Judge Wyndham's Oak is well documented to be 1000 years old and it's still putting out new leaves and buds #treesofmastdon #veterantrees #silentsaturday #oak #veteranoak #dorset #tree

We have a couple of daffodils in our yard. I'm not sure how they got here. So pretty. #Gardening @plants

Cave Sunset

2023-02-24/25 day 252/253 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off). 

I followed a Joel Create tutorial.

For more info, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/cave-sunset/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A digital painting. Viewed from…

Pink Tree

2023-02-22/23 day 250/251 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off). 

This was a Joel Create tutorial. If you watch the timelapse, you will see that I change my mind a fair bit and redo things. I change the leaves entirely at least three times until I was happy. I’m sure there are faster, more efficient ways to get things done, but I am not there yet. 😀

For more info, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/pink-tree/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A digital painting of a tree wi…

A striking visualisation of #climatechange: the date of Kyoto cherry blossoms' reaching full bloom, plotted over the past 1000 years.

Thanks to the cultural significance of cherry blossoms in Japan, we have data on the specific day of the year when a very particular species of cherry blossom (P. jamasakura) reached "full-flowering" (満開) in a specific area on the outskirts of Kyoto (Arashiyama), all the way back to 800 AD.

The trend of the past 50 years is hard to miss…

Happy to share the early online version of our new study (#OpenAccess): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/acc81a

We use #machinelearning to detect the emergence of distinguishable climate patterns in a new model experiment simulating stratospheric aerosol injection relative to a moderate future emissions scenario.

I have a summary of the paper at https://zacklabe.com/climate-signals-and-explainable-ai/. More on this all soon! #OpenScience #SciComm

Various Cladonia lichen and moss landscape among rocks

#lichen #LichenSubscribe #moss #Mosstodon #LichenLandscape

Google employees are known as ‘Googlers’. New employees are ‘Nooglers’ and dogs that come to work with their owners are ‘Dooglers.

@AngelaPreston The wife and I both loved, “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” on the Switch 🙂 The great thing about the Switch for us was that we could take the game with us anywhere and play anywhere. But as we get older and eye-sight becomes weaker, the handhelds just don’t work for us 😛

Similarly, we loved the Xbox back in the day when the Kinect was there because we could do active gaming without controllers — like play tennis or bowling. But sadly, they discontinued the Kinect and so it isn’t as compelling to us now.

The other thing that we love about the PlayStation, that I forgot to mention, is that it seems to have more couch co-op games. Sure, couch co-op doesn’t seem to be that popular generally, but we love it since that allows us to play together with two controllers and on the same TV screen and that’s a huge draw for us 🙂

@AngelaPreston I’m fairly certain that switching to a controller would help you too (and definitely not advocating for switching over to consoles) 🙂 Perhaps you can get a controller from Amazon so that you can try it out and if it isn’t to your liking, you can return it?

I believe what helps the most (at least for me) is that I have something solid to hold on to which gives my palm support and not have my fingers arched over the keyboard. But of course, YMMV.

As far as consoles go, I think my favourite is the PlayStation but that’s mostly historical since that is the first console that I really loved. I have owned/used all three of the current main consoles — Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation and I keep coming back to the PlayStation. But that’s also partially due to it having some of my favourite games like the “Horizon” series and the “Uncharted” series ….

@AngelaPreston I started playing PC games over 30 years ago and using the keyboard always felt very cramped and difficult to me, especially when it came to doing various combos.

When I started using a controller and playing console games (about 20 years ago possibly), I realized that the controller was so much easier to use and my fingers didn’t feel so cramped.

Unfortunately, I’ve never used a controller for PC games since I switched to mostly console-only game play once I got into console gaming. Sure, I’d occasionally play a PC game but most of these were very much mouse-clicking type of games. So other than sharing the fact that I felt a controller was easier than the keyboard, I’m afraid that I don’t have anything much to offer 🙂

In the 1800s, some people tried to disguise toilets as stacks of books (Image: FrDr; CC BY-SA).

Mathematically, I'm most interested in #NumberTheory (years ago did some research related to #ContinuedFractions). I love the numbers #phi, #pi, and #e, and the various days celebrating them! I enjoy #geometry and #discretemath recreationally too. CS/engineering-wise, I'm most interested in #ai #artificialintelligence and #MachineLearning, #robotics and #automation, #Android #appdev, #cybersecurity, #softwaredevelopment, and more!

Andy Weir's The Martian astronaut (supposedly a botanist), played by Matt Damon, almost starved due to a misunderstanding of #potato #propagation. He waited for his #garden's first crop to make tubers before starting the next generation when, instead, he could have taken stem cuttings, or even leaf cuttings, and made hundreds of new plants.
Of course that would have killed the dramatic tension.
Learn plant propagation. It can save lives, AND it's not f*cking rocket science. /end rant
#permaculture #ScienceFiction

#silentSunday ferns on tree (also one for #mosstadon )

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alighodsi_hello-dolly-democratizing-the-magic-of-chatgpt-activity-7045014694385917952-JUVH?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop "We are open sourcing Dolly, a ChatGPT-like model that can do instruction following, brainstorming, summarization. The remarkable thing is that we created it for $30 using one server for 3 hours on a small dataset using a 2 year old open source LLM model. The secret in magical human-like interactivity probably lies in a small dataset, not huge models, not training for 100,000 GPU hours." #StochasticParrots #LLM #MachineLearning

I’ve been writing quite a bit about Indian movies recently. This is mostly because I get up early in the morning these days and am trying to get through my backlog of movies and a lot of them are Indian movies.

Speaking of which, I watched “Writer Padmabhushan” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15341106) yesterday and I was entranced 🙂 It was funny, heartfelt, and very, very interesting.

