🎓 Doc Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@qoto.org

Hi everyone, I am new to Mastodon, so I'm still not very familiar with the whole thing, but I smell very good premises!

I am a (soon to be) Physics PhD student, and I'm interested to links Statistical Mechanics and biological evolution.
Other than this, I like to read (and sometimes write) about the links between technological advancement, such as machine learning or social networks and changes in our society and politics!

#introduction

@freemo Thank you for the warm welcome, it looks like this instance has been growing pretty rapidly lately. I can't wait to dive into some discussions around here!

I definitely plan to share some of the data I've been collecting. Much of my recent work involves irradiating air samples with neutrons (neutron activation), then detecting the sample's resulting gamma radioactivity on a spectrum to get a measure of trace quantities. I could upload some gamma spectra soon to show what I mean here! :)

For the USA -- it's time to register to vote (register online here!) http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/electronic-or-online-voter-registration.aspx#Table%20of%20states%20w/ovr
#election #voting

@bnys Brendan Nystedt: Thanks for bringing my attention to Mastadon! I like a lot of it...but one essential feature is missing (easy account migration):
https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177
#mastadon

So I've decided each follow friday I will compile a list of all the active users on #QOTO with a one line description explaining why people should follow you (the types of things you post about). Here is how it will work for anyone who wants to participate.

1) write a post with a short one line description of the things you post about on thursday (you can change this from week to week).

2) Add the following two hashtags to the post: #FF and #QOTO_FF

3) tag me on the post

4) make a list of all the people you particularly enjoyed following the previous week that is a member of QOTO. Give a one line explanation of what you enjoyed.

Then on friday i will search for the hashtag #QOTO_FF and add anyone who made a post into my post for that week then share it with my follower base.

This will help us all connect and get to know each other better.

Since its already friday lets give it a practice run today. Try out posting in the format I just described, then around midnight Dutch time I will post the list!

Hello everyone, I'm excited to try out Mastodon! It may take me some time to warm up but I would like to get in the habit of posting regularly.

I am a physics phd student researching dust transport kinetics to create better dose predictions of radioactive release exposures. I also teach college physics in a variety of settings (classroom/lab, studio, online). I'm driven by the scientific method and improving the health and understanding of our society. Feel free to chat!

#introduction #physics

Videotex 1983 http://danismm.tumblr.com/post/177339199069/videotex-1983

LISTEN UP...

Gnu it's the new black

https://qoto.org/media/sWjg9glX4nl_lkDmZ-E

me trying to find the origin of mastodon memes:

Anyway, that's all background. Today I spent a few hours trying to set up python scripts to find the most recent Sentinel passes over a given geographical location and download the associated imagery products. This would almost certainly be trivial for anyone with a proper computing background, but for this procrastinating chemist the steps involved learning how to:

• Find the relevant API and options: ✔️, not too bad
• Make an authenticated HTTP call to the constructed URI ✔️
• Parse the XML returned into a pandas dataframe containing imaging modes/acquisition time and date/unique ID for each frame containing the specified lat/lon location ✔️
• Download each ~1.8 GB image into a folder for processing. Still in progress: I've found out how to make an authenticated http GET request that *should* be streaming the retrieved file to storage, but the connection seems unstable and I can't get the download to finish. Sorting this out is the next thing I need to do: when I've got a way to download and archive the specified files, it'll be time start looking into automated processing and analysis. Still not even really sure what I'm trying to achieve, but I'm having fun and learning stuff so far!

@freemo #FF #QOTO_FF

Native Amsterdam lecturer AND student in AI/Robotics, starting the new academic year. Also screwing up in the kitchen.

I've enjoyed @freemo (so kind!) @commandelicious (great cats! ask him about them!) @Surasanji (fellow L5R geek) @spinflip (interesting hobby!)

@freemo #FF #QOTO_FF

Postin' #RandomQuestion and #ShareTheMusic , along with equally random thoughts, memes, and whatever!

Follow list:

@commandelicious - Good guy, good Youtube Content, glad to have met him!

@freemo - Awesome Admin of Awesomeness. Also friendly- looking forward to seeing where your MuD server ends up!

@Demo318 - Interesting ideas, and good conversation. Looking forward to potential polite debates!

Remember! @Surasanji : Like Delicious Chocolate, Only More So!

SAR imagery does not have amazing spatial resolution, but is often good enough to do things like identify shipping. Water is a uniquely flat surface, so metal objects floating on water give a good return against a low background signal*. Some computationally demanding image processing later, and you can pick out ship locations. I've got a vague idea that it could be interesting to find ships in the territorial waters of North Korea, correlate against AIS tracks, and try to find some sanction-busting shipping running dark without AIS.

*This makes me wonder: the USSR really struggled with power requirements for the radar on its RORSAT ocean-monitoring satellites, to the point that it ended up having to power them using the only nuclear reactors to be launched into space. Why is SAR so much more efficient?

I've got a hobby-interest in remote sensing (satellite imagery). Over the past couple of days, I've been playing around with data from the ESA's Sentinel-1 mission. The ESA (being cool and European Union-y) makes most of the data from Sentinel series of satellites freely accessible to the public, and provides some decent software for processing and analysing the data.

Sentinel-1 is a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite. I don't fully understand the physics behind SAR, but it's basically an active radar measurement of the ground track the satellite passes over. Different surfaces give different sorts of radar returns (measured as a change in polarisation), and so SAR can be used to classify different terrains (crops, forests, grasslands, rock, etc), like in the false-colour image of Flevoland I've attached. Resolution is moderate: for Sentinel-1, each pixel ends up being about 4x4 m on the ground.

My cat @Poulet

Hello World!
#introduction

@nerthos @freemo Oh, absolutely, I always thought that myself, but the sad fact is, these things never work that way. The best way we've found so far is simply to support everyone, get visibility for the differences and learn to embrace them and accept them for what they are. Not try and erase the differences. For example, if you have 20 people in the room who are all the same and have the same opinions, how will you ever look at a problem from a different PoV?

Something I enjoy to do, inline with my Mush/Muxing fun is to make playlists for characters, themes, or games.

I do make these in Spotify.

Here's one for White Wolf's Geist: The Sineaters.

https://open.spotify.com/user/jllq4hxgij9l1w7uyxg7zplg0/playlist/7fk7yMna4EgTp5mSAumCf8

And here's one for a gender-swapped Lex Luthor I'm playing on a mixed universe comic/Superhero game set in mid-60s New York:

https://open.spotify.com/user/jllq4hxgij9l1w7uyxg7zplg0/playlist/7fxTzASB81bIfeqtkSugti

#sharethemusic