Notices by Albert Cardona (albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz)

A fascinating read, and a challenge: get your life back, make it fill your day, bring it closer to friends and family. Be present. Be you.

Technology can help you, but it can also be – it almost for sure is – the problem. Reconsider your technology use and make it work for you.

https://therealists.org/2023/04/aligning-our-life-goals-with-our-technology-use/

Thank you @_elena for spelling this out so clearly. I too shall restart my morning pages.

@alex @sibylle Last summer I was visiting a friend who had been wanting to learn to do a potato omelette for some time, since I used to make them for their family. So I asked for eggs, and a child was sent to pick them up from the chicken coop. Then I asked for potatoes, and a child again was sent to dig them up from the garden. I had brought olive oil. The whole process, done slowly, was about 40 minutes. If we were to factor the costs in hours spent looking after chickens, potatoes, and even picking and pressing olives, the cheapest part would be my time cooking. Overall, the most expensive potato omelette any of us had ever eaten. Yet delicious and, in some ways, inexpensive, as every step was woven into a particular, and deliberately chosen, way of life.

@pvonhellermannn

The Palisades fire is rather large right now:
https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2025/1/7/palisades-fire

#LosAngeles #PalisadesFire

@pvonhellermannn I happen to have lived in the area of the Palisades fire in Los Angeles. That neighborhood was built into the mountain, into what used to be brush and forest, with hills all around with more brush and forest, most often quite dry due to the nature of the climate there, and made dryer in late Autumn and early Winter with the Santa Ana winds from the East.

The houses that are burning were therefore built in a forest to begin with, and not any forest but one with Mediterranean plants, a number of which are "fire-responsive", i.e., depend on fire for their seeds to open and their saplings to grow without shade.
https://theodorepayne.org/post-fire-regeneration/

A "Los Angeles neighborhood" is not quite the definition I'd have given to the area. The deeper tragedy is one of encroachment into nature and failure of regulations to prevent that in the first place.

@aral @w3c Isn't it a bit like in the United Nations: at least they are at the table speaking to each other? Consider the alternative. Yes I know this falls very short of ideal.

@thetransmitter What a nice initiative from Prof. Liz Kirby and collaborators: to make a free neuroscience textbook. And thanks to the NSF for the funding mechanism that make this possible.

The book: "Introduction to behavioral neuroscience"
https://openstax.org/details/books/introduction-behavioral-neuroscience

(With some more initiatives like this, students will be able to stop borrowing books from the university library or downloading them from libgen. That's how to combat piracy: by making free books. Not by prosecuting students. In other words: by removing the problem – books are too expensive.)

#academia #textbooks #neuroscience

@alfiekohn The switch from punishing to nurturing doesn't seem to come naturally to modern teachers.

@alfiekohn Nice to see this spelled out:

"Many math teachers will say a community of learners like Wees describes is a fairytale classroom with no time constraints and no standards to cover. They say their jobs depend on covering all the topics on the test and helping students correct their errors, not taking days to uncover the thinking behind that error. Wees acknowledges the limitations that many math teachers struggle with, but points out the way most people teach math now doesn’t work, so it could be considered a waste of time anyway."

#MathTeacher #math #teaching

Had never received such a high number of summer student internship applications that read more or less the same: same tone, same paragraph ordering and size, same highlights of my research, same interests. And some critical words in quotes.

I can't think of any explanation other than ChatGPT. What a blight.

#academia

Counting our blessings; uncertain for how long we’ll be able to take simple things like freshly baked bread loaves for granted.
#YeastMasters #bread

@_elena The calm and clarity of a timeline where boosts are hidden and one only reads the thoughts of those one chose to follow. How little time it takes, freeing me to move on with my day, having caught up with those with whom I decided to rely on.

@dmacphee "Preprints are preprints because they’re published on a platform for preprints: It’s not synonymous with un-peer-reviewed. And the screening at good preprint servers is better quality control than exists at the worst journals.
Authors can, and often do, upload new versions of a preprint after responses to the first version, or after journal peer review."

"The quality of so many of them is so high, and the quality of so many journal reports of research so low, that I don’t think publication status is a reliable distinction."

"... the onus for not misleading the public lies in vetting a preprint before publishing a news story about it. Cautioning that it’s a preprint doesn’t really get anyone off the hook."

#ScientificPublishing

A 110-million year old mantis [1], a ~20/5-million year old mantis [2], and a mantis from our garden [3].

[1] "An exceptionally preserved 110 million years old praying mantis provides new insights into the predatory behaviour of early mantodeans", Hörnig et al. 2017 https://peerj.com/articles/3605/
[2] "A new species of mantis (Insecta: Mantodea: Amelidae) from the Miocene Amber-Lagerstätte in Mexico", Terríquez-Beltrán et al. 2022 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08912963.2022.2134782
[3] https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/179582544

#iNaturalist #Mantodea #entomology #insects #mantis

Unfortunately the really well-preserved mantis encased in amber are stashed away in private collections where nobody can study them. I can't even track where this image is from except that the specimen was sold in an auction.

#Mantodea #mantis

@mattjhodgkinson @atthenius @williamgunn @andrewdessler

Academics are many things but united is not one of them. Hence we are easy prey to single-minded top-down-run corporations.

Fall is but a whisper away. Cambridge, UK.
#Pembroke1347

Postdoc position in #Drosophila circuit neuroscience with Prof. Dr. Ilona Grunwald Kadow in Bonn, Germany
https://www.fens.org/careers/job-market/job/119839

Deadline: 27 September 2024

#PhDJobs #academia #neuroscience

Postdoc position (3 years) on mosquito physiology and behaviour, with Lena Riabinina at Durham University.
https://www.fens.org/careers/job-market/job/120059

Deadline: 22 September 2024

#PhDJobs #academia

Postdoc position on olfaction and plasticity in mice with Elisa Galiano at Cambridge University:

Intro: https://gallianolab.org/join-us/
Full ad: https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/47775/

Deadline September 10th 2024.

#PhDJobs #academia #neuroscience

@evan Might want to read Brian Martin's take on the Olympic games:
https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/00sa2.html