kleopullin

Zeiss Axio Imager research grade upright light microscope with DIC, phase contrast, and fluorescence. It's easy to use without training if you've had at least a high school or college bio course with a real microscope. It's stable and sturdy, the lenses rotate into position with a lovely stop, the stage moves steadily, the lenses are fantastic. All the microscopy perks are there, but just the way the basics are assembled into an instrument make it a gem, from focusing the eyepieces, to focusing the image, centering the stage, aligning the beam in the optical axis, inserting prisms or filters. It reminds me of my 40 year old Husqvarna sewing machine, built solid and heavy and designed to be used with controls to be handled.

In geosciences, still many. Some leading ones: carbon sequestration, mineral resources (mining and associated environmental and political risks), origin of moon, earthquake prediction, age and Earth conditions of origin of life, magnetic reversals, mechanisms and speed of recovery from mass extinctions.

In all of these, earth scientist are likely to work across diverse size (diatom to outcrop to mountain range to solar system) and time (the lifetime of an organism, a species, an ecosystem, a biome) scales gathering data to create models. What do past carbon isotope ratios tell us, what's the size of the atmosphere. X-ray crystallography, surface area of a large copper deposit.

Geologists' datasets may be small for creating complex models, and they often are looking at unique processes, so they frequently write their own programs.

Maybe my first program in Pascal, my first programming course.

The school had never taught programming before (yeah, I'm that old), and it was a business teacher who didn't know how to program or use a Mac, and the incomplete syllabus was for a class from another school that used a Honeywell and punch cards.

The first Pascal program was to write a calculator that allowed a user to input arithmetic problems in words and get the correct answer.

>five plus seventeen

22

>two hundred fifty six divided by three

85 r 1

The professor hadn't taught us strings and the textbook Pascal was different from the Mac.

However, the school required me to maintain minimum credits to stay in a welding program I needed for a raise at work, so that by the time I realized how bad the class was, it was too late to drop.

I welded all day at school, programmed for 1-2 hours, went to class, then worked on the program all night at libraries at the UW. One of the UW students complained to a librarian about my smell from the welding; he knew I was junior college scum.

It seems ridiculous today, but it took me a week to pull it together. I sometimes cried from the frustration. I wrote everything out longhand on yellow legal pads at the UW libraries, welded 8 hours, then computer lab, and class, bus back to the UW. I was struggling in my arc welding class, too. I couldn't get the feel of striking an arc, and the men helped each other, but initially refused to help the only woman in the class.

My first solution was clumsy, but I got all the components to run, figured out reading strings, input/output, handling spelling errors. The text had a rigorous theoretical description of top down programming, and after I got the syntax and op system nailed, I used that to write an elegant and robust algorithm. I didn't realize until years later what I was doing, writing an algorithm.

Then late one night, library almost closing, I had it! Next day I entered the hand written program into a Mac at school, and it ran perfectly.

It was the solving, not the problem that was hard, and I bet most here can't imagine all the missing components I had to find for myself, but the lack of tools, prior knowledge, and information made solving it almost impossible. Today, I could Google all the help I needed for a zero-to-program in two hours, but I'd never feel the level of victory as I did that afternoon when all my classmates entered arithmetic problems into my calculator and got answers.

This is a big issue with gigwork, major underpayment for services leading to non-livable wages for workers. This is about the level, too, pennies for dollars.

I just learned about the law change, and I think it's driven in part by the low wages of Uber drivers and a recent lawsuit there.

Great, you built a unicorn on the broken backs of low wage earners, structured the unicorn to avoid your share of infrastructure taxes (social security, workmans comp, road use taxes), but could you have done it with a less destructive wage structure? Probably. The laws have to catch up.

It's a bit in response to a change in California laws. California has always more strictly enforced employment regulations, especially with regards to contractor classifications.

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/09/04/cal...

The article does specifically say "a person usually has some time," which is why I put it in quotes. There's no value to the article downgrading an urgent medical situation, and the author lists herself only as a journalist. The standard of care is urgent, ERs are equipped to give the shots. This is USA.

