Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

Three articles published yesterday in #Science, Science Advances & Nature 🤔

Women remain underrepresented among faculty in nearly all academic fields https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi2205

Toxic workplaces are the main reason women leave academic jobs https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03251-8

Women faculty feel ‘pushed’ from academia by poor workplace climate
https://www.science.org/content/article/women-faculty-feel-pushed-academia-poor-workplace-climate

I just published “How do you even web dev without node? A quick introduction to test-driven web development using just the browser”

I figured it might be useful to publish this blog post a bit early to get more eyeballs on it before I push it out to the newsletter Monday https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/web-dev-without-node/

@Edent @lazerwalker I fed the audio into Whisper and it seems there's a YouTuber trapped in there

Award-winning writers Ted Chiang and Eric Heisserer, who worked together on the movie #Arrival and are familiar with the impact of #AI on creative professions, reflect on techno-optimism vs. techno-realism at the #GeekWireSummit. https://www.geekwire.com/2023/writers-techno-optimism-ai-nonsense/

Physicist and astronaut Ronald McNair was born #OTD in 1950. He spent about 8 days in space aboard Challenger in 1984 during STS-41-B. McNair was one of the seven crew members who lost their lives in the 1986 Challenger disaster.

Image: NASA

"The good news? I got an answer right away from a friend on LinkedIn. He told me that he also had problems advertising his Python training courses on Meta platforms because — get this — Meta thought that he was dealing in live animals, which is forbidden."

I'm banned for life from advertising on Meta. Because I teach Python. — Reuven Lerner https://lerner.co.il/2023/10/19/im-banned-for-life-from-advertising-on-meta-because-i-teach-python/

The world is designed against the elderly, writes Don Norman, 83-year-old author of the industry bible Design of Everyday Things https://www.fastcompany.com/90338379/i-wrote-the-book-on-user-friendly-design-what-i-see-today-horrifies-me

reminder that the early and not-so-early days of computing are basically incomprehensible from a modern lens

there was a time when the idea of having "if and else blocks" in your language was a *novel paradigm* with people arguing over whether "structured programming" was sufficiently expressive or somehow worse than the goto soup of assembly (60s -> 80s)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured_programming

there was a time when letting a function directly or indirectly call itself was a *controversial decision* that people violently disagreed with (because that would require something like a *stack*, when everyone knows local variables are much more efficient to implement as statically allocated globals!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_60

maybe the "absurd", "restrictive", or "wasteful" things you see in today's new programming languages will become as common as water one day too :)

Republicans making a great argument for ranked choice voting this month.

Last of the summer dragonflies? 😕

A common darter (Sympetrum striolatum) ekeing out some slight warmth from the wan late October sunshine in our garden.

Surprisingly enough, there was another bigger dragonfly out there today, but I didn't have a chance to ID it before it flew away – tomorrow perhaps 🤞

#Odonata
#Dragonflies 🐲🪰
#Netherlands 🇳🇱
#Photography 📷
#MacroPhotography
#BackGardenEntomology

An owl gliding through a cloud of helium-filled soap bubbles reveals wingtip and tail vortices.

Video credit: Usherwood et al.
Source: https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/223/3/jeb214809/223686/High-aerodynamic-lift-from-the-tail-reduces-drag

After a long hiatus, I’m back! Please afford me once again the opportunity to be a productive contributor to the Mastodon communities!

😑

In praise of Apple, Meta, and other companies switching over to end-to-end encrypted products:

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/the-vital-role-of-end-to-end-encryption

Ad campaigns meant to shame these companies for protecting their users do not acknowledge the serious dangers created by a less free and less secure internet.

@daringfireball The worst thing, to me, is that Apple has found a way to profit from things that they would not do themselves and seemingly pride themselves at holding steadfastly against, via the loophole of just getting a generic bucket of money from a company doing all those things.

I've been getting asked the same question a lot in the thread I started on adblocking yesterday. Here's a quick summary of what I do. I will not be recommending specific services, please do due diligence before choosing one. If they don't pass the vibe check don't use them.

Is lead really to blame for crime in the '90s and the gullibility of present day Boomers? I dug into the science https://skepchick.org/2023/10/is-lead-to-blame-for-crime-boomer-stupidity/

For a brief time this year, Amazon's bestselling "bitter lemon drink" was "Release Energy," which consisted of the harvested urine of Amazon delivery drivers, rebottled for sale by #CatfishUK prankster #OobahButler in a stunt for a new #Channel4 doc, "#TheGreatAmazonHeist":

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-great-amazon-heist

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

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I wrote about my first two months on Mastodon. I was a Mastodon hater because I thought it would be weird, complicated, or dead. It's been none of those things.

I'm ashamed I didn't join earlier and I'm ashamed I haven't been telling people to join it, because it's a version of the internet and social media I've long advocated for with my reporting: decentralized, portable, user controlled, not corporate:

https://www.404media.co/mastodon-is-the-good-one/

Kevin McCarthy giving the nominating speech for Jim Jordan is like making the ex-boyfriend give the wedding toast. And to top it all off, McCarthy comes out and says that Jordan has been an effective legislator—even though he hasn’t passed a single bill into law in his 16 years in Congress. The response? Uproarious laughter from the Democrats. And well-deserved scorn.