Bjørnar (he/him)

I'm currently a Research Associate at [redacted]*. I've been a professional tutor, a teacher and a software engineer, and now I do genetics research programming and analysis.

*Just making it fractionally more difficult for the fash to datamine in their nonsense attacks on free speech. it's you enn see

Personal blog: https://hyperbolsk.wordpress.com/
Impersonal blogging: https://skepchick.org/author/bjornart/

Public Key

npub1f7wtahsz4uav4xsyzt7wrmvkh6paz079ngd99tq4hstmlrhvd3zstc5yyq

NIP-05 Address

btuftin_at_social.coop@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsyl897mcp27wk2ngzp9l8pakttaq738lze5xjj4s2mc9al3mkxc3gprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmnt4qhp46

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub1f7wtahsz4uav4xsyzt7wrmvkh6paz079ngd99tq4hstmlrhvd3zstc5yyq

Show more details

Last Notes

2026-03-15 11:36:29 UTC

- reply

Going to the gym, them my every-other-week online Daggerheart game. Last week the players fought a group of war wizards and an unruly magical box with an unfamiliar type of energy. After most of the wizards and their conscript troops were killed the remaining wizard surrendered. This week we'll see how lucky/skillful the group is in investigating the box and interrogating the prisoner to get leads for their mission. Oh, and they stuffed an immovable rod into the box during combat. A box that, unbeknownst to them so far, contains the essence of a minor deity. I wonder how they'll deal with that.

2026-03-14 11:02:03 UTC

- reply

my wife is doing pi-day for her own and her group's PhD students, so I'll be doing the weekly shopping and assist her in whatever way she requires. Also I've been meaning to clear out a debris dam in the creek and evaluate what recent high water events have done to the erosion prevention walls.

2026-03-12 12:41:39 UTC

- reply

Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij, it's justified and it's ancient

2026-02-15 12:06:23 UTC

- reply

Weight training, running an RPG session with one of three players absent and come up with some good lore for the next sub arc of the campaign. Probably also run some code for ongoing analyses. Perhaps write down the story fragments my brain has been obsessing about lately, though that never seems to stop the obsessing.

2026-01-26 10:03:29 UTC

- reply

From glazed over North Carolina I'll be working from home while my anxiety level hopeful slowly reduces. Counting myself lucky I'm not among the more than a million people facing at least a week of very unusual prolonged freezing weather without power.

2026-01-19 14:44:32 UTC

- reply

I just posted the summary of yesterday's Daggerheart session where the players did some investigation and fought a desperate battle against a group of assassins hired to kill them. Then I checked my email and realized I don't have much pressing work to do this week and decided that I will consider MLK jr day a day off. I'll probably play some Crusader Knights III. I've gotten slightly better at it, and had some luck, and now the Empire of Scandinavia is ruled by Harald Fairhair (48).

2026-01-18 00:26:08 UTC

- reply

I read a very popular book by a Norwegian author in 1999? and the protagonist found a buried treasure for no other reason than to free the author from the trouble of having him worry about money. I think I read a different book where he did practically the same thing.

2026-01-16 13:41:47 UTC

Was going to make a joke about "codeo" being better than "hackaton", but it turns out someone named their AI app that, so ...

2026-01-12 11:03:33 UTC

- reply

"rarely" and "often" are relative terms. And besides, in the quoted statement the weekly trips are exempted from the "rarely". It's equivalent to "other than weekly for laundry I rarely visited the basement".

2026-01-12 10:39:37 UTC

- reply

So do you think weekly isn't rarely, or that it's too infrequent for laundry? Either seems fine to me.

2026-01-06 14:23:41 UTC

- reply

De gikk gjennom telefonkatalogen etter polsk- eller spansk-klingende navn og registrerte dem som medlemmer uten å sjekke med personen.
Oppsummering med lenker til tidligere saker. https://www.nrk.no/nyheter/medlemsjuks-i-oslo-katolske-kirke-1.12021644

2026-01-06 12:37:50 UTC

- reply

random thought triggered by this: did you catch the Catholic Church of Norway membership scandal a few (12?) years back, or did that stay in the Norwegian sphere?

2026-01-06 12:01:30 UTC

- reply

meeting the closest other Catholic clergyman

2025-12-28 14:18:54 UTC

- reply

"strict -vegetarian" quadrupeds have developed various shape of digestion tract to harbor gut fermentation, but they all function in a similar way. And despite that, horses can and do still eat carrion. I have no idea how well that maps onto microorganisms though.