"An estimated 40,000 people in the United States who might not be up-to-date on vaccinations," again, I used quotes specifically because that is how it is worded, "people who might not be up-to-date on vaccinations," as it is less usual for someone to be up to date on rabies vaccinations.

The science was badly worded, as if it was copied without understanding the context, and this is a legitimate concern when the press misstates medical advice. The number is probably from the CDC information page,

"Every year, about 40,000 people receive a rabies prevention treatment called post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) because they had contact with potentially rabid animal."

CDC also doesn't say dog/cat bite or scratch, just potentially rabid animal, mostly dogs or cats.

I read the article, notices her carelessness, checked sources. There are more errors. It's badly done.

This is a badly written article, journalists should have a little science background.

"... the bats .... were carriers of a rabid and highly contagious virus."

Yes, it is a rabid virus...

"A person usually has some time before it is necessary to get the post-exposure prophylaxis vaccination."

A friend had to handle a bat in her cabin, and she was not told she had "some time" before the shots. If you've been exposed get your butt to the ER.

"An estimated 40,000

people in the US who might not be up-to-date on vaccinations

get preventive treatment for rabies after a bite or scratch from a dog or cat."

Statistically 100% of peeps aren't up to date on rabies vaccines. Vets, bat researchers, and bat house zookeepers may be up-to-date, but no one else is.

Rabies shots costs thousands of dollars, btw. Tricare, for military dependents, doesn't charge a copay for rabies post-exposure injections. My friend's insurance had something like $4000 copayment.

An article with some pictures:

https://www.ringodaigaku.com/ringo_blog/english/2018/02/02/1...

Nah, programming and computer power are still the new sequencing and microscopy.

This article is about vertebrates, though. The headline is distinctly incorrect, whatever else is happening to flying insect biomass, or even plants, the article is a survey of vertebrate decline. Vertebrates are one subphyllum of the chordates, not even the most diverse phyllum of animals. Even children know snails are animals but not vertebrates, so how does a journalist miss this.

I thought it would be a down with Lisp article, but it was like my experience with the language, omg, how cool. From that ancient introduction to Lisp all I learned was that Lisp was as close to perfection and beauty as I would get in a programming language.

Why would or could they? It's a digital print created by a computer algorithm. Computer algorithms can't own copyrights, so you can print your own.

It's printed on canvas, the AI did not paint it literally, it is digital art; it's not an actual painting.

If you wanted, you could print your own!

Purchasers of controversial artwork often chose to remain anonymous at least initially. There's nothing unusual about this, and discussing it with friends we all assumed it would sell 1) for much more and 2) to an anonymous buyer. Nothing unusual about it.

What highly valued work that requires little sophistication to produce have you seen at exhibits and auctions?

At that point in time, yes 200my earlier is a very big deal. This is a fundamental question in geology, when did life on earth begin.

This is an interesting not fully resolved debate in geology/paleontology. This is a great article that discusses some of the need for the debate, and the comments on the article in later issues name some of the other major players. I think anyone interested in the question of life in the universe outside of our own little biosphere might enjoy reading this as an intro to the debate:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1342937X1...

It's available on Research Gate, too.

This is a solid read for anyone in any field. There's a time when you have no confidence, then false confidence, then real confidence with knowledge of your own limits.

The underlying article for this post is interesting, too.

http://www.freeholdgames.com/papers/Generation_of_mythic_bio...

I'd love to have more time in the universe and the computing power to not look at the information transfer or the number of degrees of separation but to consider how those connections were formed. What could we learn about human relations by investigating the chain of connections of millions of humans? I'm certain it would give huge insights into how we could generate fictional narratives that are richer, also, but that would be the least.

I'm very sorry for your and your family's loss.

In the information age, there are so many irresponsible and incomplete bits supporting this, that or the other in as many superlatives as possible. What can a person do? I thought that VBAC was more dangerous for the mother than the newborn, for a healthy young woman, coupled with even a tiny amount of pressure this could easily lead people to make a decision they were not really comfortable with. The "sheer force of opinion surrounding ... childbirth in general" is astonishing; I agree with you here. The information age is badly curated and gives far too much weight to the inexpert opinion, imh (and non-expert) o. Mothers must give birth naturally, mothers must nurse their infants for x months, fathers must cut the umbilical cord.

