Shibaprasad Bhattacharya @shibaprasad@qoto.org

The Northern latitudes is where the impact of climate change, temperatures raising is showing most clearly.

The permafrost, frozen soil under very large areas of Siberia, Alaska, Northern Canada is starting to melt, releasing a lot of water in the Spring (with floods being worse), buildings badly affected by softer soil underneath their foundations.

Gas and Oil pipelines with hundreds of kilometers lengths are built on those regions, and can be damaged by shifting soils. Major leaks can result.

The melting permafrost also leads to ancient vegetation in it starting to rot, and releasing vast quantities of CO2 and other gases, as well as noxious rotting smells.

Saw a really good report on the Washington post on this subject :

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climate-environment/climate-change-siberia/

Hi Friends,
The Mercury transit has begun.Remember the next time mercury travels across the face of the sun (from the earths perspective ) will be on 2032.so dont miss this journey.it goes on for about 5.5 hours, so you can tune in when your free.

If you own a telescope with appropriate sunfilter, you can watch the transit.its visible from Europe,parts of west Asia, Americas,Africa, Atlantic & pacific ocean.
If you can't see it,dont worry NASA has you covered with SDO lives.The solar dynamics observatory would be doing live broadcasts,link down here
https://mercurytransit.gsfc.nasa.gov/2019/
Happy watching :)

There is a very special place in hell for any monster who would tie up a dog and abandon them.

A pet is for life!

Man this one made me cry...

https://cheezburger.com/9581829/artist-creates-heartfelt-story-titled-good-boy

Hi all, subjects of the STEM community; My name is Abhijith. I've a degree in Mechanical Engineering, my interests are in Mechanical Design, System Dynamics & control. I also study language, words, speech and its applications and effects. I'll be writing about my experiments and understandings of these and above all looking forward to learn, engage in discussions and contribute to the community for a better world. #introduction #stem

The policy comes at the time when Twitter is facing flak for turning a blind eye to casteist and communal discourse on their platform.

https://www.thequint.com/news/india/mastodon-introduces-policy-against-casteism-open-source-micro-blogging-platform

Janna Levin's heartbreaking, heartwarming story about the finite and the infinite possibilities of the universe and, like always, of love.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/08/16/life-on-a-mobius-janna-levin-moth/

All my new Indian friends who found their way here this week (and others).

Dont forget to do two things to help you get some followers:

1) write a post about yourself, include as many hashtags as you ca think of along with the #introductions tag and a paragraph or two. I will reboost these

2) Go into your profile settings and opt-in to the proile directory. This ensures people can find you. It also helps if you add the same tags from your introduction post to your description in your profile. These tags help index you in the profile directory

3) Stay active and post interesting stuff (and some stuff relevant to STEM). If you do then on friday I will share your account in Follow Friday and help get you more followers as well.

For those of you who missed the announcement from the @freemo account just wanted to reiterate it here.

In honor of our new Indian friends we added two new emoji to the server.

Also if anyone has any emoji they want added, even if its just for personal use (like a monogram of your name or a picture of your own face, anything) we can add it. Just send a 50kb or less PNG image to @freemo and it can be added.

@ngaravind @Gargron @BhavanaVarun @Mastodon Here's a regional break-down. Source : internetshutdowns.in

What a huge spike at #QOTO. 723 new users in less than a week.

All the new STEM posts I'm seeing popping up are amazing and its also great to meet so many new people.

As many of you know they are largely from India and I for one amd enjoying all the new culture and perspectives they are bringing.

Its great being a part of this community and seeing it grow.

Reading Permanent record, autobiography of Edward Snowden.There is an intresting bit when he talks about Intelligence agencies & tech industries.The very belief that they are entitled to their unilateral decision making based on data,makes them apolitical as data itself is just information.The idea of harmless surveilance or surveilance for greater good?
Makes me feel vulnerable when one pours out into the digital world,someone is just calling it data & putting a label on you & uses it in a way profitable to them.Imagine tweeting feeling sad tonight after a break up & netflix suggests me Always be my may be😐 and Google suggests best shops that sell cookie dough near by.They know me too well.🙊
Its like they put a label on my feeling & advertise it."swapy is sad & would probably eat cookie dough today & watch netflix😣."
The otherside to this is the assumption that since I posted it, I gave them permission to use this data.But do most people even read the license agreement or data usage policies?People just click accept.I didnt agree to sell my sadness 😑.These tech companies are merging all the time.Google has taken over so many that google knows more about me than I do.Its like If I die, the google me would go on living, inactive till they archive me.creepy digital existance?

This book is a gem.Especially for people from a country like India where the Data protection laws are virtually non existant.

@shibaprasad First, I won't consider myself a master in coding with python. But, here is my approach of understanding python.
Just like learning any other languages, for me, python had some "WHYs". Firstly, I am pretty passionate and fantasized about Machine Learning and Python seems to have good ground base for all ML and AI applications. Second reason is the Python's deployment on web development. If you're learning python, you probably know about it, already.

Learning any language needs certain approach, you may dive yourself in books. Or, there are already enough resource available on internet for anyone to master it.

In simple way, you just need to have some kind of passion or excitement to learn not just Python, any other PLs.

@shibaprasad I wouldn't say im a master at python, but I use it and I'm a good programmer in general...

As for how I learn it.. well there are two parts to learn for programming to me:

1) The theory - this part is completely disconnected from a language, you can, and often should, do this in psuedocode when working with it in its pure form

2) The language / platform technicals - This is stuff like syntax, and what posix means or how some bytecode is defined or whatever. This is the concrete part

They are both equally as vital, #1 is usually neglected among many programmers in my opinion and it really hurts their abilities when this is the case.

As for how I learned, well #1 was mostly from books and then later peer-reviewed studies coupled with any internet resources I could find (a lot of IRC chat rooms too).

#2 is usually from example code snippets and API documentation and, depending ont he quality of those two, perhaps a lot of trial and error. But this half is less using books, for me, and more just digging in and coding and just reading the technical documentation as you do.

Mastodon social adds policy against casteism as more Indian users join

Hundreds of users opened accounts on mastodon social last week, many of them accusing Twitter of casteism.

https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/mastodon-social-adds-policy-against-casteism-more-indian-users-join-112064

For the love of windows and reading nooks.

Interesting fact of the day: despite the moon only being 1/4th the diameter of the earth it is a whole 1/80th the mass! But in terms of volume it is 1/50th the volume.

People don't realize how the relationship between diameter and volume is non linear. So it creates these very unexpected differences, especially at large scales.

#Space #science #moon #IFOD