2025-12-28 11:38:57 UTC

- reply

Although it doesn't seem to me to take much to be a generalist in the world of "decompose organic matter". All life has pretty much the same main chemicals and the same temperature once you turn the metabolism off.

2025-12-28 11:36:23 UTC

- reply

There are several fungi used in cheese making, with different levels of generalization in the original wild type and the strain used in modern production, but penicillium roqueforti seems like pretty much a generalist, to pick one example.
"Penicillium roqueforti is a common saprotrophic fungus in the genus Penicillium. Widespread in nature, it can be isolated from soil, decaying organic matter, and plants."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillium_roqueforti

2025-12-28 10:51:51 UTC

- reply

Apparently other organic material. There's a lot of research on cheese related microorganisms because of the massive economic consequences of issues with decreased generic diversity and other changes with the available varieties.

2025-12-06 09:40:03 UTC

- reply

Do our weekly meal planning and grocery order. Really start reading the fourth and final book of Stealing from Wizards, which I've been waiting to start for weeks and could only get through a page of last night. And prepare for Sunday's session zero of the online TTRPG campaign I've recruited four complete strangers to play with me in a system that's new to me (Daggerheart) on a platform that's new to me (Foundry). I really wanted to play Daggerheart and found this the best option.

2025-11-14 11:56:35 UTC

- reply

I shouldn't kink shame, but you're doing either publication or ass play wrong.

2025-11-11 10:59:37 UTC

- reply

Work, work, work, and then continue my CK3 game where my Norwegian, Catholic emperor of Britannica is waging war on the Swedish, Muslim sultan of Lappland. This will be revenge on a rival dynasty and bring me closer to forming the empire of Scandinavia. It's all very game of thrones.

2025-11-06 11:19:20 UTC

- reply

Decades ago I learned the word made up of omni and scient has been pronounced om-NIshent for centuries and lost the ability to care about how English speakers treat words. At least they don't fully fuck up smorgasbord or slalom.

2025-10-22 12:48:50 UTC

- reply

Aaaaand my job timed out after 12 hours aaaand it's cause I'm a dummy. I thought I had 6 parts that would run 30 minutes each and decided to run them consecutively, but I should have remembered there were actually 25 parts. Making some small changes now so I can run them in parallel and testing one first so I don't waste university computing time ...

2025-10-22 12:07:34 UTC

- reply

Indeed. Though I also have work where we pay directly for used computer resources, gotta optimize there. And sometimes brute force takes so long I have to look at alternatives. I already made this script four times faster than the first draft, but I I fear any real further improvement is going to be two days work.

2025-10-22 11:00:17 UTC

- reply

or I have chosen to let the computer spend hours instead of me spending hours to figure out how to potentially get the computer to spend minutes.

2025-10-22 10:59:50 UTC

- reply

Large data files in unfortunate formats. And also very large data in general, but I'm this case it's the first. I do coding on genetics and a lot of what's happening in that field is looking at thousands of results and trying to check if they are new or can be found among the millions of results already published. In this case the database of published results is in an unfortunate format ...

2025-10-22 10:31:03 UTC

- reply

Work will be fixing and rerunning code, or looking through the output if the current version eventually completed overnight. I guesstimated three hours runtime, but at 6h it was still running strong. I regret not having it write out partial results along the way.
Other than that I'll continue playing the head of the Yngling dynasty in the computer game Crusader King 3. I'm extremely noob at it, but enjoy it even when things aren't going to plan. It's a bit like a solo, epic RPG

2025-10-15 10:42:20 UTC

- reply

My best interaction with them is when I was 16. I was in the bathroom and my slightly shy and occasionally stuttering (at the time) brother opened the door. I could hear them starting their spiel and just yelled "tell them we don't want any" and they left.

2025-10-08 09:46:49 UTC

- reply

Nerd me: "It's too thick, the anomaly was precisely 1:4:9 proportions!"

2025-08-27 10:54:19 UTC

- reply

Yes, "pedicured" wouldn't work. m-w.com doesn't even have pedicure listed as a verb. But manicure is listed with "groom" as one sense, and the example "manicured flower beds". And more important, usage of "manicured eyebrows" appears to be comparable to "groomed eyebrows". And it's not a new thing, as the ngram shows. I've left of the last two decades, in which they rose in parallel. You owe this "young person" an apology post. ;-) https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=trimmed+eyebrows%2Cgroomed+eyebrows%2C+manicured+eyebrows&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/115/100/325/233/123/443/original/dd6d383d7d7940a4.png

