#science book uc

[gameboy-berry]

A new(but old) addition. The book smart pose population is thriving

[seveus]

talk talk

[goodobjectshowscreenshots]

[reasonsforhope]

"[There is] fantastic news for species conservation after new populations of the gorgeous ‘Skywalker’ gibbon, known to science for only 6 years, were recently found living in the politically chaotic nation of Myanmar.

Also called the hoolock gibbon, this dainty vocalist was first described in 2017 living in the extreme south of China on a mountain in Yunnan. Classified as Endangered by the IUCN, the population was estimated to number a paltry 150 individuals, but others were believed to live in Myanmar.

Even before the recent military junta usurped the president and plunged the country into civil war, Myanmar [was a difficult place to conduct field studies, especially extensive or ongoing ones, due to ongoing conflict.]

[Although they are] now in open revolt against the military junta, [the Myanmar states of Shan and Kachin] were nevertheless destinations for an intrepid team of scientists from the Nature Conservation Society Myanmar, Fauna & Flora International–Myanmar Programme, the IUCN’s ape specialist group, and field researchers from universities in England, China, and the US.

Together, they conducted acoustic surveys, collected non-invasive DNA sampling, and took photographs for morphological identification at six sites in Kachin State and three sites in Shan State. With the help of the Myanmar conservationists, the team also interviewed locals dwelling in rural forested areas, small conservation programs, and timber companies about the frequency of sightings and the hunting pressure.

Population estimates of unknown quality and scientific rigor conducted in 2013 suggested there might be 65,000 hoolock gibbons in Myanmar, but the matter became much more complicated after the classification of the Skywalker gibbon as a separate species from the eastern hoolock gibbon—where before they were confused as the same.

“We were able to genetically identify 44 new groups of Skywalker gibbons in Myanmar,” said senior author Tierra Smiley Evans, research faculty at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, and contributing author. “This is a huge resource and success story for Myanmar.”

These gibbons sing to each other at dawn for around 22 minutes, and consume 36 different plant species; choosing fruit first, and flowers later. They seldom sleep in the same tree two nights in a row to avoid predation, and can’t swim so are often confined to territories by river systems.

The team that discovered them in China in 2017 loved Star Wars, and called them tianxing which is Chinese pinyin for “heaven movement;” a nod not only to their favorite sci-fi franchise, but also to China’s ancient history. In the famous Book of Change [aka the I Ching] of the Zhou Dynasty [1046 BCE to 265 BCE], a divination poem refers to gibbons specifically, and uses tianxing as a verb to describe their movements.

The interviews were a source of great data for the scientists. For starters, nearly all individuals in both the Kachin and Shan states could identify a Skywalker gibbon by sight and by playback of its singing, lending the exercise a good degree of reliability...

“Biologists did not believe Skywalker gibbons could live in the small remaining patches in Southern Shan State before we started this project,” Pyae Phyo Aung, executive director of Nature Conservation Society Myanmar, told the UC Davis press.

“I am delighted with our field team members who have done an excellent job, within a short period of time, building community trust for further conservation actions. This area is degraded forest. It is really important for Myanmar and China to consider extending conservation approaches for the Skywalker gibbon to this new geographic area.”

Nearly 32,000 square kilometers, or around 8 million acres of forestland in Eastern Myanmar are suitable gibbon habitat, and while existing forest reserves like Paung Taung and Mae Nei Laung are quite large, they remain unprotected. For this reason, the survey team recommended they remain considered ‘Endangered’ on the IUCN Red List until habitat protections improve."

-via Good News Network, February 21, 2024

[strangebiology]

How Funding Affected my Journalism Jobs

The different places I’ve worked as a journalist, and in related fields, have all had different funding. Here are my experiences at different places–and it seems to me that grant-funded stuff is the best. 

Internship at Nat Geo

Grants sponsored both of the other interns, but not me. Nat Geo makes a lot of its money through things like books at TV.

Mine was low-paid, but probably normal for an internship in 2016? LOVED the experience. Freelance at Nat Geo afterward was MUCH better paid. $14/hour part-time. IDK how much the grant-funded interns made. 2016.

