iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mathurin Dorel @mathsrish.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

Nice thing about having a thermal camera on your phone is that you can quantify your suffering during a heat wave. You can also check if your insulation measures are working and how much worse it could get which is nice I guess.

Thermal imaging of a kitchen window. Temperature readings indicate 34.6C at the surface of the window and 29.6C for the wall.

Thermal imaging of a fridge. Temperature reads 29.3C on the front and 35.8C on the side.

Thermal imaging of a towel on drying rack in front of a window. Temperature reads 28.6C for the floor, 25.8C for the towel and 30.6C for the window.

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Mathurin Dorel @mathsrish.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

Fair enough, it's not their fault, it was literally a red day at Geneva airport. (If anyone knows why some flights could take off though I'm curious). But then they start rebooking us *on the same flight 24h later*. So like for KLM, wtf, can't you do better? (spoiler: they can)

Departure board at Geneva airport on 01/06/2024.
Half of the flight are cancelled. ("Annulé")

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Mathurin Dorel @mathsrish.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

As I just visited CERN I have to oppose this statement. But EMBO is a very good second ^^ And I say it as a biologist who regularly interacts with EMBO. (Also personally I choose Geneva over Heidelberg any day 😍)

Artwork at CERN: the entertwined metal ribbons engraved with landmark contribution to physics.
On the top salient edge of the ribbon "2012 CERN: Higgs boson" is at the forefront of the picture.

Landscape photograph from the bridge of CERN's museum encompassing the tram, a few cars, the flags of CERN contributing nations, and in the background the "Haut Jura".

Landscape picture of the Geneva lake and the Alps taken from the Jura chain near La Dôle. Geneva and it's iconic "Jet d'eau" is visible on the right of the picture.

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Mathurin Dorel @mathsrish.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

Update (kind of daily, yesterday I had to kill firefox remotely because it froze everything so not screenshot). For this one I kept other processes active: notice how it is a problem only with the nature.com tabs (www.nature.com/articles/nme... and www.nature.com/articles/s41... today)

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Mathurin Dorel @mathsrish.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

And then you remember it's gonna trigger a massive US recession with consequences for many other countries and billions of people and you get sad again.

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Mathurin Dorel @mathsrish.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

Hey @nature.com could you fix you javascript please? An paper tab left open overnight blows out to over 1Gb of RAM and that's just messed up.

firefox about:unloads tab screenshot showing a nature.com tab using 1Gb of RAM and another using 2.2Gb of RAM

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Mathurin Dorel @mathsrish.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

In case you missed the tariff drama, it turns out they likely asked an LLM to provide tariff rates for a "bilateral trade balance of zero" and ignored half of the formula (epsilon*psi assumed to be 1) and the major assumption "assuming exchange rate effects are small enough to be ignored"

$Screenshot of Kush Desai's explanation of the formula used to calculate reciprocal tariffs. The (very likely LLM-generates answer) reads: "Consider an environment in which the US levies a tariff rate t_i on country I and Dt_i reflects the change in the traffic rate. Let e<0 represent the elasticity of import prices, let phi>0 represent the passthrough from tariffs to import prices, let m_i>0 represent total imports from country i, and let x_i>0 represent total efforts. Then the decrease in imports due to a change in tariffs equals Dt_i*e*phi*m_i<0. Assuming that offsetting exchange rate and general equilibrium effects are small enough to be ignored, the reciprocal tariff that results in a bilateral trade balance of zero satisfies: Dt_i={x_i-m_i}/{e*phi*m_i}"$

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Mathurin Dorel @mathsrish.bsky.social · 30/03/2025

TIL Google docs has a project management interface. It looks a bit more finicky and less powerful than dedicated options like Monday or Notion but looks great for quick and dirty management for a short project where you have to involve many people as the access is easier.

Screenshot of Google docs with a task tracker and a project assignment table.

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Mathurin Dorel @mathsrish.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

Picture taken by our irreplaceable microscopy specialist (one of the many reasons we need overheads) @renebuschow.bsky.social who made the noble sacrifice not to appear on the group picture.

Selfie of Mathurin and René half blinded by the sun in front of the Max Planck for Molecular Genetics.

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Mathurin Dorel @mathsrish.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Never thought I'd miss the time f**ing Mike Pence was VP. What the hell did the USA elect? How can you let this administration do what it does? If the Americans don't do something soon the whole world is in big trouble. Our leaders in Europe suck but at least we haven't elected Hitler 2025.

Tweet of Mike Pence stating that Ukraine did not start the war but was invaded by Russia.

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Mathurin Dorel @mathsrish.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

This week I got a harsh reminder of my ivory tower when I wanted to share my excitement over an igv track. I even had to explain the central dogma of biology... and then why it's not so simple for this specific case. So for my fellow biologists, TUBB CRISPR KO non sense mediated decay from RNAseq.

igv track showing RNAseq aligned on the TUBB gene for 4 NYC and one TUBB CRISPR KO. For the KO no reads are found past a few hundred bp downstream of the translation start site.

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Mathurin Dorel @mathsrish.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

TIL that if you don't resuspend your siRNA-lipofectamine mix then the siRNA settle at the bottom you don't get liposomes. Don't be like me, take those extra pipetting steps that will save you experiment (so much for saving pipette tips).

Fluorescence image of medium treated with non mixed siRNA-lipofectamine. The signal is homogeneous.

Fluorescence image of medium treated with properly mixed siRNA-lipofectamine. The signal is concentrated into high intensity dots.

Image of two eppendorfs with medium and fluorescent siRNA.
One has a clear red aggregate at the bottom.

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Mathurin Dorel @mathsrish.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

I heard there was some rant going on about base vs tidyverse so here's my take to make everyone agree on something.

Elephant pingouin meme with ggplot as the elephant, base::pairs as the pingouin and ggpairs as the weird looking hybrid.

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Mathurin Dorel @mathsrish.bsky.social · 05/01/2024

Do doctors use thermal cameras sometimes to detect injuries sometimes? Because my finger tip is currently inflammated (frostnip) and that's what a FLIR picture looks like. You can probably guess which finger is guilty.

FLIR image of my right hand. The middle finger appears hotter.

FLIR image of my left hand, all fingers have similar temperatures with the tips being colder.

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Mathurin Dorel @mathsrish.bsky.social · 19/10/2023

Je n'avais pas de melon en stock.

Projection of a planetary surface (I think) on a sphere for the 2023 light festival in Berlin.

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Mathurin Dorel @mathsrish.bsky.social · 29/09/2023

Those are drills right? Are the Germans looking for shale gas in front of the Bundestag?

Tall metallic contraptions in front of the Bundestag at night.

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Mathurin Dorel @mathsrish.bsky.social · 15/09/2023

Having a tight deadline apparently makes me turn corpo really fast 😅

Picture of an automated message from a task manager saying "Reminder that {experiment} is planned to start today, make sure to get on it and update the status or change the date".

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