Danny @danwchan@scholar.social

@quokka I always thought your username had a familiar ring to and after an animalogic video I think I know why! What a cute mammal to align yourself with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj-EGNN5HwQ

Chicken candy doesn't taste like chicken

Oh I realized I haven't updated on this project in a while. Members successfully propagated the wild samples in axenic conditions and the incubator has really helped with their growth. We received samples from the UK of cam and tak strains so we have the common lab strains now. They were a little dried out so we're hoping that gemma will revive.

Something about the resigned tone of this long read from the NYT made me quite teary. Almost all the events transpired before I was born and it made me think about when I first learned about climate change and how it was argued for and against. I appreciate knowing some historical context to this whole saga. It's hopeful that we are seeing economic arguments for emissions reduction (among other +'s), but I'm still feeling a little blue. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html

#nowreading

Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate by Rose George

This is one of two books (the other: box) I'm reading to kick-off research for my own TBA trip on a cargo ship to write and explore what it means to disconnect among the artifacts of our globalized consumerist society. If you have suggestions let me know!

The group exercise for tonight.

https://scholar.social/media/SROAT8XFKwy3q-v2pTE

Tonight I'm at biotech without borders for a NSF funded talk about genetic engineering of humans. Looks like it'll be a discussion format. Before we start Dr. Jorgensen is explaining the challenges of opening up the scientific enterprise.

https://scholar.social/media/_WRWqNkvjNVSzGs0Cls

@bgcarlisle That profile picture is most excellent. I first encountered that term second hand and was told it was from a blog post about Star Trek. Where does that image come from?

#nowreading

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

and with pictures:
Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

There were cool ideas of tech ultimately preserving the inequalities of power as a minor but persistent backdrop to a story which engaged in too much explicit description of abuse for my likes. Nuance in characters was washed out by cyberpunk action sequences where the takeaway was "people can be awful to each other" and "sometimes there is limited justice". The world was great but various threads of tech and trauma didn't come together cohesively.

Philsci preprint via @hildabast@twitter.com:
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/14238/

It considers that current merit rankings fail to account for systematic bias and coverage of epistemic space. Argues for the use of lotteries to maximize efficiency and sense of fairness in science funding.

Draws heavily from Boyle 1998 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9884.00133