All the modern medicine in the world coupled with the power of the information age can't make these decisions for us. Maybe, in the future, machine learning methods can pull relevant information out for people to counter some of the cultural pressures.

What IP are they protecting? I think the problem is there was no IP. Ever.

How many of them sold fake blood tests to real patients? I think fraud is one thing, putting up a successful facade is not quite fraud.

Well played. Now, what percentage of people were in local jails for drug possession? Pre- and post-conviction?

https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.01847 Abstract, it looks like a preprint so there should be a link to a PDF.

Really? How many insects to genetically modify the Ukraine's wheat? I, too, wonder what they're doing.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a buzz.

Yes, I should have included this in my post, it's another perfect example of bringing the theoretical to the real world view.

The DeGraef is a great text.

In Electron Microscopy, for beginners:

Bozzola and Russell, Electron Microscopy, 2nd Edition, published in 1998.

Although 20 years old in a field undergoing a revolution, the authors' method of connecting the theoretical to the (once physical, now touch screen) knobs on the instrument make it probably the best technical manual I've ever read. It's for biological EM, but the introductory chapters on the instruments are for everyone.

Transmission Electron Microscopy, materials, including high resolution, for more advanced users:

Williams and Carter, their 4 volume set, Transmission Electron Microscopy.

Photography?

Christopher James, The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes.

I agree for undergraduate math. I love math textbooks, but it never occurred to me that one reads them without doing the exercises. And yes to the other post that points out many math texts contain cumulative knowledge making picking a random topic a method from someone not doing math. Intro geology text, sure. Some math textbooks have a few core chapters, too. Generally not reasonable to struggle through a random topic in chapter 5 when its underpinnings are clearly given in the first three chapters.

In school I read all of my math textbooks, cover to cover. But, I never sat down to read them, until after doing the exercises. I go through a chapter with pencil and paper, doing all of the examples, then attempting the easy set of exercises. Then I go through the chapter, reading the text and reworking the examples, then do all the exercises. For differential equations and linear algebra this was sufficient to do the homework and ace tests. For calc I and II, I needed class also, calc III a study group helped, crystallography I worked with one other person. It's highly dependent on the topic.

Other than crystallography, I haven't taken any graduate math courses. I did work through maybe half of my mom's advanced engineering math text, and it's not overboard or harder than the first two years. The exercises are where you learn math.

My favorite manager was a new store manager at a box store I worked at while finishing my degree. I generally haven't had great tech managers. This store manager was great because he was an outstanding team player who knew the rules of the game and who identified and trusted the strengths of his employees. He didn't micromanage. Sometimes he let you fail.

As a team player, he was out on the floor during the busiest retail times. The best floor associates in retail work well with each other as team players and pass tasks around, but you have to know which other members are competent and reliable. This guy was 100% both and let you know he was another team member and available for anything; if you were running to get a forklift, you could send him to an aisle where you saw a customer looking lost, have him haul goods to checkout, grab him to help load a car.

He trusted his employees and identified and rewarded excellence. I was a customer service queen at my store, and he saw that and told me, then gave me an award for it, and a raise based on it. One time when we had an unusual customer mess-up and a cashier called me to fix it (because she knew I would do everything to make it work), I pulled a team together and got it done, but he gave just me, not my team, an award for it, when I really thought it was team work. Later I realized he was right, that the task had first required a team builder (and, yeah, I got my teammates awards, also). The few times I called him as a manager to resolve a customer issue, he just stepped in and took over, never requiring me to explain my side (which didn't matter, the customer wanted something I couldn't provide, so I got them a manager), because he not only let you do your job, he understood what his was. He paid attention. He knew who was contributing and how much.

Mostly though, if you were good at your job, he knew it, he acknowledged it through opportunities, awards, and raises in addition to telling you, and he let you do it, while he did his job.

Oh, eventually some startup snagged him.