Nat Coombs

If I had a dollar for every time a national statistics center website offered secondary language options that bricked their search tool, I'd be going out for lunch right now.

Happy Pride! (But also more seriously I strongly recommend this movie and if you want to talk about it, I am so game)

Being the child of a former children's choir director gives you an extremely funny Pavlovian response to hearing güiro when you least expect it.

@lifenonlinear RITUAL MAGIC, to clarify. There has to be formalism and a shared language for it to count.

Quote of the month: “Math is the closest thing we have to magic” (by @coombs_nat)

Still think the funniest thing about my undergrad degree in environmental science is how much more I learned about time series analysis from my music classes

Publish your goddamn code.

Literally anyone except NOAA provide functioning metadata for national-and-above scale datasets challenge. "We're a world-leading institution and format our data to reflect the needs of users" Sure but I've had lab partners whom I failed labs because of with better metadata docs.

The language with this stuff is tricky, so, as long as the interpretations aren't totally off base, I'm always happy with more synchrony pubs, and I'm even happier when slip-ups with words are of no consequence and extremely fun.

Oh happy day! It's been a solid four months but I found it! Yet another case of someone creatively misappropriating synchrony terminology (b/c, let's face it, it's easy to do) in a solid journal and coming up with a BEAUTIFUL sci fi term!

Oh did I mention that these standards are also used for insurance billing purposes? Because they really, really shouldn't be. Human health & simple encoding don't play nice, especially when that encoding changes rapidly, in nuanced ways, to then be debated in the courts.

And, given that they're third party, they aren't developed in parallel with the standards, so any brick walls they run into can't be addressed, plus there's a lag between standard changes and the needed tools.

Gotta say, really impressed with the medical field for somehow being more invested in fucking up the interoperability of their own INTERNATIONALLY MANDATED SYSTEMS than Techbros are. Like wow babes go get 'em, I bet not a single paper will be published bemoaning this choice.

Worth noting that it isn't like some arcane scientific concepts that are locked behind highly specialized knowledge to "fully understand." Researchers who work on things like far-rhetoric heavily prioritize lay communication, so this is just not taking the time to double check.

Holy shit am I tired of scientists being bad at recognizing dogwhistles because of good-faith interpretations of everything they read. Especially scientists who preach "Be suspicious" when teaching people to read papers. That is 100% clown shit.

"Politics is a sophisticated game of chess" says local dipstick claiming that the Interstate Commerce Clause & the Elastic Clause are unconstitutional.... Somehow. More at 11.

Listen, if I think a Haskell programmer's take on monads is helping address a question on a forum FOR A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE more than the actual solutions listed by people using the language, there's a cultural problem. Pythonic is good jargon for language devs, and not for users

Pythonic: because we really fucking needed one more justification for competitive pedantry for a language that everybody is expected to use. Literally just use the word for the specific priority case you're making, I swear to god, you're not doing Baroque historical performance.

I may not be a hardcore fish person, but I do have the intense desire to blast someone with a garden hose every time I hear the phrase "There's enough volume in the tank, it's just vertical!"

Manually cleaning spatial metadata is so fun because I get to play a silly little game in which I get to guess if the data's fucked because somebody goofed it in the field, they used an iPhone as a GPS, or some poor undergrad had a final the same week they were doing data input.