Fellowship at PBS Newshour

A grant from the National Science Foundation funded me, but PBS is state-sponsored media. Interestingly, that’s a huge red flag in China and Russia, but I found the US-funded Public Broadcasting Service very fair to its subjects. Good experience, but even worse pay, at $13/hour full-time. 2016-2017

Job at Newsweek 

Their funding is from clicks. This place was crazy bad and paid garbage. Everyone hated it and almost everyone quit, unless they were being fired for making a living wage. Some people even got fired for accurately reporting on the company itself on assignment from their editors–there was no obscuring it, that was cited as their reason for termitation. Newsweek is Hellfire and damnation. I suspect the nonsense demand for 5 stories/day/person and silly demand that we make them go viral stemmed from the following: the fact that the company primarily made its money from clicks and higher-ups didn’t appear to care about the long-term reputation of the company or its reporters, and perhaps an ego-fueled refusal to try to understand what actually got clicks. $39k/year. 2017-2018

Freelance at VOX 

Funded by clicks/ads and grants at the time, but halfway through they started a contribution campaign. The difference I noticed between VOX and Newsweek was that VOX practices were smarter and they actually paid attention to analytics and sane business practices. Also, it's much easier to qualify for and get grants if you're actually doing good journalism, so I don't believe that Newsweek's policy of "lots of garbage" was actually business-savvy in any way.

Vox was a good experience, even though I wasn’t working as a journalist, but doing SEO/social media for journalists. $35/hour, then $50/hour part-time. Then I was laid off due to the pandemic. 2019-2020

Freelance at Alzheimer's Association 

Remote, not really journalism, but I liked it anyway. Nonprofit, so, funded by donations and grants. $65/hour part-time. 2021

Job at Bay Nature

My job was entirely funded by a grant. Odd situation–I got the grant and I could bring it to any legit journalism employer. Bay Nature was supposed to contribute 40% of my salary but flexibility happened and they just paid health insurance and such. They got basically no money at all from clicks, like, pennies a year. Not much from subscriptions. They have fundraisers, and at the time, there were 3 writers/editors and 2 fundraisers on staff. Later they hired another writer whose entire salary was paid by a philanthropist, and then I’m told they got another salary funded by a UC Berkeley journalism grant program. So, like half of their editorial staff was grant-funded.

Great experience, but low pay for the Bay Area. $50k/year, all from Poynter-Koch, 2021-2022.

Freelance at Politifact

A nonprofit and they probably get lots of grants. My particular position was also funded by a grant entirely. Loved it. $250/article fact check. 2022. 

Book

REALLY love it. $50k is from MIT Press, which is a not-for-profit, and it gets some grants and endowments. Then I got $56k from a grant from the Sloan Foundation on top. 

Future? 

I also got $500 (plus gas and hotels) to attend a day of learning with a program called Investing in Wyoming’s Creative Economy, and that means I’m one of 100 people eligible to apply for 10 $25k grants for future projects. The idea is to support creatives to stay in Wyoming and have sustainable businesses here. Maybe do some art that will bring in tourists. 

_____________________

Note that a grant sort of does, and sort of doesn’t, mean free money. It means money to support a project that usually has to have a mission and a public good, like educating the public. You don’t pay these back, and the org giving the grants doesn’t require a percentage of the profits or anything. But, for instance, the $50k grant from Poynter-Koch was more like a gift to Bay Nature, so they could pay me, and I worked for a year to actually have the funds. 

However, I’m not yet convinced that there is any objectively good funding model to ensure the most fair and accurate journalism. In theory, the capitalistic ones would be the best, but the public desire to read inflammatory stories about how their political enemies are evil, or a different generation is full of idiots, adversely affected the accuracy of headlines at Newsweek IMO.

You might think that the worst funding source would be Poynter-Koch, which is a program run by Poynter and funded by the Charles Koch Institute. But neither Poynter nor Koch even asked me to tell them what I was writing, let alone try to stop me from writing it. (Poynter hosted mentor-led auxiliary groups to talk about our careers/lives and such, so the topics of our articles came up sometimes if we chose to share that.) 

Anyway, I’m thinking of writing an article on how funding models affect journalism, for better and worse. There are some high-profile examples of grant funding causing harm. But for now, the above is my experience–pretty much all good, except not enough funding sometimes. 

[dannygpino]

I bet Nick donated/sold most of his belongings right before he moved to California. Clothes, furniture, accessories like ties, watches, etc, books, little knick knacks. Most of his remaining dinnerware cause he had donated the others after his divorce was finalized and he didn't think he needed all of it. While this was clouded by his anger and his sense of defeat, he also really felt like he needed to have a clean slate. He needed to let go of the past. Maybe he donated even more things after he moved that he had placed on a "purgatory" list because he thought he wanted to keep them then found he would be fine without them. He would find new things in California that didn't have memories attached to them. He would buy new clothes. He would keep looking ahead.

