Yes. It gathers up people from every field working on Artificial Light At Night (ALAN) every two years. It’s always very interesting and brings forth a lot on international and interdisciplinary collaborations.

Plus, it’ll be in Ireland next year.

You should come to the ALAN conference next year if you can.

Mercurial is way better.

There, I said it.

I’m a scientist that has been coding almost exclusively in Python for the past decade and I strongly disagree.

Python is great at being the glue that holds everything together, and everything crunchy part of the program is being handled by a library anyways.

I code with two terminals, one for iPython and one for vim. And you don’t need anything else. The beauty of Python is that it’s not a language that is so full of boilerplate that you need an IDE to type it for you to be remotely productive.

Overall, Python is a language made to be used by people that need to make something that just works and don’t need to spend years learning programming paradigms and industry practices. Fortran and C are so unwieldy in comparison and everything more modern lacks the expansive and diverse libraries of Python.

In my (admittedly limited) experience, mercurial is much more intuitive than git. I really dislike that git branches are only tags on the heads and completely ephemeral. It favours creating a single clean history instead of preserving what actually happened.

Inkscape and LaTeX are what I used throughout my undergrad for all documents. The quality always impresses people.

How does it compare to LaTeX?

Actually a positive correlation has been found between the amount of roadway lighting and car accidents. More streetlights cause more crashes.

In an iPython terminal if I think of doing some, but I do want to implement something more formal soon.

Win10 for gaming and Manjaro for working.

I want to stop usibg Windows but I haven’t made the move yet. I probly will when Win10 gets EOL.

High resell value just means you can’t get cheap old products. I spent about 300$ on phones in the past decade. I buy used android for ~100$ and use them for 3-5 years. Never had any issue.

And then there f2py for calling Fortran code from Python!

Typing in LaTeX is way slower than writing by hand, especially equations. Charts and graphs are absolutely needed in many fields, and even though there are ways to produce them digitally, none are as fast and easy as taking notes by hand.

You could argue that teachers will just hand over PDF notes, but actually writing them yourself is a way better way to memorize them.

To this day, I always keep pads of graph paper on hand to jut to-do lists, solve equations or draw quick diagrams.