Rob Carr

@robcarr.bsky.social

654 Followers 383 Following

Former runner, former paramedic, former biochemist, former Director of Communications, former instructor, former young person. Still he/him/nerd. Working on a hard but fun SF novel about the science involved in the search for life.

A very worn copy of Bird, Stewart and Lightfoot's (BSL) red Transport Phenomena book. I learned this for Earthbound chemical engineering. It shocks me how many times BSL shows up in astrophysics papers and the like. We joked about relativistic fluid flow. It's apparently not a joke. If you study the book, you'll figure out how to adapt it for Special Relativity. I would have no hope of adapting it for General Relativity.
Star Trek Lower Decks: A Moopsy: the cutest, most dangerous predator in the galaxy.
Article about Shark Bites Fruit Snacks, molded out of some kind of fruit slurry and gum and solidified into shark shapes
A still from a psychotic computer AI about human reproduction that includes air for the baby to breathe. I don't know how to describe how wrong it is. I think my brain is horrified. It's absurd, ridiculous, and the human associated with it should be ashamed.
Photo of Android translation of post into English. The OBJ is in capital letters and actually means my phone saw a marker for a letter it couldn't type and put a placeholder there, the letters OBJ in a box Accessibility and inclusion is a matter of attitude, awareness, and decision. This is where social democratic competence OBJ is apparent.
Blue sky search showing no articles on the Nobel Prize in Chemistry at 7:18 am EST.
Moon and four stars. I can see the four stars with my eyes and if I enlarge the picture a bit on my phone. Need to look them up. Photo taken with Night Sight on a Pixel 6a.
There are a lot of parrots drawn cartoon style, but with my eyes recovering from cataract surgery I'm ironically having trouble reading the writing for the ALT description. Lovebird, Budgie, Quaker Parrot, Green Cheek Conure Pionus, African Grey, Ringneck, Sun Conure, Hawk Headed Parrot, Scarlet Macaw, Cacique, Yellow Headed Amazon, Sulfur Crested Cockatoo, Blue and Gold Macaw, Hyacinth Macaw, Moluccan Cockatoo, Military Macaw, Galah, Eclectus Parrot, cockatiel
Fishbourne Roman Palace Writes: For Blue Monday we can't think of anything more appropriate than this charming depiction of a man getting his face eaten off by a leopard. #MosaicMonday There's an ancient (looks to be Roman) mosaic of a man having his face eaten by a Leopard-Luke animal. Someone may be using the man as a shield (pieces are missing) and a javelin appears to have just missed either the leopard or the man.
Tobor the 8th Man, an android, got energy boosts from smoking. Tobor is from an earlier time. Tobor has a black helmet with yellow clear covers, a black sleeveless shirt with a 8 on it in red, and armor covering his arms. He's smoking a cigarette. Above him, it reads "Super Energy Boosters taste good like a Super Energy Booster should. To the left of Tobor is a pack of energy boosters that say 8th Man and look like the old Marlboro cigarette packs.
Learning by Association in Plants MonicaGagliano1, VladyslavV.Vyazovskiy2, AlexanderA. Borbély3, MavraGrimonprez1 & Martial Depczynski4,5 In complex and ever-changing environments, resources such as food are often scarce and unevenly distributed in space and time. Therefore, utilizing external cues to locate and remember high-quality sources allows more efficient foraging, thus increasing chances for survival. Associations between environmental cues and food are readily formed because of the tangible benefits they confer. While examples of the key role they play in shaping foraging behaviours are widespread in the animal world, the possibility that plants are also able to acquire learned associations to guide their foraging behaviour has never been demonstrated. Here we show that this type of learning occurs in the garden pea, Pisum sativum. By using a Y-maze task, we show that the position of a neutral cue, predicting the location of a light source, affected the direction of plant growth. This learned behaviour prevailed over innate phototropism. Notably, learning was successful only when it occurred during the subjective day, suggesting that behavioural performance is regulated by metabolic demands. Our results show that associative learning is an essential component of plant behaviour. We conclude that associative learning represents a universal adaptive mechanism shared by both animals and plants.