I loved most of the cast but especially, the actors who played the parents of the protagonist — Rohini and Ashish Vidyarthi.

Now anybody who watches Indian movies probably knows Ashish Vidyarthi. He generally plays corrupt cops, or villains. But here he plays a loving and supporting father and it was a joy to watch his performance.

Perhaps I have a soft-spot for actors who generally play villains who play a loving parent/support role, but this was like watching Amrish Puri in “Gardish” (or “Muskurahat”) or Anupam Kher in “Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge” or Jagapathi Babu in “Father Chitti Umaa Karthik” … It’s a special kind of joy watching these actors transform 🙂

But, back to the movie. Again, it might be personal preferences, but I do love well-told stories about writers (and maybe writing). This was such a story. It’s about the protagonists need to be known as a writer and his journey in actually getting there but with some interesting (and emotional) twists and turns.

#Movies #MinReview #Telugu

@AngelaPreston You really should give “Shadow and Bone” a try 🙂 I enjoy the fact that there are multiple characters that I care about and that there are several different storylines going on at the same time. I’m sure that the books explain the magic system more in detail too and I think I’d enjoy finding out more ….

Regarding “Carnival Row”, I totally agree that the world has to be that way for the story being told. And also, it’s spot on for how humans would behave when they have to deal with magical races since the critch are just an analogy for how people now treat other races.

The issue for me is generally that it hits too close to home. Given today’s world, it’s just too stark a reminder of things that I’d rather forget about for a bit maybe? Which is why I hope for the rainbow-filled “Star Trek”-land where everybody gets along and everybody is considerate of others — just wanting to escape 🙂

But “Carnival Row” is very powerful in the way it conveys it’s message and despite wishing for better human-critch relations, I did really enjoy watching it and am sad that we’ll get no more “Carnival Row” 😞

The Indian film industry is huge. I think back in the ‘90s they said that India release around a 1000 movies a year. I’ve seen figures online (unverified) saying that the figure was at around 1900+ before the lockdown.

Most people think that Indian cinema is just Bollywood/Hindi movies. But there are a lot of other regional movie industries such as Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Punjabi, Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati etc. Each of these languages/sectors have their own vibe/feel.

I started my Indian film journey as a child with Tamil and Hindi movies. Then I kind of dropped out of Hindi movies for a while since I didn’t understand the language, but in my 20’s I learnt Hindi and got back into watching Hindi movies.

Back in the ‘90s Bollywood was all about romantic movies — it was boy-meets-girl all the time. And I loved it! They had love stories happening in all sorts of places and under all sorts of circumstances. It might have been a single theme, but I personally enjoyed it a lot since it was an escape from daily life into a magical world where things just worked out in the end.

These days though, Hindi cinema seems to be kind of in limbo. I hardly ever see any more love stories. It seems to be mostly movies trying to be Hollywood blockbusters and not quite succeeding. You have the huge budgets, the stars, and the glitz and glamour, but they don’t seem to be able to make things believable/likeable.

Tamil cinema too has undergone its one metamorphosis but in a different direction. Back in the day it used to be a mix of love stories, action movies, and some very-down-to-earth stories about life and people. These days, it seems that the thoughtful stories are less common and you get a lot of hyper-violent action movies or revenge/political dramas. Of all the Indian movies we watch, my wife generally does not want to watch Tamil movies because of the level of violence.

I got into Telugu movies late — probably about 5 - 6 years ago? But they seem to be where Hindi and Tamil movies were at one time. They have action, love stories, and the colourful scenes that makes Indian cinema so interesting. Telugu is probably my most favourite Indian cinema language at the moment for sheer entertainment value. Of course, Telugu cinema isn’t without its own share of issues. Especially with older movies, you see a lot of subtle/casual misogyny. Without going into deeper issues, in the older movies the way the protagonist expresses love is usually by teasing/harassing the object of his affection — which seems rather problematic on so many levels.

But on a positive note, haven’t seen movies like that from Telugu cinema recently. In fact, I’ve seen some very interesting love stories where the characters behave in unexpected ways. So yeah, Telugu cinema is changing too and is one of my favourites at the moment.

Then there’s Malayalam. I’ve watched Malayalam movies on and off since the language is close enough to Tamil that I can understand at least some of it. And with the advent of subtitles, it becomes even easier to understand what is going on 🙂

With very few exceptions, every Malayalam movie I’ve seen has impressed me in some way. Back in the day, Malayalam movies used to be slow though. The stories were good but the build up was slow and it took a while for you to really get into the story. But that too is changing and the newer Malayalam movies seem to tell stories at very different paces and some are so fast moving that I’d sit at the edge of my seat waiting to see what happened next. But they all retain that old ability to be thought-provoking in some way, no matter what.

And that’s just four of the wide variety of Indian movie sectors/languages. There are so many more, each with their own flavour. So if you’re a cinema buff, you owe it to yourself to try out some and see if you find something that you really like …

#Movies #IndianCinema #Hindi #Tamil #Telugu #Malayalam #Bollywood #Kollywood #Tollywood #Mollywood

Started watching “Vendhu Thanindhathu Kaadu: Part 1 - The Kindling” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14182646) today and what a difference from “Pathaan” from yesterday …

It took us quite a few breaks to finish “Pathaan” because it was all style and no real substance. We didn’t care for the main character and almost every situation was predictable. About the only thing that I liked was the bits of humour here and there …

This movie on the other hand is raw … I’ve been in the kind of situations that the movie portrays — well, maybe not 36 people sleeping in a single room and being part of a gang, but I have had to live in strange cities/countries where 4 - 5 of us shared an apartment. I can feel for what is going on in the movie.

And above all, I actually care about the protagonist and want to see what happens to him. This shows life in Mumbai from the not so glamorous side and I want to know more …

#Movies #MiniReview #Tamil #India