spinflip @spinflip@qoto.org
PhD student working with visible-light photoswitches, supramolecular chemistry, NMR spectroscopy. Musician. Some politics.
Joined Aug 2018
Spent today hanging with relatives, and ended up going to a German beer festival with my 93yo grandfather. I honestly find it hard to deal with the idea of how old he is: he's healthy (if a very slow walker), pretty sharp mentally, and full of stories like going to French Algeria before shit got wild or wandering around a stable, unified Yugoslavia. I really enjoy talking to him, but there's such a gulf between our life experiences that it can feel like hard work to find common ground
spinflip
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Friendly reminder: In a world where so many people are cruel for the sake of it, the most punk thing you can do is to be kind without expecting anything in return.
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really for me the unforgivable thing Twitter did was to shut down Vine; that was a legitimate popular novel artform and they killed it
@dulcet @sampo @Demo318 not absolute surrender, but without the plausible threat of violence noone is going to take your ideas seriously enough to open a discussion. It's no coincidence that workplace rights and conditions in the West began to collapse the moment it became clear that Eastern bloc socialism was on its way out, and there was no longer a realistic threat of violent revolution.
@kara@witchcraft.cafe I'd kind of love to see a mod go full Tarkovsky: fill the game with threatening and oppressive environments and have enough weird shit to keep you on edge, but there's no actual danger and no ending
@realmattseymour hey! As a former on-campus dweller: assuming you're aware of the terabytes flowing through the student DC++ filesharing network, do you a) ignore it, b) try to shut it down, or c) look for someone to set you up with an account?
(bonus option: d), you're the one running it)
@Demo318 @dulcet @sampo People have different material interests. Sometimes those interests are diametrically opposed.
In my case, interests like "being able to retire one day" and "having a livable climate in the future" are opposed by powerful individuals. If those individuals aren't willing to step aside and surrender, I'm not really sure how violence can be avoided.
@sampo has this ever not been the case? Dehumanisation and political violence against the underclasses is a staple of every democracy I can think of. Rhetoric calling for violence against those with the ability to object is certainly increasing, but calling for violence against opponents is hardly new.
@Liberty4Masses mate, you're trying to make a point by drawing a Venn diagram from two concentric circles
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Seems like my #VerticalGardening is working... spinach, cabbages, lettuce and 2 tomatoes (just to experiment). The fertility is replenish by #composting kitchen scraps from an increasing amount of neighbors, which I plan to repay in food.
That's just a test, if it works properly I expect my yard walls to be covered by fall =D
@Liberty4Masses please tell me more about these mythical poor people who have any level of control over bourgeois governance
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thinking about how the real tragedy of the common was, of course, enclosure and the mass privatisation of shared land. I think you can look at the transition from somewhat collectively controlled fora and email threads to a handful of massive corporatised social media sites in a similar sense.
@drewfer I'd guess so, but which advances in particular? I'd guess it's most likely to be linked to onboard data storage and processing, but have no real evidence to support that
@Tsunachi well, I'd say it's probably non-trivial to put a nuclear reactor-driven high power radar setup into space. SAR seems to do the same job more efficiently, so I'd be interested to know why RORSAT didn't use a similar setup. I assume it was impossible at the time, but why is that so?
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it only just struck me how incorrect the concept of "self made" wealth is
it's an absolute lie
@squid tusky's not too bad tbh
@pkok ah, I think I might actually have heard of that! Right now I'm still very much focused on data collection + processing. Image recognition would be cool once I've started to stack processed TIFFs up.
I'm going to be away from my (shitty, struggling) computer this weekend, but I might have a few python Qs for you next week. My experience so far has all been in data analysis, and the whole http/API/file management sphere is completely new to me
@pkok opencv? Not at all. What is it?
And I may well do that! Is your experience in imagery, SAR, python in general, SNAPPy in particular?..
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!
@mikemcdonald83@mastodon.social I have no real understanding of the history that led to what we have access to today, bur 100% agree. Interferometry is the real mindfuck to me: I get how it works, but the tolerances on orbital parameters + onboard clock timing to get comparable data over multiple passes must be absolutely insane. How many orders of the earth's gravitational field terms do you need to know for it to be possible?
PhD student working with visible-light photoswitches, supramolecular chemistry, NMR spectroscopy. Musician. Some politics.
Joined Aug 2018