Too many men don't know female anatomy.
Trilobite fossil. Some segments in the middle appear to be split off. I don't know if that's the trauma that killed the trilobite or occurred during fossilization.
Trilobite, possibly with a broken back. No idea if that was perimortem.
Cirrus the Congo African Grey getting a head skritch and looking skeptically at politicians.
Browned focaccia bread decorated like a Christmas tree with parsley, rosemary, yellow sweet peppers, and cherry tomatoes.
Focaccia bread with an embedded Christmas tree artwork made of rosemary and red, orange, and yellow small sweet pepper rings. The pot for the tree is a rectangular piece of red pepper. The pot, ornament rings and rosemary show browning, but the bread itself browned very little. The bread is paler than I am, which is saying something, as I'm pretty pale. I have some leads on what might be causing the problem.
Paper from Astroparticle Physical retracted. Quote: Astroparticle Physics Volume 164, January 2025, 103036 RETRACTED: On the same origin of quantum physics and general relativity from Riemannian geometry and Planck scale formalism Chavis Srichan, Pobporn Danvirutai, Adrian David Cheok, Jun Cai b, Ying Yan b
London broil (cheap at local grocery store) cooked by sous vide for 22 hours. London broil is sliced on a wood cutting board. Seared outside, pink inside (looks a bit more done in the photo than real life).
Cirrus, the Congo African grey parrot looking annoyed because I'm typing on BlueSky rather than making her breakfast. Cirrus has a shiny black beak, a white face mask, a gray ring around the visible nostril, grey chest and wing feathers (and one back feather that is red and white). She's looking at me suspiciously with one eye that's a pale yellow iris with black flecks and a pupil. Head feathers are gray, edged in white and you can see a bit of her red tail feathers in back of her legs.
Chauncey the Moluccan Cockatoo snuggling up to me. I'm wearing a blue shirt. Chauncey varies in color from nearly white to faint salmon color to brilliant salmon color. You can see his feathers in the picture go from white to faint salmon. His eyes look black and the beak is several shades of gray, mostly from feather dust. The beak itself is black.
Chauncey the Moluccan Cockatoo (left) with me (right). Chauncey is snuggling up to me.
Orange pumpkin with a carved out picture of an owl sitting on a branch in front of a crescent moon. Candles make the cut-out material. Glow bright orange.
New York Post headline: NEW YORK POST SPACE NASA rocket begins 5-year journey to Jupiter's moon Europa to find right conditions for human life By Associated Press Published Oct. 14, 2024, 12:38 p.m. ET
French Onion Pasta with Gruyer Cheese that reminded me of Neutron Star nuclear pasta except I misunderstood the drawings of spaghetti and thought they were rigatoni. I'm a biochemist and don't know my neutron star astrophysics or my cooking pastas. Should have gone with small shells. Also, I didn't have anything to grate the cheese with so I used my knife skills. At one point I had a pile of cute 1/32 of an inch Gruyer Cheese cubes. I do have decent knife skills for cooking.
Words: Thousands of years of Humanity, and you are alive to witness the first photo of a Sunset on another World; Mars. Photo: Sunset on Mars.
Wie viele liberale Parteien gibt es in Deutschland? Was Duolingo hat mir über Deutschpolitik gelernt.