2025-08-16 15:16:28 UTC

What is your favorite ship name from the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks?
Mine is the Offensive Unit named, in small print, "I Said, I've Got A Big Stick".
#books #bookstodon #scienceFiction #theCulture #IainMBanks

2025-08-08 10:28:51 UTC

I'm seeing fungus/mycelium-based materials in the news again as potentially green alternatives and it's time to remind people that "mushrooms build large underground networks of mycelium" is wrong. Correct* is "the large underground networks of mycelium occasionally grow some mushrooms". Writing the first is like if we couldn't usually see apple trees and wrote that "apples grow large wooden support structures".
#fungus #scienceWriting #mushrooms #pedantry
*I'm being hyperbolic here

2025-06-13 19:32:25 UTC

- reply

After a week in Boston, where revisiting old haunts made me slightly maudlin we're visiting family before heading to "the Cape" tomorrow for two weeks of actual vacation for the both of us (and the dog).

2025-06-11 11:24:58 UTC

- reply

In Boston, where my wife is attending a conference. Might visit the science museum, we'll see once I've figured out breakfast, as this hotel currently doesn't have a restaurant.

2025-05-08 10:44:15 UTC

- reply

How are you defining "Real communist"? Rødt (The Norwegian Party/electoral coalition Red) has a representative in Stortinget and are for a communist society, but not violent revolution. Their youth party refuses to toe that pragmatic line though, and if be surprised if it wasn't a common personal belief of many members and voters. "If we only had the numbers"

2025-04-29 09:42:16 UTC

- reply

For maximum footnote madness, have you read fforde's Thursday Next novels?

2025-04-26 12:11:32 UTC

- reply

I probably will be listening to a podcast, but the goal is for all the pine cones in the ditch not to just get flushed down the creek in the next rain storm. I have to clear the ditch of debris anyway. :)

2025-04-26 09:26:14 UTC

- reply

I'm considering collecting all the pinecones on the property and putting them in the flowerbeds as decorative soil cover.

2025-04-22 14:05:13 UTC

- reply

Yes, but it's the style that usually tips off a very proficient reader. It's bad in "subtly"* different ways than what a mediocre writer produces, and you know from experience it's unreliable. The mediocre reader doesn't even notice it's bad, or at least not bad in a different way from the other stuff they read, so they don't even question the reliability.
*"Subtle" is subjective, so you might think it's glaring, but many obviously do not.

2025-04-22 12:42:41 UTC

- reply

And I think that's the world we live in. This is made up numbers on a scale that's hard to even define, but I think you need reading comprehension well over median to find LLM writing to be obviously bad. There are a lot of people with over the median reading and writing skills, but not great skill. Just look at all the academic papers that have been reviewed multiple times and still are clunky, and that's the section of society that most prizes reading. Also, again, lawyers.

2025-04-22 11:17:34 UTC

- reply

And like other such things it seems obvious to the person with high reading comprehension, but it's very hard to explain to someone who doesn't just get it, or even to realize it's something that isn't obvious to all.

2025-04-22 11:15:48 UTC

- reply

This is the source of your bafflement: "when you know that the answers they give are glorified auto-complete."
They don't. The first report of US lawyers reprimanded for using LLMs to prepare court fillings and including non-existent cases was years ago, and yet it keeps happening. "People" think it's a better search engine, everyone around them agree with that, actual academics study the output like there's thought behind it. Spotting it requires high reading comprehension. 1/

2025-04-17 10:17:25 UTC

- reply

Am I misremembering or do you generally discount free will for people? But you make an exception for voting?

2025-04-14 20:38:28 UTC

- reply

I think you should allow some dectorists from latter centuries to participate as well. /j

2025-04-11 10:27:07 UTC

- reply

Like anything else in the financial markets it's largely based on vibes. Some vibes have been around for longer, such as gold being a more stable haven in uncertain times.
If you want to prep for an actual collapse of society, you buy canned food and ammo, and then some physical gold, but most people cannot conceive of our current financial market ecosystem fully collapsing, so buying digital gold goes on.

2025-04-08 10:46:12 UTC

- reply

There's always watching Tesla stock. That one is still dropping faster than the market, and reports for the first quarter are coming up in two weeks.

2025-04-08 01:38:39 UTC

- reply

I think it's unfortunately a flawed view. Their fortunes are all in stocks, which are now less worth, but they're still the same proportion of ownership and they could never be converted to that amount of cash anyway. It makes more sense when an individual company drops in value, but when it's the whole stock market the super rich aren't truly hurt at all, except possibly in their feels, so there's that.

