Nordstahl @Nordstahl@social.cleverlibre.org

Mastodon receives $100k on a single donation:

“Thank you Sujitech

Felix Hlatky

CFO

Today we would like to thank Sujitech for kindly donating $100k USD to Mastodon, by far the largest single donation to our non-profit so far. Building Mastodon, which encompasses the core software on one end, and two native mobile applications on the other, is not cheap, and we can only afford a handful of full-time positions right now, relying in many ways on volunteer work.”

Via https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/11/thank-you-sujitech/

@dougiec3 @LindaCollins11

Snacking on the hay ball.

#rabbit #bunny #rabbits #bunnies #rabbitsofmastodon #bunniesofmastodon

The fucking reason lowly dumb plebs like me with zero motherfucking reach, mercantile power or redneck bona fides flail about in our little corners of the internet trying to put a giant red arrow that says "FASCISM" on overtly, clownshow-obvious fascist shit is because the gatekeepers of the public narrative utterly abrogate their jobs of typing or saying that a thing is THE THING it fucking obviously is.

This is piss-streaked coward work. That's what you've made the job. It's NECESSARY work, there SHOULD be a New York Times and a Washington Post, but the point at which you have that kind of power over the public narrative and you say "Well, the politics-as-sports playbook suggests we really need to LISTEN to the people who want dissent-relocation-centers because if SOME people want it, it' is valid and it's not our job to say those perfectly nice violent armed sociopaths are wrong or call those dissent-relocation-centers 'deathcamps,'" just fuck you. You're the garbage who made deathcamps possible in the first place, you cipher fucking Nazi-complicit pricks. https://beige.party/@GrimmReality/111393200419699055

I am really getting angry at my fellow Americans. We KNOW the role that Fox is playing in leading to the erasure of this democracy, and other than a few gestures from Media Matters and a few others, we are doing nothing about it. You want to save this country? Burn that faux news network to the ground. Make everyone working there fear that they will never work again if they don’t just walk out now. Enough is enough. You don’t cure cancers. You rip them out—or poison them.

Lest we forget.

No aurora for us so far this weekend in the north east of Scotland but on Armistice Day the clear sky above the hilltop war memorial in Stonehaven was filled with millions of stars.

20 second exposure, ISO3200, f2.8, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens.

#photography #astrophotography #stars #ArmisticeDay

It just f*ckin sucks to grow up on scifi movies about the future and then to finally arrive in a scifi future and it’s the bad kind.

A delicate ballet of soft pink roses unfolds in a close-up photograph. The front bloom, a vision of tender elegance, steals the spotlight while its companions gracefully fade into a matte backdrop.

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/whispers-of-blush-a-ballet-of-elegance-w-craig-photography.html

https://www.wcraigphotography.com/product-page/whispers-of-blush-a-ballet-of-elegance

#Flowers #macro #nature #bloomscrolling #botanical #AYearForArt #buyintoart #artmatters #Art #photography #photo #Texas #Austin #GiftIdeas #WallArt #prints #windycraig #mastoart #FediGiftShop #FediArt #mastodon #MastodonArt

#每日一look 今天去提车！为了不被长辈念叨多穿点

Please read.

(it's the DEMOCRACY STUPID!

Greetings everyone ! My name is François Rincon, I am a theoretical physicist working in France at CNRS. I spent the first 20 years of my career doing research on nonlinear astrophysical fluids, plasmas and magnetic dynamics in astrophysical systems spanning many scales, ranging from the Sun, to protoplanetary accretion disks, to clusters of galaxies and the primordial Universe.

(Astro)Physics has been a core part of my personal identity since childhood and illuminates my views of the natural and human world. In particular, doing research on dynamical complexity on astronomical scales has contributed to the development of my increasingly alarmed scientist perspective on a variety of very earthly issues, chief among which our climate & ecological crises.

However, paradoxically (or perhaps as a logical conclusion ? ), what I have learned in part thanks to my astrophysicist viewpoint has also increasingly led me in recent years to wonder if I should not use my scientific skills and training to help mitigate these crises, rather than in astrophysics. After much weighing what was the best move from my comfy position in the astrophysics ivory tower, I have finally “looked up” from my speculative theoretical calculations, and have recently decided to gradually shift my research priorities to ecological sciences with a focus on biodiversity conservation, in an attempt to make the most of my research training, experience and vocation to modestly help, to the best of my scientific abilities, understand & mitigate the ecological crisis we are facing here, on Earth.

Why ? Well, first of all, with increasing professional experience, I have personally discovered astrophysics & astronomy to be quite a mixed bag. On the one hand, it is a field full of very smart people and intellectually challenging. But it is also now sufficiently mature that we essentially know all we need to know to grasp our position, both insignificant and precarious, on Earth and in the larger Universe. In some sense, mission accomplished: the field has done its job (well) to scientifically enlighten human bipedes. On the other hand, there remains a myriad of unanswered questions, more or less important and interesting to solve, that in my opinion me and most of my colleagues could spend their lives working on without making any significant difference to human progress, knowledge, or well-being in relation to our environment. Most of the research questions we work on have become in my opinion misguided intellectual raisons-d’être in an era of bloated mediocre hyped academic research and industrial-scale scientific publication. Working on such questions make us feel busy and smart, but in reality my own impression, informed by experience, is that we are nowhere near to have the adequate tools, theoretical, numerical, observational, or experimental, to make any significant progress on many of these. Why then waste our energy on these questions, most of them quite insignificant – especially in exceptional times that invite us to focus our intellect on more pressing issues ? Fact is, astrophysics is and will remain a very speculative field, with very limited falsifiability, in the foreseeable future. I may expand on this in future posts. What matters here is that having spent most of my professional life myself on not even being wrong, all of this while the world burns, has become a major existential problem for me.

