March 20th 2020

School just went online because of COVID-19 and my library closed. So I dug out an old coffee maker and luckily years of collecting discounted books has paid off. Good luck with your studies and stay safe!

-heather

Opinion: Another Species of Hominin May Still Be Alive

That’s a wrap! Thank you for all the wonderful questions. James Webb Space Telescope Planetary Scientist Dr. Naomi Rowe-Gurney answered questions about the science goals, capabilities, and her hopes for the world’s most powerful telescope.

Check out her full Answer Time for more: Career|Science Goals|Capabilities

We hope you enjoyed today and learned something new about the Webb mission! Don’t miss the historic launch of this first-of-its kind space observatory. Tune in to NASA TV HERE on Dec. 22 starting at 7:20 a.m. EST (12:20 UTC).

If today’s Answer Time got you excited, explore all the ways you can engage with the mission before launch! Join our #UnfoldTheUniverse art challenge, our virtual social event with international space agencies, and countdown to liftoff with us. Check out all the ways to participate HERE.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblrfor your regular dose of space!

How I was scammed a few days ago, research for a good cause went side-ways.

Hey guys I am back after a short break, had some personal duties to take care of and I have some time for myself finally. So if you have been following me since the beginning, you would have known that writing is a lifelong dream of mine. So recently I saw a youtube video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jHaKPF5Jk8 ) about the infection of HIV/AIDS and other STDs and I have been told that it’s quite common is it in same-sex relationships. I wanted to do some floor work by myself on how things work among themselves.

Google helped me a little as I was surveying about these particular lifestyles, so as I was surveying what sort of ways people used to connect and the most popular way was dating app. Google gave me a list and the top two applications being used were Grindr and Scruff. To be honest, I have never heard of something called scruffing but I sure do know what is grinding, boom - Just a little humor haha.

As I was looking into some information into this Grindr app, I did not get much information. So I decided to download the app and create a free account. Just to see how things are in that world. I used my photo (because I got nothing to hide, from my perspective this is purely for educational purposes), but I used an alias though. I used it for a total of 4 days, I received a few “pokes”. Most of them were just looking for sex basically, maybe 1 or 2 were having a conversation about themselves. It was like a gay sex market.

Here is when it got interesting, on the last day before I deleted the app. I received a poke and these guys wanted to know if I was interested to meet him in person. I was keener on getting some information about that person and the “lifestyle” itself, so I made it a two-way communication. He wanted to communicate via WhatsApp and the biggest mistake I did was moving the communication to WhatsApp, more on that later. So on WhatsApp, I gotta admit I was trying to fish on how things go so later on I got to know what he is what they call themselves as moneyboy a.k.a male/gay prostitute. However, my inquisitiveness did not stop there and I started asking him about group affairs and parties and where these happen and do we need to get the place by ourselves or do they provide such. At one point, I felt like I have had enough, so I ended the conversation by saying that “okay noted, if I need it I will let you know” and I did not give that person any agreement to proceed with a meet-up certainly as it was full of red flags and I deleted the “Grindr” app and the WhatsApp conversation. I did not tell him that I was just trying to fish some information from him as I did not want to trigger that person into doing something rash and it’s not my goal to have sex with 1 man but to make it more disgusting with multiple men in this case.

A few days passed, then I received a WhatsApp message from a new number. So what happened was this person stole my WhatsApp display picture and edited it with a google picture of a penis and some caption about I am a cheating gay person. It was very cheap and ugly editing by standards, technology has improved and they could have tried better haha. However, at first, I was shocked as I had forgotten about the previous communication we had, so I tried asking him who was that, and he told me some bullshit story saying that he borrowed 500 ringgit from the loan sharks because I requested for a meet-up session and he needs to pay twice the borrowed money and it’s my fault he borrowed that money. However, I gotta admit I was stupid and I fold. Just to avoid problems, I agreed to pay him back the money and he passed me his CIMB account number which was registered under the name “Ganesh Thiagarajan” with account number “7066473035”. It was done, I shared the receipt with him and he told me that he will delete the photos and I blocked that number.

A few hours passed after that incident, I got another new message from a new number with a new bullshit story from someone new claiming to be that guys sister, claiming that the loan sharks beat her brother up and robbed his chain and I am accountable on paying this up, or else she will come to my house with the police force as her husband works in Contingents Police Headquarters Malaysia (which was a bluff, I got to know later, as the so-called husband is not a police officer and they do not have my physical address). As you know, only I knew my pure intent on why I got into these, and I didn’t want to trouble anyone else, to be honest, I folded again and she told me to transfer 1K so that she can buy the chain back and I will need to pay her up monthly, which I initially agreed with it to think that I messed up by trying to be a professional blogger and I need to pay the price. I transferred the money to the same account number the brother provided earlier.

