Upbeat Former Prof

been a tough day, @nuclearanthro.bsky.social --hope this helps

Hi, are you an academic biology lab in the Boston area? I am a lab manager at a local biotech and I will be getting rid of a lot consumables in the near future (as will many of my colleagues, unfortunately). If you would be interested in free consumables, please reach out to me!

anecdotal, @cherylrofer.bsky.social, but after the dot com bust in 2000 and the downturn in late 2001, about a quarter of my CS classmates (then-new grads) were unemployed for an extended period. that's not much comfort to anyone, of course, but the cycles in tech have been dramatic for a long time.

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire Amazon.com: Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire (Audible Audio Edition): Jonathan M. Katz, Adam Barr, Macmillan Audio: Books

i really appreciated Katz's book on the backstory

a.co/d/aA8kLxq

S: uh, hmm... wait, the dominant singular vectors would stay the same no matter what...

A: so how much does such an approach capture the dynamics of the original system?

S: *is enlightened*

(i think about this story a lot these days)

A: but wait. what if i reversed the order of the columns? surely that would correspond to a very different dynamical system?

S: yes.

A: but the reduced model would be... the same, no?

S: hm. yep.

A: what if i randomly permuted the columns? hard to imagine that would come from any related system?

A: that would be amazing! how does it work?

S: you sample at a lot of time points & time sample is a column; then you do rank revealing QR

A: ah, so you're getting like the dominant left singular vectors! and that lets you reproduce a set of trajectories

S: yes, exactly!

once upon a time, a student saw a fascinating paper that touted using Karhunen-Loève decomposition to do model order reduction on nonlinear dynamical systems. S took it to their advisor to discuss.

Kinder, weirder and less serious.

haha, see you at the next one

What’s your favorite food fact that is true but sounds totally made up?

I’ll start: about half of the mushrooms produced across the United States of America each year (more than 300 million pounds of mushrooms in recent years) are produced in *one county* in Pennsylvania.

It's nine o'clock on a Saturday
I'm writing as fast as I can
It'll soon be the end of the fiscal year
Performance evals say hey, I'm a fan!

a phrase that comes to mind often these days:
“… knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing”

a close up of a person with the words " it 's a unix system i know this " Alt: Jurassic Park: Lex looks at a computer and exclaims, "it 's a unix system! i know this "

a high point for my weekend: friend's HS-age kid has assignment to explain / show computer model of heat transfer. my reaction, essentially:

oh man, another all time favorite. the final act in the church is spectacular.

oh so good

if you haven't watched this and gunfights are your speed, please enjoy some of the most amazing sequences ever filmed

A glowing orb surrounded by dark clouds in a russet sky.

Tonight's sunset.

Jim Lovell

Jim Lovell and Tom Hanks, who plays Jim Lovell in Apollo 13 (1995).

Jim Lovell and David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

Jim Lovell.

RIP Jim Lovell.

One of the first three astronauts to fly to and orbit the Moon in Apollo 8. Then he survived Apollo 13. . Prior, he flew on two Gemini missions (7 & 12).

He was 97.

☝️He played himself in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and the captain of the USS Iwo Jima in Apollo 13 (1995).

#RIP naval aviator and astronaut Jim Lovell who passed away on Thursday at the age of 97. A 1952 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Lovell flew F2H Banshee fighters before being selected for NASA’s Gemini program. In 1970, he commanded the near-tragic Apollo 13 mission.

When we talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we typically focus on August 6 and August 9. But August 8, 1945, is also one of the most important dates for understanding those unprecedented attacks. (This is an adaptation of a thread originally written by @wellerstein.bsky.social in 2020 on Twitter.)

Will I understand The Shawshank Redemption if I haven’t seen The Shawshank I?

attention deficit hypertext transfer protocol

heh

bsky.app/profile/upbe...

congratulations on the new paper, @wkhuber.bsky.social ! science like it's supposed to be done.

Sven the raindeer says, glumly, "I'm 37?"

so it's been a pretty good day.

:)

it's been a while

9 years
3 employers
6 job titles
5 home addresses
1 wedding
1 house purchase
3 nieces/nephews born

since my last notice of award

there's this anecdote about "group mind" in a book about improv, wish i could remember which book, about a player suddenly running across the stage and leaping in a superman-type pose, and the other players were on the same page enough that they had time to line up and catch her.