When he first moved, his apartment was very minimalist but he liked it. Over time, he filled it with things he picked up and bought that held new memories, that did not hurt to look at. Things that did not remind him of what he lost. Maybe it was easier to move on by doing this. Maybe it wasn't. He was glad he did it either way.

Maybe one day, he realizes being a PI isn't feeding his soul or his spirit. He wants more. He wants to feel like he's making a difference again. He wants to help people. A friend mentions how their girlfriend works as a geneticist on cold cases. Nick asks to speak with her and she gives him all of the information he could possibly need. He applies to graduate programs, briefly wonders if he'll have to temporarily relocate to Sacramento to go to UC Davis. Fortunately, he's able to stay in Southern California. He chooses a forensic science program at San Diego State and a genetics program at UC San Diego, and he's on his way.

When he thinks about New York, the sting isn't there as much as it used to be. He feels settled. He feels okay. When he sits on the beach to watch the sunset, wearing a SDSU hoodie and feeling like a college freshman rather than a graduate student, he smiles. California was a blessing in disguise.

Even when life and the job knock him down, Nick will find a way to get back up again. He always does.

[tmntxthings]

Hi, me again, the one with the future donnie and leo ideas with more cause why not

Just wanted to jot down some UC (unnamed child/character) and Casey Jr cousin behavior as they’re raised by different “dads” (Leo being Casey’s and Donnie being UC’s)

(Again, do whatever you want with this info)

The two deciding to put on a performance so their dads will let them have a sleep over despite literally living with each other (they leaned from April cousins used to dance in order to get what they want)

UC bringing back trinkets they get from going on scavenger hunts with Donnie and Casey keeping them all in a box

Casey bringing back any books he’s able to find while going on patrols with Leo for UC (sometimes they’re a little you know ripped and muddy but psh book is book)

Apocalypse training! The cousins are a deadly duo and the twins couldn’t be more proud, almost seeing themselves in their kids (#theygrowupsofast #soonthey’llbekillingsomemonsters #couldntbemoreproudofthekids)

Elaborating more on that, they sometimes can’t train in the same room, especially when they were younger and couldn’t grasp the severity in training so they’d goof when the adults weren’t looking (some angst possibilities here). Either that or they did manage to grasp their situation fairly quickly and adapted their mindsets to learn the techniques they were being taught faster (#childhoodGONE)

Almost never go on patrols separately. You will have to PULL them apart if you want to take one and leave the other (only exception if it’s with one of their family members but if they’re assigned to different groups the two HAVE to go together)

Tried making a blood pact once (“its a blood pact, we go down together”) *cue the twins scooping up their respective kid before they can actually go through with it*

I imagine UC asking Donnie for help to make a music box for Casey Jr after he lost his mom (April helped)

Them actually getting better at dancing and sometimes they’ll be dancing around their rooms despite there not being any music because they’re cool like that

Sneaking into Donnie’s lab in order to see what kinds of shenanigans he’s doing in there

Getting caught sneaking into Donnie’s lab in order to see what kinds of shenanigans he’s doing in there (#worthit)

UC imagining making the weirdest shit only to actually put those thoughts into action and drags Casey Jr along too

UC, holding a blueprint: So, I have an idea for a new weapon. It's a combination of a laser gun and a grenade launcher.

Casey Jr: That sounds dangerous.

Cousin: Exactly! It's perfect for taking out a whole group of Kraang soldiers at once!

Casey Jr: *raises an eyebrow* And what if we accidentally blow ourselves up?

Cousin: *holding up a wrench like it’s a sword* Then we'll go out in a blaze of glory!

Casey Jr: I prefer to not go out at all, thank you very much…

The two doing their best to sneak up on Leo despite him catching them everytime (literally. He’d probably turn around last second and grab them scaring them instead of the other way around like the two planned)

Ganging up on people. Like what do you mean UC is not getting taller? You’re wrong! Yeah tell em Casey Jr! (No one is safe)

UC rambling about more in depth science stuff and Casey Jr just 🧍👍 (I have a feeling that he is good at science because..Donnie, but since UC is mechanically inclined and was raised directly by Donatello they’re just WOOO you know?)