2025-04-03 11:32:38 UTC

- reply

hva med papirteip med trykk? Riv av en ny bit og voila! https://www.bestmark.no/pakketape-med-trykk

2025-03-23 18:59:23 UTC

- reply

I don't think we're anywhere near that. Tesla is still at a price to earnings rate of 176. It's priced as a startup with explosive growth "just around the corner". And the belief in that growth is almost entirely tied to Elon. Yes, he's harming the company, but without the "Elon is a genius" belief Tesla is not a 176 P/E company, unless they find a different CEO who can say "robotaxis next year, I promise" _and be believed by investors_ over and over again.

2025-03-23 10:06:50 UTC

- reply

And he'll still be a major stock holder, and they'll ask him back in a heartbeat when dismissing him makes the stock tank. It is, after all, a balloon kept inflated by Elon's mouth farts.

2025-03-17 09:49:17 UTC

- reply

I have some analyses to run, some documentation to write, and I'm having a look at our finances to see how long our savings would last if both our incomes disappear due to the US government's decision to dismantle health research.

2025-03-15 19:09:43 UTC

- reply

what's the expression?

2025-03-13 13:57:06 UTC

- reply

Say they could hire one for a tenth or a thousandth, how much would that actually mean for the overall profit? Very little. And it would mean getting someone from outside the ecosystem they live in, where this is the price of an experienced CEO, which objectively is a risk.
It would also, it seems to me, raise questions about their own compensation. So it's not so much CEO Messiah as it is Very rich people are better at everything.

2025-03-13 13:34:49 UTC

- reply

I think that view ignores that they don't think paying the upper classes, i.e. CEOs, C-whatever-Os, and board members, millions or billions is remarkable.

2025-03-13 12:10:45 UTC

- reply

I think they still believe they're doing that for CEOs. It's just that they have a bizarre idea of what value they're getting. It's not much different from how buying and selling luxury brands work.

2025-03-13 10:58:55 UTC

- reply

yes. The bigger the investor, the more shares, the more votes, and the more likelihood they live in a world where "some people" deserve that level of compensation.

2025-03-13 10:37:29 UTC

- reply

Though horrifyingly large, compared with workers salaries, CEO salaries generally aren't that huge an item in any company's budget. And the class of people who set them i.e. board members and big investors think they are just fine, because they have that kind of income themselves, from their CEO positions, investment portfolios and, in particular, their pay for sitting on a sl much of boards, approving high CEO salaries.

2025-03-08 11:35:35 UTC

- reply

I was wondering why you referenced the German, so I had a look at the word's origin, and see that it said spread from French to all over the place, except of course English.
It's probably incomprehensible today to most people under 30. Right?

2025-03-07 10:06:27 UTC

- reply

I find the angle of all these articles annoying. Danes will still get letters delivered by the commercial actor who beat PostNord for the commercial contract, Dao, in the privatized Danish Mail and delivery market, but it's almost impossible to find articles that explain this. Instead we get PostNord's "90% decrease in letters, you can get refunds on stamps"-bullshit. That I don't know is bullshit, but the lack of interrogating the situation further and 1/2
https://globalpost.com/stories/after-five-centuries-danish-post-says-no-more-letters/

2025-03-02 17:17:00 UTC

I dag fikk jeg en kritisk kommentar på en én-stjernes Goodreads-anmeldelse fra 2015. Vedkommende var så snurt over at jeg bruker én stjerne slik Goodreads-grensesnittet definerer det, altså "likte ikke boka", og ikke "håpløst søppel" at han syntes han måtte fortelle meg at det var slik folk flest oppfattet det. Han var nemlig et stykke inn i Jotnens Hjemkomst og like boka godt.
Tok en kikk på hans liste og han har aldri gitt ei bok noe annet enn fem stjerner.
#bøker
#norskTut

2025-03-01 02:05:30 UTC

- reply

Oh no! That's a nightmare I've had more than once.

2025-02-24 16:06:28 UTC

- reply

The party started in 1973 as "Anders Lange's party for severe cuts in taxes, fees and government interference" is now the Progress Party, Norway's second largest and most right wing party among those with members in parliament.
They changed the name just a few years in, when Anders Lange died.

2025-02-13 15:17:53 UTC

- reply

I think we're looking at global hunger disasters in our lifetime. The global food systems are optimized for profits, with resilience and food reserves having been abandoned, and a few natural disasters impacting multiple major food exporters at the same time will set off a spiral of war and famine that further reduces production, which ...
Food production has been under-emphasized in reports because the _direct_ impact on GDP is small. Never mind that starving people with less.

