Brian Beach @bwbeach@social.cleverlibre.org

We are all stardust.

That oxygen you breath? That comes from dying massive stars, ending their light in a supernova.

The iron in your blood? Some massive stars dying, but mainly white dwarfs, the leftovers of dwarf stars like our own Sun, exploding.

The gold ring on your finger? Mostly merging neutron stars, leftovers from supernovae.

#astrodon #scicomm #astronomy

Perhaps some of the readers of this fine thread (https://mastodon.social/@Sheril/109729242613811062) will be interested in a diversion into statistics? It turns out that while you can easily calculate the average of a population’s various dimensions (age, region, etc.), it turns out that the number of people who are “close” to the average in more than a few dimensions becomes vanishingly small. This strange feature of high-dimensional vector spaces surprised people when they looked for the “average woman” most resembling Norma, a sculpture of a woman with average features (none were found who were close to average in all ten anatomical measurements), as well as the US Air Force when they found that 3-sizes-fits-most approach to designing airplane cockpits didn’t fit anyone but caused crashes (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2076608-the-end-of-average-tells-us-why-we-should-discard-a-mean-idea/ has the Norma story, https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/15/08/beyond-average is a nice recap of the pilot story, and here’s the popular podcast you might have heard this from https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/).

In this case, because so many of these variables are correlated, you can definitely imagine at least a few Chinese-speaking Christian adults living in urban Asia who are literate but didn’t graduate college, and who don’t have Internet but do have shelter and safe drinking water. But even though you can visualize such a sub-population and know it’s size is non-zero, I think it is notable how thin a sliver of the whole it is. The average person in all these dimensions is quite unusual and interesting!

(Math nerds will also enjoy revisiting the fact about higher dimensional spaces where, as the dimension increases, all but the most infinitesimal part of the volume of a spheroid is along its shell. I and many others discovered this through Richard Hamming’s book “Art of Doing Science” but here’s a YouTube lecture of him delivering the same discussion! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uU_Q2a0S0zI) #Hamming #statistics

Oh hey, I just realized that with so many new people I'm connecting with many of you may not be aware of the be my eyes app. If you find yourself with extra time and just want to give visual assistance to someone over video, it's a free app that connects blind people like myself with sighted volunteers. I've used it for all kinds of things over the last few years.

“Give Cyclists Space”

I just got successfully phished for the first time in 31 years of internet use. I'm mortified, but also fascinated by the unique combination of factors that contributed to my successful hoodwinkery. #LiveAndLearn

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” (#MLK Beyond Vietnam, 1967)

https://sacobserver.com/2023/01/some-lesser-known-yet-still-powerful-mlk-quotes/

Do yourself a favour and add @auschwitzmuseum to your timeline. In the turmoil of the day, It will give you a short reminder of what really matters and help put things into perspective.

If you like writing, or you just want to get better at it, I highly recommend doing something you ought to be doing anyway.

Put descriptive alt text on your photos.

The more I do it, the more I enjoy it. It’s strengthening my ability to describe things; whether scenery or a technical diagram.

And check the settings in your Mastodon client. Most of them have a setting you can turn on that won’t let you post photos without adding alt text.

#WritingTips #writing #AltText

Nothing will make me close your website faster than finding I have to watch a fucking video to find something out

Reading on a smartphone reduces reading comprehension and ~elicits fewer sighs.~

This is so weird and interesting. h/t @clive

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05605-0

One of the most frustrating and depressing things is the right has a coordinated, well funded plan to impose reactionary white fascist rule on the rest of us, democracy and legality be damned, and they're succeeding, and there is no comparable counter mobilization to stop them.

This actually isn’t surprising at all, but it still needs to said over & over — the biggest barrier to more urban biking in cities is the fear of cars.

“A study confirms that if we are serious about getting people on bikes, they need a safe place to ride.”

Via @lloydalter #TreeHugger #bikes #cities #urbanism #cars #BikeLanes
https://www.treehugger.com/fear-of-cars-biggest-biking-barrier-study-6979522

Unearthing long ignored African writing system, researcher finds African history

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/fallou-ngom-discovers-ajami-african-writing-system/

“U.S. cities, in contrast to their international counterparts, dedicate a relatively greater proportion of land area to streets…A typical street in modern Osaka or Paris is under 20ft wide, while many American cities require widths of between 50-60ft .”

North American cities waste too much space/land & public money on too wide roads that encourage us to drive too fast, fueling (among other things) too many injuries & deaths.
https://planning.org/blog/9229552/the-costs-of-wide-streets-in-the-us/

Carl Sagan passed away #OTD in 1996. In his final interviews he left us with two messages that are even more relevant today: one emphasizing the importance of a science literate public, the other a warning about how hard it is to extract ourselves when we’ve been conned.