cossatot

D3.js is, to me, one of those tools that makes things possible rather than making things easy (although I only use javascript once every year or two so it's always a slog). This is big: it's like a zero-to-one step, rather than incremental progress.

This fall I made an interactive visualization of the fine-grained plate tectonic model I have built for the Himalaya and Tibet for a research project[0]. The model building process (i.e., finding the relative motions of the plates) is largely solving a system of linear equations, so it's not immediately apparent what the results really mean and whether they are acceptably realistic.

D3.js allows me to explore and understand my own scientific results so much more thoroughly than the static quiver plots that I was making in Matplotlib--being able to pan and zoom a globe (not just a projected map!) and see the tectonic plates move through time is phenomenal. Being able to share the results so trivially as a web page is a huge force multiplier as well.

Thanks so much, Mike!

[0]: http://rocksandwater.net/blog/2020/11/tibet-blocks-js/

Though I ran across this article by happenstance today, I am sad to find Mr. Doba actually passed away yesterday, apparently just after climbing Kilimanjaro.

So many gems in this article, telling the tale of a man with the right mix of fortitude and pugnaciousness for serious solo adventuring. My personal favorite: "Event producers asked him to just walk onstage and say, in English, “Thank you very much.” Doba, who wore jeans to the June ceremony, walked onstage and said, “Polacy nie gesi i swoj jezyk maja.” Polish people are not geese and have their own language."

The use cases for many people have changed dramatically as well. I think if I was an audiophile, and used headphones primarily to lie on the bed smoking hash and listening to Steely Dan, I would share your concerns.

But I use headphones for two things: talking on the phone/listening to music when I walk my dogs or to pick up my kid, and for meetings at work (I'm long-term remote). Having cordless technology is nice for the former, where it replaced cheap wired earbuds that are always tangled in my pocket and never last for more than a year or so. It's critical for the second, so that I am not chained to my desk for the 1-2.5 hour meetings that I have multiple times a week. And I have to talk with my use cases, not just listen.

The heirloom-quality audiophile headphones are simply not workable for my use case, and I am sure that I am not alone here. And my father, who I am pretty sure did spend lots of time lying on the bed smoking hash and listening to Steely Dan, did not ever pass his headphones down to me.

It would be very useful for some users if you could use either real stereo camera setup or a sort of effective one (i.e. structure from motion) to generate digital elevation/terrain models at high resolution. If you don't want to do the work (understandable to focus on just one thing) at least giving enough information that others can work from what you have would be great.

Federal scientists are on the General Schedule payscale. As mentioned in another comment, they start out at about a GS-12 for PhD-level positions and move up to GS-15 from there (and then a small number of highly influential scientists can become 'super scientists' at the GS-16 level, and a very select few, i.e. Fauci, are on RF rather than GS scales). Then there is a locality adjustment.

This is the table with the DC locality adjustment: https://www.fedweek.com/pay-tables/2021-gs-pay-table-washing...

The rates are pretty similar to professor salaries at research universities; staff scientists at universities are often subordinate or soft-money positions.

It should be noted that the Federalist papers only represent the views of a few of the Federalists (Hamilton, Madison, Jay), i.e. from one of the two major parties. The Democratic-Republicans had a greater distrust of centralized government and were more supportive of democracy and rule by the better of the average Joes (Jefferson's 'yeoman farmers' and all that).

This is quite similar to taking the views of Paul Ryan and Rand Paul and calling them representative of the US government. Those views are not extreme in the context of the time and are shared by a sizeable fraction but it's not a random or representative sample.

I'm in America though I work for a firm based in northern Italy (Lombardia), with colleagues in France, Portugal and Switzerland as well. The lockdowns faced by those in western Europe seemed extraordinarily difficult, in particular the much greater restrictions on being outdoors, and the fact that many Europeans live in much smaller homes than in the US and do not have private yards/gardens as commonly. It has been very tough for my colleagues. You're definitely not alone.

The article states in Twitter's reasoning that:

The second Tweet may also serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a “safe” target, as he will not be attending.

Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.

It seems possible if not likely that Twitter is closely monitoring how his followers are reacting to the tweets (at a scale that none of us are really capable of), and the permanent ban results most closely from that.

It is also possible that Twitter is trying to evade liability in case there are more attacks and there was some organization on their platform.

Life isn't a constituent part of the Earth. It's a coating.