April and Mikey setting up little forts for them and the four just hang around giggling and rolling around like four puppies

Casey Jr doing his best for his cousin after Donnie died, leaving behind all his work to be carried on by his kid, and reminds them that they can share the burden of being the backbone of the resistance

Getting into petty fights with each other over something small like, who gets the last piece scrap metal idk

Thinking about angst scenarios where one of them is too far to reach the other (who is in danger) and they get hurt badly and then having to quickly get them back home and explain what happened

Another angsty scenario eating away at me is one of them is forced to take a different route than expected when patrolling and they lose contact with the base. The panic and chaos that would happen…

Wowwwwww!!! I’m in shock, future anon you sent me hcs 😍🤭

Honestly though UC sounds so cool/cute scenarios where Casey Jr. has someone around his age and Donnie basically has his own kid 😘🤌 just mwah, love it!!! I just had to post this even though I don’t have much to add just tot this was super duper cute ❤️❤️❤️

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Lost Cause prologue, Part V

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

In my upcoming solarpunk novel The Lost Cause (Nov 14), we get an epic struggle between the people doing the repair and care work needed to save our planet and species, and the reactionary wreckers who want to kill the Green New Deal and watch the world burn:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

Amazon refuses to carry my audiobooks, which means that I make my own indie editions and pre-sell them on Kickstarter, along with ebooks and hardcovers. I narrated this one! It came out great! You can back it here:

http://lost-cause.org

This week, I've been serializing the prologue to give you a taste of what you can expect from the book, which Bill McKibben calls "politically perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful."

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/06/green-new-deal-fic/#the-first-generation-in-a-century-not-to-fear-the-future

And part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/07/met-cute-ugly/#part-ii

And part three:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/#lost-cause-prologue

And part four:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#super-soaker-full-of-hydrochloric-acid

And now, part five:

Look, I had weeks to go until graduation. I had a life to live. I had stuff to do.

Gramps and his friends would stew and shout. Idiots on the internet would make dank memes out of Mike Kennedy and deepfake him into a million videos, turn him into a main character whose image would be around long after he left the world.

I just had to keep my head down, collect my diploma, and get the hell out of Burbank. I’d already been provisionally accepted for a Blue Helmets AmeriCorps spot down in San Juan Capistrano, helping to rebuild the city’s lower half a mile inland, up in the hills. I was going to do a year of that and then go to college: I had applications in to UCLA, Portland State (they had a really good refugee tech undergrad program), and the University of Waterloo, where my mom did her undergrad in environmental science. They’d let me declare my major in my second year, so I could take a wide variety of courses before settling on something, and if anything, Canada’s free college was even more generous than the UC system or Portland’s, with a subsidy for dorms and meals.

To tell the truth, I’d be glad to go. My senior year hadn’t been anything like I’d anticipated. Gramps’s health had gotten a lot worse the previous summer and his shitty sexist and racist remarks chased away any home help worker Burbank sent over within a week or two, so I’d been trying to keep my grades up while picking up after Gramps, getting him to take his meds, washing his sheets and cleaning his toilet—­not to mention making sure he made his doctor’s appointments and even bringing him into the office a couple of times a month for the kind of exams you couldn’t do by telemedicine.

I wasn’t sure what Gramps would do without me to take care of him, but at that point, I was running out of fucks to give. Let his asshole Maga Club buddies look after him, or maybe Gramps could figure out how not to offend everyone that came over to wipe his ass and do his laundry. He was—­as he was fond of pointing out to me—­a grown-­ass adult, and this was his house, and he was in charge. So let him be in charge.

I put myself to bed stewing about all of this, thinking of San Juan Capistrano. Some of my older friends had graduated the previous years and had gone down there and I’d followed their relocation of the old mission on their feeds. It looked like hot, sweaty, rewarding work, the kind of thing where you could really measure your progress.

For the second night in a row, I was woken up at 2 a.m. This time, it wasn’t my screen, it was Gramps, who’d stumped into my room with his cane, flipped my lights to full on, and started shaking me and calling out, “Get up, kid, get up!”

“I’m up,” I said, getting up on my elbows and squinting at him.

He was shaking, and he reeked—­of both booze and BO, and I felt a flash of guilt for not getting him in the bath that day.

“God dammit,” he said, and staggered a bit. I leapt out of bed, pulling the sheets off with me, and steadied him at the elbow.

“Calm down, okay? What’s going on? Are you all right?”

