DecaturNature @DecaturNature@social.cleverlibre.org
Nature lover in Decatur, GA, USA. Interested in the sciences and science education. Science is a practical philosophy to be shared with all, not a commodity to be owned and sold.
Joined Aug 2018
Adult culture should be focused on adult topics -- these still leave plenty of room for escapism, whether they are 'academic' topics (e.g. science, technology, nature, adult literature, art, history) or craft activities. My impression is that this is the way in many countries, and used to be true in the USA #culture
I'm baffled by the bru-ha-ha over the Hogwarts Legacy boycott. It's not the superficial topics that everyone talks about that confuse me (bigotry, boycotts, etc), and it's not that I dislike the Harry Potter stories (I enjoyed them, though they are far from great literature or even exceptional kids lit) -- what I don't get is that adults think it's worthwhile to repeatedly revisit this fictional world and repeatedly shell out $$ for the privilege. I don't think I can take any of this seriously. The same goes for Star Wars, etc. So much of our 'culture wars' is focused on topics where, win or lose, the culture will remain degenerate. It's really idiotic.
#hogwarts #books #HarryPotter #culture
DecaturNature
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Amarillo’s plan for broadband in El Barrio could be a playbook for other Texas communities without internet
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/02/07/texas-broadband-access-amarillo/
DecaturNature
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I, a lowly adjunct, just publicly called out a tenured professor for using a student’s work (a tutorial she made) as the basis of a project in his class, without any mention of her.
So… I’m probably going to be looking for a new place to teach soon. If anyone needs an experienced teacher for a library school, hit me up 💜
DecaturNature
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Doubtless you've heard that "we all get the same 24 hours in the day." Of course it's not true: rich people and poor people experience very different demands on their time. The richer you are, the more your time is your own - not only are many systems arranged with your convenience in mind, but you also command the social power to do something about systems that abuse your time.
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DecaturNature
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Cyclists are portrayed in debates about bike lanes as younger, athletic people. Berkeley's Commission on Aging recommended against supporting the city's current bike lane project (#Hopkins), apparently thinking bike lanes were not for older people.
And yet, over the past eleven years, the median age of the six cyclists and pedestrians severely injured or killed on Hopkins is 69. Only one of those people was under 50. The oldest was 78.
The stereotypes are wrong.
DecaturNature
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A new real-world effectiveness study documents 85% reduction of deaths and 55% reduction of hospitalizations for Paxlovid, independent of vaccination status, age, variants https://thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(23)00011-7/fulltext…
@TheLancetInfDis
DecaturNature
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Do you use the Internet Archive in your research? Are you using our books to check citations? Doing large-scale data analysis using our web archives? We want to hear from you!
Please take a moment to tell us how you use our collections in your research: https://forms.gle/99C9YNuzdc7Jp6az7
DecaturNature
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Kudos to the New York Public Library (#NYPL) for mining this vein of gold beneath our feet.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzyde/librarians-are-finding-thousands-of-books-no-longer-protected-by-copyright-law
"NYPL has been reviewing the US #Copyright Office’s official…records for [books] whose copyrights haven’t been renewed…The books in question were published between 1923 & 1964, before changes to US copyright law removed the requirement for rights holders to renew their copyrights…Around 65 -75% of rights holders opted not to renew their copyrights."
DecaturNature
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Major development in Mastodon/fediverse ecosystem: Cloudflare is launching a project that will, if it works as promised, make it simple to launch Mastodon (and related) sites. Aimed at individuals and smaller communities. Hugely promising move. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/10/23593966/cloudflare-mastodon-server-wildebeest-instance-fediverse
(Note: I own a small number of shares in Cloudflare.)
DecaturNature
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Not a great sign of health when the obituaries start being rolled out… #twitter
DecaturNature
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It is amazing how much of a difference one day of rest can yield.
@gilad73 @greeen@sfba.social I think most conspiracy theories start with a grain of truth and mainstream prejudices/assumptions. Dismantling them -- or at least combating their propaganda -- is not as simple as saying "bah, what BS!". For instance, the idea that evil spirits are misleading people makes it very easy to believe in absurd conspiracy theories (since the evil spirits do all the hard work of coordinating everyone) -- yet this idea is pretty widespread, even among harmless people. Writing off the conspiracy theory as 'completely baseless' is pretty close to writing off humanity as 'hopelessly irrational and violent'.
@greeen@sfba.social Imagine this radicalization process: A future white Nationalist is a mainstream conservative. They are frustrated that Democrats sometimes win elections and people like him don't completely dominate politics. Anyone who disagrees with him about anything 'big' is obviously either stupid or evil. They notice that people of color make up a substantial chunk of the Democratic voters, so most people of color must be either evil or stupid. At this point, they can easily fall back on old ideas about 'happy slaves' (and political instability in various countries) and conclude that the Democratic coalition consists of a large mass of ignorant and easily manipulated colored people, and an elite group that does the manipulation.
@greeen@sfba.social They think that the "natural condition" of people of color is slavery.
DecaturNature
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The inside of a cello looks like a place where something whimsically unspeakable happened in a Guillermo del Toro movie
DecaturNature
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Ta-Nehisi Coates on the right-wing backlash to teaching Black history
@TechConnectify @vegetablegremlin A good 1/3 of that "60%" believes batshit crap also, it just is not the same shit as what the "40%" believes.
@brianpierce If 'prescription' means "directions", doctors are great. The problem comes from prescriptions as "a legally required document for accessing medicine." Most medicines should simply be over-the-counter. For the few that may see widespread abuse, regulations may be worthwhile -- but it should be a careful, narrowly defined set rather than the default condition for medicine.
DecaturNature
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People tell me they're afraid of AI and computers taking over the world but if it helps: I'm really not.
For the last few decades since Terminator came out, we've been hard at work building in a dead man's switch to every major system on Earth to prevent this from happening. I guarantee you that if computers try to take over the world, somewhere, within a month, a certificate for some critical dependency no one ever considered will expire and take all the machines out at once. We've done a few dozen trial runs of this to make sure the system works. 100% success rate so far.
Nature lover in Decatur, GA, USA. Interested in the sciences and science education. Science is a practical philosophy to be shared with all, not a commodity to be owned and sold.
Joined Aug 2018