The crystal thing is throwing me (a geologist) off. Basically all Earth materials are crystalline. So rocks are alive (colonial organisms I guess since they are aggregates of crystalline minerals) but the magma that they crystallize from is not alive? Or is magma alive too? What about obsidian, which is glass but compositionally identical to a crystalline igneous rock. No crystals! The Earth's crust and mantle: Crystalline. Alive. The Earth's outer core: liquid iron and nickel. Non-living. The inner core: crystalline iron and nickel. Alive.

Crystallization is reversible in a thermodynamic sense. You take some granite, melt it, and then cool it (slowly, under pressure), and you have granite again. Is this a phoenix/Jesus-like life and death cycle? Or does life only change forms?

I agree with you generally that 'life' may be gradational. However I think calling crystals 'life' actually removes any meaning whatsoever from the term. If the line isn't somewhere in the neighborhood of viruses and prions then it kinda has to expand to include anything made of matter (and then energy etc.).

While we don't (and don't have to) have a precise definition of 'life', the 'life' gradation needs to branch like a Bezier curve off the x axis at some point for it to be a functional term.

"a bicycle for the body"

I grew up in a small town in the Ozarks and there was a huge amount of fundamentalist Christian propaganda and social conditioning going on in the public school system. The high school principal passed out bibles, prayer was held before many sports practices or events, recruiters/councilors for Christian youth groups sat with the students at the cafeteria at lunch, etc. Some of the science teachers taught science well, though others made it explicit that they were Creationists and were only teaching evolution/Earth science because they had to, and that the students could stick around after class to hear 'what really happened'.

This was on top of another layer of class conflict between the middle class teachers/administration and lower class/trailer park kids, who mostly dropped out at 16 which was fine with the admin. Lots of additional pressure on other students who didn't conform for various race/gender/etc. reasons. And then completely bizarre stuff like, though the official reason for not having a soccer team was that it would detract from the sacrosanct football program, many of the teachers were clear that believed soccer to be a Communist sport (this was in the 90s when the cold war was long over).

Many of the perpetrators here are very nice people and fine neighbors, but if you aren't an evangelical Christian it can be a challenge. Especially if you're not white: the KKK is still a well known presence just down the road in Harrison, AR, so it's not just woke fearmongering.

It's one thing to live in these environments as an adult and be able to blow a lot of it off, but it's another thing completely to have kids there, which really detracts from the 'leave California to raise kids' motivation.

And it would be better at a larger city like St. Louis or Indianapolis but some fraction of the population of those places are from towns like mine and don't find these beliefs and practices to be particularly problematic.

As of late this summer I was unable to get my BT headphones to work on Fedora in a 2-way transmission mode. The speakers would work but not the microphone. I don't remember the details but when I dug deep into the issue, there seemed to be a fight about merging a PR that would allow it.

There are no longer many things keeping me from going all-Linux but I am not going to sit through every meeting chained to my desktop with a little earbud wire.

Hopefully pipewire will resolve this, and I don't think any of us realized in advance what meetings were going to look like in 2020.

My wife built a beautiful wooden crib (despite no previous experience with finer carpentry, mortise and tenon joinery, etc.) and it's worked out wonderfully. I think she based it off of this: https://mattcremona.com/uncategorized/walnut-and-maple-crib

And then think about tectonic plate motions and that any point affixed to a continent is moving with regards to an ECEF coordinate system.

Because the stock may still appreciate at 6% annually.

And, depending on what is actually done with the money that Congress has decided to appropriate, it may be redistributed to consumers who will buy more of whatever that publicly traded company produces, or pay off the national debt, or do other things that can increase the health and growth of the economy. (Or not.)

I agree that this is great, but I think saying it's Julia's best attribute is underselling the language quite a bit. Personally I like how effectively it can replace those languages, at least for future projects.

Although it's not as customizable based on fine-grained location, the USGS (not Ray Wells, the geologist who compiled the map, but his colleagues) are working on making what they call geonarratives or story maps (which is an ESRI trademarked product). These are interactive webmaps that also have a lot of narrative content (prose and pictures) that you can read through in a start-to-finish type of way, or browse the map and click on spots, seeing that part of the narrative.

They are focusing right now on making these that describe geologic hazards such as Cascadia subduction zone earthquakes and attendant 'secondary perils' such as tsunamis, landslides, and liquefaction, all of which have different geographic distributions and types of impacts.

The big hold-up with this is not really technological, it's that it takes a lot of time to write the damn content, make the maps and charts, and edit the photos. But on the (information) technical side, there are still a lot of cool things that can be done within webmaps or similar interfaces, showing interactive geologic events and having sliders for different times, or whatever.