Then, there is the problem of the pollution footprint of astrophysics. Let’s write this plainly: we are the most polluting scientific field on the planet: mega-observatories, steel and concrete cathedrals of science built in remote desertic locations, mega-space observatories packed with electronics dumped into space by huge rockets (some of them built by corporations that are actively contributing to the destruction of our environment), billions of CPU hours spent in high-performance computing numerical models of doubtful informational value sucking lots of not-so-low-carbon electricity (3t/MCPUh in the lowest-emitting countries), lots of electronic purchases to develop high-tech astronomical instruments, and buzzing international travel all over the world to conferences and international collaborations all contribute to our huge footprint. In my current research institute, each individual, researcher or other, emits on average 28t CO2 eq/ year in his/her professional activities ! My own individual professional footprint, including HPC (but excluding my occasional use of observational data from space observatories) was of the order of 10t CO2 eq/year until recently. None of this is sustainable and justifiable for a field that is nowhere near essential to document and help solve our environmental crises. However, despite a raising awareness among the base, our community has barely started taking significant steps to change that at the science policy power levels that really matter. This would require questioning the actual need for our most polluting research activities, and to downscale significantly instrumentally and in term of human resources. I am having a very hard time being part of the problem in the environmental catastrophe movie unfolding under our eyes. On this front too, I will probably talk more in future posts about the detailed arguments underlying the case I’m making, as I do not want to give the impression that I am making this case lightly.

Mix all these considerations together, and shake with a pinch of mid-career scientist professional existential crisis and boredom, having the feeling of having done everything I could and not being able to give more to the field, and you have the recipe for a major introspection and reconsideration of future plans. I have honestly grown tired of astrophysical sciences, its research practices, and my own perceived personal inadequacy to do anything significant there. I feel both useless and wasted. So I have concluded it is high time I use my energy and experience to serve more important causes before I get too old and professionally rotten, modestly and with whatever limited intellectual capacities I have left at my advanced age of 45. What better cause to serve than ecology and biodiversity conservation research for someone with a deep sensibility for nature, mountains, and natural complex patterns in the world ?

This place will be here to describe my experience, thoughts and struggles as a scientist in the process of such a (scientifically difficult, and certainly not obvious) transition. I thought it would be a good idea to share my experience as it unfolds, both for egoistic reasons, to encourage myself and to conserve momentum when things get difficult (as they inevitably will do), but also to make other younger or older people with similar questionings, and maybe eager to take similar steps, relate and share. And also maybe as a bit of an activivist too, to contribute to instill through some logical arguments some sense of emergency and questioning among some of my colleagues less sensitive to these issues.

How, when, where all of this is going to happen, what is going to be posted in this place, that will be a story for upcoming posts. I hope you enjoy the ride. Please feel free to weigh in in the comments now and then to tell me/us about our your own experience and thoughts on the matters I will post about, especially if you are a scientist yourself. I would also like this place to be a forum for debate or experience-sharing on all these matters. What’s important for me though is that this is always done constructively, in a civil and informed way, and in good faith. My view of these exchanges is that they should in the end lift us up all to help us better understand our place and role as humans and sometimes scientists, both as part, and powerful (for the best or the worst) actors of our earthly natural world. This kind of conversation, in my view, is more than ever needed (and well-beyond scientific circles) in times of massive media dis- or mis-information and off-the-roof political irresponsibility on the biggest issues of our times, preserving nature and life on the pale blue dot.

https://lookingup.francois-rincon.org/from-scratch-the-origins-of-a-transition/

#astrophysics #biodiversity #ecology #research #transition

Hey, GOP! If you really want a Democrat Underground, keep it up.

We'll guerilla up your ass.

The German eXit from Musk's hate platform is real and ongoing.

I'm seeing accounts for newspapers, courts, libraries, radio stations, cities, nonprofits, etc. getting shut down permanently or moved into maintenance mode. This is all very organic, e.g., the city of Cologne had a vote on withdrawal from X:

https://ratsinformation.stadt-koeln.de/getfile.asp?id=956920&type=do

I can barely keep up. Many of these accounts are now on the fediverse. The ones I've tracked so far are in the eXit spreadsheet:

https://bit.ly/eXit

Why yes, I am ready for my close up!

#Caturday

Girly lunch was slightly tense.
Bestie said shared she's been feeling some kind of way about Global Events.

It's so complicated, she said.

I made some neutral noises and listened as she walked a fine line between not being Zionist, but repeating their talking points, and saying what's happening is terrible but Gaza brought it on itself.

Me: Well, in about 3 months all this will be moot. Gaza will be wiped off the map, and the people with it, and then the West Bank will be next. That sort of eases the complexity quickly, doesn't it?

Her: [silence]

Me: Because in the end that's all that matters. We can debate fine points all we want, or not. We all know what the Nakba was. We all know what was *not* supposed to happen in the west bank. None of that really matters now. In the end, a people and a region will be obliterated. When it happens I hope folks will have the intellectual honesty to call a thing a thing. Because I will.

I had three mimosas.

One more #Caturday pic. This time a selfie with Alex. #CatsOfMastondon #selfie