Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

NASA Photos from today's OSIRIS-REx sample-landing day:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasahqphoto/albums/72177720311435828/with/53210646183/
#OSIRISRex

Funny thing - when you read more scholarly histories of science it's amazing the extent to which nobody is ever that far ahead of the field. Even people we think of as rebels - Einstein, Cantor, Darwin, were firmly inside existing discussions and movements. I remember one author saying good scientists are a year ahead of the field, great ones are 5, the greatest are 10, and more and more that seems right, even generous.

5 Documents That Helped Us Understand How #Columbia Protected a Predator
==

For decades, Columbia obstetrician Robert Hadden was abusing #patients.

Here’s some of the #evidence ProPublica reporter Bianca Fortis used to investigate how the #university allowed it to happen.

#SexualAssault #Education #Hospitals #Doctors #Parents #Moms #Pregnancy #News #NewYork #NYC

https://www.propublica.org/article/five-documents-helped-us-understand-how-columbia-protected-a-predator?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

I know twitter is usually awful, but the JAXA #Hayabusa2 team have posted a thread of congratulations messages to the NASA #OSIRISREx team, and the support that different missions from different countries have for one another is why I'm in space science.

The enthusiasm at JAXA (and actually, everyone I've met at other agencies) to support all endeavours is a glimmer of hope in what can feel like pretty dark times.

iOS has an entire facility for third-party credential managers to plug into to be a data provider for passkeys.

Some third-party credential managers have instead decided to overwrite the JavaScript API in web browsers for passkeys and security keys, making it difficult for users to use the OS functionality, causing user experience havoc.

I’ve made my thoughts on this reckless behavior clear to them and will do what I can to fix this situation up. https://macaw.social/@april/111121055176419392

Good for Signal! If a willfully misguided government regulation fundamentally breaks your product in a way that compromises user safety, it doesn’t make much sense to continue offering it in the affected market. #E2EE #ForeverCryptoWars #CryptoMeansCryptography

Meredith Whittaker Reaffirms That Signal Would Leave UK If Forced By Privacy Bill - Slashdot https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/09/22/1913215/meredith-whittaker-reaffirms-that-signal-would-leave-uk-if-forced-by-privacy-bill

It's an OSIRIS-REx return mission, bringing #Bennu samples to my cream-of-wheat this morning.

Tasty tasty samples.

#osirisrex #nasa

US: Say bias/unfair treatment in hiring based on applicants' race/ethnicity is a major problem
Black adults 64%
Asian 49%
Hispanic 41%
White 30%
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/31/black-workers-views-and-experiences-in-the-us-labor-force-stand-out-in-key-ways/

And the #OSIRISREX samples are on the ground. Here's our story about why that's important and what happens next: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02954-2

I was considering creating my own blog, but I am instead happy to post here or occasionally at @andrejbauer 's blog Mathematics and Computation.

For easy access, though, I've created a web page that indexes my posts, which, with luck, will itself be indexed by search engines:

https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mhe/blog.html

A question for teachers, but I'd welcome thoughts from others.

In teaching, should one talk about a quadratic equation such as x^2+10x+25=0 as having one solution or a repeated solution, and do you think it matters?

If you're at all interested, or think some of your followers might be, then I'd be delighted if you would boost this for reach ... thank you.

Hey physics geeks-- before Feynman's 1982 paper on simulating physics with computers, had anyone else proposed some form of quantum computer, in the sense of using quantum stuff for computation specifically to deal with computational explosion when trying to compute some physical process?

I also loved @simon’s own isomorphism between #ActivityPub and blogs!

“I'm finding Mastodon a lot easier to understand having I've realized that it's just blogs. Everyone gets a little blog, on their own server or someone else's. Following someone is pretty much subscribing to their feed. You can even roll your own implementation from scratch.

Under the hood ActivityPub is more-or-less RSS/Atom Plus: it adds the ability to send replies to posts, and send and receive likes, and "boost" (aka retweet) posts - and a push-based notification system so you can see stuff faster than if everyone was polling each other

But really Mastodon is a return to personal blogging, loosely disguised as an open source Twitter clone” https://nitter.ca/i/status/1589644456361590785

I agree with this especially if you’re on Glitch-soc or some Fediverse server that gives you Markdown and 2000~ characters: voila, a very tidy blog platform. (The mathematicians even have instances with LaTeX enabled.)

With the added benefit that you can share or outsource the labor of spam and abuse control to moderators and your fellow bloggers!

And have a built-in permission system, if you don’t auto-accept all follow requests.

I first noticed this tight analogy because I noticed a few years ago that I was writing less in my journal app and actual blog and more on Mastodon, but the type of content tended to be similar.

1/16 This July, I gave an invited talk in the "Communicating Science Through Art" session at the European Astronomical Society annual meeting, organized by the amazing @theastrophoenix . And I thought it may be something that would also interest you #fediverse folks.

The aim of the talk was partly to give people insight into my why & how of my art. But mainly to encourage others to just try. In a very subjective manner.

A thread: 🧵

#VicisArt #AcademicChatter #SciArt #SciComm #WissKomm #Art

Me: Orions’s belt is just a waste of space…
Daughter: That’s a terrible joke, Dad. Only three stars.
Me: *tears of pride*

So I'm having to refollow quite a lot of people post-Mastodon update to 4.2.0. Including IRL friends and many people who follow me and I'm pretty sure didn't suddenly ALL soft-block me at the same time this week. Is anyone else experiencing this? 😬

There should be a reverse Indiana Jones film where a South American tribe sneaks into the Vatican, steals some relics, and gets away on a boat while a bunch of men in golden robes shake their fists and shout their strange language.

“Google’s New Gmail Tool Is Hallucinating Emails That Don’t Exist”

😬️ https://futurism.com/the-byte/google-gmail-tool-hallucinating-emails