There’s a white color. You can tell they erased it from the legend

It was a poor reference to a quote from the TV show Community. The half Palestinian character Abed says that his father’s falafel restaurant had been struggling for a while because “9/11 was pretty much the 9/11 of the falafel business”

9/11 was the 9/11 of the Jenga business

That’s a good idea. I think in that situation the fancy stuff matters less than the magnification so the “cheaper” telescopes might make more sense. I’ll have to look into it!

I actually was using my 200-600 with a 1.4x teleconverter. For photos it was a little easier but particularly for video was harder. But honestly it’s all great. I don’t do crazy hikes with a lot of gear so I’m happy to lug my 200-600 around. And it usually gets me the shot or close to it. I’m not a professional so it’s not like anything depends on me getting the shot. It’s more about the journey anyway haha

Main thing is my a7iv no longer feels like it’s limiting me like my d3300 did and more often than not, it is my own limitations

I started with a used Nikon d3300 a while ago, and then upgraded to an a7iv when it came out. I was mostly starting to feel the limitations of low light performance and slow autofocus on the d3300. For me the a7iv seemed like the right choice at the time, and I’ve been very happy with it. But I think if I were making the same decision now, I might choose the a6700. It’s smaller, similar specs, cheaper, and most importantly for me, the apsc crop would be better for wildlife as it gives better reach. I recently went to Yellowstone and the number of times cool stuff was happening just a little too far away was a bit frustrating. If I had something like an a7riv or a7rv, it wouldn’t be a problem because of how high resolution they are. But those cameras cost a ton more. But I’m still very happy with my a7iv and will not be changing cameras any time soon.

I would say that unless you have a lot of nice glass for the d3200 already, don’t worry about switching to Sony. I think it really is the best brand for hobbyists because of how much affordable and excellent 3rd party glass is available for the system in both full frame and aspc. Just cannot be matched with any other system. Also, if you do want the crazy fancy stuff, the Sony G and GM lenses are some of the best in the game, and definitely have the most variety of lenses.

I would avoid m43. A lot of the newer cameras aren’t particularly light or small. I think the Sony apsc cameras are often more compact and more affordable.

Which coaster is that? It looks terrifying!

It counts as another reference for whatever you’re writing at the moment

Hasn’t this always been a possibility? People could always record their screen or take screenshots during meetings or whatever

Glad I could help! The zoom ring really is perfect. It’s so easy to go through the whole range from 200-600. This makes it much more comfortable to hand hold since you never actually have to take your left hand off of it.

And yeah, you’re never gonna regret a photo that looks too good haha! As for wraps, I really like the alphagvrd vinyl wraps. They even have a Lego one that the kids might get a kick out of!

I take it on walks for wildlife and usually hand hold there. If your subject isn’t very far and tiny, you can hand hold relatively comfortably. I did get a small rig baseplate to make my a7iv’s grip tall enough so my pinky fits comfortably. I’m 5’11" and kind of chunky, but if you’re a lot smaller the lens may not be as easy to hand hold. In that case even a monopole is enough to make it easier to use the lens, I think. I used to feel shy about carrying my big lens around, but once I got over that, I realized I should use the best thing I’ve got to take photos I enjoy taking. I just got back from a Yellowstone trip where every dude over 55 years old made some comment like “now that’s a camera/lens” when they saw me, but I just laughed and carried on. I wouldn’t be too worried about how you look. Just carry on with the things you enjoy, and get those overly profession photos of your kids’ sports.

I was only slightly kidding about that sigma haha. I have the Sony 200-600 and it is a great lens. Not one you’d regret, though it is bulky and attention grabbing, so maybe not exactly what you’re looking for either. There is also the sigma 500mm prime for e mount which is pretty small and light.

Sigma 60-600. The one lens to rule them all.

Maybe the problem is a lot of their marketing relies on the dominance of their search engine (ie sponsored search results, and ads based on user searches, as well as tracking user web usage via their search click throughs and other cookies). If open ai’s products become the go to for questions and basic searches, they will eventually be able to use that dominance to include marketing results in their answers. I think this threat is why they want to try to compete with them to be able to offer an alternative. Because it doesn’t actually have to be better than chat gpt. It just has to be similar enough for people to continue using Google rather than change their habits to use chatgpt, or Microsoft’s implementations of it. Especially with windows 11 where copilot (basically Microsoft rebrand of chatgpt) is built in and you can use it from the task bar. That ease of use may steadily decrease people’s reliance on Google search, which will eventually hurt their ability to sell targeted ads.

GPT is just trying to get a good tip.

Never too old to learn. I think Python is a great beginner language. It has fairly broad applications, and easy to set up an environment (don’t have to download/install a thousand things, you just install python and can run the text files in terminal). I also learned by doing starting in late middle school/early high school. I always found YouTube videos to be the most engaging way to get started. I used to like thenewboston. Once I had a handle on the basic programming language, I would do easy programming challenges where you have to solve some sort of basic problem. The challenges helped me learn basics like taking in input, changing the input based on the various rules and conditions of the challenges, then outputting the proper results formatted in the right way. Also helped me to think about algorithms, etc. After that, I started learning programming through a textbook. This was helpful for understanding some of the more technical aspects, basics of memory management, what different variable types are really for, OOP, abstraction, algorithms etc. I found that leaving these advanced topics till after I had a working understanding of the programming language helped understand the concepts better, and helped me understand why it’s important to learn the concepts in the first place. I was using Java for learning most of this, which might also be a good place to start for you, but I feel like python has simpler syntax to start with. In the end once you learn one language, I recommend learning more and not being stuck to any particular language. Every language has it’s own strengths and weaknesses, and understanding the commonalities and differences will only make you better in the long run.

Edit - now I use Go, python, JavaScript, R, Java, Julia, rust based on what I’m actually doing. It’s fairly easy to switch languages once you get used to basic syntax.

I have a question about rigid curriculums. This is mostly for high school. Many of my teachers had curriculums and syllabi that they had been using for years and kept them basically the same, and then there were the AP classes where the curriculum was determined by the AP exam. I felt that I learned really well in AP classes and we would get through much more advanced material in the AP classes than in others. And I also felt that the teachers who had developed somewhat fixed curriculums from experience taught much more efficiently than those who hadn’t. It never felt like the teachers were changing their curriculum for each class whether it was an AP class or not because most had their curriculums kind of figured out over the course of teaching for many years. And most of the teachers I had in high school were excellent. So my question is, why is it believed that rigid curriculums don’t work? Because in my schooling experience, whether the rigid curriculum was developed by the individual teacher or by an external organization (like AP), the class seemed to benefit from having fixed goals for the year.

I might’ve missed the bee if it wasn’t for the title haha. Nice shot

During my graduate research, our lab space was next to the cell modeling department and I would catch a talk here or there. Always found it a super interesting approach because it really tries to make sense of what we’ve learned from traditional biology and generates really nice hypotheses/theories for testing out in biological models. I also love how you can apply so much abstract mathematics to biological systems for biologically meaningful findings. Most of these types of cell modeling papers go above my head, but I still really appreciate them from outside.

Cool! I used to work on molecular dynamics of viral proteins through computational simulations in undergrad, but had never heard it be called theoretical biology before haha.