Notices by Iris Young (he/they/she) (PhD) (iris@neuromatch.social), page 3

@timixretroplays @clusterfcku @arisummerland @akamran only on Fedi will you find a crowdsourced study of bread knife handle widths.

I guess instance migration is a good time for an #Introduction post. Hello lovely people, I'm here both as a scientific researcher and as a human being, and you can expect a range of genres of posts and interactions from me.

On the work side, I'm a computational scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the field of biological X-ray crystallography, specifically at free electron lasers. It's a glorious interdisciplinary mess, and the description I give to non-scientists is that i use my degree in chemistry to write software to do math that models the physics of experiments that we're running to learn about biology.

For fellow structural biologists: I work on crystallography data reduction software for the steps between photons hitting the detector and a merged set of structure factors. I also support XFEL experiments, both on site and remotely, and assist in post-experiment data processing as needed. My PhD focused on using simultaneous XFEL crystallography and XES spectroscopy to probe the water splitting reaction in oxygenic photosynthesis. I did a postdoc in computational methods development for cryoEM, and I'm now back to XFEL crystallography but still in methods development.

For fellow software developers: all of our work is open source and mostly under the cctbx project/repo. It's mostly python with a bunch of C++ under the hood (including some low-level stuff redundant with scipy and numpy because those weren't around yet!), plus a user-facing wxPython GUI. More recently we've done a ton of work with GPU acceleration (using Kokkos, for NVIDIA, Intel and AMD architectures) and scaling up at three different national labs' supercomputing centers in anticipation of next-gen experimental capabilities. I derive too much joy from writing bash-sed-awk monstrosities on the occasions we need them to fix an urgent problem during an experiment, and I guess I'm most proud of the fact that I somewhat understand git.

As far as hobbies, the longest-standing one is probably #coffee, followed closely by #language (s) / #languageLearning and a love of #patterns and #symmetry in various contexts. I have too many different ways of making coffee (they have overrun my coffee cupboard), but my favorite remains the classic latte, and by now I can make a better latte than I can buy. I'm trying to refresh my #Japanese and learn #Dutch and #German simultaneously/comparatively, which of course is terrible for speed of learning, but fascinating. So far I've found #ASL the most challenging but also deeply satisfying -- I only have one semester under my belt but hope to take a lot more. I studied and continue to study all the #math and #science I possibly can. Right now I seem to be pretty engrossed in #electronics, #CAD, #3DPrinting, and just generally #DIY-ing/fixing/repairing things. Other active interests include #sewing, #reading, #cooking, #bike commuting, and #publicTransit. My journeys in #aikido and #pottery are on hold but I definitely want to pick them back up when I'm not already overcommitted. I'm casually interested in #neurophilosophy, #neuropsychology, #neurodivergence and #neuroscience. I've taken one course in neurophilosophy and can read literature in the rest, with effort.

On a personal note, I'm trans and nonbinary and very open about it -- I transitioned back when I had to explain what that meant. I've retired from some forms of community engagement and support but I'm very happy to answer any questions I can about the US legal and medical landscapes, available resources, policy and terminology best practices, or whatever you know you shouldn't ask [person in your life].

Finally, I spend a lot of time with my cat Rory (pictured), who is perfect and the most affectionate creature I have ever met. I promise to share photos of him from time to time.

Thank you, tiny strangers in my phone, for the asynchronous and casual human interaction. I appreciate it very much. The serious stuff and the light stuff, the learning and the shouting and the showing off of projects. Obviously all the cats, dogs, invertebrates, fungi, and bodies of water. Especially the incredible trans people I wouldn't otherwise know existed. And thank you to everyone who engages with me to teach and learn, share ideas and philosophies, or just co-human. Y'all are great.

can't sleep, chatting into the void. anybody have a problem they need solved in python or bash?

Been a while since I tried to make coffee by pouring whole beans directly into the mug.

Unrelatedly: a thing I like to do when I have zero brainpower is adversarial object design (usually of coffee mugs). Like, if you told someone to make you a coffee mug, and they hated you, what would you get back?

Inspired by https://www.theuncomfortable.com/ which is my favorite art collection ever.

@MrHedmad removing op as she clearly indicated your comment was not welcome in the first place --

Why? Why are you choosing this battle? Believe it or not, this is not about you. It's about women's experiences of meeting friction that is created expressly to slow them down and tire them out. Anecdotal is exactly the right mode of information for sharing these experiences, and sharing them has real purpose.

It doesn't matter if you individually match the stereotype (and for the record, your response is not helping your credibility here). It's not about you.

And it's not being handled poorly if it resonates with women and gives them space to imagine and create a better reality. It's. Not. About. You.

@marc_veld oof. As much as I agree these problems are problems, I can't disagree more strongly with the quoted response, “But you have to understand what’s under your control. You can control your well-being, your reactions to things and you can influence what’s around you.” You can exercise *some* control over these things, but when your wellbeing is suffering because of food insecurity, you can't meditate your way out of being harmed by that. If you're having panic attacks because you have to work in an abusive environment, you don't have control over that reaction, by definition. It's harmful to shift the responsibility to the individual in these contexts.

Some of the interventions mentioned are, as intended, empowering. And I'm sure many researchers do benefit from yoga and painting classes, because they're awesome. But that's the epitome of treating the symptom. Institutions are quick to adopt these programs because they don't require systemic change and they shift responsibility to the individual. They really straddle the line between helpful and counterproductive, because allowing any institution to cite these wellness initiatives as progress toward researcher wellness delays and distracts from the real work.

Basically, teaching people to survive hostile conditions is something very distinct from improving conditions.