Category: Research

The Default

When your attention is committed and a task still needs to be done, how do you approach it? When you’re too tired for the challenging and still looking for something fun, where do you look first?

I play a lot of games when I’m not thinking; the ones with which I’m so familiar that it’s more pattern recognition than active thought. (I play a lot of games when I’m thinking, too, about anything else. Strategy games make good fidgets.) At the moment, my most in use and so most easy-to-default-to game is Yi Xian.

My most default of kitchen processes, meanwhile, is definitely the hummus wrap. When in doubt, grab four ready-to-use ingredients, chop a sweet pepper, and roll. Nice system, right? It’s certainly practical. I’m curious about the patterns, more so – the way that I fall into a normal, and stay there awhile, and then wander to something new and adventurous, and then stay there, and so on. Is that universal? I expect that it would be, and you know what they say about assume.

If it is – how do you address the normal-that-was? I used to write whole essays to the backdrop of Hearthstone Battlegrounds. I used to bake chicken like clockwork. As a very small child, I could recite by heart most if not all of my Mo Willem’s books.

How do you go about carrying what something meant when you’re not actively holding it?

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Onwards and Downwards

…a catchphrase which only really makes sense in a handful of contexts. Habitually hanging out on an upper floor. Living at high altitudes. And ocean exploration, where most everything interesting is down.

Such is the case for the program the catchphrase belongs to, Fathomverse, an app dedicated to all life oceanic. Mechanically, it’s a lot like what I’ve already said about Zooniverse: the objective is classifying scientific data, and the mechanism is strangers on the internet.

Of course, Fathomverse has the benefit of being one big project with its own dedicated workspace, so it’s a little bit more specialized. Its participants, also – you train in a given group of organisms before working with new data, so you have plenty of practice in what to look for! I’ve delighted in learning about critters I didn’t know exist. Especially brittle stars. Turns out, they’re everywhere!

Training done, and depending on how much training you’ve done, there are a few ways to classify. There are games, for starters, or perhaps the digital equivalent of moving meditations, by which one finds photos, pockets them, and then sorts them out once the seeking is done. At a certain point, you also unlock the ability to just classify directly! Which is nice for when you just want to see a bunch of fish. Or coral, or…

Regardless. One can also do the Spot-The-Lifeforms puzzle of Bound, in which one puts little boxes around all organisms in an image. I get way too detail-obsessive on this one and have recused myself, because it impacts my user experience, but if that level of detail-obsessive and/or making little boxes will delight you, it exists! And it both teaches their software how to pinpoint where an organism is, and indicates for us classifiers which animal in an image with multiples is being ID’d. If you’ve ever stopped and really stared at one of those nice, dramatic coral reef photos, you can appreciate just How Much is Happening. Even in less photogenic environments.

For more information on Fathomverse and its related Ocean Stuff, there are both in-app rewards the more you contribute (community consensus gives you points) with videos on all sorts of stuff, and a community Discord, which I joined for the data analysis and stuck around in for #marine-memes. Priorities. If you’re curious about where in the world the images come from, which categories they currently have more of, or how to tell some of the trickier critters apart – or, you know, marine memes – it’s worth checking out!

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What Do You Keep In Reach?

I was wondering recently about the things I keep easy access to, and what they say about me. I almost never wear pants without pockets anymore – I’ve gotten used to carrying two hands’ worth of objects and my phone. It feels really weird on the occasion I do wear them and have to juggle stuff.

On the other hand, I no longer keep access to a portable charger. I have a charger – it’s not as though my phone would work if I didn’t – but it’s on my desk, a solid kind meant to have my phone standing up, and plugged into one of those outlets you don’t really want to get to to take it out of. I used to have a much more portable charger on hand on the daily – I had to, going from place to place as I was. But I live a lot more of my life around a central location, and now my portable charger is in an obnoxiously crinkly plastic bag, in a drawer, under other bits and bobs, where it only gets excavated a handful of times a year. (My mouse’s charger, on the other hand, is on the shortlist, and in easy reach of my mouse.)