Chi-square test results P value and statistical significance: Chi squared equals 5.420 with 5 degrees of freedom. The two-tailed P value equals 0.3668 By conventional criteria, this difference is considered to be not statistically significant. The P value answers this question: If the theory that generated the expected values were correct, what is the probability of observing such a large discrepancy (or larger) between observed and expected values? A small P value is evidence that the data are not sampled from the distribution you expected. Statistically, 1 through 6 should occur 100 times on average. 1 occurred 82 times. 2 occurred 106 times 3 occurred 109 times 4 occurred 101 times 5 occurred 108 times 6 occurred 94 times
P value and statistical significance: Chi squared equals 2.920 with 5 degrees of freedom. The two-tailed P value equals 0.7123 By conventional criteria, this difference is considered to be not statistically significant. The P value answers this question: If the theory that generated the expected values were correct, what is the probability of observing such a large discrepancy (or larger) between observed and expected values? A small P value is evidence that the data are not sampled from the distribution you expected. 1: Rolled 107x, expected 100 2: Rolled 100x, expected 100 3. Rolled 93x, expected 100 4. Rolled 103x, expected 100 5. Rolled 89x, expected 100 6. Rolled 108x, expected 100.
Two glow-in-the-dark pale green with black pips dice from dicemakers.com. The pips are placed in an abnormal position. The pips are placed randomly, but the totals of opposite sides add up to 7 as on normal dice.
Two glow in the dark Chaos Dice from Dice Makers on Etsy. Greenish glow with irregularly spaced pips. Are they fair? I want to find out.
Two with a florescent green glow.Glow in the Dark Chaos Dice by Dice Makers On Etsy! Black irregularly spaced pips
Alien saying: "I'm not saying it was humans but it was humans." It's a meme based on the History Channel guy saying "I'm not saying it was aliens but it was aliens."
Post by Matthew Francis talking about a stack of books almost falling down, followed by Phil Plait talking about gravitational wave detection possibilities.
Binary stars through the large scope on a monitor!
Smaller scope on left, larger on right at the Mingo Creek Observatory
Cars parked, people setting up telescopes, kids playing, two honkin' big telescopes in the background
Text: Most people don't know that the most humid place on Earth is the Persian Gulf in the Middle East. Water temperatures in the Persian Gulf are currently as wasm as 95°F (35°C), leading to oppressive humidity and widespread heat indices above 125°F (51.7°C). Today at noon, Persian Gulf International Airport reported a heat index of 149°F ( 65°C). Picture: Persian Gulf area in red because of the temperature.
Arp 142, JWST photo of "Penguin and Egg," credit NASA
Screenshot of a portion of an article with the following highlighted: Anyone who reads papers about natural selection gets used to thinking, "WTF, evolution?!?"
From bottom up: Bottom Bun American cheese Hamburger Chopped kimchi with a scrambled egg fried in a green pepper ring Dab of mayo Top bun
Moluccan Cockatoo thinking of destroying cellphone/camera. Salmon crest feathers not visible, crest is up!
The bolts holding the NOAA-N Prime satellite to the cradle were borrowed and not replaced. The picture shows the satellite tipped over, the head smashed into the floor, the base on the cradle. Caption: No matter how much you screw up, you'll never ever have to tell your boss, "Sir, I toppled that 290 million dollar NOAA-N Prime satellite right onto the shop floor." For the record, it was repaired and launched.
Starlink Satellites in a "Train" in a somewhat hazy late dusk sky.
Starlink Satellites in a "Train" in a somewhat hazy late dusk sky.
Train of about 16 Starlink Satellites coming up over some houses and wires in a suburb of Pittsburgh at about 8:36 pm tonight. The sky is a moderate dark blue and satellites are slightly wiggly dashes in a row, fairly evenly spaced but not perfect. Not sure if some are one or two. Three stars of the Big Dipper Handle off to the right.
Region III One a t-shirt, worn by those working the temporary morgue for Flight 93. Yellow print on dark green.
Chauncey the Moluccan Cockatoo snuggled up to my face getting skritches. Flakes of feather sheaths and dust on my green shirt.
Junior the Cockatiel (male, yellow head with grey and yellow crest, orange cheeks,gravy chest, and grey and cream wings)
Pineapple Green Cheek Conure with pinfeathers.
Photo by Astronaut Hoburg on the International Space Station, looking out the cupola, with a Pittsburgh Steeler's Terrible Towel floating in front of the window. A US flag patch is on the towel. (Towel is inside the space station.)