Josh Evans
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synbiojosh.bsky.social
Josh Evans
@synbiojosh.bsky.social
79 followers 130 following 44 posts
PhD student in Petr Sulc's lab at ASU using computer simulations to study how DNA nanostructures self-assembly (@ other fun stuff)
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synbiojosh.bsky.social
guilty as charged
[A graph of "Productivity when a major internet service goes down" over time] [The productivity line starts at average. A point in time is labelled 'outage begins'] [After that, the line splits into two lines: one labelled "People whose work relies on the service". It goes down over time.] [The second line is labelled "People whose work doesn't rely on the service". It jumps a little and stays roughly constant after.] [The second line is illustrated by Cueball seated at a desk, using a laptop computer. A thought bubble says: "Aw man, the outage took down the Star Wars Legends wiki."]
November 21, 2025 at 3:00 AM
synbiojosh.bsky.social
[Cueball sits at a table, eating a meal.] Cueball: Can you pass the salt? [Cueball pauses, a bite of food on his fork, silently.] [Cueball still has fork in mid-air.] Cueball: I said- Off-screen person: I know! I'm developing a system to pass you arbitrary condiments. Cueball: It's been 20 minutes! Off-screen person: It'll save time in the long run!
May 23, 2025 at 4:54 AM
synbiojosh.bsky.social
I've been working from home a lot this week (we've arrived at the time where the walk from the bus stop to office becomes.... difficult), which isn't a huge issue except that I'm not constantly looking at my Donald Knuth poster and I am beginning to forget his wisdom
photo of Donald Knuth, next to white text on black background reading "Premature optimization is the root of all evil. - [cursive] Donald Knuth -" the image is labelled "AZ QUOTES"
May 22, 2025 at 3:50 AM
synbiojosh.bsky.social
amazing things happening over in my git repo
snippet of github website, showing two branches named "nightmare" and "horrible_mistake", which both have pushes within the last 20 minutes
March 26, 2025 at 7:16 AM
synbiojosh.bsky.social
I would like to start being wrong about things for a change
www.theverge.com/news/622990/...
Set of tweets from July 2024, by me (@SynBioJosh) "I try (unsuccessfully) to avoid talking (nonstop) about politics in my capacity as a professional, but as someone who has worked with climate data in the past, I cannot express enough how much of a public good NOAA and NWS are and how harmful it would be to paywall and privatize" "NWS and NOAA serve the public good as a source for local weather forecasters, an invaluable source of data to plan and prepare for future natural disasters, and a vast data source for academic and private climate research." "This last one is vital for America as we move into the age of anthropocentric climate disruption, and is explicitly the reason that Project 2025 proposes to cut NOAA and NWS. Their goal - here as in so many other places- is to prevent research because they don't like the outcome."
March 4, 2025 at 8:48 AM
synbiojosh.bsky.social
[A single frame depicting a flowchart is shown. Many chaotic arrows are arranged between the items which are:] $PYTHONPATH EASY_INSTALL ANACONDA PYTHON HOMEBREW PYTHON (3.6) ANOTHER PIP?? HOMEBREW PYTHON (2.7) PYTHON.ORG BINARY (2.6) PIP EASY_INSTALL $PATH (MISC FOLDERS OWNED BY ROOT) ???? [The endpoints are:] /usr/local/Cellar /usr/local/opt /(A BUNCH OF PATHS WITH "FRAMEWORKS" IN THEM SOMEWHERE)/ ~/python/ ~/newenv/ /usr/local/lib/python3.6 /usr/local/lib/python2.7 [Caption below the panel:] My Python environment has become so degraded that my laptop has been declared a superfund site.
February 3, 2025 at 4:28 AM
synbiojosh.bsky.social
"What's the subject of your PhD?"
xkcd comid #1319 "I spend a lot of time on this task. I should write a program automating it!" [Two graphs are shown, plotting workload against time.] Theory: [The line for "work on original task" is steady but then drops down to a much lower level.] [The line for the automating job increases heavily while "writing code" and then drops down when "automation takes over".] [Both lines end up with a big amount of "free time".] Reality: [The line for "work on original task" is steady with no drop to a lower level.] [The line for the automating job increases heavily while "writing code", then it increases again while "debugging", it drops down slightly while "rethinking", and grows up again with an infinite end while the task is still an "ongoing development".] [The line for "work on original task" ends up with "no time for original task anymore".]
January 13, 2025 at 8:13 PM