Quickies

Quickies: Helping each other, understanding data, and empathy…

... plus this week's cute animals!

Hello, friends! This weekend I finished the Impossible Semester, so I look forward to putting the Cute Animal Fridays BACK on actual Fridays. For now, here are some good reads from the week.

  • As we struggle through *WAVES ARMS* all this, CNN has a list of places where you can give or get help with charitable organizations. Via Muscadine
  • I think we all need a very close read of this 2019 piece on data science and how we should be skeptical of it, FROM a data scientist. It emphasizes the human side of data collection, analysis, and reporting, showing that we’re never completely free from leaving our influence on supposedly objective data.
  • I was struck by this quote from a podcast on how we need a riot of empathy:

We need to rebel against the nature of our current situation, which is a situation that puts us in our own homes, living out our own little dramas in this disconnected way, waging our own battles without the strength of our community at our backs. We need a riot of empathy. We need collective grief as a rebellion against the normalization of mass death because what we are fighting for is our value and our collective understanding of that value. We are talking about a battle over what death means and it is being waged right now. We’re all part of it whether we know it or not, and we all have the power to fight for what connects us. History is a chain reaction, and the tone we set this week will affect everything after. So let’s remember who we are and who we want to be, as well as who we want to be to each other.

Now, it’s cute animals for the win:

  • I woke up this morning to the delightful news that you can get a  goat to come to your Zoom meeting. I’m super sad that I didn’t know this BEFORE my Zoom classes ended for the semester. Thanks, Misty!
  • We have a cool video of a fishing cat, not to be confused with a fisher cat, via Muscadine

 !

Noisy

Nicole is a professor, astronomer, educator, geek, dog mom, occasional fitness nerd, and maker of tiny comets. She is also very loud under the right circumstances. Like what you read? Buy me a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/noisyastronomer

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