DecaturNature @DecaturNature@social.cleverlibre.org

#OnThisDay, 28 Nov 1967, PhD student Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovers the existence of pulsars.

Not included in the 1974 Nobel prize for the discovery, Bell received a £3m prize for her work in 2018. She's using it to set up a foundation to improve diversity in STEM.

#WomenInSTEM #Histodons #ScienceHistory

Spoke with an engineer over the holidays who maintained that Meta is blameless for abuses on their platform. He asked me, mockingly, "should they stop scaling just because they can't moderate everything?"

The answer is YES. Scale is not just a technical issue. If you cannot control your system, stop growing it.

(btw this is also a good example of how #UX comes from more than just the buttons on the screen)

#ProductManagement

In 1938, kindergarten teacher Helen Hulick wore slacks to court to testify as a witness in Los Angeles, CA. Judge Arthur Guerin was appalled & rescheduled the case, instructing her to “return in a dress.”

The next day, Hulick showed up in slacks again, declaring, “I will stand on my rights…I like slacks. They’re comfortable.”

She was sent to jail. https://web.archive.org/web/20210315143406/https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-15/from-the-archives-wear-slacks-to-court-and-go-to-jail

The Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Musuem in MA now has all the original manuscripts from the #Salem #witchcraft trials available in their #DigitalCollection portal. Search by date or subject. Some of the 500+ docs are transcribed.
#histodons #sschat #educators
https://pem.quartexcollections.com/documents?collections=Salem%20Witch%20Trials%20Collection&applyState=true

Views like this, I always find breathtaking. There's just something about a photograph of the Moon occulting Earth which is oddly humbling. Just imagine being aboard a spacecraft and being able to see that sight!

.@elonmusk@twitter.com is the wealthiest person in the world and owns Twitter, one of the most powerful communications platforms in the world

He is also ATROCIOUSLY UNINFORMED

🧵

Beautiful illustration of where people are concentrated.

If you squint, you can see Australia and New Zealand.

An impressive visualization of the SARS-CoV-2 life cycle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlOi2hVGtg0&t=2s

Corvid Love.
I captured an intimate moment for these two American Crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) at a park near my house in #Seattle.

While #crows have a reputation for being jerks, I like this image for showing they have a tender side as well. I observed long enough to know he's not actually poking her eye out; this was an example of "allogrooming" behavior for your science word of the day. You're welcome.

#NaturePhotography #nature #birds #BirdPhotography #birdwatching

Unpopular Opinion to #1000DaysOfCovid: SARS-CoV-2 is, as much as it is a dangerous, deadly, and debilitating pathogen, more on the “lighter” side of what pathogens can and could do to humankind.

The past precisely 1000 days since the first WHO recommendations almost all communication, medially but also medically, has been tainted by greed, simplification, demarcation, side-taking, politicking, and sloganeering.

Development of measures was led by financial and corporate interests, measures were hyped or put down, depending on feelings and sensitivities, not the commons and public health where first to be considered but elections, income statements, and cronyism.

Because SARS-CoV-2 is, as far as dirty bastards go, not the worst that could have happened to us, we are coasting OK. Not great, not fine, but OK. But whatever the next pathogen to emerge, and one will emerge, might be much more injurious.

We had a chance to make this right. To communicate clearly, to focus on the commons and public health, to state harsh but true realities rather than playing with hopes and fears to manipulate.

The spread of pathogens is a function of the mobility of humankind and moderated by it. The more mobile we become, the more likely a debilitating pathogen will go from small epidemic, the likes of which we have observed and largely ignored for decades, centuries even, to global pandemic. The bubonic plague killed 200 million people, in a much less mobile world (but mobile enough for it to spread).

We can’t dial back mobility, we can’t become xenophobic, cloistered, tribes again. But we can learn from this, accept (and this includes everyone, not just the antivax morons and antimasker idiots) that we were too led by fears and hopes, by simplification, by media click baits and politicking this time, and that we need to, urgently, all change how we deal with pathogenic spread.

We need to accept that social norms may not be medically and scientifically the most beneficial scenario, but that rather than dismantling society, we need to find ways to fight around them. We also need to become MUCH more sensitive to antibiotic stewardship (my money is on a resistant bacterium being the next big killer, they already are but don’t generally murder the kind of person that makes for good click bait articles).

We need to take health threats such as the rise of obesity related clinical overload and deaths, pollution related health problems, and nosocomial infections MUCH more serious. We need to sensitize each other for good hygiene and employers against the drive to place employee presence over employee health. And, yeah, we should probably normalize wearing medical masks if you feel sick or have a cough.

It’s been a 1000 days since the WHO announcement. Monday, March 2 2020. 1000 days since I wrote, to much hate mail from all corners of the Internet since, my first #mediverse post about SARS-CoV-2. And nothing much has changed.

1000 days is a hell of a long time. It’s a shame how little we’ve advanced since.

Outstanding post from @eff about the #security of #Mastodon

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/mastodon-private-and-secure-lets-take-look

Visiting twitter is like going back to your old neighborhood and seeing that all of the houses are run down and being lived in by a bunch of creepy dudes who sniff cat pee to get high, and that there are an unusually large amount of unmarked white vans parked in the grass.

I can’t with these essays on leaving Twitter—the digital paradise—that fully paper over *years of harassment* organized on the platform (gamergate, yourslip, countless other examples). the company finally addressed harassment several years back (because advertisers were complaining) and progressively tweaked measures but it was by no means flawless by 2022.

Leading by example? The 🇪🇺is going full #mastodon. Own instance for all institutions:

EU Voice is the official ActivityPub microblogging platform of the EU institutions, bodies and agencies (EUIs)

@communicationscholars @politicalscience @sociology #commodon #eustudies

https://social.network.europa.eu/about

Ya know what is annoying? Listening to people who have HUGE social media followings, tons of media coverage, and get to share their theories EVERYWHERE, complain academic freedom & censorship.

Bigger problem: false balance (our study on pt explored media representations of "natural herd immunity) https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgph.0000078)

#scicomm #covid #publichealth #immunity #freedom #censorship #research #socialmedia #stanford

Interesting comment on Hackernews regarding a possible scenario/long term risk should Mastodon threaten the corporate sphere of social media.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33545541

I took all the domains from https://fediblock.neocities.org/ block list and put it in a csv file that can be imported so you can block all hateful instances.
Download it [here](https://anonfiles.com/0088mcF8y8/blocked_domains_csv)
### How to import
- go to settings
- click on import & export
- click on import
- under import select domain blocking list
- then select the csv file you downloaded
- click upload
**Boom** a friendly mastodon & fediverse experience

hmm just found this one sat around not processed.. Was worth an hour or so to polish up!

The milky way over the Humboldt Mountains and Lake Wakitipu, taken near Glenorchy

#aotearoa #nztwits #nz #newzealand #photography #nature #naturephotography #landscapephotography #NewZealand #longexposure #astro

@nicerobot @pluralistic but also, support your local library (if you have one), they love audiobooks just as much as they love visual books.