And this is in everything, isn’t it? The fact that I carry Lactaid and Kleenex on the regular but have long since stopped carrying a mechanical pencil. The fact that the muffin tins are easier to get to than the ice cream maker – a year-round affair, not just approaching winter. The fact that I deliberately put the guac in the back of the fridge because I knew I’d still reach for that if I couldn’t see it, but maybe not for the things that are now in front.

And I wonder – if this is what my life says about me… what does yours say about you?

How do you organize yourself?

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Hard Boundaries To Soft Problems

What is it like to live at the border of time zones? Where “six o’clock” means something different where you live than it does ten minutes away?

As someone who lives pretty solidly in Central Time (US), I haven’t had to reckon with that, and it comes to mind because of something more personally relevant – USDA hardiness zones.

For the unitiated, USDA hardiness zones are a map of average coldest temperatures across the United States, which are grouped into zones to indicate which plants your winters (probably) won’t kill. A zone 7 minimum, like some pomegranates, won’t handle the negatives Fahrenheit well. This makes them viable in Portland, Oregon – likely because of the Pacific – but not so much in northern Illinois. Which makes sense! The finer problem is this: because of Lake Michigan, much like with the Pacific, the Chicago suburbs closer to the lake are a zone warmer than the ones further away. We cross this divide regularly. The Morton Arboretum, which I’ve written about before, might actually straddle it. So if a fig tree’s minimum zone is 6… can it survive one or two suburbs over?

The answer, realistically, is it depends on the specific conditions where you specifically plant it, and the zones are more guideline than rule. But it is an interesting thought experiment, is it not? Because at some point, “just another suburb over”… is one too many. Which is why northern Illinois can’t grow pomegranates.

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ALL The Holidays

As a youngling I discovered that there are holidays for everything, from food to awareness to that which is just plain silly. Of course, that was on a paper calendar, which quickly fell out of function, and I took to the internet to find something similar. What I found was Checkiday! Defaulting to the day-you’re-checking, Checkiday also lets you search by dates or keywords, and has a truly impressive range of holidays, from National Black Forest Cake Day, to Champion Crab Races Day (and I’m very curious about this one now), to International Day for Monuments and Sites. There’s always an “On This Day In History” link, too!

I have to remind myself occasionally that I can’t celebrate everything to my interest – not to overthink it – and in that light: it’s fun, it’s educational, and it brings to light things you may not realize how much you appreciate, until someone calls attention to it. Like pencils!

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Wikipedia Is… Actually Well-Organized!

“Don’t use Wikipedia as a source,” the teachers said, which may well have been my first introduction to the platform’s existence. Since then, it’s become a sort of shadow monolith – a baseline for perusing matters on which I know nothing or need very specific details formatted coherently, without extending much thought beyond the individual pages or the search function. It’s served me well! And, rather abruptly, I’ve realized how impressive that is.

In the last couple months, I’ve been doodling plants from different countries, coupling geography practice with gorgeous flowers and some really fascinating ecology – like the fact that there’s a parasitic, ant-pollinated plant growing around the Mediterranean. I’d never have found that out otherwise! It’s a funky lookin’ thing, too. This is the point in my life when I discovered the Categories feature.

Categories have saved this art-science pursuit so many times over, my friends. “Flora of Tunisia” on a search engine? Informational roulette. “Flora of Tunisia” on Wikipedia? An organized list of both species that qualify and adjacent topics, to do with the Mediterranean in general. Some countries have a subset for endemic plants specifically! More importantly, the superset “Flora By Country” guarantees this same lack of headache in the future.

What this is is an exceptionally niche use of a much broader application, I know. And isn’t that what Wikipedia is for?

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Duck… Duck… Not Goose!

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo on mobile for a while now, since hearing about the feature that keeps your other apps from sharing your data with each other. Aside from that, DuckDuckGo is a browser and a search engine, without the targeted advertising of its competitors.

