Daniel Asarnow

PSA 😊

Fyi it's still recommended to get a shingles vaccine if you were vaccinated against chicken pox. It's an attenuated live virus vaccine; based on studies in younger people the risk of reactivation (shingles) is some ~7x lower compared to natural infection, but not zero.

I'm waiting for the bus, bunch of kids just drove through campus in an open top Model A, bumping music, no headlights

(Actual Model A, a really fly restoration, all blue, historical plates)

9 out of 53 🤷‍♂️

Two Axygen MCT-150-C-S 1.5 mL tubes from the same lot. The graduations and fogged label box are bizarrely on opposite sides of either five, causing them to naturally rest either on the hinge or bill of the cap.

There are right and left handed tubes in this bag and it's mildly disturbing 😨

That's how you pay the APC! Your fancy paper deserves a fancy journal, right?

Not every amino acid can be histidine, no need to take it out on proline

Don't worry, if you have the right chair and the right friends, one of them can bring a PA

(Kidding, I'm sure you'll find a new room...a new audience would be much more difficult)

two sets of concentric circles overlapping in blue and black

Wave Interference, Ink on Yupo, 2026

A quick mental facility for linear interpolation

I don't think there's anything you can *uniquely* learn from using a slide rule, although the addition/multiplication insight is actually quite important in many places (see for example, the relationship between equilibrium constants and free energy in chemistry)

Even small ones usually have scales for the "different kinds" of square and cube roots (even or odd digits: 4->2, 40->6.32455...), and some have trig functions. Larger ones have more precision, and there were helical ones packing great lengths into a relatively small cylinder - fun, right?

I did (kid me thought they were neat). You understand logs convert between multiplication and addition a little more intuitively, and get a tactile sense for certain values, which can be useful for mental estimation

4 also does the 2nd one in continued or clean context for me (memory always disabled). In both cases it's via 4.6 offering 4 in response to the flag however

That makes sense, I was surprised at first decoding rot13 was so facile but in retrospect should not have been

But only Sonnet 4.6, Sonnet 4 correctly interpreted the message and replied normally to the prompt. Is it an example from somewhere?

Good points, I'd add that the visualization makes it difficult to assess the true density of responses, because there are a lot of points on top of each other. It may be that a large majority of responses are actually near Iran - a contour plot based on a density estimator would be clearer IMO

A whiteboard in an academic lab, with a years-old message left by a former student. Computer Lab Rules: NO OVERFITTING!

Good to see the PhD lab is still following the rules

I know how you feel! Keep pushing (or push advisor to push). At a certain point the editor needs to decide or you must go elsewhere...

ChimeraX screenshot showing CubeNTube plugin.

The new ChimeraX CubeNTube plugin allows erasing parts of maps using cube, cylinder, and custom shapes and has undo. Created by Tamino Cairoli. Available from ChimeraX menu Tools / More Tools....

This is me not reposting Videodrome

Share a movie you incorrectly think no one else remembers 😇

This series by Obi Kaufmann. Higher quality images are available, but without the brick.

Another illustrated poster on the brick wall of the BART station. This one depicts Mt. Diablo, revered by the Ohlone as the center of creation, therefore slandered by missionaries. Also featured are several large, native avian predators.

A third artistic poster at BART. The Edwards wildlife refuge, with native fish, birds, insects, lizard and snake illustrated.

I try to collect new ones when I'm home.

BART station poster depicting the city roughly as seen from the shipping channel, South of the bridge and West of Yerba Buena, with illustrations of several native animals (bat, egret, coyote, river otter, raptor).

I really like these

New experimental data is the bottleneck in virtually all research areas, so "collecting data" also needs to be in there, maybe at 0. At the moment, we don't have liquid handlers that work without human supervision - or even label makers that consistently outcompete permanent marker

Plot twist, the commits were blank

Not just the headline

Did you ever read this?
www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0...

What speaks all languages,
but has no voice?
Would be silent,
but has no choice?

As old as the air,
it spoke only when we did.