Bored of normal Jenga? Try Cursed Jenga!

Sitting (and also presenting) at a math bio thingy today. Humourous Zoom captions transcription: "agent-based model" -> "Asian-based model" 😂

Just heard an interesting story from mum: When I was entering a Catholic primary school, the principal didn't want to admit me (because of my hearing loss) and another kid with non-verbal autism that I apparently got really well along with. Understandable stigma back then. 1/2

Something nice lately: Top posts of /r/bald have been drifting across my main Reddit feed and there's something nice about seeing men taking the plunge and looking much more presentable and younger after they shave their head (though some could've kept their beards as well!)

Watched "The Whale" (Brendan Fraser's comeback movie). The acting's really good (esp. Sadie Sink as the daughter), the intertwined story was really good. But it's missing the cherry on top, I think I'd have expected a more squalid environment, esp. with the broken side table 🤔

UniMelb is hiring for a new Senior Advisor for LGBTIQA+ Inclusion.  This is a key high-level role within the D&I team in Chancellory, with a lot of responsibility and ability to actually influence and drive the university's actions in this space.

My brain keeps on thinking about bits and jokes and puns to slip into my (academic) talks and I'm worried it's starting to get a bit out of control now 😬 I swear I'm not intentionally trying to be contrarian 😅

Strategy "Don't go home until I've conquered this stupid mental hump that my brain is having trouble getting over, so that I could make headway on important work" was successful. But at what cost...🥲

I realise I'm only putting to words now what other academics probably already know: I'm so frustrated at how hard it is to find people working on certain niche topics. Can't tell if I'm looking in the wrong places or some people are just busy enough in their own bubbles.

Someone please tell me why ALL the opportunities are rolling in now when I'm like super busy and starting to feel the end-of-year burnout creeping in 😭 "When it rain, it pours" ringing true here, grrrr.

This was a good read. It's making me think about how to target other demographics (e.g. people with disabilities, in my case) for similar interventions.

How can we flip the decline in girls and gender-diverse students doing mathematics at higher levels? Zsuzsanna Dancso explains how her program of mentorship and encouragement piloted at @sydney.edu.au increased enrolments from 22% to 30%📈 🧮 More here: doi.org/10.64628/AA.... #MathSky doi.

I understand why my work laptop has a program on it that forces me to take a break from it but there are moments where I do take a break but my brain has forgotten what I was doing so now it takes longer to resume the task arrrrrrrrrrrrgh /flails

It took me like two weeks from the start of seemingly random angry feelings I'd been having to finally having a breakthrough on realising where it was coming from. It was about 3-4 levels deep inside my psyche, ugh. Taking tips on making emotional work easier.

I'm wondering how this would ideally work. Digital signatures generated on one machine can be spoofed/generated-to-fit (eventually). If I wanted it to be more rock solid I can only imagine some cryptographic protocol requiring at least the receiving party to have their own private/public keys.

Image screening is going to fail. We need audit trails for data provenance.

Was looking for various theses to figure out the overall structure for mine. Randomly stumbled across a mathematical biology PhD thesis of someone who'd done 5 papers. Took me a while to recalibrate myself and acknowledge I probably won't be /that/ productive for my PhD 😅

I think it’s something he and Mamdani have in common — they believe hard that leadership requires love for, joy in, and appreciation of the world as it is, because if you hate that for which you are responsible, you cannot see its future and hope to make it better. You will only destroy it.

As twitchy as I am about AI implementation in "everything" I can definitely get along with this thinking given that Firefox is open-source.

idk why I'm lining up this obviously-going-to-be-a-tearjerker-of-a-movie to watch tonight: "Big World" (2014), Chinese movie about a man with cerebral palsy. If I don't post further tonight I'll probably be curled up in bed in emotional pain 🙃 www.imdb.com/title/t...

Looking forward to next week as we kickstart the Biometrics conference! We’ve also got an explicit printout of the Pac-Man rule to make it a welcome and inclusive event 🤗 #BIBC2025

Some additional info on this for Australians: there's a National Building Code 2022 (yikes, so late?!) that dictates a standard, but in general if you can host conferences in newer buildings the more likely they'll have more accessibility considerations.

This morning I was helping a (neurodivergent) friend calm down from someone else spreading lies about him. This afternoon my (also neurodivergent) housemate is doing his 6 month PhD confirmation talk, but I also know he's quietly freaking out about other things. Hmm. 😵‍💫

Yesterday I learnt that mathematical (computational?) neuroscience builds off non-linear dynamical systems via this Reddit thread (which as of writing has two resource/expert recommendations), fascinating! www.reddit.com/r/mat...

So if you don't know me, I'm hard-of-hearing and can only hear out of my left ear with a hearing aid, and for academic talks I use Google's Live Transcribe on my phone. How does this impact where I choose to sit for academic talks? Here's a blog post! matthras.com/2025/11...

