Notices by Albert Cardona (albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz)

To find the subject of my PhD in the garden pond at my very Cambridge college, that made my day.

Planaria, genus Schmidtea, swimming near the surface:
http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/270690367

#iNaturalist #flatworms #planaria #Pembroke1347

@jonny Nobody gets blamed for hiring the cloud.

@DavidSD

More alarming: "about half of all CO2 from burning fossil fuels ever emitted was emitted over the last two decades or so" https://albert.rierol.net/tell/20210407_two_centuries_of_global_warming_warnings.html (and also: "Half of all plastics ever made were produced in the last 13 years leading to 2017".)

In other words, it's us, our very lifestyle, that contributed most of the damage. Not the people from the 50s, or the 60s, or the 70s, not even those of the 80s. But us, over the last two decades.

Hanna Ritchie runs the numbers: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

#GlobalWarming #CO2 #ClimateChange

@afewbugs Indeed. Have read enough scifi as a child that the fungal food factories of Trantor’s Mycogen district seemed inevitable, and living now my childhood’s future I am disapointed synthetic foods still fall so short of expectations. I love cheese yet I am appalled at the reality of dairy and meat production. As a biologist I am convinced there aren’t any conceptual barriers to manufacturing nutritionally excellent and pallatable foods, only engineering and cultural ones.

@afewbugs As a kid my sister asked our mom in which factory is milk made, and my mom, daugther of a farmer, took her to see a dairy farm. Came back horrified and didn’t drink milk for weeks.

Most of us have grown too detached from the land and food production. Working a tiny allotment is my own minimal way to keep my own kids grounded on the realities of food and farming.

Today. January 30th, I spotted a bumblebee, a solitary bee that could have been a large mining bee (Andrena), and a drone fly (Eristalis). In Cambridge, UK. Snowdrops, Crocus and other plants have been in flower for at least a week. Present-day England is trying hard to emulate the climate of the South-East coast of the Iberian peninsula.

#GlobalWarming #ClimateChange

@Daojoan

"The professional class likes to pretend they’re not part of this fight. Lawyers, doctors, engineers — they think their degrees and salaries put them on the other side. But they’re workers too, just with fancier titles. Their jobs can be automated or outsourced just like ours. Their debts can crush them just like ours. Their children face the same bleak future as ours."

Well said.

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