iris

iris, 1 month ago to cycling

My sister and her husband took me with them to Muir Woods today for a hike while they're in the area. It was lovely, and I found the most unexpectedly awesome resources in the gift shop: I now have a literal deck of options for recreational bike rides near home and a book of walks and hikes. I can pick one at random when I don't have a destination in mind. I know it's silly but this changes so much!

#BikeTooter #SFBA

Small book titled "Urban trails [of] San Francisco" and boxed deck of oversized cards labeled "Bay Area Bike Rides Deck". The latter helpfully says it's "completely revised and updated" but does not indicate anywhere when it was updated.

thetransmitter, 1 month ago to random

What neuroscientists should know—and what they can do—about changes to BRAIN initiative funding.

By Angie Voyles Askham

https://www.thetransmitter.org/funding/what-neuroscientists-should-know-and-what-they-can-do-about-changes-to-brain-initiative-funding/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=org-social&utm_campaign=20240502-what-neuroscientists

iris, 1 month ago to random

This is a communication failure. The milk is not testing positive for the virus it is testing positive for evidence of the virus in the cows, by virtue of containing viral genetic material fragments, not intact virus. There are dozens of ways to phrase this, I'm sure, but taking the shortcut of saying grocery store milk tests positive for virus is misleading.

@NPR https://press.coop/@NPR/112328698470096046

iris, 1 month ago to random

Sticking references all over the apartment so I can do 10-20 second practices throughout the day. It took me ages to settle on a relational system between the Morse alphabet letters that (1) could be encoded in 2d space, (2) maximized cluster size, (3) avoided singletons, (4) minimized duplicate membership, and (5) fit okay on a single sheet of paper, but I really like the result. The visual mapping is helping a LOT.

Zoom of International Morse Code visual reference system. The 26 letters are organized into 5 groups: dots only, single dash, 2 dashes adjacent, 2-3 dashes separated, 3 dashes adjacent, and iambic (substrings of dash-dot-dash-dot) starting with a dash. Each group is assigned a pair of colors for dots and dashes, and they're used to encode the letters as thin and wide bars of color across the letter blocks themselves. Within each group, letters are related by dropping one character from the beginning as you move from left to right, and adding one character at the end as you move from top to bottom. At far right there is also a lookup of the numerals in Morse and the NATO phonetic alphabet (alpha, bravo, Charlie, etc.)

iris, 1 month ago to random

I REALLY need to stop waiting to eat/meal plan/get groceries until I will die of hunger if I don't eat in the next 15 seconds.

iris, 2 months ago to random

Ok what the fuck Covered California, I applied for health care coverage from April but you enrolled me for May? I submitted my paperwork at the end of March. Now we're a third of the way into April and you only now tell me I'm not actually covered this month?

iris, 2 months ago to random

Have another #Caturday. You deserve it.

iris, 2 months ago to random

Officially unemployed! Now to decide which of 17423 projects I want to work on... I have lots of things I want to print, but first I need to get the raspberry pi controlling the printer back in shape, since it managed to get into a broken state that I couldn't update or fix. There's also the CAD stage, or software projects, including IOT but also various other purposes. I have wood lying around that needs to be used. And a bunch of bike related things in progress. But I don't want to get too messy before I clear out some space by finishing some of the things that are closer to done... so organization would be a natural choice, but I really want to print some of the organizational aids, especially dividers and containers for the really awkwardly shaped items... and I'm so far behind on sewing!!

iris, 2 months ago to random

I'm having an entire identity crisis over whether to call myself a scientist if I take a job doing computer-y stuff that isn't directly science but still plan to continue in a science career in the long run. (Job remains a verbal offer that will become a formal offer when a hiring freeze ends, and yes I know how precarious that is.)

I really want the job. It's very cool supercomputer stuff, we're on the same page about it being a learning opportunity for me in hardware and a chance to mentor some other folks in software skills for a couple years, and the people and environment seem awesome, which historically has been an outsized factor for me in whether I can succeed in a role.

I'm also torn up something awful at the conferences I'm not going to get to attend, experiments I'm not going to get to help with, projects I will be stepping away from... I want to just say I'll do all kinds of science on the side, but realistically I don't think that's logistically possible. I can swing a conference or two early on, but I will quickly run out of things to contribute to the field if I'm not active in it.

I'm trying to convince myself I can do this thing I really want to do without abandoning a career I love. I feel like I've built myself a pretty positive reputation in XFEL science and a strong, flexible skill set. I think taking a detour into hardware is survivable, if I'm intentional about how I use my time. (This is mostly the distilled wisdom of a couple mentors, with my stamp of approval.) It's normal and okay to be anxious about change and uncertainty. I think this is a good choice for me, based on the information I have.

