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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 11th, 2023

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  • Never too old to learn. I think Python is a great beginner language. It has fairly broad applications, and easy to set up an environment (don’t have to download/install a thousand things, you just install python and can run the text files in terminal). I also learned by doing starting in late middle school/early high school. I always found YouTube videos to be the most engaging way to get started. I used to like thenewboston. Once I had a handle on the basic programming language, I would do easy programming challenges where you have to solve some sort of basic problem. The challenges helped me learn basics like taking in input, changing the input based on the various rules and conditions of the challenges, then outputting the proper results formatted in the right way. Also helped me to think about algorithms, etc. After that, I started learning programming through a textbook. This was helpful for understanding some of the more technical aspects, basics of memory management, what different variable types are really for, OOP, abstraction, algorithms etc. I found that leaving these advanced topics till after I had a working understanding of the programming language helped understand the concepts better, and helped me understand why it’s important to learn the concepts in the first place. I was using Java for learning most of this, which might also be a good place to start for you, but I feel like python has simpler syntax to start with. In the end once you learn one language, I recommend learning more and not being stuck to any particular language. Every language has it’s own strengths and weaknesses, and understanding the commonalities and differences will only make you better in the long run.

    Edit - now I use Go, python, JavaScript, R, Java, Julia, rust based on what I’m actually doing. It’s fairly easy to switch languages once you get used to basic syntax.


  • During my graduate research, our lab space was next to the cell modeling department and I would catch a talk here or there. Always found it a super interesting approach because it really tries to make sense of what we’ve learned from traditional biology and generates really nice hypotheses/theories for testing out in biological models. I also love how you can apply so much abstract mathematics to biological systems for biologically meaningful findings. Most of these types of cell modeling papers go above my head, but I still really appreciate them from outside.




  • No Microsoft Access is/was a GUI software actually meant to have databases instead of how everyone uses Excel/spreadsheets as databases. It is a part of the office suite. It works pretty much like traditional databases but has an easier to access GUI for non programmers I guess. I don’t think it’s used a ton nowadays except for legacy processes that haven’t been updated.






  • Honestly I remember it being at 7 o’clock too but I think it might’ve just been that my camera was rotated a bit weird because it was mounted to a star tracker. I was really happy with how crisp it came out. I used a longer lens (this photo was at 400mm) and also made sure to use f8 as that’s been noted to be the sharpest aperture for my lens. Beyond that I had focused on the sun using the sun spots and then didn’t change the focus at all. I also had a remote trigger so I wouldn’t shake the camera while taking the image. Also for this image I brought down the highlights which helped cut down on the blooming around the brightest features and helped them look more defined. I am very happy I was able to get this result because this was the first time I’ve tried shooting an eclipse and really wasn’t sure if I was doing it right.




  • Yeah it was crazy, we could all see a red dot with our bare eyes during totality and weren’t sure what it was. Think it might’ve been a particularly bright solar flare!

    Like this photo isn’t even specially edited. I literally just brought down the highlights to get better definition on the beads because without that it looked more like the diamond ring. No artificial color enhancement or anything.