@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

libroraptor

@libroraptor@mastodon.nz

Editor and writer of academic and technical things like articles, books, theses, dissertations, reports, brochures, instruction manuals and spec sheets for researchers, engineers, tech companies.

Postgraduate research educator.

ICOM-UMAC.

I clarify ambiguity. I also bake, garden, and foster homeless dogs. Polymath not-that-kind-of-doctor in history of sci-med-tech and stuff, mainly in early modern Europe.

Posts auto-delete because the Internet's too cluttered.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

bananabob, to AncientHistory
@bananabob@mastodon.nz avatar

Scientists find buried branch of the Nile that may have carried pyramids’ stones

Discovery of the branch, which ran alongside 31 pyramids, could solve mystery of blocks’ transportation

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/16/scientists-find-buried-branch-of-the-nile-that-may-have-carried-pyramids-stones

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@bananabob As much as I like reading this sort of stuff, it perturbs me that it garners so much more attention than even immediately pressing threats like Covid and climate change and dangerous pedestrian crossings and kennel cough.

And petty celebrity gossip, even more so.

compost, to gardening
@compost@regenerate.social avatar

I have identified what is eating our roses.

It is some bees that I have finally seen on the roses.

It feels better to know that it is just some bees having a snack.

The flowers of the roses are edible and it is a nice treat if you make rose water with the petals.

When you deadhead the dead flowers you can simply add the hips to the compost pile they will add a lot of nutrients to your compost that you can feed to the roses.

#gardening #compostodon

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@compost if you let the hips ripen, you can eat those, too. The most common uses now are to cook them into jams, jellies and syrups, and to dry them for tisanes. If you go searching for older recipes, you'll find them also in soups and stews.

iangriffin, to NewZealand

Here is a timelapse of an aurora corona as seen over New Zealand's South Island between 00:33 and 00:41 on 12/May/2024. Shot from Lake Aviemore

A blend of green and red lines move along magnetic field lines.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@iangriffin Is that looking into the geomagnetic pole?

stojg, to random
@stojg@mastodon.nz avatar

this will rub some people, in some way.

i have to confess that when i was a young lad, i saw a website talking about how much nicer looking and easier it is to read text in only lowercase, and i still think about it.

i can see the point of helping to separate sentences when paper is expensive, but digitally, a space is cheap.

so this is my occasional rebellion against the non-tyranny of writing rules. :P

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@billbennett @BobLefridge @stojg Not everyone's on board with modernity, you know. Before modernity, we didn't even have cases. Only majuscules and minuscules, and for the most part you didn't mix them.

Something that newfangled is surely optional. It's only been a few hundred years.

It is something that I have always hated about computers, ever since I first got onto them. They push so hard, by design, towards American domination.

skinnylatte, (edited ) to food
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

My friend @jasonli runs the Asian food dictionary! https://www.asianfooddictionary.com/

It’d be nice to have more tofu entries.

Tofu pudding ‘dou fu hua’ (mandarin) is ‘tau foo fah’ (Cantonese) is ‘tau huey’ (Hokkien) and all of these things really exist in my brain depending on where I am and who I’m speaking to (KL or Perak, tau foo fah); in Singapore, tau huey, but in Singapore talking to a northern Chinese person, dou fu hua (and then there’s their names in Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian)

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@skinnylatte @jasonli "noodle" is a conundrum for me. I can't reconcile how it encompasses both 麵 and 粉. Because aren't those COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS?

Even "pasta" doesn't mix them together. But pasta does go in directions that most anglophones don't know about – it includes sweet breakfast breads, as in "pasta e cappuccino". What "pasta" really means is "paste" in the sense of dough, also still said in the anglophone baking industry (e.g. "shortpaste").

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@skinnylatte @jasonli Another fun one for translators is 豬腸粉 – the best way to look up steamers is "pig intestine powder".

The friendliest translations I've seen are "rice roll" and "rice noodle roll", both of which are too broad to be good. I think that we need to get past the monolingualish need to translate things that really don't translate at all.

The two that knocked me hardest are "Chinese tamales" and, as if one borrowing isn't enough, "raviolis chinois aux crevettes à la vapeur".

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@jasonli @skinnylatte One of the students from China brought 粽子 (or just 粽, as my uneducated peasant family say) to a party when we were at grad school together in the US. American professor lit up as soon as he saw them and exclaimed, "Chinese tamales!"

I lost control enough to cringe.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@jasonli @geraineon @skinnylatte I tried that but no one got it.

How about nutella as Italian dousha?

Cabbage as English pak choy?

iangriffin, to random

My 2 year anniversary of leaving Twitter. I left for astronomical reasons!

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@iangriffin Other astronomers I know are still there and have had, at the most, only brief Mastodon presences. I feel that the key difference is that you and I look at the sky and (at least in my case) at astrolabes in our hands; they look at data downloads and the outputs of filtering and pattern-matching on computer screens.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@iangriffin Academics. They live in herd cults that they deny; many of them came over briefly but, unable to see the rest of their herd, promptly went back.

Academic concern about things like Musk-ethics rarely gets beyond theory. And vice chancellors work hard to keep it that way – my observation in both US and NZ academia is that just about every one who stands too openly for principle (versus standing for "senior leadership" and "strategy") is quickly sidelined.

skinnylatte, to food
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

Following my tofu posts from earlier: I read everything Hannah Che writes. She’s writing about plant based food culture in China. Based in Yunnan now. Her tofu post is exceptional as always

https://hannahche.substack.com/p/eating-notes-free-form-tofu

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@skinnylatte Do you make your own 豆花？ Where I live, you can't buy it. And my own sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. I am getting the impression that I need to master soy milk first because, if the soy milk isn't right, and isn't consistent, there's no predicting how much gypsum to add.

