Gregory @gregory@qoto.org

I cannot even begin to imagine the reasons why Orthonevra flies have chaotic wavy lines in their eyes. But that someone gave a toddler the blueprints and a marker sounds about as good as anything else.

#diptera #insects #photography

I very recently learned that the term “boycott” comes from someone’s actual name: Charles Boycott. Boycott was an English land agent who tried, in 1880, to collect unpayable rents from Irish peasants on behalf of an English aristocrat landlord. When he failed to collect the rents, he tried evicting the tenants. The Irish Land League responded with a campaign to ignore Boycott’s orders and isolate him socially and economically.

They not only ignored his eviction orders and threw manure at his process servers, but refused to deliver his mail or sell him food.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boycott

It was pretty effective—the British government eventually had to deploy a thousand soldiers (naturally, because the state works for the propertied class and none more than the 19th century British state) at a cost of some £10,000 to harvest £500 worth of crops. Boycott had to be evacuated by the soldiers, who even had to drive him out, as no locals would agree to drive his carriage out of the region.

Imagine being cancelled so hard that your name becomes permanently associated with getting cancelled.

Well I am absolutely beside myself with excitement to discover #mosstodon & #lichensubscribe!

Here are my humble contributions, some #Umbillicaria, #Bryum, #moss encrusting a chunk of former pengiun and #Xanthoria from Casey Station, Antarctica 🇦🇶

"89 years have passed since Thomas Parnell (...) wanted to demonstrate to the students the liquid nature of pitch. When it is cold, this material is so hard it could be hammered; nonetheless it is still a liquid. Now, to show that a material is liquid, there is nothing better to pour it into a funnel to see it drip. In fact, the pitch really does that: however, a little slower than the liquids we are used to. Today those students (who in the meantime we presume graduated, besides those as dense as the pitch) have seen just 8 drops falling, with the patient yet incessant rate of a drop every six-twelve years.
Mainstone took charge of the experiment on his 2nd day of work, in 1961, and today still waits to see his first drop fall: the poor man was never present when it happened.
Unfortunately, even if a drop takes a few lustra to form, it only takes 1/10 of a second to fall - 3 billions times less than what it takes to become a drop. The probability of catching the moment in which the drop falls are quite low, especially if you think that people have other things to do - sleeping, taking a shower, combing their hair and go out to dinner with their friends, presumably laughing if some of them complains of how boring their job is.
Thinking he was clever, in the '90s Mainstone installed a webcam in front of the funnel, to record all day and night and finally assist to the moment a drop falls, if not live, at least on streaming.
But destiny had been twice as cruel with this man.
First, causing a malfunction to the camera exactly that night in 2000 in which the drop number 8 met its fate and fell from the exit of the funnel. Then, allowing a camera, at last, to record the moment a drop succumbed to the law of gravity, and eventually fell.
But not in Brisbane.
Instead, exactly on the other side of the globe: in Oxford, where in 1944 an analogous experiment to the Australian one was set up.
The 70-years-old Mainstone, however, does not surrender; he has already found among his colleagues of Queensland someone who, after his death, will keep following the experiment."

- Marco Malvaldi, "L'infinito tra parentesi"

Translation by me, because apparently this book has not been translated in English so I apologize for any eventual mistake. It's 1:23AM, I'm tired but I truly wanted to share this piece from a book I'm loving. I can't wait to finish it so I can write a decent review. It's truly a pity that we don't seem to have an English version of this book.

#sciencecommunication #scicom #marcomalvaldi #malvaldi #book #bookclub #chemistry #physics #reading

One of the best feedback comments I've ever gotten? It came from my kid, who said that this test output looked like "Unicorn Barf"

#datavis #DataVisualization #CreativeCoding #parenting

It's much cheaper and easier than you think to start your own server on here.

If you use "managed hosting", it means the hosting company does all the techy stuff like installation, upgrades and maintenance.

The cheapest Mastodon server through managed hosting costs around 8 US dollars a month.

I've done a website all about using managed hosting at:

➡️ https://growyourown.services

...and here's a long article about making your own Mastodon server:

➡️ https://growyourown.services/making-your-own-mastodon-server-in-10-steps

#Mastodon #Fediverse

The rules for vis.social have changed to not allow any AI-generated images... but I'm literally writing an academic paper right now about AI applications to VIS (including ethical implications), and a rule like this prevents even sharing this kind of research. This seems like a pretty... abrupt and sweeping decision? @kristinHenry @darth_mall is there a place for public conversation on the server to discuss rule changes like this? #dataVis #visSocial #dataViz

https://vis.social/about/more

Love this new community paper in @PLOSBiology "The benefits of contributing to the citizen science platform iNaturalist as an identifier" https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001843

#iNaturalist #CommunityScience #CitizenScience HT @npariente

Hello #Fosstodon, from your friendly neighborhood #OpenSource #GeographicInformationSystem

#OSGeo

Please boost this post if you see it! It will help my new Mastodon server federate with other servers to get us all connected. Thanks! #fediverse #mastodon

I have a variety of #tutorials posted on my website (https://peter-stewart.github.io/posts/) on a variety of topics, including a series on classic ecological #models in #Stan and #RStats, an #occupancy model which handles spatial autocorrelation using a #GaussianProcess, and a variety of useful Windows batch files for dealing with #CameraTrap images.

Here is a quick #thread 🧵 with links to the individual posts:

1/n

#BayesianStatistics #Ecology

This woman, who has done a great deal of good in her life, deserves better than this. She has been a wonderful activist for equal rights as well as science and deserves some support.

I rarely share go fund me pages, but this one seems worth sharing.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/shields-up-nichelle-nichols

⛵ Help climate scientists by transcribing weather data from old ships' logs

https://boingboing.net/2019/07/10/old-weather-is-good-weather.html

#climate #weather #science #OpenData #CitizenScience

🐦 RT: @juliesquid@twitter.com

So heartened by the responses to this piece, and thankful for the people and communities making #opensource and science welcoming. Super motivated and focused on kindness in 2020 #rstats #openscience #opendata

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/open-software-means-kinder-science/