The primary advantage that I notice of writing complex thoughts by hand, for example a first draft of something important, is that insertion of more than a few words is difficult on paper. Therefore I tend to work just a bit more deliberately and focus a bit more on the narrative structure. The results tend to have a more coherent narrative flow, be easier to read, and be more organized than a draft written on a computer where I can jump back and forth between partially-completed paragraphs or sections.

Similarly, decreasing the accessibility of information, code, etc. helps me develop the narrative when making the first draft.

I get a pretty big productivity bump from bringing a notebook to a desk or table away from a computer (with its attendant distractions) and spend an hour or two, producing a page or two, that require much less editing later. I can leave little spaces for numbers or other specifics that I don't have on hand, and make marginal notes for other things to research or fill in later, while focusing on the structure and organizing my thoughts and arguments. Afterwards I can make figures, check calculations and statistics, etc.

I also frequently draw out powerpoint presentations on graph paper, maybe 8 slides per paper page, and just write the basic points and sketch in the figures I want to add. Then I go through and actually make the slides at the computer.

> But neither are useful.

Useful to whom? To the paleontologists?

In practice, paleontologists look at the passage of traits down evolutionary lineages regularly. You are correct in stating that the same features can develop independently, but that does not mean they do every time. I don't think the assertion that 'evolution is not linear at smaller scales' holds up to much scrutiny. Life as we know it results from the passage of traits encoded in genes, otherwise there would be no evolution; we would have basic unicellular life spontaneously arising from the primordial ooze over and over again Groundhog Day style.

> The fact that this critter had a particular shape of eye is not an indication that it passed that structure to later lifeforms.

In the parlance of the geosciences, depending on the context, we'd call this a suggestion rather than an indication, as there may be weaker evidence or credible alternative hypotheses. However depending on the scales of the time and speciation differences between the species under consideration it may be very strong evidence.

For example, it's highly unlikely that the presence of limbs in both Homo erectus and Homo sapiens is coincidental and Homo sapiens have limbs that evolved independently of Homo sapiens. This is very different than asserting that wings in both bats and birds are indications that one evolved from the other.

You're right about this. In practice, geologists are very used to providing asymmetrical or one-sided bounds on many estimates (not only time estimates; also estimates of quantities like the thickness of a rock layer before the top was eroded off and lost to history), and these are often linked to another event so they are sort of relative estimates.

We often say that some piece of evidence establishes the minimum age, or the maximum age, of a geologic event. Then we try to find another event that provides the other constraint. For example, let's say we want to know when a specific meteor hit the earth. The rock that are impacted by the meteor are 100 million years, so we know that the meteor impact was younger than 100 million years. Then if we were able to find a rock unit deposited on top of the impact crater and impacted rocks, that is not itself damaged, we can infer that the undamaged rock unit is younger than the impact. If we date it at 80 million years old, we know that the meteor impact occurred between 100 and 80 million years. (We refer to these relationships as 'cross-cutting relationships' because visually, a younger feature may 'cut across' an older feature and we find and describe these relationships to develop the geologic histories.)

In fact, the entire geologic time scale as it's commonly known (using time categories like the Paleozoic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, etc.) was basically set in complete relative terms without knowing the absolute dates. Then, when absolute dating based on radioactive decay of elements in earth materials became common in the 20th century we started to pin down the whole framework.

I think that there is a really interesting logical structure to the whole enterprise that is begging to be modeled using tools that are more familiar to software engineers. For example I think that a lot of the relationships could be represented abstractly and analyzed using graph theory. But I have not had time to make much progress with this as geology has so many little exceptions that formalizing it is a long and tedious process.

> In the end, who really cares if someone is black, white, Korean, or half Vietnamese?

Yale, in this case.

This is false. In the case of the original Hyperloop idea which crosses the San Andreas Fault, a major earthquake on that fault in line with the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco should produce accelerations the ground surface within 10 km of the fault in either direction of around 1 g (i.e., 9.8 m s^-2), corresponding to Modified Mercalli intensities of disruption to people and infrastructure of X ("Extreme: Some well-built wooden structures destroyed; most masonry and frame structures destroyed with foundations. Rails bent")[1] Vertical Accelerations above 1 g will literally throw anything not bolted to the ground into the air. Not much will make it through this unscathed.

