Udo Seiffert

Lucky to have seen some beautiful noctilucent clouds last night (3am, approx. 2 hrs before sunrise, 51.9N). BTW, the bright star in the right third of the image is Capella in Auriga (The Charioteer). @NLCalerts #NLC

… after some days and a few cans of cat food, a hedgehog actually moved in.

We built a hedgehog house last weekend…

In Aug 2021,The University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons calculated π to 62,831,853,071,796 digits, adding 12.8 trillion new digits to the previous record. They used a high-performance computer with one terabyte of RAM and 510 terabytes of disk space. The calculation took 108 days and 9 hours to complete. In March 2019 Iwao Emma Haruka from @Google cloud computing calculated the value of π to 31,415,926,535,897 digits using a program called y-cruncher. She then set the world record in 2022 by calculating up to 100 trillion digits of π. The history of the computation of π is a long and fascinating one, dating back to ancient times. π is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, and it is an irrational number, meaning that it cannot be expressed as a fraction of two integers. It is also a transcendental number, meaning that it cannot be the solution of any polynomial equation with rational coefficients. Some of the earliest approximations of π were made by the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, Sumerians, and Chinese, who used various methods to estimate the area or circumference of a circle. They obtained values ranging from 3 to 3.16. The first rigorous calculation of pi was done by Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC), one of the greatest mathematicians of the ancient world. He used a method called exhaustion, which involved inscribing and circumscribing regular polygons around a circle and calculating their perimeters. Many other mathematicians and scientists contributed to the computation of π over the centuries, using different techniques such as infinite series, continued fractions, arithmetic-geometric means, and Monte Carlo methods. Some notable names include Zu Chongzhi (429–501), who calculated pi to seven decimal places; François Viète (1540–1603), who derived an infinite product formula for pi; John Machin (1680–1751), who computed pi to 100 decimal places; Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920), who discovered many rapidly converging series for pi; and John Wrench (1913–1990), who computed pi to one million decimal places using a desk calculator. Today, computers have enabled the computation of π to trillions of digits, using algorithms such as the Chudnovsky algorithm, the Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe formula, and the y-cruncher program. These calculations are mainly done for testing the performance and reliability of computers, as well as for setting world records. However, for most practical purposes, only a few digits of π are sufficient.

@AustPlantPhenom @frederike_stock @scienceANU Hm, phenotyping Xmas trees. The results could soon become very topical again. But somehow the Xmas balls are missing, aren’t they? That will probably come in the next project phase. 😉

APPF ANU’s Ming Dao-Cha & @frederike_stock are phenotyping baby Xmas trees for a project on phosphorus availability & uptake from biosolid biochar. Full 3D scans of Pinus radiata seedlings were made with the Phenospex PlantEye F600 multispectral scanner. @scienceANU 🎄

That’s really a great opportunity and a super team to work with! If only I didn’t already have a good job… 😉

Hiring a Mechatronics Engineer. Excellent opportunity for PostDocs and PhD Students. Know anyone who might be interested? Get more information here: compolytics.com/careers/ #ScienceJobs

@WurzelKosmos Congrats Matt! Enjoy your honeymoon 😉

Guess the date I got married. 😅😎 And it was absolutely worth it.

It was just wonderful to meeting colleagues and friends of the German crop plant research community at the annual convention in Potsdam. Thank you to @PLANT2030 for organising a great event. @Die_Blattmacher @Pflanzenwissen

APPF JOB ALERT! We have an awesome position available - Technology & Development Lead. Based at the @AgrifoodUoA you will be working on enhancing infrastructure such as drones, growth chambers & phenotyping. It’s cool tech stuff. Click here to apply: bit.ly/3k0X5do

Thank you all for your cooperation and the as always very pleasant working atmosphere. I can't wait to be back here later this year!

For someone like me, who usually deals with plant applications, this was really a great experience.

@AustPlantPhenom It was a lot of fun － Thank you for organising this event!

Let the festivities begin! The Plant Accelerator and Central APPF team had their mallets at the ready for our annual festive season croquet tournament. Well done to the top five strikers - sound the bell! (And yes, we are back at work now 😊).

It’s so nice to be back on this beautiful Adelaide campus and to see all the familiar colleagues and meet some new ones. Thanks for hosting me again! @waiteresearch @AustPlantPhenom

I like the domain hack!

@aus_zac Groovy! I always thought phone / tablet cams have cut-off filters in this wavelength range to block NIR (and UV on the other side of VIS).

The beautiful glow of 790 nm in our fibre amplifiers. Lab lights are off and I see nothing with my own eyes. Thank you iPad!

“The King has asked me to become Prime Minister because this nonsense has gone on long enough.”

From hyperspectral to multispectral sensing – from simulation to reality: A comprehensive approach for… Happy to share our new paper published at the European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks in Belgium last week. @HammerLabML @Fraunhofer_IFF dx.doi.org/10.14428/esann…

@_COMPOLYTICS And I got plants to decorate my office? Hardly. To calibrate and test the sensor for maize, of course. This work is done now. Let's see how long the poor plants will last as decoration under my care. #houseplant #indoorgardening

Just by chance, we had the front position on the car ferry across Lake Maggiore in Italy. As there is no front barrier, the edge is vanishing and it feels like you are driving a car across the lake. Kind of infinity ferry. Amazing!