requiem @requiem@qoto.org

@trinsec I have, but I wouldn't say I really achieved fluency? I've grown up around Spanish speakers, so I'm familiar enough with the language to understand it, but I can only say basic words/phrases. I also learned French for the first five years of my schooling, so while I was almost "caught up" to my age group at that point, after that, I switched schools and couldn't continue, tragically. I've also tried, independently, to learn German, Esperanto, Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic.

I don't know if I'll ever try French again, mostly because the rigidity of Parisian French stresses me out? The idea of having an organization that tells you whether your words are "proper" or not is just the opposite of appealing. But I'd like to give Scots Gaelic another go, Esperanto is pretty easy, and eventually I'd like to learn Hebrew.

@trinsec That's pretty cool. Do you switch your thinking language frequently?

I've been monolingual for most of my life, but I also don't believe I think in coherent sentences, so I'm not as familiar with this experience.

@trinsec The difference between what you said ("It's more useful for live updates from companies. Or to contact their customer support.") and what I said ("Anytime someone's institution is hiring, they tend to do a little shoutout mentioning the opening on twitter, and will sometimes offer to do recommendations for anyone who asks.") lies in the source of the information. Companies (as in, corporate accounts) posting job offerings are desperate for new blood. They will typically be advertising base, entry-level positions, sometimes, or more likely a higher-level position with high-level requirements that they *must* cast a wide net to fill. They won't advertise every position.

Meanwhile, an individual academic at an institution is better aware of both the job offerings at their institution *and* the culture of that place. The positions that aren't reported through corporate twitters, but rather circulated internally, can easily be publicized by an individual academic. If it's a job with a good culture, their mention of it is a marker of a good culture for their mutual follows: If you enjoy that person's demeanor and manner, you will probably fit into the culture of that institution. Personal recommendations for those positions are often also extremely critical, especially from current employees.

Re: sign: my bad, I hadn't actually looked at your profile. Busy day this morning. Do you have a sign language you prefer, out of curiosity?

@trinsec I think it's a matter, like most things on the internet, of knowing where to look. I have a twitter also, though I don't have my name on it / use it much these days, and once you find the academic circles it becomes pretty plain to see, and it's actually pretty neat in my opinion.

For instance, Black Birders Week set off a chain reaction of "Black in STEM" weeks for every imaginable discipline. Saw a lot of really good posts made in chemistry, astronomy/astrophysics, physics, bio, marine bio, etc. Lots of resource-sharing, the likes of which ought to make open science proponents proud, and a *lot* of job postings. Anytime someone's institution is hiring, they tend to do a little shoutout mentioning the opening on twitter, and will sometimes offer to do recommendations for anyone who asks.

My problem is that I don't really trust twitter, I value data privacy and I don't like being served personalized ads, nor being constantly informed of the most stressful things happening in the world. So I plan to maintain both, at some point, but I'm not at a stage in my studies yet where I'm really "ready" to put my name & credentials on twitter.

Re: Sign languages, that's super neat! I will probably look into International Sign when I'm done with level 4 of my ASL course (hopefully this summer). When did you start learning? I've only been studying for a little over a year.

Morning reading: Politics + alternative therapies for addressing antibiotic-resistant bacteria

- Discussion of the PASTEUR Act, an attempt to change the way pharma companies are paid for drugs, to incentivize societally-important medicines over selling more individual units
- Phage therapy, both natural and synthetic phages, to target specific bacteria
- Antimicrobial peptides, which also target specific bacteria

Overall, incredibly pleased, because I knew this was an issue, but much of the buzz around antibiotic-resistant bacteria ends up leading to doomsaying rather than solutions.

https://gizmodo.com/scientists-are-looking-beyond-antibiotics-to-stop-the-d-1846184160

@FailForward I think part of the issue is: How are you planning to publish/share it? If you're not planning to *monetize* it, that's going to remove a lot of your issues, but not all.

How big are your "extensive quotes"? The other primary concern I would have is "Are you making a significant enough portion of the work available when it *should* be locked behind a paywall/purchase?" Because I know that's usually illegal.

@trinsec Thanks! And yes, haha, it's very smart - but at the same time, I really need something that will show up in search results. Tragically social media is basically required for academics in the 2020s, so I have to engage at least a little. I've seen some totally batshit studies about how significantly birdsite posts impact the readership/usage of academic papers. Plus, employers get suspicious if nothing shows up on a web search.

