Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️
@obialik.bsky.social
5K followers 160 following 4.5K posts
Sediment, climate change, and impostor syndrome | Science and SFF for the win | Writing for a living and fun | Opinions are my own (or the characters' in my head). Academic stuff: https://obialik.weebly.com Non-academic writing: https://ombialik.weebly.com
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obialik.bsky.social
BECAUSE MY MOM SAID SO

Meet Ismat and follow them as they try to navigate their identity, workplace romance, their mom, and somehow also thwart a conservative conspiracy.

itch.io: obialik.itch.io/because-my-m...
Amazon: www.amazon.com/dp/B0DSG7WBLY
B2R: books2read.com/u/31oj9W

🌈📚🪐 | 📚💙 | 🌈🚀💫
Ad for the book BECAUSE MY MOM SAID SO, featuring the book cover (by the amazing Carla Negrini https://www.carlanegrini.com/) with some important bits of information on the book like: LBGTQ+ cast, Spy thriller, Nothing goes according to plan, Figuring out romance and Stopping a conservative coup.
obialik.bsky.social
Words written the other day: 1106.
Words erased today: 1027.

This is how initial draft writing refuses to end.

#WritingCommunity
obialik.bsky.social
If it's really something that hurts you, look locally at your municipality and see if you can promote advocacy. You'd be surprise how many ordinance comes from someone who just keeps showing up to town hall meetings and brings up the same topic over and over.
obialik.bsky.social
As someone who actually got safety training on working in high-noise environment, I can tell you that there are heavy-duty headphones that do lower noise by a lot - but they are really expensive.
obialik.bsky.social
When we get legislation to recognise noise as a pollutant, regulate and enforce its reduction.
obialik.bsky.social
The construction site next door is jackhammering all morning (to remove a slab of concrete they put in 🙉), and I'm finding myself reading up on the health effects of environmental noise. Continues noise exposure really messes up the human brain and body. 🧪

Link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Noise from different sources was previously shown to likely affect different organ systems and promote a wide variety of diseases. Detrimental effects of noise can also play a prominent role in onset and progression of many aspects of mental health, like anxiety and depression.
obialik.bsky.social
A great way to flare my imposter syndrome is complimenting me about something I actually suck at.
obialik.bsky.social
A paper got to my table today under my hat as an editor. It's the first one I got where I strongly suspect GenAI was used (use or wrong terms, overenthusiasm not appropriate for the type of text, oversimplifications, etc.)

Expected it would come; now to take action.

#AcademicSky #AcWri
obialik.bsky.social
Heat and radiation are likely the rate-limiting factors, although that isn't really discussed too much. It's an interesting first experiment at these high CO2 levels. I would like to see more of it, preferably with basle gymnosperms.
obialik.bsky.social
Getting to >1000 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere is something we hope we never get to. But in the geological past, those levels were reached... so... what does that do to trees?
They take more carbon, release less water, but grow at about the same rate. 🧪

Link: bg.copernicus.org/articles/22/...
Net assimilation is mildly changed at 1600 ppm CO2 and increases at 6000 ppm, driving a major increase in water-use efficiency. Bar heights are means of 10 guava saplings subjected to different CO2 concentrations. Error bars represent standard errors. P values are from paired t tests, and * and ** indicate differences among CO2 levels at 0.01 and 0.001 significance levels. (a) Net assimilation was calculated from chamber CO2 dynamics. (b) Water-use efficiency was calculated as net assimilation divided by transpiration.
obialik.bsky.social
I totally missed you, and I won't be there tomorrow. Have fun and survive the experience; this country definitely takes a toll just being around sometimes.
obialik.bsky.social
Completely with you there... with a caveat. As a regular thing, transformers should definitely not have transformation sequences. But, once in a while, first use of a powerup or combination or something, when it's special and earned, it's awesome.
obialik.bsky.social
Hoping to catch you by at least to say Hi sometimes tomorrow.
obialik.bsky.social
It takes a few months to collect/generate the data (give or take), a few more months to figure out what it all means, part of that overlaps with months of writing, then editing, then submission, some months for review... Take a deep breath, publication takes a while.

#AcademicSky
obialik.bsky.social
This is why we shouldn't go about not wearing our hammers.
obialik.bsky.social
It was in the alt text — Mary Lyn Ray's When You Find the Right Rock (a translated version, naturally).
obialik.bsky.social
People around me definitely know what sort of books get me in order to get a smile out of me.
(Although this one's going straight to the office, I need to remind people there I'm actually [not that secretly] a geologist)

💙📚 | ⚒️
Cover of the Hebrew translation of Mary Lyn Ray's When You Find the Right Rock
obialik.bsky.social
Deliberate ignorance is not just a slogan people toss around; it's a studied psychological phenomenon. In this study, people were asked whether they would like to receive information on who would benefit from a sacrifice; some preferred not to know. 🧪

Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
The trolley problem presents a dilemma: is it preferable to pull the lever to divert the runaway trolley onto the side track with just one person?
obialik.bsky.social
In the cases reported, this POC accumulation is in shallow subsurface waters (~200m), not intermediate water, so it can easily flux back to the atmosphere in winter and decrease the next sink.
obialik.bsky.social
Warm oceans are oceans that remove less carbon from the atmosphere. During marine heatwaves, more organic material might be produced, but it doesn't get to the seafloor; it sort of gets stuck in the water, and all that carbon gets respired. 🧪🌊

Link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
a Map of the Northeastern subarctic Pacific (NESAP) showing BGC-Argo float trajectories (colored dots; float IDs in legend), approximate float positions during the marine heatwave (MHW) peaks in 2015 and 2019 (black dots), and Line P stations sampled for pigments and genetics (magenta triangles, stations P20-P26). b, c Mean monthly chlorophyll-a to carbon ratio (Chl:C, dimensionless) integrated over 0-100 m. d, e Mean monthly particulate organic carbon (POC, mg m-2) for 0-100 m. f, g Mean monthly POC (mg m-2) for 100-300 m (upper mesopelagic). In each panel, lines are colored by year (see panel legends); MHW years (2014, 2015, 2019, 2020) are red. “Small particles” denotes the bbp-derived fraction <100 µm.
obialik.bsky.social
I do enjoy living in a country that has the holidays I grew up with as off days.
But it does happen to put on a 1π phase offset relative to most of my professional network and the people I work with... well... this is how one becomes one of those people who don't respond to emails.
obialik.bsky.social
I really wish we had a gender nutral non-relation informing commonly used salutations for situations such as this, other than using rank or title.
(and I stumble through three languages, and neither of them has that)