It's a good job I'm so utterly drained and exhausted because otherwise I'd just be pure rage right now.
Instead I'm just tired and sad.
I can't address what has come to light, and indeed is still coming to light, in the birding world this week anywhere near adequately. Heck I can barely manage to get out my pyjamas.
But what I will say is this. Encouraging women into a field where they are underrepresented and feel unwelcome only to use it to hook up with them is absolutely gross behaviour on its own.
And, because some people apparently need to still hear this, stop raping people. It's not difficult jfc. Listen to women.
So I've seen a fair few 'it's wrong to send a rover to mars when species are dying' takes - and I personally think they are misguided and potentially damaging.
And I say this as someone who really doesn't like space! (1/n)
First off, let's look at the cost: $2.6 billion.
That's literally a drop in the ocean in terms of government budgets. They could quite easily spend that on sending a rover to Mars AND spend the same on conservation. (2/n)
The US military budget is $849 billion. Yet no-one is ever like how come the govt is spending money on bombs not conservation. It's only ever when it's another field of science, or something culturally important like the Notre Dame fire that this comes up. (3/n)
So, inspired by by this, here's a thing I think quite a few people may have not noticed in #rstats (and other programming languages). When I first saw this i was like what the heck R is broken someone pls help.
R does something called bankers rounding. If you have a lot of n.5 numbers in a vector and you were to do your normal rounding where 0.5 rounds up then that would increase the mean of your sample. By rounding .5 to the nearest even number R avoids this bias.
Moments pause as I crashed my computer generating a huge vector because I am a fool.
This is so much in my wheelhouse that I'm going to have to do a modelling thread aren't I? I hope you're all excited ^_^
Bear with me I'll get on it shortly.
Right: welcome, gather round all.
Let's talk projections.
Projections are really important in science. As our man Craig points out - we can't spend the time counting every single thing that's out there. It would take a reeeaaally long time, and often it is hard to find.
On my first day in Botswana I saw a baby leopard and look how cute it is
I've previously only seen brief glimpses of leopards as they walked through long grass, so it was incredible to see them so close and relaxed. Mum was busy having dinner up a tree. They do this to keep the kill away from lions and hyenas
There's a lot of really inspirational people on Twitter, but I want to name a few that have inspired me this year! (a thread) #tweepspiration2018
1. @jesswade - Jess has has a storming year creating hundreds of profiles for women scientists on @Wikipedia and successfully crowdfunded to get copies of @AngelaDSaini's Inferior into schools!! I also met her and she is totally awesome. theguardian.com/education/2018…
2. @alexevans91 - grew #guessthecrest completed his PhD, got a job, and hit 100,000 unread emails in his inbox. Absolute hero.