Survival of the fittest is a pretty demonstration how algorithmic bias comes to be.

Just got back from Dornbirn and the paper is sent off for review. So I got some time at hand and can checkout atom again. My workhorse was vim - and although I generally feel empowered using it in larger projects I would prefer a more user-friendly organization.

I started the project R-Hugo-Papercss.

This is a template for the hugo static site engine. The purpose is to use its page bundle feature with generated content from R. There were small issues to make hugo write the relative URLs.

I also uses the papercss layout. It seems suitable for a private science blog as it reminds me on the Randal Munroes XKCD style.

By now feels complete enough to try out blogging.

Some animal pictures from my garden to test content images.

Having some downtime I watched some tutorials for blender.

It feels like a powerful tool. However the long wait for rendering is annoying.
I particularly like the physics simulations. As test I followed the this tutorial. Really simple - just the render took over an hour.

Anyway enjoy some nice wood chipping.

There is an interesting paper on Mosquitoes from Raji et. al. (“Aedes aegypti Mosquitoes Detect Acidic Volatiles Found in Human Odor Using the IR8a Pathway”, doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.02.045). It deals with how mosquitoes track their human targets. They identify three ranges - at furthest they track by CO2, in mid-range by IR and at closest they zoom in on particular VOCs.

I’m working on project KIRAS now for some time, and we essentially also need to track humans. It seems our machine learning algorithm has a similar approach (although we do not use IR). But CO2 is more dominant in large containers, while in smaller other compounds play greater role.

“BBC in our time” had a good podcast about pheromones. Too bad they don’t offer transcripts.

Pheromones in breath would be most interesting however it is still in debate whether human pheromones exist at all.
But there was the discovery of rabbit mammary pheromone by Schaal et al. And the darcin pheromone in mice. I did learn that some animals also have another organ related to smell - the vomeronasal organ (Jacobson’s organ). It seems to be also present in humans.

Unfortunately our tech still doesn’t perform to well at the relevant masses, though that is an most interesting research area.

Recently some html and css videos caught my attention. I started reworking the layout using the new practices I learnt. Hope they will still work fine.

In particular I found the videos by Jen Simmons inspiring.

Syncthing is currently my preferred tool to keep folders in sync. Previously I had affairs with git annex, and rsync scripts.

Recently I reactivated a 2009 Mac Mini as headless server under El Capitan. Homebrew is the tool of choice - it complains a little about the old OS but things work out nicely.

Three blue one brown who makes amazing videos about maths found another amazing fact linking how masses collide with an amazing mathematical property. Since I don’t want to spoil anything watch it!