deathmtn

Whoa, wasps can use transitive inference!

Dr. Tibbetts and her colleagues wanted to see whether the wasps could take this a step further. Say a particular paper wasp beat Suzy, and then was ringside a few days later when Suzy walloped Jane. Could that wasp figure out that she’d probably best Jane, too?

Via Hot Garbage.

I finally finished working in hand-drawn (based on the original bones from the public domain Collier's skeleton images) bones into Dem Bones. There's line thickness consistency issues, but I like them better.

Whoa. I. M. Pei lived to 102.

I was talking with Alex at project night about this job in Antarctica: Winter-Over Engineer, South Pole Station

Reporting to Astronomy faculty member, will oversee the BICEP3 experiment at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station during the winter observing season from January to November 2020. Responsible for daily operations and service of the BICEP3 telescope; will maintain and troubleshoot BICEP3 instrument components, including electronic, cryogenic, and mechanical subsystems, in consultation with the BICEP3 team. Will manage BICEP3 computer systems, including organization and transfer of observing script queues and data files; will update control software as needed. Will communicate regularly, via internet and satellite telephone, with the BICEP3 team in North America; will report on telescope performance and activity, and discuss operations at South Pole. Will collaborate with the Winter-Over Engineer for BICEP Array, the other on-site telescope of the BICEP/Keck experimental program, handling tasks that call for several personnel.

It's an incredibly sci-fi job!

Even if I had no attachments, I don't think I'd get that much out of 11 months in the Antarctic. Alex was saying, though, that when he worked on science boats, he talked to people who had worked in Antarctica, who really loved it and wished they could spend more time there.

In parallel, there's a work day trip to go fishing. It's, like, five hours on a boat. I've heard fishing is really peaceful, but I can't imagine that actually being fun. Maybe I should try being out in tranquil nature to see if I can get it.

Over the past few years, I've come to favor jobs that run at set times over dynamic, on-the-fly processing whenever it is possible.

One opportunity I missed is RSS for static-web-archive, which powers this weblog and my other weblogs.

Right now, as a post comes in, it updates the RSS feed after it's done creating the post metadata and HTML. The thinking is, hey, we need up-to-date RSS all the time!

In actuality, RSS readers check for updates once every hour or so. So, a cron job that generated RSS from metadata would be fine. There's currently a problem with RSS generation that's hard to debug, so I've just been rebooting my static-web-archive server app every day.

I have something that I'd normally say is done at this point, but I think I've circled back around to wanting to spend extra time to make it feel complete instead of shipping anything. Maybe it's because I'm doing a lot of prototyping at work?

10-4-4-4-4-4. I feel that taking two or more days off and am able to do the full sets is not something I'm going to be able to do forever, if I keep taking two days off.

"Don't stand on the urinal." —A thing that had to be said to my son

The last two nights have been all about holding fast to the idea that fairness is not just getting what you want. Also, I think we need an earlier bedtime.

I just saw a bunch of kindergartners' art today, and I watched a documentary on Joan Miro during lunch. I have to say, I enjoyed the kids' art as much as I enjoyed Miro's. This is not to say "oh, a kid could do that". Rather, kids at a certain age seem to have an artistic confidence, joy, and clarity that really well-established artists do.

I may be the one guy that actually genuinely enjoys kids' drawings?

Some accidental flying.

1-5-3-7-3-5. I think I coulda tried harder but am OK with at least having tried at all.