🙈

#PSA #Safety

Back in my day, we didn't have tweets or toots. We had bumper stickers. And we were happy with that.

The word "excellent" is derived from the Christian practice of giving up using Microsoft Excel for 40 days to commemorate Christ's sacrifice.

It is a period of great productivity.

The date of lent is calculated using an obscure Excel macro on a field that didn't originally have anything to do with dates, but Excel converted it to one anyway.

One of the most useful things I've ever found on the web comes from NOAA, and is about dealing with disruptive behaviors in meetings: https://coast.noaa.gov/ddb/ I've cached the PDF at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DgQmgHWWdRXdHv28zR5_4B84qUTwus1d/view?usp=sharing if you want to post a framed copy on the wall in your office…

they probably aren't on here but the US fish and wildlife service is asking people in the most populated parts of the country to dim their lights for migrating birds tonight. #lightpollution

@adapalmer I'm a scientist married to a humanist. The degree to which they exceed me at "understand human emotions and motivations and institutional structures" is ... honestly not even funny. Except it kind of is because sometimes I wonder why people disagree when there are shiny beetles to look at and they just sigh.

When facing the "All we need is STEM!" approach to education, my usual response is:

Developing the vaccine was the STEM problem; distribution & getting shots in arms was the Social Science problem; getting people to trust it & combatting misinformation was the Humanities problem -- which did we fail?

I have just lost half an hour to reading about the burrows Wheeler transform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transform

It's brilliant. I don't regret my choices.

#computer #digital

Hey, scientists: how often do you calibrate your scales?

I've just had a terrifying experience analyzing some field data: turned out that one scale was weighing 2/3 what the others were. If it hadn't been so far off we never would have noticed, and the resulting batch effects would have produced some very misleading signal.

That left bump of z-scores? From the bad scale:

Dream job! Reserve Director (Station Manager) at the UC Berkeley Sagehen Creek Field Station. Live in the beautiful Sierra Nevada near Lake Tahoe! Work with scientists, educators, artists, & students! Email or DM me with questions. tinyurl.com/4jdtyycx

@etosaurus Fortunately it's about to be a good season for collecting here in Ontario - come about October-November, everything will be done reproducing and I collect safe in the knowledge that if the insect's going to reproduce, it's done it and I'm not perturbing its lifecycle!

:mastodon_oops:

@etosaurus Oh no that's awful! My closet system just fell out of my wall (not actually ruining anything, just causing my clothes to be in great disarray) and it's so deeply disturbing when walls lose structural integrity.

The damaged specimens included a cabbage white and a black swallowtail, so nothing hugely rare, but one of them was a dragonfly my partner caught for me, and all of them were old. Mostly sentimental value, but still OW.

#Entomology mastodon - I dropped a (sealed) can of beer on my beloved insect collection, smashing some specimens. I think I can glue some of them back together, but I could use some sympathy. (It was open because I was showing it to a nine year old! The specimens were ruined for a good cause but I am still devastated!)

I feel like this belongs here.
⚠️“Protect our wildlife before it’s too late!”⚠️ #extinctionsucks #graphicdesign #socialmedia

Sequence diversity data in THIRTY-EIGHT THOUSAND plant and animal species reveal "nontropical species are more likely to deviate from neutral expectations, indicating that they have historically experienced dramatic fluctuations in population size likely associated with Pleistocene glacial cycles"

Pleistocene glaciations caused the latitudinal gradient of
within-species genetic diversity

https://doi.org/10.1093/evlett/qrad030

#genetics #evolution

Grindr's Return to Office plan would have me uprooting my family and moving 1000 miles back to Chicago. I'm taking the generous severance they're offering and I'll be parting ways with them at the end of August.

If you know anyone who might be interested in a remote Director of Engineering or Sr. Engineering Manager with ten years experience leading global remote software teams, send me a message here and feel free to share my LinkedIn with them: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-rose-ross

How many cups of coffee do you drink per day?☕
#poll

Please boost for a wider demographic 😊

Genetic genealogists working with US law enforcement have routinely been searching genetic databases that were opted out of forensic searches violating DOJ guidelines (and covering their tracks). #GeneticGenealogy
https://theintercept.com/2023/08/18/gedmatch-dna-police-forensic-genetic-genealogy/

My daughter just asked me if in the Star Trek universe there was a federation data base where new parents could check to make sure that their kids names weren’t profane words on other planets?

And now I want to know and so do you.