If anyone can provide insight on how diVine can ban/prevent AI-generated videos on a technical/code/metadata level I'd love to know because I don't know enough on that front. Any solution I can think of is easily circumvented/bypassed.

This week's moment that made me feel old: Watching "Man vs. Bee" and realising there're kids today who haven't seen the original Mr. Bean nor the Mr. Bean movies. I do wonder if I'd enjoy it more if I didn't recognise all the recycled bits 🤔

I'm noticing that discussions at a high/policy/leadership level using generalised terms run into disagreements purely because different people work off different assumptions underlying said generalised terms and it's really annoying me 💢 1/2

UK Maths students - interested in doing a cross-disciplinary PhD in biofilms and doing part of your studies in Australia? This could be your chance! ima.org.uk/27939/compet...

First time coming into work and seeing two fire engines right outside my building 😳. Thankfully the building affected was the one on the opposite side of the walk way 😅 That'll be one heck of a hump day for the week!

I'm really appreciating that I'm learning data cleaning + stats + machine learning stuff through my PhD by analysing clinical data but it's also really affirming my "I really couldn't be a generic data scientist unless the data is relevant to something I care about" 😅

Interesting paper: Researchers wondered if it's possible to predict "Eureka!" moments based on observable behaviour (on a blackboard), so they recorded mathematicians working on Putnam problems. tl;dr: Definitely some hints! www.pnas.org/doi/10....

I'd appreciate help circulating this survey, part of our overall work on neurodivergence. This one is on behalf of the graduate deans, to develop better supervision guidelines. You can help by boosting and circulating the link in your various networks 🙏 redcap.unisq.edu.au/surveys/?s=D...

Today I fell down the rabbit hole of data imputation and got annoyed at "just wanting to replace missing values but the guides/tutorials seem to be doing a whole lot more that I probably should care about but don't" grrrrrr. Definitely a me problem, I imagine!

Feeling really grateful to know people that I can talk to about ill-defined oddly specific hangups and my niche areas and they so willingly engage with the topic. Life really has gotten better since I started this PhD, the amount of life stuff I'm figuring out has really expanded. 😊

Well reading this and the replies made my brain perk up this morning. Fascinating! 😁

Today I drove to work because I wanted to drop by an electronics store a suburb away to grab a couple of things. Then I walked home because I wanted to do a bit of shopping on the way back. /facepalm Thankfully it's only a 10 minute walk.

I'm enjoying the biostats stuff but I'm so annoyed at how my brain goes blank in terms of figuring out what's useful for my biology supervisors. I don't know /how/ to think about what's useful for them, how they interpret charts/graphs, and I feel so stuuuuuuupid about it /flails

Mathematicians' discussion at the communal lunch table today started with baseball then drifted onto bowling and it turns out we were all wondering at some point how the scoring system worked and how we were trying to optimize our bowling technique 😂

Third bread loaf in a row.

I'm trying to understand how the generalised linear model lends itself to ANOVA (and t-tests by extension) and I'm running up against the same frustration: majority of explanations on the internet are terrible, arrrrrrrrrgh. But I did find one good one!

once again seeking others' opinions to guide my life choices: of those who dropped out of a PhD or converted to Masters, did anyone subsequently complete a PhD with a different topic and supervisors? thoughts for or against this path?

Landlady is babysitting a friend's two dogs for the week and after interacting with them last night it's like "Shit I really need to get a pet if I ever end up living alone again." The uptick in happiness cannot be underrated.

My brain is having the weirdest twitches to having to use a university-supplied template for this upcoming presentation. It's like "RAAARGH. MUST NOT CONFORM. WILL NOT CONFORM. NEED BIGGER CANVAS FOR EXPRESSIVITY." /flails

Was doing up stuff in (the now free!) Affinity for a friend, forgot to save to a separate working file, figured out how to sketch out a gearwheel vector, but something went weird with the color picker so I had to force-close and lost all of my effort 😢😭 It's VERY good, though!

Giving talks at conferences is basically the adult version of Show & Tell /facepalm

I'm now at a point where I have enough multiple things going on for my PhD and it only just occurred to me last week (this is already after a year into my PhD) to have a separate to-do list file in Obsidian for each project. Dismayed it didn't occur to me earlier /facepalm

Post-conference exhaustion is finally setting in 🫠 Will be interesting to take note of how many days it takes me to recover fully. Last conference was a week long, I was 80% back to normal after a week, two weeks before back to full form. Expecting similar ratios.

This is a real sign from a real deli near the Wesleyan math department, and they put it up because the mathematicians were too engrossed in their mathematics discussions to efficiently order sandwiches. www.cbc.ca/radio/asitha...

Man. Giving a conference talk reminds me of the general frustration of trying to communicate complex multilayered concepts through a one-dimensional medium (i.e. one's mouth; speech). Wish I could just set up a virtual world and allow people to explore. 🙄