What do you think?

dnc, to gardening
@dnc@vive.im avatar

I’ve dun goofed with my peas haven’t I? https://www.diningandcooking.com/1342322/ive-dun-goofed-with-my-peas-havent-i/

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@dnc what are you going to do?

I see three ways forwards

  1. cut the pots to liberate the roots

  2. separate the pots to plant with the plants

  3. cut the roots and trust that they'll regrow, maybe with better roots

Maybe you could do an experiment by implementing all three!

libroraptor, to random
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

I went to the supermarket for a bottle of ammonia water yesterday. The sort often sold as "cloudy ammonia" as if there is also a non-cloudy version. Could not find it.

Today, following a web search, I found that it's not with the cleaning stuff where I'd expected it, but in hardware. And there I found it on the lowest shelf sandwiched between methylated spirits on the left, and soft toys on the right.

This has me wondering: what do other people use ammonia solution for?

tiamat271, to Colorado
@tiamat271@mastodon.online avatar

Did you use a colander to see or take pics of the eclipse? I know we laugh at it, but I seriously enjoy seeing others’ colander pics. In such a divided time, at least we all have colanders in common! Anyone remember Hands Across America? This is like that, but with colanders 🤣 Please post your pics and use the hashtag (and maybe ?). Here’s mine, from :

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@inquiline @tiamat271 Aristotle!

RichiH, to 3DPrinting
@RichiH@chaos.social avatar

Another one for the , , and maybe bubble:

What, if any, are the considerations when selecting a reasonably priced decent quality cleaning bath?

Use case would be to clean and degrease/deoil small tools, glasses, watches, etc. Maybe a second unit some day to experiment with e.g. wood-chip infused milk; that second unit would remain food-safe.

I didn't get much farther than "probably stainless steel, and correct volume" -- and select that from eBay?

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@RichiH For diverse uses, how about an immersible unit rather than a bath?

Or a large bath – large enough that you can insert a smaller bath inside it. This is how we used to clean things in the lab that required a non-polar solvent like alcohol or acetone. Instead of a separate bath, we'd put the container into the water bath, in the manner of a bain marie. It could do with a different name – a bain someone-else. Does anyone rattly come to mind?

moira, to baking
@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

dough rising, time for DRILL PRESS

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@moira I call them swarf here in New Zealand. My machine shop teacher and the other old-man machinists I met in Connecticut had never heard that word and called them chips. What do you call them?

Minimus, to random
@Minimus@archaeo.social avatar

fabula murina (mouse story) CXVIII
hodie Silvius funambulus est! (Today Silvius is a tightrope walker!). baculum longum tenet, ut se libret (He's holding a long stick to balance himself). difficile est per extentum funem ambulare (It's difficult to walk on a tightrope)!

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@Minimus don't trip on your shoelace ...

libroraptor, to random
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

Another academic journal outs its authors, reviewers, editors on the pseudo-intellectual catwalk.

There surely can't be a shortage of rigorous, honest candidates for academic jobs?

libroraptor, to random
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

I just learnt that the buffer tool radius in QGIS depends heavily on the projection. And also how easy it is to reproject a layer – just export it! That shifted a purported 800 metres to pretty much exactly the 1000 metres that I'd asked for.

It has been so long since I took the ArcGIS University courses (which I found not that great; perhaps they're better now) that I'm re-learning things that I didn't even know I'd forgotten.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@inquiline It is nice! I like working with my ignorance, especially when it involves making interesting pictures and revealing meaning inside a mess. I happen to have a grad student at the moment who needs GIS technique (or a LOT of manual paperwork and calculation) to answer his research questions. I inherited him from a previous advisor who did not tell him this so it's been hard going for both of us. But fun for me, because I am tinkering and learning and making pictures.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@inquiline The first time I got into this was because I wanted to know about the geography of the American Philosophical Society's activities back in Franklin's time. I scanned big period maps of Philly, got members' street addresses, and figured out how to bring these together in ArcGIS.

Ten years later, along comes this new thing called "digital humanities" and I failed to recognise an opportunity to co-drive the bandwagon.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@inquiline Philly's quite hard to map because the street numbering system is idiosyncratic. After about six weeks of the GIS expert telling me what to do, I backed him into a corner and he confessed that he never had any idea from the outset but was just hoping that his thoughts would lead me to solve what he promised. So I did it myself. As annoyed as I was with him, the event taught me how much of this technology is actually within reach even though sold as being exotically difficult.

inquiline, to academicchatter
@inquiline@union.place avatar

All right , can anyone recommend lit on and ? In , , or traditions?

@academicchatter @sts

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@inquiline @academicchatter @sts there's a big tradition of looking to Gibson's framing of environmental psychology to talk about affordances. But most of it, at least in education-oriented computing, does not use the word "affordance" in the same way that Gibson does. Current writers often say "affordance" to mean something like "features" regardless of whether there is any interface design to make those features available or to guide users to finding and appropriately activating them.

donkey, to LGBTQ
@donkey@mastodon.nz avatar

Clearly the + community own time machines. How else do you explain the rainbow agenda starting in the book of Genesis!

Seriously though, let’s get rid of all Zebra Crossings and replace them with Rainbow ones.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@donkey @vik isn't it just little spheres in the paint? That could go into paint of any colour?

libroraptor, to random
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/4th-anniversary-of-covid-19/

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