tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

@kjhealy “Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard AI made at camp”

I’ll add some personal bonus information to why I’ve come to think opening a git issue is peer review.

I started my PhD by beginning to develop little software/hardware tools by myself. I could “finish” them off and get a publication out of it (actual academic currency) and leave it at that, as happens ever too often.

Yet, I believe that we (the scientific community) need fewer projects, that are (1) better maintained, (2) with a larger community and (3) better adoption. I think this is crucial to ensure not just future reproducibility, but also that skills we researchers acquire (and learned how to use a piece of software is a skill that takes valuable time) will benefit us for much longer.

So what I decided, instead, I re-aligned, and decided my efforts were better spent contributing to existing projects that were *almost* what I needed, but not quite. Rather than committing code, I’ve written countless detailed feature requests and bug reports, spending countless hours coming up with minimal reproducible examples to help the developers pin down issues. I’ve worked closely with a number of project maintainers improving their projects (at least I think so) without contributing a line of code.

I think it’s the best decision I could possibly have made. It means the software that is already used widely (or that I think will be) improved, and personally I have had so many great interactions because of it. But there is no formal way this adds *anything* to my CV - grant applications, job applications are completely unaffected by what I consider some of my most important contributions to science as of now.

Dark matter glowing in the Galactic Center? After a multitude of tests & methods, a large group of us previously working independently got together to robustly check claims that the best models prefer dark matter. We find that the best diffuse models attribute the excess emission to be associated with the population of stars in the Galactic Center, a conclusion that is robust to many different choices of masking the Galactic plane & point sources. #ParticlePhysics

➡️ https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05449

In the same article where he admitted that he still doesn't have a plan for North Carolina's farm future after two decades in the job, my opponent found a new villain to blame for our state losing so much farmland:

Solar panels!

(The article: https://www.carolinajournal.com/stakeholders-launch-initiative-aiming-to-protect-ncs-agricultural-future/)

🇪🇺 There's a petition to the EU asking for a European wealth tax to finance the social and climate transition and help countries hit by climate change.

Initiated by Marlene Engelhorn und Thomas Piketty, among others.

💸 Many people want a tax like that and so this could be a success.

🔢 France has already reached the threshold of signatures.

Germany is close but in many countries more signatures are needed.

See https://eci.ec.europa.eu/038/public/#/screen/home/allcountries

✍️ Share, and sign!

#TaxTheRich

https://www.tax-the-rich.eu/

None of us need reminding, of course, but others do. Please share.

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/donald-trump-president-nuclear-weapons-danger-20240719.html

Every year, the worst social product design decision in a generation rears its ugly head. This time it's JD Vance's turn to be bitten by the fact Venmo transactions and friends list are public by default. 🤦🏾‍♂️

https://www.wired.com/story/jd-vance-venmo/

Hey #opensource folks - sounds like some of you have forgotten how to disagree in public spaces and forums by challenging ideas without attacking people or remembering why codes of conduct were created in the first place.

Cut. It. Out. We do, in fact, talk, and know each other.

I predict this will be one of the last elections before both U.S. political parties are forced by climate-related economic factors to make climate a serious issue. The economy has been shielded to an extent by insurers, who are rapidly learning to take climate effects seriously. See: withdrawal of insurers from Florida home insurance market.

As for the GOP: Even authoritarian states need a biosphere to exist. They'll have to get real eventually, if in power.

#climate #politics

The International Society for Bayesian Analysis tells me Statistical Rethinking has won the 2024 DeGroot Prize for its contributions to "statistical inference, decision theory and statistical applications". This is huge honor especially given the previous winners who have influenced me so much. Book details: https://xcelab.net/rm/

“Two people who were wounded at Trump's rally are in the hospital and one person is dead.

Trump didn't visit the hospital or the family of the man who was killed.

He went golfing.

Nothing more needs to be said.”

Via \ Eric Foltz #USAPolitics #cdnpolitics

What am I doing online right now? Well my doctor says I should do more activities that raise my heart rate.

Forgetting things when you are a certain age is normal 🙂I never remember what I had for lunch yesterday and I'm fine with that.

But I vividly remember a lot of stuff from when I was like 2 years old up to about my 20s and it's a little bit more poignant when I think I've forgotten something from that period ...

Yesterday I was talking to a friend from school whom I'd known since the early 80s. I mentioned another friend from the same school that I'd met in the early 90s (but who I hadn't known at school) and this friend said something like "What do you mean? He was in the same class as you!"

I was dumbfounded. Had I known he was my classmate when I met him in the 90s? Or had we not recognized each other at all? All I remember about him was from meeting him in the 90s. Nothing about knowing himi from the 80s.

So I contacted this other friend. He said that he hadn't known me before the 90s even though we'd gone to the same school (it was a big school ...)

You can't imagine how relieved I felt 🙂 I had not lost a chunk of my childhood memories after all.

It later turned out that my first friend had confused the other one with somebody else who had the same name ... But for a while there, I really wasn't sure if I was losing chunks of memory or if my friend was wrong or if something else was going on.

It's funny the things we cling to 🙂

Hey, remember ALF?
Well the kid from ALF was just killed by Climate Change!
Boy, if only the 1980s knew how things would turn out....

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/benji-gregory-alf-child-star-dies-suspected-heatstroke-car-arizona-sis-rcna161353

#ALF #ClimateCrisis #BenjiGregory

The Netanyahu Government kills 90, wounds 300, in an attempt to kill 2 terrorists.

Let me repeat that: For the chance to kill 2 terrorists, The Netanyahu Government has approved a JDAM bombing which kills 90 and wounds 300.

Not a single country in the democratic world would allow these losses. No country would view this as compliant with the laws of war, so why are we turning a blind eye to the war crimes of the Netanyahu Government?

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/13/middleeast/mawasi-deif-israel-hamas-gaza-intl

Det sprids en uppgift om att 54 % av Nationell samlings (RN) väljare beskriver sig själva som rasistiska. Källan är denna, och alternativen som räknats ihop är "plutôt" och "un peu" rasistisk.
Övr. alternativ att välja på var: "pas très" och "pas du tout". https://www.cncdh.fr/sites/default/files/2024-06/CNCDH_Rapport_Racisme_2023.pdf

Did this animation of the Crab pulsar nebula about a year ago. I used all of the data from the Chandra archive that I could scrounge up to make the most complete animation I could. Most of the frames do not overlap the entire image, giving it a patchy appearance.

A version of it is on the NYT today. They missed me in the credits, but I'm told they've been informed of that. Gift article link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/science/space/chandra-videos-supernova-explosions.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6k0.65Q6.bRjgEbMjyrCI&smid=url-share

BREAKING: U.S. phone giant AT&T confirmed Friday it will notify millions of consumers about a fresh data breach that allowed cybercriminals to steal the phone and text records of "nearly all" of its customers, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

AT&T confirmed the breach was linked to a data theft at cloud data giant Snowflake. AT&T said the data breach affects at least 110 million AT&T customers.

More: https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/12/att-phone-records-stolen-data-breach/

The Kremlin prides itself on being master trolls, but only someone with a terrible sense of humor could pursue this: Russia’s Prosecutor General is ordering bookstores to stop selling a novel about a zombie apocalypse spread by an infected mouse that escapes a lab making an everlasting life serum for Putin. https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0ddk9FhRo6zMDN7b8zUwGWgF6RW4LhQjeuVWc7B77dajE7dcPM3BaqsdAaWMTTNpql&id=1329192159