ASL is super fun! Most of my peers are taking it to get their interpreting cert, but I just want to communicate with it. Do you know any sign languages (or other languages)?

Hi, I'm going by Requiem. I'm in school studying bio/medicine at the moment, and wishing I could study physics too! This account is my first venture into professional social media, so I'll probably actually put my name on it later, but for now I'm using a pseud.

I like sharks, marine biology, video games, and the color blue. I'm learning American Sign Language at the moment, and hope to pick up some other languages later.

Wild to think that we're almost a full year since things started locking down en masse. I was mid-semester, we were sent home for spring break and then told not to come back for a month. I haven't been back to campus since.

I miss being able to do things in the classroom, and I know lockdowns are for a good reason - one of my profs and one of my classmates have both gotten COVID in the past year, and those are only the ones I know about. Still wild.

@robertwgehl I know a little about this! I hate fullscreen apps so I go to great lengths to contain them, haha.

Possible solutions:
1. If someone screenshares, Zoom's default setting is to make your whole zoom window fullscreen.

If you don't want this, open your zoom app, click on your icon/profile in the top right, click Settings > Share Screen. At the top of this window you should see "Window size when screen sharing:" which has 3 options - Fullscreen, Maximize, and Maintain current size. The "Maintain current size" option will prevent your app from resizing itself when others screenshare.

2. I don't know if this setting is default, but in Settings > General there's a "Enter full screen automatically when starting/joining a meeting" option? You may want to make sure that's turned off.

@ambulocetus Oh, I see, that's interesting! They seem really excited about this, it's good to see.

Since I sent that update, I've done a little more with the help of friends. The image of bushes turned out to be a link in binary, to another youtube video, which had morse code on the audio and a QR code on the video. The QR code led to an image of symbols and numbers on a 5x5 grid, and the morse code is a weird string of numbers/letters we're not really sure what to do with yet. The alphanumeric code on the back of the paper that the channel owner reads out loud turned out to be hexadecimal bytes, which translated to another youtube video, where there's a video track of a "snaking" string of letters in alternating red and green, and a five minute long voiceover of a computer voice reading out letters.

I was, at first, really frustrated by the length of the video, but now that I know it's a fan of a youtube channel specifically devoted to codes and other "rogueish" things, that makes significantly more sense. They probably wanted to make it tedious on purpose to waste more time.

Here are the other two videos we uncovered, if you're curious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWlYuAj8d1M&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN6EpO1ITBM&feature=youtu.be

Truthfully not sure if I'll do more, transcribing from the five minute video is extremely tedious, but it was really fun to go through this much. Thanks for sharing!

@canmekik If the course is asynchronous, live events may be hampered somewhat? The people who take those courses tend to be people who are very busy or unpredictably so. What sort of interaction do you want to prioritize, and what's the motivation for it? ex. Is it important to have face-to-face contact? Do you want to facilitate discussion on topics, do you want to try to help them learn...?

@ambulocetus So what I can tell so far - again, primarily working on the braille at this time - is that it seems to link to a URL. There's two slashes and a .co, and the second line of braille is a file extension. Braille made this kind of tricky because, again, it can be hard to distinguish from symbols alone whether something stands for a letter or a number, but braille has an answer to this: There are symbols that indicate whether the following symbol is a letter or a number.

It *seems* like the person who wrote this tried to use those, especially in the last line - I'll attach my chickenscratch MS Paint just for the hell of it - but it comes down to a matter of "can I trust that this person actually has a full understanding of Braille as a language" - and being that they flashed braille letters (used for blind/partially sighted people) one letter per frame, that kind of indicates "maybe not?"

So I did some trial and error, came up with this url: https://i.ibb.co/ypr7Wp4/BushMsg.jpg so it actually leads somewhere, and that's nice. The colors are slightly eye searing so I'm having trouble looking at it long enough to parse it, but hey, image get.

Now, the numbers and letters at the end seem to be encrypted via Enigma Machine, maybe? I've tried to decode it other ways but no dice. Problem is that I don't yet know what settings need to be on the enigma machine for it to decode the right way. Have to imagine those settings can be learned from the bush image.

@ambulocetus I've been working on it between classes, I'll let you know when I've got something coherent!

So far: Noticed braille flash on the screen, went frame by frame to transcribe it, but need to translate it (hard to tell if letters or numbers were intended, trial and error), also need to transcribe the number/letter code towards the end of the video.

@ambulocetus Is this your vid? Just curious.