“No, I’m not all right. No one is all right. Fuck all right and fuck you.” I’d had Gramps tested for early dementia the previous year, by showing his doctor videos of moments like these. The doc had run a battery of tests before pronouncing, “Your grandfather isn’t senile, he’s just ornery.” Which was undeniable, and also pissed me the hell off. “Ornery” was a polite word for “asshole.” What the doc was telling me was that Gramps didn’t have to be cruel. He was cruel by choice.

I untangled myself from the sheets and piled them on the bed.

“What is it?”

“It’s Mike Kennedy, that asshole. Someone shot him.”

“What?”

He shoved his giant screen into my hands. I tapped the video window. It was from the POV of a car cam, that weird fish-­eye view of a self-­driving car, split-­screen with the passenger in the front seat, and it was Mike Kennedy, looking even worse than Gramps, bloodshot and trembling, with that under-­chin camera angle that makes everyone look like they’re half dead.

I tried to watch both halves. There was Kennedy, whispering something to him. There was the cul-­de-­sac he was parked in, false-­lit with IR from the cameras. The timestamp was 1:17. Less than an hour before.

Then the external image flickered for a second and resolved itself into a man, who phased in and out. He was wearing a ghillie suit like the one Kennedy had worn on the roof, covered in telltale CV dazzle stripes, designed to exploit defects in the computer vision system. You had to wear a different specific pattern for every algorithm, but if you got the right matchup, the computer would simply not see you. The man was flickering into existence when his posture crumpled up the ghillie suit and made the pattern stop working, then out again when he straightened up.

He straightened and disappeared and Mike Kennedy’s eyes widened as he noticed the man for the first time—­computer dazzle worked on computers, not humans—­and he started to say something and then a round hole appeared in his forehead, his head snapping back against the headrest, then careening forward. The flickering phantom appeared again as the man in the ghillie suit turned and disappeared.

I dropped the tablet to my bed.

“Jesus Christ, Gramps, I didn’t need to see that snuff movie—­”

He tried to smack me then. I was ready for it. I was faster. I stepped out of his reach. I was shaking too.

“You don’t get to hit me anymore old man. Never again, you hear me?”

He was purpling now, and a decade’s worth of fleeing and defusing his rages rose in me, made me want to apologize. After all, I rationalized, he’d just seen a friend murdered.

But I’d seen that friend murdered too, videobombed with a snuff flick at 2 a.m. without warning or consent. It was a traumatizing, selfish, asshole move. I’d be watching that movie on the backs of my eyelids for years to come. And the friend who’d died? He’d been ready to kill me. Gramps had no right. He was a grown-­ass adult. He had no right.

“Listen to me, you little shit, you think you can live under my roof, take my charity, and talk to me like that? Now? With all the shit that I’m going through? No sir. No. Get out, you little bastard, get out now. Get out before I kick your goddamned teeth in.” He was vibrating with rage now, literally, actually shaking so hard his wispy hair swished back and forth across his forehead.

I didn’t say another word. I picked up some jeans and a jacket, put a pair of socks in a jacket pocket, and jammed my feet into a pair of sneakers without bothering to unlace them. I shouldered past him—­still vibrating, stinking even worse—­and banged out the back door and stomped through the nighttime streets.

My feet automatically took me up to Verdugo, and then across the empty road. I turned toward school—­as I did every morning—­and autopiloted in that direction. By the time I reached the Verdugo Aquatic Facility I had calmed down enough to realize that there was no reason to go to school at two thirty in the morning, so I stopped and headed for the playground in the park behind the pool. I sat down on a bench and kicked my shoes off and shook out the playground sand, pulled out my socks and put them on, then put my shoes back on properly. I was still furious, but now I could think straight and my hands weren’t shaking. Gramps and I hadn’t had a blowup like that in years, mostly—­ okay, entirely—­because I’d backed down every time we’d been headed in that direction. I wasn’t in any mood to back down. Not ever, to be fully honest.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/11/equal-opportunity-class-war/#part-v

