snow observer ❄️ @cryospheroid@scholar.social

Fun fact: bird guano reflects light uniquely enough (compared to other things on the ground such as rocks) that it can be detected from space! This can help with locating and keeping track of seabird colonies, which can otherwise be challenging to do, especially in locations such as the Antarctic coast that are hard to get to.

Here's a link to a paper on this for reference: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425714004192

(To be clear I don’t use text to speech all the time; I mostly use it when I’m having a particularly bad ADHD day or when I need to proofread something.)

Really wish there were an easy way to get text-to-speech to not read parenthetical citations. Contemplated throwing something together myself (extract text from pdf, get rid of things formatted as citations using regex, then pipe to text to speech or something) but didn’t feel like expending the effort.

Though these days I mostly read papers on my tablet, and when I’m using text to speech I use the setting where I select the text I want it to read, so I just avoid selecting citations.

I know weather is an inconvenience to a lot of people but I still enjoy seeing it sometimes.

I’m waiting for a severe rainstorm which is supposed to be approaching, but it looks like it might miss where I live.

My university email has a folder used to train the spam filter, and the annoyance of receiving spam email in my inbox is greatly tempered by how much I enjoy the concept of feeding those emails to the spam filter.

Another is the TA whom I told that I would need to hand an assignment in late, and he said “I haven’t checked the assignment dropbox yet, so if you drop it off before the end of the day, I won’t mark deduct any marks for lateness.”

One of my teaching inspirations is the TA I had in an undergrad classical mechanics course who didn’t deduct any marks on my assignment when I got everything right except for a single misplaced negative sign that altered my answer.

The more I teach, the more I feel like my brain interprets teaching as some weird sort of performance art. I’m basically just constantly flailing around the classroom trying to express myself.

Not sure that’s how you’re supposed to do teaching, but it works well enough for me!

7000 of the steps I took today (walking) were while teaching. Needless to say, I like to pace around the classroom a lot…

Today, in Teaching Adventures: late-night copy-pasting the letter h all over some slides because it’s a nicer variable than what’s in the diagrams.