I went back home from work and had a few beers. Sat back and tried to backtrack what happened a few days back and what was the communication me and the other guy had and things came clear to me. I was SCAMMED!!! because when I was inquisitively fishing for details about the “group thingy” he told me each person costs rm 50 and including him there are 4 people in total and that makes rm 200 and hotel is not that costly nowadays, it’s just below rm100. Max would be rm 300 only, but this guy even if it was real that he borrowed from the loan sharks, borrowed an additional rm 200 for his gain, and due to his stupidity he went to the loan sharks with a gold necklace around his neck? How stupid is that (considering that happened)? Aside from that, the sister’s concern was not about the brother all along when I spoke to her, she wanted money only.

The next day, the sister contacted me again asking for more money and I had enough. I started questioning her, she claimed that she needed to buy back the necklace. So I asked for the receipt, but she couldn’t show it to me (meaning she did not buy the necklace with that money). Aside from that, the number her brother used and the sister used was not registered under their name, there is a very useful app called “truecaller” which you guys can use to check on whose name the mobile number was registered under. That’s when I knew that they do not have anything against me cause, to be honest, I was not at fault nor accountable at any point here. These scums are scammers who are trying to feed off other people’s hard earn money.

When I asked the sister about all these, there was no valid response and I told her that I will be making an official police report and if they wish to share my photo on social media, they can go ahead as it was a stolen photo from my WhatsApp display picture and I was handsome in that picture, haha and another threat came by saying that they will share a photo of my family as well, well they can try all they can but I got nothing to be afraid of cause my intent was not to fuck nor get fucked by a guy and I did what I did to get information for a good purpose. I guess dating apps are still dangerous to many people out there as we are not aware of who are we surrounded by. I have gotta say, I learned my lesson on sharing my details with strangers (even the slightest such as phone number). At least I am a guy, sharing my photo might not affect me much but I can’t imagine what if it was a girl’s photo is shared with false claims and how that affects the girl’s life.

Some people don’t get that, I guess the saying “When there is a light, there will be shadow” is true though. It is a dangerous world we live in, let’s not corrupt it anymore, and let’s make it better for our future children.

Human existence is scary and confusing, a few hundred thousand years ago, we became conscious and found ourselves in a strange place. It was filled with other beings, We could eat some, some could eat us. There was liquid stuff we could drink, things we could use to make more things. The daytime sky had a tiny yellow ball that warmed our skin, the night sky was filled with beautiful lights. This place was obviously made for us; something was watching over us. We were home, this made everything much less scary and confusing.

But the older we got, the more we learned about the world and ourselves. We learned that the twinkling lights are not shining beautifully for us, they just are. We learned that we’re not at the center of what we now call the universe, and that it is much…much older that we thought. We learned that we’re made of many little dead things which make up bigger things that are not dead, for some reason, and that we’re just another temporary stage in a history going back over a billion years.

We learned, in awe that we live on a moist speck of dust moving around a medium-sized star in a quiet region of one arm of an average galaxy, which is part of a galaxy group that we will never leave and this group is only one of thousands that together make up a galaxy supercluster but even our supercluster is only one in thousands that make up what we call the observable universe. The universe might be a million times bigger, but we will never know.

We can throw words around like two hundred million galaxies or trillions of stars or bazillions of planets, but all of these numbers mean nothing. Our brains can’t comprehend these concepts, the universe is too big and there is too much of it but size is not the most troubling concept we have to dealt with, it’s time or more precisely, the time we have. If you’re lucky enough to live to one hundred, you have five thousand two hundred weeks at your disposal. If you’re twenty-five now, then you have three thousand nine hundred weeks left. If you’re going to die at seventy, then there are two thousand three hundred and forty weeks left. A lot of time, but also…not really, and then what? Your biological processes will break down, and the dynamic patter that is you will stop being dynamic. It will dissolve until there is no “you” left. Some believe that there is a part of us we can’t see or measure, but we have no way to find out, so this life might be it and we might end up dead forever. This is less scary that it sounds, though. If you don’t remember the 13.75 billion years that went by before you existed, then the trillions and trillions and trillions of years that come after will pass in no time once you’re gone. Close your eyes, count to one. That’s how long forever feels in the cosmic world and as far as we know, in the end, the universe itself will die and nothing will ever change again.

This article might have induced existential dread in you guys, and the last few things we looked into probably haven’t helped. So, for once I want to offer a different wat of looking at these things, an unscientific, subjective point of view, “THE P WORD”, if you want. Please take it with a grain of salt, I don’t know any more about human existence than you do. We counter existential dread with optimistic nihilism, what do I mean by that?