This is both their appeal and their business model: they don’t collect your personal information, and they don’t use it. The ads that they make money off of? Paired to be on-subject with what you’re currently searching, not some behind-the-scenes profile of who you are and everything you like. Truthfully, I’d have swapped them in as my primary on desktop a long time ago, if only switching browsers wasn’t so tedious.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t! Once I finally plucked up the courage to transfer my digital life, I found out that DuckDuckGo has an “import bookmarks and passwords” option, which did most of the work for me! Since then, I’ve discovered that the desktop version also blocks tracking attempts, pop-ups, and most cookies, and has an omnipresent fire button with which you can wipe out all cookies, caches, browser history, and permissions, except on websites you’ve specifically and deliberately fireproofed. (The mobile version has this too!)

I’ve been further and perhaps most delighted by Duck Player, however. Privacy and self-determination are all well and good, but can they hold a candle to watching YouTube videos without the ads?! The answer is yet to be determined.

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The Great Mystery That Is Language

It’s not exactly a secret that I love languages, generically and in specifics. So I’ve been consistently delighted by K Klein, a YouTube channel all about linguistics!

Sort of like Tasting History, this is somewhere I go for specificity. Give me this very zoomed-in little niche of your science, whether the focus is on a specific language, specific feature, or specific event! K Klein covers a little bit of everything, from French’s spelling system to temporal pronouns to spelling reforms, which has given me both a deeper understanding of languages I speak, and a sort of starter platter as to the fascinating phenomena other languages offer!

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Overly Sarcastic Productions (The Right Amount Of Sarcasm)

In my opinion, anyway. Overly Sarcastic Productions is an educational YouTube channel that covers topics like history, mythology, and tropes in entertainment, and they’re a great joy to watch. They offer the facts intermingled with often-snarky commentary (if you’ve analyzed history or writing, you know it’s well-deserved) and visual presentations you’ll want to stop and read. Sometimes for the info, and sometimes for the sass.

This is one of those discover-your-niche-for-yourself situations, but to start you off, may I suggest History-Makers: Iceland’s #1 Menace, Snorri Sturluson, Miscellaneous Myths: Pride Tales, and/or Trope Talk: Noodle Incidents? This Trope Talk delighted me especially by featuring Leverage as a primary example; identifying beloved stories in the explanation or the background clips is part of the fun! If you’re a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender, you’ll find it works as an example for a truly shocking number of elements. The narrative kind, not bending. (And a good example, which not all of them are. Often the trope is as relevant for the ways it’s crashed and burned as the ways it’s been done well. And everything in between – the video on time travel is a good example of this.)

History and mythology, meanwhile, have a lot of “ugh, this guy again,” and “this guy” is frequently Murder. The narrators share our exasperation. And parts of those subjects that aren’t “ugh, murder”! As a treat. Honestly, I can’t believe I haven’t covered this channel yet – they’ve been a cornerstone of my edutainment for years.

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OmniSets

Happy holidays! Let’s talk about learning. OmniSets is a free digital study platform. There are a few of these, and I actually started on a different one, but when I came back to that in recent years I found it had paywalled its services, so I went looking for an alternative. What I found was OmniSets, and it’s been serving me well ever since.

The main tool is the digital flashcards. You can search the library for StudySets other people have made, or make your own! It’s really easy, and if you already made the set on another platform you can import it! (I thought I’d have to transcribe my 100+ flashcards individually, so this in particular was a delightful surprise.)

From there, you have several practice options. You can just use them as flashcards, plain and simple; you can Study, which provides a mix of true/false, multiple choice, and written response questions until you’re consistently correct; Quiz functions as a practice test; Match is, of course, a matching game; and Spell is purely written response. You can also pick and choose which types of questions you get in Study, and Favorite cards to if you want to just study those! The only caveat is that Match works much better with smaller StudySets; it uses your whole set, so when that’s 370 cards like mine, it’s kind of clunky. That’s on me for not splitting it out at all, though.

The rest of the site really centers around making the sets as helpful as possible: you can customize how your sets are sorted, decide whether they’re public or private, decide whether they can be copied by other users (“forked”), and set StudyPlans that account for factors like when your test is to best help you memorize everything! I can’t speak to the efficacy of StudyPlans, because my flashcards aren’t for a class, but I do think it’s awesome that they’re an option.

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