Notices by Hilda Bastian (hildabast@mastodon.online), page 3

...As a citizen of an enemy country, Yuasa had to leave France when the Allies landed at Normandy in 1944.

She went to Berlin, where she built a double-focusing beta-ray spectrometer.

Yuasa got back to Japan, via Trans-Siberian Railway with her spectrometer. It was just before the atomic bombs fell...

5/9

...In 1931 she became the first woman to study physics in Japan, at the only university that accepted women students.

Yuasa graduated in 1934, publishing her first paper that year too.

She had applied to get to Paris before the war started & gained a degree there...

4/9

...Yuasa was born in downtown Tokyo in 1909, the next-to-youngest of 7 children.

Her mother came from a long line of poets, in the family of a renowned 19th century scholar, Tachibana Moribe.

Her father was an engineer & inventor who worked at the patent office...

3/9

...The drawcard for Yuasa in Paris was Marie Curie's daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie & her husband Frédéric. Yuasa was inspired by their papers on artificial radioactivity.

More about Irène: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ir%C3%A8ne_Joliot-Curie

Here's Toshiko & Irène at the Joliot-Curie home in 1941...

2/9

This is Toshiko Yuasa (1909-1980). She was the first woman physicist from Japan. It's 1940 & with her science prospects at home blocked by gender prejudice, she'd managed to get into wartime Paris to do physics research...

1/9

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiko_Yuasa

#tbt #WomeninSTEM

@pfefferle WordPress.

@pfefferle I don't have an expensive enough plan for plugins, so I assume it's not accessible to me for my personal sites.

(I keep a simple plan so that it can stay online unchanged once I stop paying.)

I'll be cringing from now on at language that relates being admirable to height - - - like, someone has stature, or, people look up to them...

Really worth thinking about the thoughtless, careless prejudice behind this. There's so much to learn in this terrific personal essay on height by @rbreich : https://robertreich.substack.com/p/why-im-so-short

Well, it's done! I've now left Substack, and will delete the newsletter when subscriber views to my farewell post trickle out.

My newsletter, Living With Evidence, is now at WordPress. (Link to subscribe in bio.)

My first post is up now:

A Fresh Start!

https://hildabastian.wordpress.com/2023/06/15/a-fresh-start/

The post's pic is this lavender from my garden. That's because it was transplanted as a seedling from a friend's house, and I'm hoping my digital transplant is as successful!

With so much of the internet circling the drain, there's a major corner of the internet that's still a good news story - thank goodness for the 22-year-old Wikipedia powering on!

My recent editing there inspired my new post @PLOS:

Some things I like about the expanding Wikipedia universe

https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2023/08/02/some-things-i-like-about-the-expanding-wikipedia-universe/

#Wikipedia #WikiData

@egonw Thanks for setting them up!

Restoration and Other Revivals.
In which I explain why I was on the quiet side for a couple of months, the comeback of my tracking of next generation Covid vaccines – and why I'll be moving my newsletter away from Substack soon.

https://hildabastian.substack.com/p/restoration-and-other-revivals

(With thanks to @annaleen & @mmasnick for writing what I needed to hear.)

Catch-22: Clinical trial edition

(From 2013 #StatisticallyFunnyCartoon: https://statistically-funny.blogspot.com/2013/04/women-and-children-overboard.html)

#MedMastodon #Epiverse #ClinicalTrials

Oh, that's cool! Just added a Mastodon verification from my Wikipedia user page.

3 easy steps:
* A link to my Mastodon account on my Wiki user page.
* Under preferences for your account, there's a section "URLs to external profiles": added the same link there.
* Then added a link to my Wiki user page to Mastodon - instantly verified.

👏 to @taavi for making this possible & to everyone spreading the word. Wikipedia + Mastodon is such a great match!

HT @wikipedia https://wikis.world/@wikipedia/110396865170645710

@levampyre @inanimatecarbongod And super cute!

...First I checked out the Wikipedia page to find out what metrology was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrology

In which I learned the first known standardized measure was the royal Egyptian cubit - the length of the Pharaoh's arm plus width of his hand. Standardizing managed to get the pyramids bang on....

Measuring by the body isn't unusual. There's the Smoot. From Michael's paper:

"The Smoot is the unit of length of 5 feet 7 inches equivalent to the height in 1958 of then student Oliver R. Smoot...

2/5

...There I learned that donkey power is a third of horse power,

a Sheppey is the closest distance "at which sheep remain picturesque" (7/8 mile, if you want to know),

& a Muggeseggele is a Swabian reference to a housefly's private parts = a teensy tiny amount.

Finally, because I didn't know what Michael was referring to, I searched for "the London fatberg" (can't recommend!). Turns out it's a gross sewer obstruction - but also a good example of the weirdness of
journalist metrology....

4/5

..."...who was used to measure the span of the Harvard Bridge (364.4 Smoots). Ironically, Smoots subsequently became the American National Standards Institute’s Chairman, and then the International Organisation for Standardisation’s (ISO) president. The Smoot, among other units, is (ironically) used by both Google Earth and Google Calculator."

The Smoot features in the Wikipedia List of humorous units of measurement, which Michael references:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_measurement

3/5

...From The Guardian "at 820 feet, the fatberg was ‘longer than Tower Bridge’ or ‘twice as long as Wembley Stadium’ and ‘the weight of 11 double-decker buses’."

Michael argues we presume too much with all this, & a #scicomm research agenda is needed.

Here's the link to his paper again: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09636625231186782

5/5

“Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst & uncertainty.”

That survey with only a 5% response rate went viral & got me wondering about other evidence & how the #ScienceTwitter #MastodonMigration was panning out.

So I updated my study tracker & wrote a new post @PLOS : https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2023/08/20/how-is-science-twitters-mastodon-migration-panning-out/

tl;dr There's been a big recent surge here; the future of #ScienceMastodon looks bright; ScienceX is materially diminished tho the network is still there.

#Science #SciComm