Brazilian landscape by Frans Jansz. Post, 1652. From 1630 the #Dutch West India Company conquered parts of Brazil expelling the Portuguese there & getting involved in the sugar trade (Rijksmuseum)
A Bird of Paradise Flower (Strelitzia reginae). I took this photo in one of the oldest botanical gardens in the world called Hortus Botanicus, which was founded in 1638 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 🇳🇱 🪴🪴🪴
The book ‘Strange Bedfellows: An experiment in Student-directed Interdisciplinary Research’ is now available #openaccess at University of #Groningen#Press.
#Interdisciplinarity is a bit of a buzzword in the #Dutch university sector. It is also one of the most prioritized #policy goals. Yet, interdisciplinarity remains under-defined. How, then, are we supposed to adopt an interdisciplinary approach?
10 Jan 1561: The recently restored #Dutch church, one of the 'stranger churches' or #Protestant foreign rite churches of #London orders a new printing of the #psalms#otd using Jan Utenhove's translation (eebo)
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce a #Dutch, far-right political party Forum voor Democratie (#FvD for short; @fvdemocratie). They're best-known for their anti-#Ukraine and pro-#Kremlin politics, and for their tendency to support the craziest conspiracy theories out there.
8 Jan 1609: the #Dutch East India Company commissions Henry Hudson (of later Bay fame) #otd to force a North-East Passage via Novaya Zemlya (Stephencdickson/BM)
Bij Stanford University (Californië) bewaart men een collectie Nederlandse #kaarten. Ze betreffen beheer van of strijd met #water. Ooit waren ze eigendom van waterbouwkundig ingenieur J.F.W. Conrad (1825-1902).
The Conrad Collection on #Dutch Waterways is the personal collection of J. F. W. Conrad, a 19th c. Dutch engineer. Included in this collection are cartographic and technical materials that document the construction of the Dutch waterways. #maps#cartographyhttps://searchworks.stanford.edu/catalog?f%5Bcollection%5D%5B%5D=vt578hf4454
I guess instance migration is a good time for an #Introduction post. Hello lovely people, I'm here both as a scientific researcher and as a human being, and you can expect a range of genres of posts and interactions from me.
On the work side, I'm a computational scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the field of biological X-ray crystallography, specifically at free electron lasers. It's a glorious interdisciplinary mess, and the description I give to non-scientists is that i use my degree in chemistry to write software to do math that models the physics of experiments that we're running to learn about biology.
For fellow structural biologists: I work on crystallography data reduction software for the steps between photons hitting the detector and a merged set of structure factors. I also support XFEL experiments, both on site and remotely, and assist in post-experiment data processing as needed. My PhD focused on using simultaneous XFEL crystallography and XES spectroscopy to probe the water splitting reaction in oxygenic photosynthesis. I did a postdoc in computational methods development for cryoEM, and I'm now back to XFEL crystallography but still in methods development.
For fellow software developers: all of our work is open source and mostly under the cctbx project/repo. It's mostly python with a bunch of C++ under the hood (including some low-level stuff redundant with scipy and numpy because those weren't around yet!), plus a user-facing wxPython GUI. More recently we've done a ton of work with GPU acceleration (using Kokkos, for NVIDIA, Intel and AMD architectures) and scaling up at three different national labs' supercomputing centers in anticipation of next-gen experimental capabilities. I derive too much joy from writing bash-sed-awk monstrosities on the occasions we need them to fix an urgent problem during an experiment, and I guess I'm most proud of the fact that I somewhat understand git.
As far as hobbies, the longest-standing one is probably #coffee, followed closely by #language (s) / #languageLearning and a love of #patterns and #symmetry in various contexts. I have too many different ways of making coffee (they have overrun my coffee cupboard), but my favorite remains the classic latte, and by now I can make a better latte than I can buy. I'm trying to refresh my #Japanese and learn #Dutch and #German simultaneously/comparatively, which of course is terrible for speed of learning, but fascinating. So far I've found #ASL the most challenging but also deeply satisfying -- I only have one semester under my belt but hope to take a lot more. I studied and continue to study all the #math and #science I possibly can. Right now I seem to be pretty engrossed in #electronics, #CAD, #3DPrinting, and just generally #DIY-ing/fixing/repairing things. Other active interests include #sewing, #reading, #cooking, #bike commuting, and #publicTransit. My journeys in #aikido and #pottery are on hold but I definitely want to pick them back up when I'm not already overcommitted. I'm casually interested in #neurophilosophy, #neuropsychology, #neurodivergence and #neuroscience. I've taken one course in neurophilosophy and can read literature in the rest, with effort.
On a personal note, I'm trans and nonbinary and very open about it -- I transitioned back when I had to explain what that meant. I've retired from some forms of community engagement and support but I'm very happy to answer any questions I can about the US legal and medical landscapes, available resources, policy and terminology best practices, or whatever you know you shouldn't ask [person in your life].
Finally, I spend a lot of time with my cat Rory (pictured), who is perfect and the most affectionate creature I have ever met. I promise to share photos of him from time to time.
"There's a shortage of 10,000 primary school #teachers. #Dutch kids have some of the worst reading skills in all of #Europe. The nursing home waitlist is eight months long. There are 80,000 people on the waitlist for mental #health care. The average waitlist for social housing? Seven years. 8% more Dutch people die of cancer than the European average. The Tax Authority is on the verge of collapse.
When people start to feel this kind of systemic disregard for their safety & well-being, they go looking for someone to blame, & this is precisely when far-right politicians swoop in & blame foreigners." https://dutchdeadline.substack.com/p/is-the-rise-of-dutch-populism-the
EU leaders should back Ukraine with significant extra financing this week to avoid a "double block" to support for #Kyiv on both sides of the Atlantic, Dutch Prime Minister Mark #Rutte warned Monday.
"We need to agree on the money part, because that's crucial for [Ukraine] to move forward as a state, but also with the war efforts," said Rutte.