PicoBlog

Tenor saxophonist Don Byas marked the transition from the swing era to the bop era. Often compared to his elder Coleman Hawkins for the similarity of their tones, Don Byas played in many top swing bands. Carlos Wesley "Don" Byas was born in 1912 in Muskogee, Oklahoma. His mother played the piano and his father the clarinet. Byas began his training in classical music, learning to play the violin, clarinet and alto saxophone.

Hello! I’m Leigh Kamping-Carder, and this is The Heart Dialogues, the newsletter for people born with heart conditions (and the people who love them). Every other week, I bring you a candid conversation with someone who has congenital heart disease, plus essays, links, recommendations, reader threads and other good stuff about living with a wonky heart. Join this community and ensure you don’t miss the next edition. I was probably already in my 20s when I first heard the term “heart warrior,” and it made me cringe.

In a remarkable essay at The Free Press, Patrick Brown, a researcher at The Breakthrough Institute, gave the world a lesson on how the sausage is made in headline stirring climate change science. Start the research with the publication outlet end in mind. The editorial practices of elite academic journals such as Nature, matter for how society understands the state of knowledge and how we relate to the world. On occasion matters arise that bring attention to the fraught activity of gatekeeping at the journal and its broader family of journals.

Originally written Dec. 27, 2020. I wrote this piece during my second year of college as an introspective way to navigate my career. Hope to respond to this in a few months as a soon-to-graduate senior! Metropolis 2221 by @TommyTaw Throughout my junior and senior year of high school, I was certain that I'd primarily study computer science in college. After all, I enjoyed coding apps, building games, and generally geeking out with others about technology.

The past couple semesters, I have worked with different student groups to use the latest in machine learning techniques to quantify my investment process and determine if I can improve on the results that I have found qualitatively through the years. This past semester, some grad students used a number of random forest models in another attempt at this process improvement. Before I go on, for those not familiar, per Wikipedia: random forests or random decision forests are an ensemble learning method for classification, regression and other tasks that operates by constructing a multitude of decision trees at training time.

What’s up, solar eclipse nerds?! If you managed to snag yourself a pair of eclipse glasses to watch today’s special celestial event, mazel tov! While these flimsy glasses seem like the kind of thing you could: There’s a better way! A small but sweet way to keep those eclipse glasses in the circular economy is to redistribute them to folks who live in the path of a future eclipse. There’s something really lovely to me about the fact that we know where people will witness the eclipse in the future, and that we can help them watch the same eclipse we saw in the past (unfortunately I was not able to communicate this sentiment in complete English, but hopefully you catch my drift).

My friend Bill just returned from a family vacation in Costa Rica and shot lots of photos and video on his iPhone, including some killer shots of breakfasts with local monkeys. No surprise that once he got home, he checked his iPhone storage and found that it was 98% full. Just a few more snaps, and he’d be totally out of room. His solution? “I’ll just … ncG1vNJzZmiilZuzpr7SqKWgqpGdrq560q6ZrKyRmLhvr86mZqlnlKS7tXnUrJxmoZOhvLawjJ%2Bmq2Wgnby1u4ybmJyjpaU%3D

Clearblue just rolled out the “Clearblue® Menopause Stage Indicator.” I think it’s worth discussing so you don’t end up wasting your money, but also because it’s a good chance to review some facts about testing so you can learn more. Menopause Basics If you have ovaries and a uterus, at some point, you will start menstruating, and at some point, you will stop menstruating and enter menopause. Menopause is the planned end of ovarian function when there are no more follicles capable of ovulation, estrogen produced by the ovary drops (other tissues still make small amounts), and progesterone production ends.

Last night, I posted a tweet thread. It was a shortened version of the piece I wrote in this space yesterday — detailing the surprising (to me, at least) numbers in a New York Times/Siena College poll that suggest that a whole bunch of people are nostalgic for the good old days of the Trump presidency. Conservative Twitter latched onto my tweets as evidence that liberals really don’t get it — or something.