Anton Savchenko
@notgaudi.bsky.social
230 followers 350 following 39 posts
fungal taxonomist • PhD • Ukrainian expat • melancholic for all the good reasons • he/him
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Keep up the good work!) BTW, I vaguely remember rumors about an ECHO movie - do you know anything new about that?
not a matchbox, but well worthy
old cigar box reused for specimen storage
One day your efforts will lift ECHO from the undeserved "mostly positive" zone.)
RGB values were then automatically translated into color names, which fell rather nicely into color categories assigned subjectively by eye.
Unsurprisingly, most of the failed extracts were dark-colored (and also old!), though ~half of dark extracts performed just fine in PCR and sequencing.
Table comparing subjectively assigned colors to automatically generated, per DNA extract.
Machine vision for poor people, or yet another way to misuse Quantum GIS! I wanted to know if color of DNA extract correlates with sequencing success, and to get the colors I imported a photo of extracts into QGIS as if it was a map, placed sample points, and measured their underlying RGB values.
Screenshot of QGIS program with a photo of PCR plate from underneath
It often works well for non-fiction academic writing, though not sure if anyone writes entire fiction books in it. Anyway, good luck.)
Looks like @obsidian.md can work for you. Desktop and mobile versions are free, and for small subscription you can sync them (or just use cloud of your choice). No fancy text formatting, but overall their text editor is sweet.
ohh no, Ustilaginomycotina is missing, Pucciniomycotina is a single tip, don't show it to mycologists, much drama ensured.)
hah, someone decided to monetize BLAST. Will be funny if it is just MMSeqs in a trenchcoat.
Reposted by Anton Savchenko
There is no "science-wide replication crisis" because every word in that phrase carries unfounded assumptions. 🧵

1. There is no evidence that progress has generally stalled in the sciences. Also, no one has actually tried to estimate replicability across fields.
Yes, all versions are downloadable unite.ut.ee/repository.php
And also PlutoF (UNITE's management side) has API, it may be more convenient for data retrieval plutof.docs.apiary.io#reference
PlutoF API · Apiary
A place where APIs are kept.
plutof.docs.apiary.io
Would be interesting to see the same for UNITE's SHs ;)
Reposted by Anton Savchenko
the beauty of humans is that even if we explicitly attempt to copy something, the noise of our lives and our brains seeps into the work. you still end up with a New messy synthesis of things

AI doesn't live a life, it may have system noise, but it doesn't have a story to tell; because its software
Reposted by Anton Savchenko
A press release is out about the Biodiversity Heritage Library. From 1 January 2026 the Smithsonian will no longer host the administrative functions of BHL. BHL is looking for a new home. For further information see blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2025/04/new-...
#ILoveBHL #BiodiversityHeritageLibrary
A New Future for the Biodiversity Heritage Library
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. A global consortium of over 660 contributors, BHL has made more …
blog.biodiversitylibrary.org
metsamaja on liminaalnemaja
One day APIs will get as fine grained as flour, but not today.)

Do you queue also remotely? Some kind of Google/Amazon cloud?
Haha, why it's always like this - any serious work requires downloading the entire resource
Sampling was... not boring: most of the material is corticioids (sometimes as thin as <100um) the most difficult fungi to sample imo.
Mycologist: I know a lovely place!

Lovely place in question:
Corridor in herbarium, ending in pitch-black darkness
The library is on site and very rich, with titles dating back to Linnaeus
Library of herbarium Field notebooks Library of herbarium Library of herbarium
One of a few places with a dedicated collection of spore prints (hundreds if not thousands of them!).
fungal spore print on black paper collection of spore prints in a box
Spent the last 2 weeks sampling dozens of type specimens in a well maintained, almost fully digitized, and just lovely TAAM fungarium (Tartu).
Reposted by Anton Savchenko
Six years ago, we published a (thus far underappreciated) study where we showed how scientific communities may generate a literature populated by irreproducible results or may converge on many perfectly reproducible yet false findings *in the absence of QRPs*, challenging popular narratives.
Scientific discovery in a model-centric framework: Reproducibility, innovation, and epistemic diversity
Consistent confirmations obtained independently of each other lend credibility to a scientific result. We refer to results satisfying this consistency as reproducible and assume that reproducibility i...
journals.plos.org