notesbyash

[notesbyash]

24.03.25

Reviewing coursework again.

I've fallen into a nice mix of digital and physical notes; a recent acquisition has helped the last few workflow pieces click into place. I've always struggled with finding a physical notes that feel flexible enough match my thought processes, but a combination of sticky notes and a refillable notebook seems to be working well. I'm delighted to be using my fountain pen regularly again.

🎶 Midnight Fiction - ILLIT

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your life is not an optimization problem

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It's very endearing to me how many people are willing to keep an eye on a video feed so they can push a button and let a fish in the Netherlands get to the other side of a dam.

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I have a fundamental need to work in a brutalist concrete building with no modern technology and endless natural light

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Ahti | 02.14.2025 | Control Ultimate Edition

Captured on Xbox Series X.

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my advisor keeps signing me up for free department lunches with guest speakers. why

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studying crunch is picking up again so you know what that means!

save me comfort media, comfort media save me

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So earlier in art class today, someone drew a characters hands in their pockets and mentioned that hands are really like the ultimate end boss of art, and most of us wholeheartedly agreed. So then, our teacher went ahead and free handed like a handful of hands on the board, earning a woah from a couple of students. So the one from earlier mentioned how it barely took the teacher ten seconds to do what I can’t do in three hours. And you know what he responded?

“It didn’t take me ten seconds, it took me forty years.”

And you know, that stuck with me somehow. Because yeah. Drawing a hand didn’t take him fourth years. But learning and practicing to draw a hand in ten seconds did. And I think there’s something to learn there but it’s so warm and my brain is fried so I can’t formulate the actual morale of the lesson.

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“the arts and sciences are completely separate fields that should be pitted against each other” the overlap of the arts and sciences make up our entire perceivable reality they r fucking on the couch

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Submitter comment: I'd like to submit this '[s]tudy of defensive behavior of a venomous snake as a new approach to understand snakebite' not for it's topic (worth studying!) but for it's insane methodology, which... well, I'll just let the researcher speak for himself:

[Q: Why did you decide to do this experiment?

A: Snake behavior has been generally neglected as a field of research, especially in Brazil. And most studies don’t examine what factors make them want to bite. If you study malaria, you can research the parasite that causes the disease—but if you don’t study the mosquito that carries it, you will never solve the problem. Up until now, the popular wisdom was that the jararaca would only attack if you touched it or stepped on it. But that was not what we found.

Q: Why did you need to be the victim?

A: The best way to do this research is to put snakes and a human together. In this case, the human was me. We put the snakes inside a ring on the floor of our lab until they got used to it, then I stepped in wearing special protective boots. I stepped close to the snake and also lightly on top of it. I didn’t put my whole weight on my foot, so I did not hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped 30 times on every animal, totaling 40,480 steps.]

From the recent (aptly named) interview: Researcher steps on deadly vipers 40,000 times to better predict snakebites

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“Ash,” you may inquire, “why are you in a PhD program if you know you aren’t a theorist?”

because apparently I make poor decisions and like to suffer

the more theoretical academic papers I read the more I realize I am not a theorist at heart

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the more theoretical academic papers I read the more I realize I am not a theorist at heart

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Gerard du Bois

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The Hour. S1E1. A New Kind of News.

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The Federal Bureau of Control was never out in the open. This was always an obfuscated, classified, top secret operation. So imagine our surprise when the building's observation-resistant aspects began, in some unquantifiable way, to affect the Bureau as a whole.

— Control (2019)

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new year. same shenanigans. back to the office I go

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Here’s a video so you can hear the water and the thrushes. I took it for you because you couldn’t be there. <3