Brent Williams @hbw@social.cleverlibre.org

USB connectors are fermions which is why you always have to rotate them twice before they fit in the port.

A decade ago, this image went mega-viral on Google+. In the ensuing years, it has been adapted and reused thousands of times.

@cra1g created this instantly viral image and tells the story of its evolution here:
https://medium.com/@CRA1G/the-evolution-of-an-accidental-meme-ddc4e139e0e4
@sociology @politicalscience

at some point maybe it would be worth doing a fediverse thread breakdown of the ideas in ocappub https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub/blob/master/README.org and how the work has continued over at @spritelyinst because everything I wrote in 2019 is now super, incredibly relevant

(I am anticipating a crash/collapse of the fediverse in its current form at a not too distant future; hopefully we'll have more answers ready by then, but this is a multi-year project)

insane timing of lightning striking a tree. Photo Credit: Debbie Parker.

Beautiful illustration of where people are concentrated.

If you squint, you can see Australia and New Zealand.

Estimated gender pay gap within job (same occupation at same firm)
🇯🇵 Japan 26%
🇰🇷 S Korea 19%
🇺🇸 US 14%
🇩🇪 Germany 13%
🇪🇸 Spain 12%
🇮🇱 Israel 12%
🇨🇦 Canada 12%
🇳🇴Norway 9%
🇫🇷 France 7%
From study just published: https://nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01470-z#
by @OlivierGodechot & 28 others

THIS. Moms 4 Liberty is using the “parental rights” rhetoric to attack public schools. The public deserves to know the Christo-fascist origin of the phrase “parental rights” bc it appears that the attacks on public schools are designed to replace public schools w/UNREGULATED Christian homeschooling and Christian private schools… #ChristoFascism #dominionism #PublicSchools

https://threadreaderapp.com/pdfs/5062535/download

“The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he did not exist.”

And the greatest trick the American oligarchs ever pulled was convincing us they're not oligarchs..

They've successfully pitted red states vs blue states (or, more accurately, rural versus urban), instead of letting us recognize the common enemy of ever-increasing corporate power.

The Great Orion Nebula #M42 #NGC1976 #astrophotography #womeninastrophotography
I have a very small window in which to image Orion due to trees so this is quite an accomplishment for me. 😊

@parismarx

Run don't walk from Post.

Listening to Sam Harris' recent podcast w/Andreessen was a full blown fascist-valley-TechBro-palooza. Marc's gone full Sith. https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/290-what-went-wrong

Waze remains one of the most egregiously invasive personal behaviour #surveillance services that #Google offers and Noam remains loosey-goosey on #privacy rights.

Post.social = Value Extraction from humans powering Value Creation for founder/VCs.

WSJ 2019:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/waze-ceo-says-privacy-definition-is-moving-target-11558390840

#SurveillanceCapitalism

55% of the world's population lives in this circle, within 2,500 miles of Yuxi, China
http://www.statsmapsnpix.com/2022/02/the-yuxi-circle.html

Harold Fisk and the Mississippi River

Rivers meander over their course as they continuously erode and deposit sediment. Harold Fisk, a geologist and cartographer working for the US Army Corps of Engineers, mapped the meanders of the mighty Mississippi in 1944 and the results are mesmerizing. (See below) They also beautifully illustrate geology’s Law of Superposition: newer and younger sediments are deposited on top of older sediments. We see thousands of years of course changes. You can unravel the layers by eye by noting which layer cuts others.

Or you can cheat and use the map legend which has the youngest course on top, to the oldest on the bottom!

“In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year.

“Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago, next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod.

“And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen.

“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”

~ Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883

#geology #LawOfSuperposition #GIS #EarthScience #map @geography

Someday soon a news outlet will link to and/or embed a post from the #Fediverse probably on #Mastodon and it will signal a new potential for peer-produced authority, influence, and speech that is wholly non-commercial. It will be a milestone in that regard.

WOW! Am jumping up with joy!

Thanks to the keen eye of a follower in the other place, I captured a Type Ia supernova event and didn't even know it!

I've been sitting on my #astrophotography images for over a year and there it was, right under my nose.

Captured two images of NGC 1566 in Feb 2021, and Dec 2021 ... and #Supernova 2021aefx appeared between them!

Amazing that I can get this kind of data from the heart of the city of Sydney (light pollution) from a galaxy 69 million light years away. Can't believe I never noticed this either!

Here's a little bit of reading about this supernova: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ac7cef

#Astrodon #Astronomy #Astrophysics

The High-Temperature Superconductivity Mystery Is Finally Solved. An atomic-scale experiment all but settles the origin of the strong form of superconductivity seen in cuprate crystals, confirming a 35-year-old theory. https://www.wired.com/story/the-high-temperature-superconductivity-mystery-is-finally-solved/

I wrote about how political parties are allowed to define journalistic ideas about balance and bias. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trumps-rough-week-and-the-press-bias-avoidance-framework/sharetoken/SnYrinGh2jVE

ATTENTION EVERYONE WRINGING THEIR HANDS OVER “#MASTODON ADMINS CAN READ MY DIRECT MESSAGES”: #SysAdmins have *always* been able to read your #email and DMs unless encrypted, including at the big #SocialNetworks and Internet providers. We used to have t-shirts that said, “I READ YOUR EMAIL.”

It’s just hitting now because you got used to places where the admins were kept away in their cubicles and data centers instead of greeting you at the front door.

#privacy #security #InfoSec #cybersecurity

When people travel to the past, they worry about radically changing the present by doing something small.

Few people think that they can radically change the future by doing something small in the present.

This is the only real time travel paradox.

Happy Birthday to Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, born #OnThisDay in 1832. Dr. Walker was the first woman surgeon in the United States Army and was captured by the Confederate forces in the Civil War. After the war she was awarded a Medal of Honor, the only woman to ever receive one. She later wrote & lectured in support of women's suffrage.