Hello! My name is Nate. I'm a physics PhD student at Northeastern University studying, roughly, ribosome folding via computational methods. I'm mostly here to enjoy others' posts (hello, Leafs/ hockey twitter) but I sometimes write silly tweets, and rarely, thoughtful threads.

Some views from two of last night's substorms in Boston + Cambridge MA! Both were brighter than I saw in May! I was looking for a dark place, glanced at the sky in a bright parking lot, and said "what the F***!" Then I texted many many people :) #SpaceWeather @TamithaSkov

If you start with the identity and play around with it by adding an off-diagonal element (rotation) or minus signs on the diagonal (reflections), and multiply vectors and draw the start vs end vectors, you'll figure out pretty much everything on that list. No memorization needed

I think of diag matrices as rectangular prisms (in some number/ dims) Set a diag entry to 0 means squish one dim down to 0. When you "place a vector inside" that prism, you lose all info on its length in the squished direction. There's no way to recover it. There's no inverse

If you instead set an entry to 2, you're changing the size of your "ruler" along that direction: 2 0 (1) = (2) 0 1 (1) = (1) What was 1 unit long in the "identity matrix space" (before the matrix multiplication) is now 2 units long.

Linalg is my fave part of math; the class was my least fave b/c it gave me this list & never said WHY I_2x2 is a Cartesian plane. Set an entry to 0, project out that dimension: 1 0 (1) = (1) 0 0 (1) (0) You can't recover the 1, so the matrix has no inverse

You only ever hear about short kings cuz we stick around longer. Harder to topple.

Do meteorologists also make small talk about the weather, or do they just come out and say what they really think of you

guy who pronounces "pirates" like "pilates"

Every time a company puts me on a mailing list I didn't ask to be on, they should have to pay me $1,000 for damages

If it looks like a tree and it barks like a tree, it's a tree

My mom assigned me to make the peppermint bark this year, knowing I'd modified her recipe but not knowing how much. She just walked into the kitchen: Mom, seeing the ginger out: what're you doing here?! Anything scary? Me, trying not to draw attention to the ghost pepper: no :)

I'm infodumping? No, I just aliased my `--verbose` flag on startup

pronouncing "chocolates" like "pilates"

Computationally shake biomolecules

Instagram lets you hide like counts, when will ORCiD let you hide publication counts?

As a computational physicist attending the @ProteinSociety's annual symposium for the first time, here is my primary takeaway so far: Holy moly. There are SO many proteins

It's a common misconception that scientists are shy and can always be found hanging out along the walls. For instance, at scientific conferences, wall space is too limited for that, and most scientists are forced to the room's interior via spatial constraints alone

Guy who puts his GitHub on his Hinge profile

Right of way: - the less mobile or smaller gets priority: mobility aided person > walker > runner > biker > car > truck - everyone else gets priority if I'm doing something I'm not supposed to: biking on sidewalk, biking wrong way on one-way street, etc

"Tomorrow is another day." The small problems can be wiped away completely with a night's sleep, especially a full one. And we get a mental reset on how we want to approach some of the bigger stuff