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obialik.bsky.social
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
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · Jun 19
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.
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 8h
I know it's a way to save money on animation, but transformation sequences are still awesome.
a cartoon of a girl holding a sword with a netflix logo in the background
Alt: A girl holding a sword; the residual awesomeness is indescribable.
media.tenor.com
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 19h
Hoping to catch you by at least to say Hi sometimes tomorrow.
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 20h
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
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 21h
This is why we shouldn't go about not wearing our hammers.
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 21h
It was in the alt text — Mary Lyn Ray's When You Find the Right Rock (a translated version, naturally).
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 22h
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
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 22h
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?
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 23h
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
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 1d
Spore planet with rapid cycles?
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 1d
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.
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 1d
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
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 1d
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)
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 1d
You are absolutely correct!
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 1d
On some level, it is better and worse than the ubiquitous Professor some students use to be on the safe side.
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 1d
Content of this panel aside, that's an oversized anthropomorphic old concept of what we thought a conodont looks like that Johnny Storm is hugging there, right?
Page from Fantastic Four (2022-) #25, art by Caros Gómez
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 1d
Given how wanky the orbits can get, it's sort of carte blanche for an author to come up with whatever crazy calendar they feel like. Four transitions, two summers, and a long winter? Sure, why not?
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 1d
If the body is small enough, you can probably get this sort of shifting eccentric orbits of a satellite between a planet and a large enough moon.
obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 2d
Not exactly #SciFiScience, but definitely a cool #worldbuilding concept: Imagine a binary star system, with the stars a bit far apart, and planets switching over between the stars over time. 🧪

Link: academic.oup.com/mnras/articl...
Curves of zero velocity in the dimensionless synodic frame of a circular binary system. In this frame the stars (red and blue dots) are fixed in space. The grey regions show inaccessible regions for test particles with the labelled value of the Jacobian integral. The continuous lines show example orbits at these energies, each originating in the space around the more massive star. At even lower values of the Jacobian constant, the forbidden regions contract around the L4 and L5 Lagrange points before vanishing.
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 2d
Honestly, one of the worse things about #writing books is just how long and lonely the turnaround is. Writing takes forever, editing, even longer, and pitching it... you don't want to know.
All the while - you have nothing to show, it's just you, the text, and maybe a few confidants.
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 2d
That said, echinoderms don't like salinity changes, at least at the species level. If you suddenly change salinity, they go away, like if you discharge undiluted brine from a desalination plant right on top of them. 🌊

Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Echinoderms as indicators of brine discharge impacts
Echinoderms are osmoconformer organisms and are expected to be very sensitive to brine discharges. The objective of this study is to examine the use o…
www.sciencedirect.com
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 2d
One of the wrong things I was taught as a student was that because echinoderms are osmoconformer organisms, they are only present under normal marine salinity. But, in reality, we knew of sainity-tolerant species even before I was born. 🧪⚒️

Link: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...
Astropecten polyacanthus from Koh Phangan, Thailand. A species the paper reports hangs out at salinity almost twice that of seawater.
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 2d
Looks like I'll only make it to ICON (אייקון) on Wednesday. If you want to grab me there - DM or text me.
At this day and age, counting on spontaneity is a losing bet (and still, somehow, my main plan for meeting people between events).
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 2d
The Seleucids would like to have a word.
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 2d
But you'd think the greekest bear would be Ursus arctos syriacus. Ursus arctos arctos is at best Greek Orthodox.
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obialik.bsky.social
Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 2d
Right, I was thinking about the Brown Bear (Ursus arctos), not the Eurasian Brown Bear (Ursus arctos arctos), which is apparently a distinct subspecies.
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