Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

hahaa! Successfully removed all IR and UV filters from my old Canon EOS 600D, I can do full spectrum, UV and IR photography now!

All of the following photos have been taken with a ~550nm+ lpf, meaning cutting everything under 550nm (blue, purple and uv) off. I love the vibrant pink foliage and dramatic turquoise skies #photography

A tremendous amount of the scientific infrastructure is based on volunteerism and the assumption that the basics of survival have been met.

I'm thinking of all of the infrastructure that makes the process actually work --- reviewing for journals, reviewing for promotion at other institutions, presenting talks, helping students, faculty governance, doing more than the absolute minimum in teaching, helping with collaborations on projects, etc.

As the grant-getting situation gets more difficult, it becomes more and more difficult to actually provide these services (not because I don't want to, but simply because my head is full of funding crises and I just... how do the kids say it? ... don't have the spoons).

Importantly, I do not think that the solution is to start charging for these things. Once you start selling them, you become a business. I *like* the volunteer system. It means that I can do these things because I believe in them. It means I can do these things for the people who deserve them and need them, not for the people who can pay for them. Moreover, the amount that one could reasonably charge for these things is no where close to the cost of running a lab. The amount of reviewing one would need to do at $450 a pop to get to the price of a trainee ($75k+) is not reasonable mathematics and would not leave one time to do the actual science.

But I don't know how much longer I can do these favors for everyone while I watch my laboratory starve to death.

Octopus neurology just gets crazier and crazier.

Note that the diagram is a little misleading. An octopus does not have a north arm and a south arm as shown here. It has four arms on the left, and four on the right.

So here we see that the frontmost of the left arms is directly connected to the rearmost of the left arms, but this connection bypasses the other two left arms. It is, however, connected directly with the third arm back on the right.

Source: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.11.007

#octopus #wtf

There’s something ominous about the speed with which the entire world has marched to require identification on platforms and, as I expected, begin the process of banning anonymous VPNs.

If amazon had lower prices I could let this go. But they just don't. And you show people this, they sort of nod along, but then the immense power of inertia prevents all change.

It's the same manufacturer most of the time! If we are taking any mass-produced object. All of these companies do wholesale if you have the time to call them and a big enough order. This is the cheapest option. The next best is aliexpress then in the back amazon.

It has always been the privilege of the corporations and the rich to define what responsibility is. I'm here to tell you don't give them what they aren't willing to give us.

"Human DDoS" — when a single person grinds a conversation to a halt not by breaking any rules on paper, but by sheer volume of engagement. Maintainers get overwhelmed, bystanders disengage, nobody can keep track, and the effort strands.

It's honestly a pretty effective way of derailing consensus efforts in projects that aren't good at telling people to cut their shit out (which can be done nicely yet firmly).