Instant Karma: GriddingMachine: A new database and software for sharing global datasets

Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.

Christopher Isherwood

You don’t have to be a spy to violate the Espionage Act – and other crucial facts about the law Trump may have broken– Joseph Ferguson

Chinese scientists create first mammal with fully reprogrammed genes South China Morning Post

Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA): “Researchers are spending way too much time finding, reading, and processing public data. 

The ever increasing amount of data, various data formats, and different data layouts are increasing the time spent on handling data—before getting  ready for scientific analysis. While the intention of sharing data is to facilitate their broad use and promote research, the increasing fragmentation makes it harder to find and access the data. Taking my personal experience as an example, I spent months to identify, download, and standardize the global datasets we use with the CliMA Land model, which came in a plethora of formats (e.g., NetCDF, GeoTIFF, CSV, and binary) that required different programming languages/packages to read them. Ordinarily, researchers would need to repeat this tedious work again and again…”

9to5Google: “youtube.com/podcasts is now live and is linked to on the existing Explore page alongside: Trending, Music, Movies & Shows, Live, Gaming, News, Sports, Learning, and Fashion & Beauty. It appears to have first gone live in late July, and is slowly becoming more widely available as it’s not showing up for all users we checked with today. Available on desktop web and mobile, it’s very rudimentary at this point. There are carousels, which can be expanded via “Show all,” for “Popular episodes,” “Popular podcast playlists,” “Recommended,” and “Popular podcast creators.” The rest of this page links to various categories: Comedy, True Crime, Sports, Music, and TV & Film.”

Inside a ‘mega-study’ on election denial, polarization, and violence—and how to stop it - Fast Company

Fast Company: “Stanford’s Strengthening Democracy Study, the largest of its kind, tested 25 strategies among 32,000 Americans to learn which could reduce partisan animosity and curb antidemocratic attitudes…According to a FiveThirtyEight study, at least 120 Republican midterm candidates don’t accept the results of the 2020 election, representing 49% of Republicans on the ballot for Senate, House, governor, attorney general, and secretary of state. Only 37 have fully accepted Joe Biden’s presidential victory. Stanford’s Polarization and Social Change Lab wanted to find out why there’s such widespread support for these antidemocratic attitudes. The Strengthening Democracy Challenge, which researchers described as a “mega-experiment,” was the largest of its kind, recruiting more than 32,000 “partisan” participants who resembled the American population with regard to age, gender, and ethnicity—and, critically, identified as either Democrat or Republican…”

How to search for images you can (legally) use for free

The Verge: “If you’re looking for an image that you can repurpose for one of your projects and aren’t able to take a photo yourself, there are a ton of free images you can use online without running into any copyright issues — you just have to know where to look. Here, we’ll go over different places where you can search for free images on the web. It’s worth noting that when searching for free images, you’ll often come across the Creative Commons (CC) licensethat lets you use an image for free. But depending on the type of CC license an image has, there may be some limitations that require you to credit the original artist or prevent you from making modifications to the image. That’s why it’s always important to read up on the license it possesses before using an image. You can find more information on the differences between specific CC licenses here. Now, let’s get into all the different ways you can find free images…”