A cranky biologist who means well. My hobbies include long walks off short piers and anything science related.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • I finally got a widget I modeled in OpenSCAD to print correctly in my resin printer. The shape is such that supports were really challenging.

    It’s interesting to me because I have graduated from the ‘tchotchkes’ phase of printing into the realm of making functional parts that further my other projects.

    Trying to get Cthulu’s tentacle-beard to print correctly was a good exercise, but designing and printing a useful part feels like a real step up.


  • I meditate as part of a dedicated yoga practice. When I am doing a group practice, i arrive early and perform a physical warm up and then spend ten minutes in a seated meditation before the class begins. It makes a huge difference in the quality of my workout to get my mind firmly rooted in the immediate experience.



  • Back when Perl was the language of choice for bioinformatics, I found a huge performance boost pre-processing large (~1Tb) text files using built in unix tools like sed and awk with regex. So while it might take me a full hour to peck out the correct incantation, the task would then run in an hour, compared to four hours or more for the same task using Perl.

    So many pipes…







  • That’s a reasonable design. The result would be interesting and may raise more questions than it answers. That is a good thing.

    I don’t think this design would conclusively prove they were engaging in abstract communication, but that would take many experiments of similar scope.

    A sceptic could say the unconditioned group reaction was a result of social awareness of the reaction of the conditioned crows. Sort of a collective freak out based on the immediate reaction of the marked individuals.

    Regardless, I hereby tender my application to be colony manager of the research group. Murder Manager is the title I would choose.




  • This is why I may never be able to fully repair my relationship with my religious father after my own journey out, because I love him too much to undermine the belief that sustains him as an 87 year old.

    My own journey out has been incredibly painful and challenging but that is MY life path, not his. He stuck with my mother for 25 years to the very end after her Parkinsons diagnosis and he got to watch her choke to death on some food at the end.

    I really believe my father doesn’t need the religion to be that good and faithful, because he is just basically made of good stuff. But I will never attack his faith even though in my heart of hearts I find the foundations of that faith to be risible. What would be gained? What would it say about me if I did?