2025-02-13 14:51:09 UTC

- reply

I often call the current trade in CO2 emission certificates indulgences, because _at best_, that is what they are. When working as intended they allow rich countries, or rich individuals, a figleaf for continuing high consumption and emissions, for the low, low price of promoting projects elsewhere that "maybe" wouldn't happen without this effort, and "maybe" reduce CO2 emissions. At worse there are no such projects or the projects are useless for CO2 emission reduction.

2025-02-06 13:26:16 UTC

I write a lot of multi-script analysis flows and I number the scripts like the lines in BASIC scripts I wrote for the C64.
010_phenotype_definition.R
020_regression_analysis.R
030_result_reformatting.R
That way I can stick additional scripts in-between if I realize I need them.
#programming #dataScience #RStudio

2025-01-23 13:38:39 UTC

- reply

Fun fact, the Norwegian limit to call something fruitX soda is 8%, so Fanta is "orange flavored soda", whereas the main competitor Solo, is "Orange soda". (The fruit and the color don't share a word in Norwegian, the color is Oransje, the fruit Appelsin, Chinese apple, like in many other European languages.)

2025-01-22 11:06:37 UTC

- reply

Yeah, I'm on my way out too. I'll miss the connection to a bunch of distant relatives and old friends and acquaintances I'll likely lose contact with, but that's not enough to stay and help prop up Zuckerberg's wealth.

2025-01-19 20:34:14 UTC

- reply

Well some of them believe in one or more radiations that don't exist, so they don't really believe the science version. Ditto for nutrients, toxins, immune system ...

2024-12-29 11:07:56 UTC

- reply

6am in Carrboro, North Carolina. Dawdling in bed in part because I was hoping not to walk the dog until dawn, but I just googled and first light is at seven so I might as well get going. Plans for the day:
Maybe play some Baldur's Gate 3, 10am personal trainer appointment together with my wife, might check on som long running analyses and restart failed ones.
Oh, and I have a plan to turn a bunch of left over potatoes into "lomper". (Norwegian soft flat breads made of potato)

2024-12-26 15:55:04 UTC

- reply

I'm not sure which part you aren't understanding, so here's an overly detailed explanation.
You move ten coins so you have two groups, the original 90 and the new 10. In total these have 90 tails and 10 heads in some random distribution. Then you flip all coins in the group of ten. There are now, for the reason I explained previously, the same number of heads (0-10) in both groups.

2024-12-26 13:02:58 UTC

- reply

Take ten and flip them. If you took ten tails, they turn into ten heads to match the original ten. If you have any heads in your new ten, they turn into tails, so they're removed from the ten in both piles, leaving a balanced number (0,1,3, ..., 9) of heads in both sets. (Edited because I wrote tails instead of heads at the end )

2024-12-08 11:34:38 UTC

- reply

We're the dinosaurs' impactor, only unlike the impactor we could have read the signs and mitigated the disaster.

2024-12-05 11:51:29 UTC

- reply

True, but you don't have to go full Nazi to vote for ill adviced policies guided in fear.

2024-12-05 11:33:50 UTC

- reply

Your optimism is admirable, but being of immigrant descent is not a guarantee against fear of future immigrants.

2024-11-04 15:45:55 UTC

- reply

Just part one of a three part work though ...

2024-10-23 08:48:20 UTC

- reply

Wonder what drove such decisions. The ambition of leaders, strong cultural beliefs and competition for resources I assume, but how much did each contribute?

2024-10-15 16:11:24 UTC

- reply

And if they did all that somehow, the next election would be won by a dictator promising to undo it all. So a counter coup is only a moral obligation if one completely ignore the consequences of one.

2024-10-15 15:09:16 UTC

- reply

So when do they hold a new election, and do you think MAGA would lose that one? I don't think a Democrat counter-coup is realistic, but it would absolutely guarantee an overwhelming red wave in the next election.

2024-10-05 11:11:34 UTC

- reply

Do you feel the same about chess ratings?

2024-09-27 13:13:36 UTC

When double checking that @npub17pz…530t s profile image was who I thought she was, I learned the actress in this Swedish Pippi Longstocking movie was German. Learned her lines in Swedish, but was then dubbed by an actual Swede to get rid of the accent, and then had to be dubbed by a German when the movies were released in Germany.
#prussiluskan #pippi_longstocking #Sweden

2024-08-08 10:25:59 UTC

- reply

TIL half the world calls Tycho's observatory Uraniborg instead of Uranienborg. This is worse than aluminium/aluminum! #astronomy #history #language #denmark #sweden