Kate Cook
@eskay8.bsky.social
scientist, coder, public servant, gardener, potter, writer, parent, Canadian
When Peter tells Wendy “second start to the right and straight on til morning”, this implies that both have been trained on dead reckoning and inertial navigation techniques, although it remains an open question whether the relative motion of the star to the earth is accounted for
New, from me: It is fine to disagree with aspects of the pandemic response. But what we saw at Fauci's hearing was something different: a show trial where cranks tried to threaten and shift blame to an public servant. Here is why this is bad for all of us.🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/watching-t...
Watching the show trials
Anthony Fauci and the politics of retribution
donmoynihan.substack.com
toronto does libraries right. our current mayor has managed to open every single library branch on all 7 days of the week. i don't believe any other major city has achieved the same in north america, not even nyc. we have the best library system in the world 🤭
Michael Druker 🇨🇦@mdruker.app · 2w agoEveryone loves to talk about what their city governments are doing wrong. What’s something your city is getting right? (And tell us what city it is!)
I'm not posting Odyssey memes because one must be wary of GIFs bearing Greeks.
Happy National Tattoo Day! To celebrate, we asked MTA employees to share their transit-themed tattoos 🚇🚌🚆
Does anyone have some examples of comments to leave on the OMB thing from non-scientists?
Tired: Ottawa is the city that fun forgot. Wired: Ottawa is the city that actively ran fun out of town so a bloated police department wouldn’t have to handle people watching pretty lights.
Ariel Troster@arieltroster.com · 4w agoGet this: the city’s emergency management department now tells me that they strategically decided NOT to inform anyone, lest they wanted to watch and overwhelmed the existing crowds at LeBreton Flats with Bluesfest on. Absolutely ludicrous.
New at Can We Still Govern: DOGE failed. The civic tech community DOGE displaced have been having frank conversations about what they did right and wrong, and what should come next. From Merici Vinton, who led the building of Direct File. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/what-did-c...
What Did Civic Tech Learn in the Last Decade?
Some Insights About How to Use Tech in Government – and What Comes Next
donmoynihan.substack.com
This essay described a bunch of things I've been thinking about all the time lately.
Kieran Healy@kjhealy.co · 4w agoWhile I don’t think this quite finds a solution, the problem it identifies is real. “What bit of the division of labor will *you* symbolically reject to create your special identity?” is the personal version of social theories that fantasize about rejecting the DoL while keeping all of its benefits.
This also applies to its sci-fi counterpart, referring to money as 'credits.'
if there is one fantasy writing rule we must all follow, it's referring to money as 'coin'
Maybe it isn’t ideal to find so much meaning in politics, but if you’re in an ideological battle for the future of a political party, it’s unwise to sneer at the faction offering meaning and belonging.
☀️ Jon Schwarz ☀️@schwarz.bsky.social · last mo.This one sneering tweet somehow explains and encapsulates everything about how corporate Democrats managed to lose to Donald Trump twice
In other news, I signed up to sell pottery at the neighbourhood art in the park sale today! Hopefully it goes well 😬
lol "we show that deep learning models barely outperform a naive model that predicts only the mean drug and cell line effects, while no complex model outperforms properly tuned tree-based ensemble baselines in relevant settings." www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Critical evaluation of drug response prediction models with DrEval - Nature Communications
Successful translation of drug response prediction models to the clinic remains limited. Here, the authors introduce a model evaluation pipeline called DrEval, and report that that deep learning model...
nature.com
They are also doing a play adaptation of The Hobbit. Just saying.
Kate Heartfield@kateheartfield.com · last mo.The Stratford Festival has a big sale on, and if you plan your play(s) to overlap with Sept. 24, you can come see me talk about fairies with professor Chester Scoville and actor Laura Condlin. (This is mainly because my new novel, Mercutio, has a lot of Mab in it.) I am looking forward to this!
So uhhhh did Plainsman clay get bought? Cause they have a brand new Instagram and Digitalfire is shutting down due to some unspecified takedown order.
Ottawa's two seasons: humidifier or dehumidifier. There's no in-between.
Getting there. I signed up for a sale at the end of the month (my first!) and am trying to get a bunch of stuff finished
Humans have only eradicated 3, maybe 4 diseases. Smallpox was the first Rinderpest was second. We got a whole strain of flu, pretty much by accident, during lockdown/masking. We're still waiting for the final final death call on guinea worm disease, thank you Jimmy Carter et al.
Kingfisher & Wombat@tkingfisher.com · 2mo agoScrewworm eradication was a parasitology moonshot. It was huge, ambitious, expensive, and required extraordinary international cooperation. It is one of the greatest technological marvels nobody’s heard of outside livestock circles and a select group of weirdos, of which I’m one.
I have to say, listening to the Today programme dedicate an entire (context free) section about whether migrants are more likely to be convicted criminals *the morning after* hundreds of non-migrants of my own ethnicity committed a pogrom is blood boiling.
Can't wait to watch the feds utterly cave on HSR (again!) and then pivot to argue this means we need jets at Billy Bishop even more.
Toronto Star@thestar.com · 2mo ago“Let’s be clear, there is no Alto project without Quebec,” Federal Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon said, referring to the Crown corporation overseeing plans for a new high-speed rail line from Toronto to Quebec City. #cdnpoli New from @aballinga.bsky.social:
Just need everyone to know that the Belgium men's soccer team has new jerseys based on the art of Rene Magritte and this is the official photo shoot
The article also makes some basic inaccurate factual claims. His solution is to diversify scientific funding, but it is already diversified. UM Ann Arbor's research expenditures, for example, are roughly half federal and non-federal, including patent revenue!!!
We saw this with Covid. The public unfortunately takes the contingent nature of scientific truth as “scientists are changing their story and so aren’t to be trusted.”
IYKYK 🌮@nisslbody.blacksky.app · 2mo agoThe anti-seed-oil thing (movement?) has always struck me as deeply weird, like yes shortening is bad for you and OK maybe we shouldn't eat things that aren't food, but there are a lot of food seeds that have been made into oil for centuries and the argument against them is unclear.