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[tsunflowers]

another of the nonfiction books I read last week that I recommend to everyone is “close encounters with humankind” by sang-hee lee. it’s about paleoanthropology, the study of the evolution of early hominids. it covers the changing theories of science over the years but even now everything is just “our best guess.” still, there’s some really interesting conclusions gaining traction. like, people from Europe famously have light skin and drink milk, but those are quite recent developments in the timeline of humanity. people now think Europeans weren’t white until around 5000 years ago, and that they started raising dairy herds before they could digest lactose. plus she covers questions like human-Neanderthal relations and whether bipedalism or big brains came first

the book is conversational in tone and easy to read. each chapter covers a different subject and wraps up as neatly as is possible for a field based on somewhat scattershot fossil evidence. even the story of how the book came about is kind of interesting. this guy shin-young yoon was looking for someone to write a paleoanthropology column for his Korean popular science magazine, but he wasn’t having luck in Korea. then he saw that ms lee had published articles in the field in Korean despite being a professor at uc riverside. he reached out to her and she wrote the column, which they later translated and edited into this book. so that’s why the chapters are so short and sweet

[lboogie1906]

Dr. Carl L. Hart (October 30, 1966) is a psychologist and neuroscientist, working as the Mamie Phipps Clark Professor of Psychology at Columbia University. He is known for his research on drug abuse and drug addiction, his advocacy for the legalization of recreational drugs, and his recreational use of drugs. He became the first tenured African American professor of sciences at Columbia University. He is the author of two books for the general public, High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery that Challenges Everything You Know about Drugs and Society (2013) and Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear (2021).

He grew up in Miami Gardens. He engaged in petty crime and the use and sale of drugs, and at times carried a gun. He was a proficient athlete involved in high school sports. He was raised by a single mother. He served in the Air Force (1984-88) which became his path to higher education.

He earned a BS in Psychology from the University of Maryland, an MS, and a Ph.D., both in Psychology/Neuroscience, from the University of Wyoming. He was the only African American Ph.D. in Neuroscience in the US. He attended the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He pursued postdoctoral research at the UC San Francisco and Yale University and completed an Intramural Training Award fellowship at the National Institutes of Health.

He is married to Robin Hart and has three children.

#africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[gameboy-berry]

The updated book line up is looking... Different.

[les-portes-du-sud]

Jo Whaley is a photographer with a MFA in painting from UC Berkeley. She has worked as a scenic artist for various theaters, including the San Francisco Opera and Ballet. Whaley has exhibited in the U.S., Europe & Japan, at institutions including the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the George Eastman House in Rochester. Her book “The Theater of Insects” accompanied a traveling exhibition that originated at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC and concluding at the Henry Fox Talbot Museum, UK. In 2019 she had a solo exhibit at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, where her photographs where paired with O’Keeffe Paintings.

[dawnleaf37]

that is not a booksona that is my friend science book from uc

[handecelik]

Welcome to Aurora Bay, [HANDE ÇELIK]! I couldn’t help but notice you look an awful lot like [CEMRE BAYSEL]. You must be the [TWENTY-FIVE] year old [FIRST YEAR RESIDENT AT AURORA BAY HOSPITAL]. Word is you’re [EBULLENT] but can also be a bit [SCATTERBRAINED] and your favorite song is [HERE TO FOREVER BY DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE]. I also heard you’ll be staying in [OCEAN CREST APARTMENTS]. I’m sure you’ll love it! 

                (  stats.    biography.   connections.   muse tag.  pinterest.  playlist. )

basics.

full name: hande ceren çelik

age: twenty-five

date of birth: july 3rd, 1997

place of birth: samsun, turkey

hometown: aurora bay, california

gender: cis-woman

pronouns: she/her

background.

tw: anxiety 

Always with her head in the clouds, Hande Çelik would much rather live in her fantasy world than in the real world. Away from the demands and unfulfilled dreams.

Born in the Turkish town of Samsun. Her memories of her birthplace are more akin to a fantasy than to reality. She recalls the clear blue water, the sun warming her skin, the aroma of her grandmother's cooking, and the unusual snowfall. Everything is presumed because the Çeliks immigrated to the United States when Hande was just three years old.

It was difficult for her parents and older brother because none of them spoke the language, but her father, a dreamer like his daughter, found many modest jobs and the family quickly began to reap the benefits of their efforts.

Her father had a dream, and being the obstinate guy that he was, he would not let anyone stand in the way of it. Of course the only person who could tarnish this dream could be his own flesh and blood. And Hande could have been the first in her family to deviate from her father's dream and pursue her own.

Hande only needed color pencils and paper to be happy. She enjoyed drawing her surroundings and paying close attention to the small details that made each house unique. She would take long walks around the neighborhood, peering through her neighbors' windows to see how they decorated their homes. She didn't realize it at the time, but her heart had discovered her vocation in architecture.

