Happy birthday to Russian #mathematician & writer Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevski (1850-1891). Her contributions to analysis, differential equations & mechanics include Cauchy-Kovalevski theorem & the famed Kovalevski top. She was 1st woman appointed to full prof in N Europe or to serve as editor of a major sci journal. She is also remembered for her contributions to Russian literature. 🧵1/n
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#sciart #printmaking #WomenInSTEM #MastoArt #printmakersOfMastodon #mathematics
"The good news is while there’s no biological solution to such a new and dangerous virus, there absolutely are engineering and social solutions."
Julia Doubleday on living with COVID via IAQ improvements
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/learning-to-live-with-covid-means
It is easier to quote the sanitized platitudes stripped of the context of his life and work than to embody the responsibility and change he asked of us.
The New York Times covered the American Dialect Society’s word-of-the-year vote and miraculously included the winner—“enshittification”—in its unexpurgated form. | cc @pluralistic (Gift link) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/15/crosswords/linguistics-word-of-the-year.html?unlocked_article_code=1.N00.wDo9.AZPARUsRKWKl&smid=url-share
@marcel @pluralistic Nice article. This quote hits the mark too:
"while we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job"
Stop Trying to Make “Nanotyrannus” Happen! https://slate.com/technology/2024/01/nanotyrannus-dinosaur-debate-paleontology-fossils.html
I'm severely colourblind - my eyes can hardly detect red light at all.
So, working in web development, picking colour schemes is hard.
There are tools around to help you pick accessible colour schemes, but they assume that you can tell by looking that a colour is the one you want, and the only information you need the computer to calculate is the contrast ratio.
I realised I need a tool that will take the name of a colour and find a shade that gives a target contrast ratio.
Here it is: https://colourblind-palette-maker.glitch.me/
It uses the new APCA perceptual contrast algorithm and the Oklab colour space to help me find colours that people with better colour vision will interpret correctly, while ensuring there's good contrast for as many people as possible.
A brand-new version of our user interface just went live, and we're excited about it! Try it out now at https://openalex.org/
American adults! You all now have access to a FREE, 24/7 ON DEMAND TELEHEALTH system for #COVID19 and influenza so you can get prescribed #Paxlovid or anti-flu medications, any time, day or night, that you test positive.
Anyone in the US who is 18 or older can use the telehealth service to talk to a prescriber if they test positive for flu or COVID.
AND! As a special service for those who are poor, old, or a veteran, they will also ship you free COVID and flu tests if you want. Sign up in the same system.
Upside to stupidly cold temps: very cool atmospheric optics! Here's a sun pillar with a faint upper tangent arc.
It got pinker as the sun set further, but I couldn't convince myself to take my hand out of my glove to get another picture...
On January 14, 2005, the Huygens probe successfully landed on the surface of Saturn's moon #Titan
Here is a link to a video clip, as well as links to where you can download this video.
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/titan-descent-data-movie-with-bells-and-whistles/
This was one of the greatest of humankind's achievements....the first time we ever landed on an #OceanWorld.
But what did we learn? What do these images tell us?
Thread time!
Steamboat Willie in 4k, digitized from 16mm film: https://archive.org/details/steamboat-willie-16mm-film-scan-4k-lossless
@OpenAlex (#OpenAlex) has a new and friendly user interface.
https://openalex.org/
PS: The new interface is wonderfully simple and should bring this powerful tool to more users. Next time you have a research question, try it before #GoogleScholar or your other stand-bys. Or try both and compare. OpenAlex searches titles, abstracts, and full-text, and has unrivaled scope, indexing over 250m works from 250k sources.
Company runners: what are you doing differently, financially, now we have had the experience of a massive market shock, in the form of a pandemic?
Prompted by this:
"...to get through COVID individual contributors took a 10% pay cut, and the CEO took a 50% pay cut, with a sliding scale on the way up the org chart."
...from this interesting article:
https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-company-5f8759ad018e
...from this interesting weeknote!
It's funny how giving each window a dedicated title bar is considered an intolerable waste of space on a 3840 × 2160 high pixel density display, when everyone lived with that just fine when the cutting edge display was 512 × 342 with a whopping 80 pixels per inch
“Your periodic reminder that less ice at the Arctic is consistent with a weaker jet stream that allows cold air to drift down into the Great Plains.
The frigid temps you're experiencing happen BECAUSE of a warming planet, not in spite of it.” Via Dr Steve Campbell from the other place
https://twitter.com/historian_steve/status/1745920780624711886?s=46&t=4TnCHrl_NkgPDLmdROH8hA
Theoretical physicist by training (PhD in quantum open systems/quantum information), University lecturer for a bit, and currently paying the bills as an engineer working in optical communication (implementation) and quantum communication (concepts), though still pursuing a little science on the side. I'm interested in physics and math, of course, but I enjoy learning about really any area of science, philosophy, and many other academic areas as well. My biggest other interest is hiking and generally being out in nature.