This isn't to say that engineering around these sorts of events is impossible. The Transalaksa oil pipeline crosses the Denali fault, and during the M7.9 Denali earthquake in 2002, the pipeline survived because it was built on sliders near the fault so it would bend when the earth shifted instead of breaking [3]. However, this is a big bend in the pipe; the lateral displacements are on the order of 5-10 m in an earthquake of this size, over a similar across-fault distance. Do you want to go at Hyperloop velocities through a tube with a bend this sharp?

[1]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.833...

[2]: https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/modified-mercalli-intensit...

[3]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2003/fs014-03/pipeline.html

Yes, lots of explosions and other events are filtered out. It's pretty easy to classify large explosions vs. earthquakes both by the depth (earthquakes are rarely so shallow; even a big earthquake that breaks the surface will have most of its energy released 5-15 km below the surface) and by the polarity of the first seismic waves (P-waves) that reach the instruments. In an explosion, all of the waves radiating out will have the 'first motion' being a push outward, away from the source towards the instrument.

However, tectonic earthquakes are rapid sliding movements of the crust along a fault that is a quasi-planar surface. This leads to patterns in the seismic waves, where half of them, two quadrants, show a compressional push away from the source and the other two quadrants have the first motion as tensile, or a pull towards the source. By looking at the geographic locations of the seismic instruments and seeing which show a pull and which show a push, seismologists fit planes separating the quadrants which correspond to the azimuth and inclination of the fault that caused the earthquake.

(edit: deleted ascii art which did not render correctly.

Interestingly, the orientation of the fault and the quadrants of push and pull reflect the directions of the stress field in the crust caused by plate tectonic motions, as well as secondary sources of stress such as gravitational loading of the crust from high topography, or the expansion and contraction of magma chambers under volcanoes. In the 60s through the 80s, geophysicists used this information to put together the first models of the rates and directions of different tectonic plates, but we now mostly use GPS for this.

> And 2/3 of the things all academics hate the most are the things that involve having to work closely with others and bureaucratic organizations (faculty meetings/service and grant writing. The third, incidentally, is grading.)

"This job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers" --Randal, Clerks

Yeah I am with you on this. In my current role, I can do R in as much as it links with D. But really I spend a lot of time building that ampersand rather than R or D specifically: constructing a framework to translate research results into a product, testing that product and then being able to guide the research based on the performance of the product.

That is in and of itself interesting, and the work (making earthquake forecasts and seismic hazard/risk models) is generally fun and has a lot more positive human impact than studying earthquakes because they are simply fascinating geophysical phenomena. But there are regularly a lot of great research ideas that go unexplored because we don't have the resources or immediate incentive to investigate them.

> Lack of respect for traditional authority, entrenched interests, and boundaries would be my take. Forgiveness > permission mindset, with a healthy risk tolerance above baseline.

This is an interesting take. A lot of researchers are pretty anti-authoritarian, at least initially, and the scientific process involves a lot of tearing down existing knowledge and rebuilding. We all really, deep down want to prove everyone else wrong.

However, when the funding comes from institutional sources, there are certainly limits on how rebellious one can actually be.

Furthermore the peer review process encourages a kind of camaraderie and politics where you compete with each other, and are actively tasked with finding fault in everyone else's work, but you are also stuck with them for decades, so you don't want to screw anyone over too hard, because their turn to review your grant proposal will come around soon.

> Founders take their research and drive towards profitable exploitation of that knowledge relentlessly.

Yeah, this latter part is what I've never really gotten. My goal is always to take my research and drive relentlessly towards... more research. Ideally while freely disseminating the products and tools used so that others can do the same, thereby letting everyone share in the fruits of the labor.

I'd love to hear a bit more about the differences.

I've spent my adult life in research environments (academic, nonprofit and industrial R&D) and while much of the activity seems entrepreneurial (particularly grant writing), the overarching structural differences between building something for profit vs. for the public good makes a lot of aspects of building a business a bit mysterious to me.

I think a larger issue is the focus on video as opposed to audio. Audio may be less sexy but it is far and away more important for most interpersonal communication (I'm not discussing gaming or streaming or whatever, but teleconferencing). Most of us don't care that much if we get super crisp, uninterrupted views of our colleagues or clients, but audio problems really impede discussion.

The author has a lot of interesting projects on his page: https://lingdong.works/ though I haven't checked all of them out (I have no desire to watch anyone's face decay).

As a geologist, I happen to think that all landscapes are procedurally generated, though it is in general a slower generation process than the computer simulations. Nonetheless I remain fascinated by both the Earth and computational representations of it, and I really enjoy looking at simulations and art depicting landscapes, envisioning what tectonic and erosional processes could have produced the scene.