Nick has moved to Mathstodon @internic@qoto.org

honestly it's time to hit pause on studying human cognition to figure out wtf is happening with crows

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-024-01874-6

I was rounding up papers and preprints for something and I realized something so cool which is that my last six scientific papers/preprints that have co-authors, all on software developers, are ALL with all-female author teams

I’m really proud of this article on Masonry & CSS.

It was incredibly hard to write. We spent weeks writing and rewriting, digging deeper & deeper into the issues at hand, working to make things as easy to understand as possible.

https://webkit.org/blog/16026/css-masonry-syntax/

There’s also a really cool idea about how to add another new feature to CSS Grid. (It would make it super easy to create a common article layout that’s not easy today.)

I can’t wait to hear what you think.

Incredibly cool: A community of people on Discord are salvaging Redbox kiosks from Walgreens all over the country and are reverse engineering and modifying them. Redbox OS got dumped this week and people are actively figuring out how to repurpose it:

https://www.404media.co/tinkerers-are-taking-old-redbox-kiosks-home-and-reverse-engineering-them/

Our department Data Analysis and Mathematical modelling is looking for a postdoctoral researcher. You'll be teaching a course introduction to #DataScience , assist with a number of master courses and spend 70% of your time in research on #MachineLearning methods with focus on analyzing #omics data.

More info:

https://jobs.ugent.be/job/Ghent-Post-doctoral-assistant-department-Data-Analysis-and-Mathematical-Modelling-9000/805536702/

#fedihire #Phd #Math #genomics #proteomics

The first 256 antennas of the Low-frequency part of the #SKA are there in 🤩
(movie via https://www.skao.int/en/explore/construction-journey)

Also in the same website, you can see the synchronisation dance of the SKA - MID (high frequency part of SKA) with MeerKAT dishes, in South Africa.

#astronomy #astrodon #science

Remember the first time you created that index.html, opened in the browser, and it felt like magic?
@bw wrote a free online ebook and I love the promise:
“I feel strongly that anyone should be able to make a website with HTML if they want. This book will teach you how to do just that. It doesn’t require any previous experience making websites or coding. I will cover everything you need to know to get started in an approachable and friendly way.”

https://htmlforpeople.com/

Some groups keep trying to use copyright to control our ability to access and share the law. But from New York, to Missouri, to the District of Columbia, judges understand that this is an absurd and undemocratic proposition. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/courts-agree-no-one-should-have-monopoly-over-law-congress-shouldnt-change

I cannot stop looking at this. HT @samim

@lukas @taylorlorenz

I've seen a number of instances where celebrities/youtubers/well-known people have been harangued out of the Fediverse by potentially well meaning but... militant, denizens.

It's not a nice place to be when something like posting a picture of your dinner results in 12 people calling you out on not CW'ing it.

$250 Analogue 3D will play all your N64 cartridges in 4K early next year

FPGA-powered hardware will capture CRT glow with "bespoke, purpose-built upscaler"

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/250-analogue-3d-will-play-all-your-n64-cartridges-in-4k-early-next-year/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

The great climate scientist Warren M. Washington, one of the first climate modelers in the world and a White House advisor from the Carter to W administrations, passed away yesterday at the age of 88.
#climatescience

In Mathematica you can define a function via pattern matching

f[x_]:=x+1

and freely redefine it

f[x_]:=x+2

or write a function as a lambda

f = Function[{x},x+3]

But woe betide you if you redefine it using pattern matching after defining it as a lambda

f[x_]:=x+4

as it'll substitute(!!!)

Function[{x},x+3][x_]:=x+4

In reality what happens is you accidentally do this in code to invert a 1000x1000 matrix and now a simple numerical computation becomes the attempt to invert a symbolic matrix with unevaluated subexpressions and it runs out of memory and you lose all your work...

Comet A3 Tsuchinshan-Atlas from DarkSkyLand last night, just barely showing the horizon in the lower right. In the lower left is Venus setting. The really cool thing was that I could see it with the unaided eye. Wish I could share that.

Ran the 'The Murkmire Malevolence' module tonight and we had a blast. It's a heist story a la Leverage. Took about 4 hours. Highly recommend Keys from the Golden Vault if you DM D&D.

Today: Trying to get an LLM to give me some scientific references for a specific question. Both GPT4 and Claude listed plausible-sounding references. Almost all were fake.

When called out on this, the replies were of the type "Upon further analysis, it appears the references I provided were fabricated. Here are some genuine reliable references" (...invents some more...). And Claude says something like "The articles I mentioned were not real but just for illustrative purposes." ...

:-((