Slides from my talk last night to the Field #Naturalists Association of #Canberra:

"Lessons from #Malaise trapping in Aranda"

https://codeberg.org/dhobern/presentation/src/branch/main/Lessons_from_Malaise_trapping_in_Aranda.pdf

As with most of my talks, there are few notes, but the gallery of amazing #insects may mean something to some of you.

#entomology #taxonomy #DNAbarcoding #biodiversity #OnceAndFutureKing #Hymenoptera #Lepidoptera #Strepsiptera #Hemiptera #Collembola #Araneae #wasps #moths #springtails #spiders

presentation/Lessons_from_Malaise_trapping_in_Aranda.pdf at main

presentation - Presentation - ridiculously minimal presentation tool

Codeberg.org
#Malaise La Chambre des représentants s'apprête à voter jeudi sur une résolution relative aux pouvoirs de guerre qui obligerait Donald Trump à obtenir l'autorisation du Congrès avant de poursuivre la guerre contre l'Iran [EN] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2026/mar/05/donald-trump-war-powers-latest-news-updates?page=with%3Ablock-69a95ce38f08b6123206a399#block-69a95ce38f08b6123206a399
House to vote on limiting Trump’s powers in Iran war after Senate measure fails – US politics live

House decision is expected to be tight after war powers resolution in the Senate fell apart along party lines

the Guardian
Je peux juste imaginer le prochain party de Noël...
"Hey Martin, je t'ai vu aller aux toilettes,va pas licher toutes les bottes dans le bain là!"
#faitdivers #malaise

As I mentioned the other day, I really wanted an ultra-simple way to declare the contents of a slideshow presentation without getting sucked deep into Node.js hell.

So, I now have a #Python / #YAML / #markdown / #bash / #ImageMagick tool that does what I need and pretty much nothing more.

The code is in a @Codeberg repository: https://codeberg.org/dhobern/presentation

The YAML definition for my upcoming presentation is here: https://codeberg.org/dhobern/presentation/src/branch/main/slides.yaml

And here is the PDF generated from the YAML: https://codeberg.org/dhobern/presentation/src/branch/main/Lessons_from_Malaise_trapping_in_Aranda.pdf

#entomology #Malaise #Canberra #Australia

https://scicomm.xyz/@dhobern/116074958194821959

Americans in their 40s and 50s are more depressed and forgetful, and weaker, than those of previous generations, and most of their peers in Europe. Education is no longer protective. Stress and financial insecurity are thought to be responsible.

Summary: https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/midlife-crisis-hits-harder/

Original paper (not open access): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09637214251410195

#Science #Psychology #Malaise #Insecurity #Depression

Midlife Crisis Hits Harder Now in the U.S. That's a Problem Other Rich Countries Don't Seem to Have

Gen X is physically weaker and more depressed than Boomers were at the same age.

ZME Science

Why is #JavaScript so popular? I hate everything about it.

I'm speaking at the #Canberra Field #Naturalists meeting at #ANU next month on #Malaise trapping and the #insects and other #invertebrates that surround us without our noticing them.

I expect most of my slides to be arrays of four or six #microscope images with a header (probably a family name in most cases) and captions for each image.

I don't want to lay out all these images in #LibreOffice (or any similar presentation tool) because I'm a perfectionist and getting it all tidy will take forever.

So, I decided to try out #Slidev, #Marp and other #Markdown-based presentation tools. The Markdown part is very appealing, but they all lean hard into JavaScript. That would be fine so long as I don't have to think about that side of things.

Slidev's AppleBasic theme seemed to be the best starting point, so I started hacking it to add som extra gridded image views. Plain image grids were not too challenging, but I really want captions for each image, so I started trying to understand how the templates use the forest of underlying JS libraries and CSS artefacts to produce the displayed slides.

Frankly, the whole thing is so opaque and would take me much longer to understand than preparing multiple presentations by hand would.

Then I realised I can use #montage on the command line to produce the kind of layouts I want, and I can script #exiftool to extract and prepare the captions which will save time.

So, my new plan is to write a #Python script that processes a #YAML file listing all the slides, titles and image paths. It can generate PNG images that are close to the target 1920*1080 size (give or take a little). I'll then use LibreOffice for a couple of more text-oriented or irregular slides, export those and combine all the images into a PDF.

I'm sure this will be way faster than battling Node.js. Not sure why I felt I had to write it up.

https://fieldnatsact.com/

Field Naturalists Association of Canberra

Le Français Tom Félix, acquitté en Malaisie après avoir risqué la peine de mort, a atterri à Roissy

Après plus de neuf cents jours derrière les barreaux, le trentenaire a décollé de Kuala Lumpur mercredi. Il avait été acquitté par un tribunal, mardi, des accusations de détention et de trafic de stupéfiants.

Le Monde
Plus ils utilisent ChatGPT, plus un malaise psychologique apparaît

Des chercheurs du MIT et d’OpenAI ont étudié les rapports entre ChatGPT et les utilisateurs. Certains, qui font appel au chatbot au quotidien de manière intensive, présentent des signes d’addiction.

Futura