Well to summarize, it seems very unlikely that 200 trillion trillion stars have been made for us.  In a way, it feels like the cruelest joke in existence has been played on us. We became self-aware only to realize this story is not about us. While it is great to know about electrons and the powerhouse of the cell, science doesn’t do a lot to make this less depressing. Okay, but so what? You only get one shot at life, which is scary but it also sets you free. If the universe ends in the heat death, every humiliation you suffer in your life will be forgotten. Every mistake you made will not matter in the end. Every bad thing you did will be voided, if our life is all we get to experience, then it’s the only thing that matters. If the universe has no principles, the only principles relevant are the ones we decided on. If the universe has no purpose, then we get to dictate what its purpose is. Humans will most certainly cease to exist at some point, but before we do we get to explore ourselves and the world around us. We get to experience feelings, we get to experience food, books, sunrises and being with each other. The fact that we’re even able to think about these things is already kind of incredible. It’s easy to think of ourselves as separated from everything, but this is not true. We are as much the universe as a neutron star or a black hole or a nebula. Even better actually, we are its thinking and feeling part, the centre organs of the universe. We are truly free in a universe-sized playground, so we might as well aim to be happy and build some kind of utopia in the stars. It’s not as if we’ve found out everything there is to know, we don’t know why the rules of the universe are as they are, how life came into existence, what life is. We have no idea what consciousness is or if we are alone in the universe but we can try to find some answers. There are billions of starts to visit, diseases to cure, people to help, happy feelings to be experienced, and video games to finish..there is so much to do.

So wrapping up, you’ve probably used up a good chunk of the time available to you, if this is our one shot at life, there is no reason not to have fun and live as happy as possible. Bonus points if you made the life of other people better, more bonus points if you help build a galactic human empire. Do the things that make you feel good, you get to decide whatever this means for you.

Thanks!

jadagul:

What is generally considered best practices for printing code in a paper when (1) the code has lines that are too long to show on the page and (2) the language doesn’t allow you to insert line breaks and still have function code?

I’m working on a LaTeX document that currently includes the following code snippet:

\begin{verbatim}
DeltaSetOfGeneratingSet := function(gs)
Print(“generators: ”);
Print(gs);
Print(“\n”);
Print(“Delta Set: ”);
return
DeltaSetUnionUpToElementForGeneratorList(DeltaSetPeriodicityBoundForGeneratorList(gs)+gs[Length(gs)]-1,gs);
end;
\end{verbatim}

which compiles to this:

and runs off the end of the page. Because GAP is a mess of a programming language from the 80s, I can’t find any way to insert a line break in the code and still have it run properly, and if I’m including code in my paper I would like to include running code. But I would also like to, you know, actually display all the code. Is there a standard solution to this problem?

After posting I found this StackExchange thread which gives a nice, or at least nice-enough, solution. Posting in case anyone else wanted an answer.

What is generally considered best practices for printing code in a paper when (1) the code has lines that are too long to show on the page and (2) the language doesn’t allow you to insert line breaks and still have function code?

I’m working on a LaTeX document that currently includes the following code snippet:

\begin{verbatim}
DeltaSetOfGeneratingSet := function(gs)
Print(“generators: ”);
Print(gs);
Print(“\n”);
Print(“Delta Set: ”);
return
DeltaSetUnionUpToElementForGeneratorList(DeltaSetPeriodicityBoundForGeneratorList(gs)+gs[Length(gs)]-1,gs);
end;
\end{verbatim}

which compiles to this:

and runs off the end of the page. Because GAP is a mess of a programming language from the 80s, I can’t find any way to insert a line break in the code and still have it run properly, and if I’m including code in my paper I would like to include running code. But I would also like to, you know, actually display all the code. Is there a standard solution to this problem?

Making remarkable progress on his research, the grad student wonders what disastrous mistake will eventually blow up in his face.

Public Lecture on Digital Restoration: Marrying Tradition & Innovation at #DraytonHall @CofC

Digital Restoration: Marrying Tradition & Innovation at Drayton Hall presented by Trish Lowe Smith Curator of Historic Architectural Resources, Drayton Hall Thursday, September 29 at 7:00 pm College of Charleston Simmons Center for the Arts, Room 309 54 St. Philip Street Free and open to the public. Trish Smith’s latest work includes a 3D rendering of Drayton Hall’s Withdrawing Room with a c.…

View On WordPress

When a librarian channels Salem as she shows the patron how to find something after the person proclaimed “it doesn’t exist.”