Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

The family of Henrietta Lacks has reached a settlement with Waltham-based Thermo Fisher Scientific over allegations the biotech company improperly profited from cells stolen from their family member. In 1951, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital harvested cells from Lacks without her knowledge. Those became the first human cells to be cloned, and the so-called HeLa cells are now considered a crucial tool of biomedical research. @gbhnews https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2023/08/01/family-of-henrietta-lacks-reaches-settlement-in-lawsuit-against-thermo-fisher

I have no legal background but as best as I can tell, "scraping" means "recording information that the twitter platform willingly served via its web interface."

There's a screengrab going around of a headline saying you should skip meals to save money, and it's real (albeit a few months old):

https://www.truthorfiction.com/to-save-money-maybe-you-should-skip-breakfast-wsj-headline/

BTW This is the oldest paper I know that proposes adjoining infinitesimals as a practical way to compute derivatives. It doesn't explicitly mention implementation on a computer but does mention "an algorithmic first course in the calculus".

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2321376

I'm an NDP voter and a social democrat.

But in the next election I will vote Liberal in my riding to stop a Pierre Poilievre government.

I know too many obstinate Green and NDPr purests that refuse to do this.

Elections aren't a purity test. Vote for the Candidate that:

A) Gets you closest to your values.
B) Has a chance of winning.
C) Will stop the electing of someone who is the opposite of your values.

The Cons are a minority, centrists and lefties can unite to stop them.

New instance, new #introduction!

I'm a woman in my 30s. I was born in #Québec City, I moved to #Vancouver for my first real job as a #translator and, a few years ago, I moved to #Ottawa with my husband so we could afford a house.

I mostly write in English, but don't hesitate to toot at me in #français!

I've worked in multiple fields... my favourite were my years with Library and Archives #Canada, which I absolutely loved. I now work in #agriculture.

I love #videogames, mostly #FFXIV right now. I have an #ebike. I love #books and #cooking. I miss #travel.

I'm very much pro (vaccine, science, choice, mask, etc.).

Come say hi 👋

I sometimes like music made according to predetermined mathematical rules. Here we have pendulums swinging and ringing out notes as they pass through the vertical. A good choice of harmonies: it sounds a bit like Bach's mind after it dissolved into small fragments. But the fun part is waiting for the moments when the pendulums line up and play a big chord, like at 4:01 or 7:50. As you approach these climaxes you can see and hear them coming. But unlike classical music, they fall apart very much as they emerged, without a nod to the past, unsentimentally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhUcHtbDOWE

the number of ppl perhaps rightly mourning the decay of academic twitter as one of the only ways to share, find and talk about research seems like it points directly to the fundamental hollowness of the current journal system as a means of uh sharing, finding, and talking about research.

our for-profit system of communication is so hostile to the way we want to work that we became dependent on a different, also very hostile informational chokepoint.

I think it is a pretty normal idea to want to try to rebuild our communication systems ourselves, in common. whatever that looks like. I get why that's weird or boring or scary to ppl I just think it would be fun and good to do.

One way to view automatic differentiation is to think of it as adjoining an "infinitesimal" element d, such that d²=0, to the reals, ie. forming ℝ[d]/(d²). If f is a polynomial then f(x+d)=f(x)+df'(x) giving a nice way to compute derivatives on a computer - especially as it can be extended to rational and even transcendental functions f. It doesn't form a field though. For example you can't always divide by d.

TIL There is a field, named after Levi-Civita, that generalises ℝ[d]/(d²) quite a bit.
Each element is a "formal" sum ∑aᵢεⁱ where the sum is over some subset S of the rationals which is left-finite, ie. for any z, S has only finitely many elements less than z. Addition and multiplication work in the way you might guess.

This means we can form things like ε^(1/2) or even the "infinite" 1/ε. It's not just a field, it's an ordered field so we have, for example, that 1 > ε^(1/2) > ε > ε² > 0.

You can even construct a Dirac delta-like function δ(x) = ε/π(x²+ε²).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi-Civita_field

Let me get this straight. Republicans are banning books, drag shows, and life-saving gender-affirming care, all to "protect children"

But they're also rolling back child labor laws, blocking gun reform, and passing laws to force adolescents to give birth.

Do I have that right?

Today's threads (a thread)

Inside: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it; and more!

Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/31/seize-the-means-of-computation/

#Pluralistic

1/

Viewing images in #Tusky is about to get better, https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/pull/3894

The extreme heat has devastated corals. As a former marine scientist, this is a truly heartbreaking read:

“The coral didn’t even have a chance to bleach, it just died. It just felt like, ‘Oh my God, we’re in the apocalypse.’ What’s happening?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/climate/coral-reefs-heat-florida-ocean-temperatures.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

“Demand #climate action right now. Not in a year, not tomorrow, right now. Actually yesterday.”

"J-core is a clean-room open source processor and SOC design using the SuperH instruction set, implemented in VHDL and available royalty and patent free under a BSD license."

j-core.org/

Important oped by my colleague Julia Moore-Vogel on the pressing need to find treatments for Long Covid

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-07-31/long-covid-prevalence-research-treatments

The Problem with Plastics
Metals and paper are well recycled. Plastic recycling is pretty much a myth. Something to consider when purchasing stuff.

https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/the-problem-with-plastics-and-recycling-bioplastics-microplastics-ocean-waste/

I mean even as a trans person, I don't feel like it's particularly important to do a blanket ban on an entire, heterogenous organization just because one arm does a transphobia. I've been kinda bristling lately about how reactive the fediverse is sometimes, to the point of harassing others (I'm sure defederation isn't the only thing the #BBC will experience today).

At the same time: it's important, as part of the fediverse experiment, to detach ourselves from wanting to make that line go "up and to the right".

I feel like the fediverse has the ability to allow for both "let's grow a lot!" people, as well as people who prefer more limited, cozy, proactively safe communities.

I think talking about it in terms of what "the fediverse" should do is the wrong way to go about it: I think we need tools/instances/software to enable both. I think this is possible, but our tooling just plain ain't there yet.

The #BBC joined the #Fediverse today.

social.bbc/about

@ottaross Yours is the only post on my feed that isn't about how instances are blocking the BBC's fediverse presence from the start

Great seeing #BBC start to reveal a #fediverse presence and pop up a number of Mastodon accts.

Need to get #CBC and #NPR to recognize this as well. It makes so much sense for any serious public media org to host their own Masto servers and start to build a footprint as a first step. Later other Fedi engagement as well.

Surely being beholden to bad-actor billionaires undermines their whole existence.