepared and ready and should be **much** quicker.

The move took a while as we keep a backlog of every message to the start of the fediverse so our media and DB stores are quite large and it took a long time. But we are back!!!

I'm looking for common spelling errors in scientific papers. Here's my list so far: confident interval, fischer's exact, guassian, kaplan-meir, odd ratio, odds ration, pubic health, public heath, randomised controlled trail, risk ration, statically significant.

@betschart Obviously you can randomly open and close libraries with the flick of a switch.

Today, we have a big announcement: The new Leiden Ranking Open Edition has been launched! 🎉

The new ranking is completely based on OpenAlex data and provides an open and transparent alternative to traditional rankings.

https://open.leidenranking.com

Looking at the Scopus AI demo, the presenter is way too confident, randomly typing in the strangest queries eg what to say when a demo fails ,looking at the generated answer that looks plausible and saying it works ! No it does not, did you even see the odd citations it surfaces?

@Rhodium103 I envy your skill.

This was a wonderful waste of time.

#Excel #ExcelSpreadshitposting

2nd year class (~13yrs) doing a salol experiment, how cooling rate changes crystal size. Lots of them are a bit "meh" until I mention that really hot rocks cooled really fast give you almost glass-like obsidian...

"Anyone heard of obsidian?"
"Minecraft!"
"How do you get obsidian?"
"You have to make lava meet water!"
"Why?"
"So it cools rapidly!"
"Exactly!"

They'll remember that.

"Then you can make a Netherworld portal!"
"That's university stuff, needs a special risk assessment."

And - where are the minutes for the Nov 2-3 #HICPAC meeting? I do not see them at https://www.cdc.gov/hicpac/minutes.html

For my day job, I work at @grafana as a Senior Developer Advocate. Grafana does a lot of things, but the main thing is that we provide open-source tools to make systems continuously reliable and observable.

Also, sometimes we help countries GET TO THE MOON!!!!

Here is a Grafana dashboard helping Japan become the fifth country to land on the moon. This shows the JAXA SLIM spacecraft landing on the lunar surface.

Video from: https://twitter.com/this_is_tckb/status/1747691182459699522
Original post: https://twitter.com/SLIM_JAXA/status/1747484502962893087

Collaborator: Any chance you have either of X or Y with an endogenous ligand on the other end? Any one would be cool.

Me: yeah, I have X with thalidomide.

Collaborator: I take it back. Not that one.

🤣

You mean you don't want to unexpectedly use this as a PROTAC?

#ChemiVerse #ChemicalBiology

The last 10 years or so of tech:

2013: Blockchain! It's a like a database, but slower and worse!
2016: VR! It's like monitors, but slower and worse!
2021: NFTs! It's like pictures, but slower and worse!
2023: AI! It's like algorithms, but slower and worse!