Brent Williams @hbw@social.cleverlibre.org

Buying a Twitter Blue Tick is the toupee of the 21st century.

Hello I’m Katie! I’m a palaeontologist & geologist who loves rocks & talking (to anyone who’ll listen) about how awesome Scotland’s geological & fossil heritage is 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿⚒
Meet Tealliocaris loudonensis - a wee 330 million year old fossilised shrimp from East Lothian 🦐 this crustacean once thrived in the brackish waters of Loch Cadell in the Carboniferous, back when Scotland lay close to the equator & experienced a hot & tropical climate 🖤 #geology #palaeontology

60% of adults in the U.S. say the founders of America originally intended for the country to be a "Christian nation".
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/10/27/45-of-americans-say-u-s-should-be-a-christian-nation/

@ryanschultz Any group of humans will require challenging governance and social decisions. Technology can facilitate this to some extent, but tbf, it requires ongoing human effort. Mastodon is not a utopia—so of course it also will require this too! I think you’re right to move away from love and toward fixing, improving, developing rather than outsourcing that effort to a non-human corporate entity.

Conservatives want big houses & liberals want walkable communities
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/section-3-political-polarization-and-personal-life/

These elections may not be great for the Democrats (lots of races still pending...), but they were never going to be. The good news is we're not seeing the red wave that some of us (read: those of us who believe in American democracy) feared.

It’s interesting that the biggest communication challenge facing Mastodon communities is explaining that it’s basically a protocol and a network of independent, interconnected servers, which is what the Web, e-mail, even DNS and most of the fundamental services we use on the internet are, and always were.
It just illustrates just how much ‘Big Tech’ proprietary social media platforms swallowed up and walled off, if it’s now difficult to explain what the internet actually is!

In recent years, we became too comfortable letting #Twitter define journalism & media. Algorithms often dictated the narratives we collectively paid attention to.

Absurd trends were covered by news outlets & ballooned into major stories while we missed so much real substance. And the quick takes of uninformed politicians & bad actors were forced upon anyone participating in the network.

It was bad for democracy. The #Mastodon model makes me hopeful we can do better. #twittermigration

Interesting new #paper in the last J. of Econ Perspectives

Danish Flexicurity: Rights and Duties

by Claus Thustrup Kreiner and Michael Svarer

"Denmark is a small country with 5.8 million inhabitants that achieves a high income per capita in combination with low inequality and comprehensive
social insurance."

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.36.4.81

The Danish Ministry of Labor has organized eleven randomized experiments since 2005. 👇

Did you know that if you capitalize each word in a multi-word hashtag, #ScreenReaders can read them as words, but if you leave them lowercase, they can't? Well, now you know! So, for #accessibility, please capitalize words when there's more than one in a hashtag.

The #strategy you decide to follow is going to vary by the situation you find yourself in. Three possible situations are #uncertainty, #risk, and #certainty. In uncertainty, the strategy is #complexity i.e., soft systems, action research, and post-modernism. For risk the strategy is contingency, which includes stochastic modeling, non-linear dynamics, and master equations. Lastly, for certainty the strategy is operations. Here the focus is on self-organization and criticality (Maguire et al., 2006).

I have no idea what a master equation(s) is! Or maybe I need a coffee

When an exoplanet passes between its host star and us, the star's light is filtered by the exoplanet's atmosphere, each molecule leaving a different imprint.

Similarly, during a lunar #eclipse like the one on Nov 7-8, sunlight passes through the Earth's atmosphere before reaching the Moon. We can thus use lunar eclipses to find clues of life on Earth, which will hopefully help us identify life elsewhere. I wrote about it here:

➡️ https://www.eso.org/public/blog/is-there-life-on-earth/

#astronomy #astrodon
📷 ESO/M. Kornmesser

The next couple of days are likely to be really difficult for some people. And you might not know who’s really struggling.

Be excellent to each other.

Top result on this survey about inflation is a reminder that Dems need to do more to educate the public:
(a) oil is sold at global prices;
(b) domestic oil production levels are set by oil companies;
(c) current levels exceed domestic demand so companies export the rest.

More domestic oil production wouldn't dent inflation.
https://today.yougov.com/topics/economy/articles-reports/2022/11/04/what-americans-know-about-inflation-yougov-poll

The DOJ Civil Rights Division is sending election monitors to 24 states.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-monitor-polls-24-states-compliance-federal-voting-rights-laws