Danny @danwchan@scholar.social

#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

RT @thelonglab@twitter.com Since Storify is now defunct, I've reassembled my collection of 73 (to date!) #LaurierBiology departmental seminar posters on @wakelet@twitter.com
http://wke.lt/w/s/7X9ZK
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/thelonglab/status/1003820314361581568

The first iteration of an #incubator for #liverworts is made! It features PID cooling and heating, cool white light (day/night cycle) and fan speed control. A timed log of those parameters is kept on an SD card. It's still under development so I'll post more updates as we bring together documentation and add features. #openscience

#nowreading βehemoth by Peter Watts

Jackson heights has a great market feel. I really like this city.

https://scholar.social/media/iDk8OpEjP9XtSoz0E34

I skimmed the prequel novel Starfish (by Peter Watts) to refresh my memory. I was surprised that I forgot there was major #AI involvement. There is a neural net who was trained to filter out junk on the internet and later appointed as neutral body by global powers to administrate a strategy of sacrificing citizens in order to control an outbreak. The retraining didn't take into account a underlying preference for simplicity and the net decided it liked the outbreak scenario more.

After GEB I am ready for fiction! #nowreading Maelstrom by Peter Watts

If you are building tutorials for software, I really enjoy this tool for capturing animated gifs of screen area. https://github.com/phw/peek

So the project has been going on for a month and a bit so far. We're waiting on our Marchantia samples to clear the authorities, meanwhile we have been talking about how to build our incubator, we got some "wild" plant samples and are trying to grow them and we're figuring out how to best engage the most people in the work. I've already learned a lot of electronics I didn't think I would. Hopefully we barcode something soon. I sense things will speed up but right now it's a simmer :D

This was the Genspace hosted bio event @ Caveat on Friday. I learned about photo microbial fuel cells and got to touch various mycelial materials while sharing a drink with experts and enthusiasts. Great start of a night and even better conversations.

#nowreading

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

AND with pictures:
The Death Ray by Daniel Clowes

on pause (because it's really long there are lots of holds on it and I had to return it to the library):
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter