Due to lockdown air pollution is at an all time low.
Although the news is good, low pollution can also have its downsides. I can imagine how this must be devastating for those who are studying atmospheric sciences because of how the sudden drop in pollution can cause huge problems in their computational models.

Just a few weeks ago, two postdoc researchers from the Ecological Department, Meterology and Atmospheric Sciences reached out to us at the computer science department. We helped them develop sophisticated models in Matlab and launched a weather baloon to capture data about the pollution levels. Assuming that these researchers knew what they were looking for, we helped them implement everything they needed but as it turns out, they were looking to triangulate the position of all the files we store in clouds.

That’s when I told them that they’re not physically stored in the cloud, but only virtually. This whole endeavor turned out to be a huge waste of time. I told my parents about this and my father got really furious and beat the everloving shit out of me with his bamboo cane for wasting precious years in college on a useless project, but that’s how research can be sometimes.

I guess everything has its ups and downs.