snow observer ❄️ @cryospheroid@scholar.social

I spent last night grading assignments and then I went to sleep and dreamt that I was grading more assignments. Disappointing to wake up and find that all the effort in my dreams was for naught.

Even the ones who get the correct solution often don't stop to think why. I guess given the volume of assignments they have, maybe they don't have time to stop and smell the metaphorical roses, but I think doing so can often save them plenty of time that would otherwise be spent debugging.

By far the biggest issue I've constantly encountered with teaching students scientific computing/computational physics is that they're constantly forgetting that even a numerical simulation is in principle supposed to represent a physical system. So many of the difficulties they run into are easily figured out by them if you manage to just convince them to use their "physics intuition" a little.

My 1.5-year-old desk almonds still seem edible, go figure. Though definitely stale.

I forgot how cosy I'd made this office for myself. It's nice to be back.

Miraculously, my desk is largely free of dust, but the sticky notes I've had up have been bleached by the sun, whoa

Also discovered that I’ve left a bunch of snacks (almonds, peanuts, cereal bars) in my desk that I completely forgot I had over there, whoops! Thankfully they were sealed and these things don’t go bad

Back working in my office for the first time in over a year! It’s very quiet around and I have to keep the door closed so it doesn’t quite feel right, but it’s nice to have my work desk and all my fun posters and things around

One of my favourite geoengineering concepts is the giant space mirror, not for any feasibility reasons, but just because there’s something humorous about the simplicity of it.

Too much radiative forcing? Giant space mirror! Reflect the extra sunlight away! What could possibly go wrong?

Doing climate research is a lot of going “oh wow, this is really cool!” followed almost immediately after by “yikes, it is not good that this is happening.”

Eg. I was thinking of posting a fun fact about how sea level rise is actually mostly from ocean thermal expansion, but then I realized that thinking about sea level rise isn’t exactly the most fun thing for a lot of people.

I want to post fun facts about my area of research, but since my work is climate-related, almost all the “fun facts” I know are actually kind of horrifying (especially to an audience that isn’t used to thinking about climate all the time)

Fool academics into believing anything with this one weird trick*: typeset your nonsense writing with LaTeX

(*unlikely to actually work under closer inspection)

Anyway, email sure is... a thing.

Keeping my emails organized would be a lot easier if I didn't have two school email addresses, but one is more of a "school" email and one is more of a "research" email, so combining them into one inbox would also make things worse.

I guess I could start tagging emails but I can see myself getting lost with tags very quickly. Maybe if I really start to get swamped with them, I can try that. Or maybe I could use a specific folder for my most important emails.

I star emails so I can quickly filter ones with important information, but now it's getting to the point where I need different levels of starring, oof