And worse comes to worst, I won't be in any more difficult a position than I am right now. I can do this.

iris, 2 months ago to random

Today's glowing success: that bucket of scripts I wrote ~8 years ago, that my former lab is still using? I met with someone to explain some internals so they can port the bash/sed/awk to python, and:

• I can still read my old code; it reads great actually
• I could tell him exactly what each regex block does and why
• the decisions I made on how to structure things were still clear and still appropriate
• my code has survived those 8 years of active development of the other program it's acting as a wrapper for
• it's been used in a bunch of publications apparently (which leads me to wonder if I'm on those papers, since this is unpunished work... otherwise I definitely need to write something up)

This has been a very nice confidence boost today.

iris, 2 months ago to random

Job update! The bad kind though. And context.

Last summer I co-wrote a grant that scored super well and looks like it'll be funded. It would fund me and a few other people full time for 5 years, and it's renewable after that. But because the government is the government, we learned today we won't have final word until this summer, and we don't have the current funding to extend my appointment past the end of this month.

I'm sitting on a verbal job offer I'm almost certainly going to take, but it won't be official until May, and the uncertainty until then is eating me alive.

I am very frustrated. I am financially able to weather a few months without a job, but I'm furious at the circumstances.

moira, 2 months ago to baking

Time for baking!

Also biking!

Because I'm gonna test the bike trailer hitch with the trailer while dough is rising for an hour. ^_^

#baking #biking #bagels #brobably

iris, 2 months ago to random

Late #caturday

iris, 2 months ago to random

Editing mmCIF files by hand feels like speaking binary to a computer. Arduous, will give you complete garbage if you're a single character off, makes you feel insanely powerful if you master it anyway, but also makes you question your life choices.

moira, 3 months ago to random

this screw sounds like my budgies nattering when they’re happy wtf xD

#maker #budgies #parakeets

iris, 3 months ago to random

Whatever is the most decadent thing you can think of, I raise you a weighted blanket fresh from the dryer. Topped with a cat. When I tell you I melted into the couch, I mean you will never be able to remove all of me from the couch or all of the couch from me.

This discovery is brought to you by spilling coffee on the blanket earlier.

MLE_online, 3 months ago to random

What do you suppose this PCB was for? I got it in a bin of stuff at a garage sale and I've never had any idea what it was supposed to be. Note: part of it was cut off before it came into my possession.

iris, 3 months ago to random

Saw a piece about LA's first trans voting center and my first reaction was, is this like when Bic invented pens 💖 for women 💖 ? (They're pink.)

But no, it's because of ID laws. Growing up with vote by mail in Oregon insulated me from all of this.

ramikrispin, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

This weekend, on Sunday afternoon non-important facts - the meaning of the YAML language abbreviation👇🏼

I always thought the YAML language abbreviation was Yet Another Markup Language, which is partially true.

The YAML language was created by Clark Evans, Ingy döt Net, and Oren Ben-Kiki in 2001. It was first named Yet Another Markup Language, as at that time, there were many other markup languages such as XML, SGML, etc. Later, in April 2002, it was renamed to YAML Ain't Markup Language.

#yaml

iris, 3 months ago to random

I'm stressing myself the fuck out trying to get my ducks in a row before my contract ends, making sure I have seen the doctor and dentist and eye doctor, spent the HSA funds, put my pre-tax public transit funds on the public transit card, moved any logins and accounts linked to my work email to my personal email, backed up anything of mine on the laptop I'll be giving back, etc

on top of finding a new job

and doing the actual work things I need to do to wrap up my current job

and having an existential crisis over the possibility of not being a scientist anymore

and a smaller crisis over my housemate moving out in a few more months and having to figure out the housing situation again but not knowing yet whether I'll be moving or where I'll be commuting to

and also I'm helping care for twins these past weeks while I'm visiting my dear friends with 9mo twins, which in retrospect may not have been great timing

and in sum,

I am mentally a compute cluster with storage at 98%, finding normally simple tasks to be somewhere between "difficult" and "sure, I can start this operation, but there's a high chance of a bad-things-chain-reaction with unexpected consequences"

iris, 4 months ago to random

He prefers to sleep on me or at least part of me. If that's impossible, he sleeps on a pillow or the back of the couch next to me. I swear the only time he's not in one of these positions is when he's playing, eating, grooming, or on the porch watching the outside. (We have an agreement -- he doesn't wander further, and comes back in when I ask, in exchange for "outdoor privileges." He's never out unsupervised.)

Same cat same pose except head now curled up facing inward.

iris, 4 months ago to random

I don’t remember what to do when my sleep meter and my fun meter are both at zero. I feel like a cranky toddler on the edge of sleep, demanding things that aren’t physically possible.