Neekerbreeker 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @Neekerbreeker@social.cleverlibre.org

Biochemist Marie Maynard Daly, who studied correlations between heart attacks and cholesterol, and between smoking and lung disease, was born #OTD in 1921. Daly was also part of the team that established the primary nucleic acid bases.

She was the first Black woman to receive a chemistry PhD in the US.

Image: National Institutes of Health

Firearms are now the leading cause of death for Americans ages 24 years and under. It really, truly, genuinely, does not have to be this way.

I used to mix metaphors but that ship has flown.

The most dangerous are the salt water squirrels.

You don’t become cooler with age, but you do care progressively less about being cool, which is the only true way of being cool. This is called the Geezer’s Paradox

Edwin Hubble announced #OTD in 1925 that Andromeda and other spiral nebulae were in fact separate galaxies outside the Milky Way, in a paper read to an AAAS meeting by H.N. Russell.

The Universe was more than just our little island of stars, far greater in extent than what many astronomers had allowed themselves to imagine.

Hubble built on observations by Vesto Slipher, collaborated with Milton Humason, and relied on Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s work on Cepheid variables to reach this conclusion.

Astronomically, January 1st is a meaningless date. It is an arbitrary reference point in a system based on the approximate orbital period of an otherwise unremarkable star that is perhaps only notable for having a life-bearing planet.

But for those of us who reckon time by this system, today is the 98th anniversary of humanity taking a monumental step towards understanding our place in a Universe that is vast and puzzling, but ultimately knowable.

Happy New Year!

Image: Richard Powell

Twitter never thought I needed to see: Moss, lichen, abandoned buildings, raku, fiber art, palentologists, mathematicians, cartoonists, watercolor, walruses, comedians, poets, penguins, celestial photography, owls, preying mantis, ants...
But it turns out, I did.
Thank you to all those publishing parts of their brilliant lives, I am grateful I am here on Mastodon (Fedi) with you.

Lord of the Rings door types

You can keep your Mastodon account extra safe by using Two Factor Authentication (2FA).

To activate this, log in through your server's website and go to ⚙️ Preferences > Account > Two Factor Auth, then follow the instructions.

It is slightly tricky to set up, but once it's been set up it's very easy to use.

2FA means that even if someone finds out your password they cannot log in. With 2FA activated, your phone will give you a special one-time code to allow your password to work.

@mekkaokereke @parkermolloy
Or in practical terms: Lots more gets accomplished by cooperation than non-cooperation (or war).
For instance, disenfranchising people leads to slums, violence, ...
Of course, if you want things to stay as they are (or go backwards) then you gerrymander, don't fund schools, and burn down libraries (everybody knows they contain things you don't already know), ...

Friendly reminder to be in-the-know on your work PTO policy... For instance, if you have a cap on your accrued PTO, you're lighting time & money on fire by being at that cap and not using it.

Nobody is going to care more about you than YOU.
USE YOUR PTO!

I have just read the 1996 Bias in Computer Systems paper by Batya Friedman and Helen Nissenbaum. What an amazing paper! They conceptualize three kinds of bias:

--preexisting (the bias that already exists in the world and that gets reproduced in a technical system)

--technical (gets introduced by the technical system)

-- emergent (appears when the context of actual use is different from the assumptions underlying the design)

#bias

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/230538.230561

If you want to give @labinthewild a try, here's the study that enabled the article mentioned above:

http://socialintelligence.labinthewild.org/mite/

#Panpsychism is a growing world view among scientists and engineers now. It's premise is that all matter has a capacity for experience or #consciousness. That's because #biology builds brains out of plain, non-living matter, and cannot imbue new #physics onto that matter, but can only appropriate capacities which exist in it already.
Hence, #cognition is a basic property of matter, and is unrelated to life.
This makes sense if we look at #MachineIntelligence. All minds compute with #electrons.

My advice, if you're new here, is to post. I'm still working on it myself.

The late stages of Twitter rewarded us for posting less frequently and for posting the worst kind of takes when we did.

There's no algorithm here to feed, so post what you're interested in and what you're curious about. Share the things that you care about and you'll find your communities here quickly enough.