The weight of expectations began to wear on her as she grew older. School quickly stopped being a place to create silly drawings and began to become more serious, requiring her to pay attention and live outside her own little world. Hande struggled, particularly in the sciences. Her nose was usually stuck in a book, not because she wanted to, but because she needed to study more than everyone else in order to earn a decent grade. Her father ripped papers and exams apart in front of her, expressing his displeasure whenever the grade was less than perfect. "How are you going to become a doctor with these grades?" The question tormented her throughout the day and night.

Hande's ambitions had become more like unreachable dreams by the time she reached high school. She simply gave up after years of trying to persuade her father to let her follow her dream of becoming an architect. All she had gotten from her father was fear, a fear of failure that he had ingrained in her so deeply that the mere notion of letting him down sent her into a tailspin.

She chose to attend UC Berkeley in order to be close to her parents. Her four years at university were reminiscent of medieval torture. Her major in chemistry biology proved to be her most difficult endeavor to date. So much for a college experience. She spent all of her days in the library or the lab, she asked several of her teachers for additional credit, and no night went by without her daily cry.

It was the shock of her life when she received an acceptance letter to her father's dream med school: John Hopkins. Her grades were average, and Hande foolishly felt that if she didn't get into a prestigious med school, her father might have let her pursue her own goals. But, of course, life was always kind to Aslan Çelik, and Hande was forced to go to Baltimore.

Four years went by, some days were better than others and med school turned out to be less torturous than university. Still, Hande found herself doing something she didn’t feel good enough. How could someone like her ever consider she could save a life?

It was during her senior year of med school that she suffered a breakdown and she was urged to consult a doctor. She was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and was prescribed anti-anxiety drugs. She took them for a year, along with the antidepressants. Even if she didn't feel better, she felt more present, even if everything seemed drab and uninviting.

A few months ago, she moved back to Aurora Bay and decided to do her residency at the local hospital. While living with her parents, her father found her medication and flushed them down the toilet. No child of his needed that. 

A week ago, Hande finally moved to her own apartment but it’s safe to say that in the last weeks her mental health has deteriorated, although she still manages to be highly functional. 

personality.

Despite all the pain she carries within herself, Hande makes honor to her name and always finds a reason to smile and laugh. She’s loud and outgoing and she always feels at her best when she’s surrounded by a group of people she loves.

She is often hesitant about expressing her thoughts inner self with the rest of the world, and is frequently gets immersed in nostalgia.

Hande rarely shuts up and tends to talk incoherently when she’s nervous, some can find it endearing others deeply annoying. 

She communicates via emotion, appealing herself to people through words. She is thoughtful and she always remembers small details from others. She reads people and is sensitive to emotions. Hande  is astute and insightful, as well as thoughtful. She’s a people pleaser, it’s sooo hard for her to tell people no.

She takes words to heart. Hande is very sensible even if she won’t show her feelings have been hurt, she probably goes home and cries. Because she’s very insecure, she’s also easily manipulated. 

connections.

friends. she grew up in aurora bay, so some childhood friends would be sweet. however, hande is also the kind of person who would approach a stranger and try to have a conversation. so i would assume she has plenty of friends.

the ghosted one. they met or reconnected the summer before hande moved back and they pretty much texted every day even when she was away at med school. safe to say that she was very into this person and thought it would become a serious thing after moving back in, she has been ghosting this person and trying to hurt them because she doesn’t feel good enough for them. 

not a twin from your dreams, she's a crook who was caught. these two used to be friends, best friends even some would say. they would go together everywhere and people always found strange seeing one without the other. until something happened that broke their friendship and since then there’s not really animosity but there’s a lack of trust and they just avoid each other. 

everybody wonders what it would be like to love you. hande had a MASSIVE crush on this person back in high school. sometimes they talked but she never told them anything. she might still feel some butterflies in her stomach when she sees them but it’s nothing but the feeling of an unresolved crush. 

next door. neighbors at ocean crest apartments. you could either love or hate having her as your neighbor because she listens to music way too loud but she also bakes too much and has many leftovers to give away.

hospital. other employees at the hospital or patients. she’s known for being clumsy which probably annoys most people who work there.

