Brian Beach @bwbeach@social.cleverlibre.org

Greetings, Mastodon! My name is Liz Landau and I love learning about space and science. I make podcasts and videos at NASA and write about other areas of science for newspapers and magazines. In my spare time, I play board games and write songs about space.

Be the person that both Mr. Rogers and George Carlin would be proud of.

It's normal to have a favorite index entry, right? #index

Fire and Smoke map with PM2.5 readings from EPA air quality sensors across the upper eastern US (legend at bottom left explains what the dots mean).

You can see the little fire icons in Quebec, and the gray background indicating smoke, containing particulate matter (PM2.5), which is a lung irritant.
[Personal note: Since I have severe asthma, I have been wheezing and coughing w/low O2 readings off and on for days from this.]

You can learn ab. air quality in your area at https://www.airnow.gov/

@breadandcircuses

Since this article mentions "Anthropocene" I thought it would be a good time to boost this piece again to clarify were the real blame lies:

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/09/21/how-colonialism-spawned-and-continues-to-exacerbate-the-climate-crisis/

"To date, researchers have mentioned the Anthropocene Epoch as the latest geological period in more than 1,300 scientific papers. While the scientific community has been debating over which year the Anthropocene Epoch began, several Indigenous and Black scholars have shot back against the term.

"The problem, some scholars say, is that the term assumes the climate crisis is caused by universal human nature, rather than the actions of a minority of colonialists, capitalists, and patriarchs. And the implication that the Earth was stable until around 1950, when the ‘Anthropocene’ supposedly began, denies the history of people who have been exploited by those systems for centuries.

"Indigenous scholars have further addressed how the term stands for colonialist ideologies that sever the deep ties and interconnections between humans, plants, animals, and the soil.

“Instead of treating the Earth like a precious entity that gives us life, Western colonial legacies operate within a paradigm that assumes they can extract its natural resources as much as they want, and the Earth will regenerate itself,” said Hadeel Assali, a lecturer and postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Science and Society, a Columbia Climate School affiliate."

#capitalism #colonialism #biodiversity #ClimateCrisis

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected in 2019 on a pledge to put “the state in a smartphone.” Today, many citizens are using the same app to track Russian troops, seek evacuation assistance — even file their taxes. Axios has more on Diia.
https://www.axios.com/2023/05/26/ukraine-diia-app-fedorov-russian-troops
#Ukraine #Zelensky #Apps #CyberSecurity

The New York Times has a profile by Siobhan Roberts on the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, celebrating its 50th anniversary: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/21/science/math-puzzles-integer-sequences.html, https://web.archive.org/web/20230522005810/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/21/science/math-puzzles-integer-sequences.html

Sometimes journalists, newspapers, “influencers,” scientists, politicians & the rest of us get things wrong. But instead of acknowledging our mistakes, too often, pride or social norms get in the way of saying so.

But it’s good to change our minds when we have new evidence or a new perspective or experience that shapes our perceptions.

That’s how we learn. How we grow. And talking about it should be normalized. The expectation rather than the exception.

Are you just catching up on the bonkers story about the lawyer using ChatGPT for federal court filings? This is a thread for you.