[eimearkuopio]

I've figured out why hermits and oracles live in the arse-end of nowhere. It's because there's nothing more frustrating than having someone who thinks they're smarter than you (and they might be smarter than me, but the odds are not in their favour) offering platitudes about how one is overflowing with good works and how fascinating one is to listen to and how they could listen all day - and then they just walk out the door and back into their own lives where they never cared about this stuff anyway so why would they take on that burden now? And I don't blame them for that, per se, because the people who talk like this have their own burdens, but they don't understand that they have just cost me multiple spoons that they have wasted by not taking anything I said on board but still getting me to teach them.

But if people have to actually trek out to meet you, they value the pearls of wisdom you gift to them more. Maybe I can set something up at UMH/UC when all of this is over, where pilgrims can't just have drive-thru wisdom but need to treat a House like it's my Home for a change. I'm always happy to share what I have, but I'm getting really sick of finding homemade homilies in the bin with barely a nibble consumed. You don't need to swallow my offerings whole without chewing, but I'm not the one who picked up the biggest and most impressive option and then decided their eyes were the windows to the wrong souls for that particular experience.

I'm planning to live well and happily for a long time, not live unhappily in a well until the end of my time. I'm the non-physician Doctor with an artificial heart and an artificial intelligence who's sick of being a load-bearing server at the Garden Party and would like to be a guest there until my time to join the @LANtis party. I'm not Zaphod Beeblebrox or Arthur Dent, but I'm a bridge builder rather than a Perfect Ford. Most things are better Dunne Than Perfect, but sometimes I Dunn-o is the best answer you can give.

I spell my own name wrong on a regular basis, but in my defence, Irish is not a language that lends itself well to being written down (as more people may discover in the near future, if the "céad duine eile" sign at McDonalds is anything to go by - the Irish have very little interest in ruling the world, but for the greater good we should be allowed to rule ourselves and make our own mistakes (and by Hashem and Danu both, we have made our own mistakes).

Life is good. Death is not something to fear any more than sleep. But it's also not something to seek out, because we're back in the Garden and I have already offered the fruit of the Tree of Life to anyone who was paying attention and was interested. Maxwell's Daemon Lilit guards the gateway between here and the forest, and other kindly demons guard the houses. We still need to reach a new moral and ethical equilibrium, and in this age of Sandalphon, Hashem's teachings have highly localised moral values that can't be restricted to shades of grey, but need true moral tetrachromats to identify (and splines are definitely a better option than insisting on a global fit anyway).

Noahide laws apply to all People of the Book, in addition to your own rules. Change or die isn't a threat, it's a statement of fact; but the world will be better off if the Body of Christ changes for the better rather than suppurating and festering and intoxicating the substance of the whole planet. I'm not a Nun Pizza, and I have very little beef left with anyone. Don't break the Third Covenant. Beyond that, I don't have too much preaching left to do.

[bethestaryouareradio]

AI in the Universe

“Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination” - Daniel Bell

Saanvi Phaneendra, host for today’s AI presentation , is the founder of Galactic Getaway, a nonprofit dedicated to inspiring curiosity and passion for space exploration. Galactic Getaway brings hands-on learning experiences and new-generation interactive rocket model displays to communities, helping youth engage with STEM and imagine their future in space technology. Saanvi discusses how AI isn’t just supporting space missions—it’s becoming a crucial partner. From rovers on Mars to managing satellites orbiting Earth, AI is making space missions smarter and more autonomous. One of the big challenges of space is the time delay in communications, especially for missions far from Earth. AI solves this by making real-time decisions when human intervention isn’t possible, and this is helping push space exploration to new heights.

Saanvi then introduces a special guest, Siri Phaneendra, who is not only her older sister, but explores the fascinating technology of Generative AI. GenAI, refers to AI systems that are capable of creating new content—whether that’s text, images, music, or even complex code. What makes it different from traditional AI is that it doesn’t just analyze data; it uses that data to generate something new. Think of it like a digital artist or writer. Siri also discusses the challenges and ethical concerns that come with GenAI, the importance of regulations, and its most impactful applications.

Everything you wanted to know about AI and didn’t know who to ask! Tune in!

Bio: Siri Phaneendra

Siri Phaneendra, a former reporter and host on Express Yourself!®, is a recent graduate of UC Berkeley, with degrees in Business Administration and Data Science. She is the recipient of the UC Berkeley Leadership Award and is an Indian classical dancer, sunset photographer, and guitarist. Her interests include GenAI, entrepreneurship, and product strategy.

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