Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

Let's take a journey through space to other worlds with #ClimateDeniers desperately seeking solace on lonely planets.

Confidently asserted while also claiming that we can't measure temperature trends here on Earth: "Mars and Jupiter are not warming, and anyway the sun has recently been cooling slightly."

Does this make sense? No, but it's still fair-to-middling in daily #ClimateMythRebuttal access at Skeptical Science.

Newly revised; critical review welcome!

https://skepticalscience.com/global-warming-other-planets-solar-system-basic.htm?utm-sourc=mastodon&utm-campaign=socialnetworks&utm-term=sks

ugh

I think if I were a movie director or writer I would definitely make the story take place before cell phones. There's like 1000x more plausible plots available when everyone involved doesn't know everything all the time, in real time. It's almost like the demarcation between when the world used candlelight to see and the adoption of the electric lightbulb.

A friend sent this to me and y'all might enjoy

“The emissions from production of computing devices exceed the emissions from operating them, so even if devices are more energy efficient producing more of them will make the emissions problem worse. Therefore we must extend the useful life of our computing devices. As a society we need to start treating computational resources as finite and precious, to be utilised only when necessary, and as effectively as possible.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.06642

Cory Doctorow ( @pluralistic ) writes:

"Disruption" is nowhere to be seen when it comes to the tech sector.

Five giant companies have been running the show for more than a decade.
A couple of these companies (Apple, Microsoft) are Gen-Xers, having been born in the 70s, then there's a couple of Millennials (Amazon, Google), and that one Gen-Z kid (Facebook).

Big Tech shows no sign of being disrupted, despite the continuous enshittification of their core products and services.

How can this be? Has Big Tech disrupted disruption itself?

That's the contention of "Coopting Disruption," a new paper from two law profs: Mark Lemley (Stanford) and Matthew Wansley (Yeshiva U):

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4713845

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/

Fun reading about how even @pluralistic falls for phishing sometimes thanks to all the enshittification of getting in touch with necessary services making us less likely to catch the red flags.

I've clicked on a few of my office's "phishing tests" which at least gets me more "watch this social engineering info video" even if the videos are so bad that you can't help zone out.

#Tech #Phishing #Scams

This week's Behind the Blog is out!
- Emanuel and Sam on constant NSFW reporting
- Jason on bypassing censorship while in Indonesia
- Me on what happens next with fake IDs a mouse click away https://www.404media.co/behind-the-blog-not-safe-for-whose-work/

"A matrix with zeros on the diagonal and positive numbers elsewhere is called a zero-diagonal matrix. Zero-diagonal matrices are not invertible. This means that there is no matrix that can be multiplied by the zero-diagonal matrix to produce the identity matrix." -- Google's AI

Canada vows to ban Flipper Zero device in crackdown on car theft

How do you ban a device built with open source hardware and software anyway?

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/02/canada-vows-to-ban-flipper-zero-device-in-crackdown-on-car-theft/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Meta is downranking/hiding political content on Threads. The company says Threads will “not recommend any content/accounts that post about politics.”

Here’s the issue: what counts as “politics” is often any news abt people who have had their whole existence politicized, such as news about Black people, LGBTQ people, disabled ppl, women, etc. Climate scientists, public health experts etc also considered “political” https://www.axios.com/2024/02/09/meta-political-content-moderation-threads

NASA's Deep Space Network communicates with a fleet of robotic spacecraft across the Solar System. These communications use radio waves, but now they're testing a new system that can send high-bandwidth signals using lasers. One disk, Deep Space Station 13, was recently retrofitted with an optical receiver to simultaneously receive radio and laser communications. In a recent test, it received 40 times more data from laser communication than can be transmitted via radio.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-new-experimental-antenna-tracks-deep-space-laser

Our atomic fountain is now - for the first time - able to launch atoms! Great to see all the progress happening on the apparatus I spent the last years setting up
@quantumsensing
https://qoto.org/@quantumsensing/111902546549965338

#AtomInterferometry #Physics #PhDLife #QuantumSensing

One day, the Sun will expand into a red giant and vaporize Mercury, Venus, and Earth.

But astronomers have found what may be planets orbiting dead stars, showing that some planets can survive that fate. Words by me:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/planets-orbiting-dead-stars-foretell-the-solar-systems-far-future-fate/

The assumptions embedded in so much commentary about technical leadership and organizational design are so hard to sit through sometimes. Like oh hmmm I wonder why certain groups of people think the only problem is that everyone else is too stupid to keep up with them. I wonder why certain facets of our society are delighted to make 10x the money of the people they sit next to, and then find themselves struggling to incorporate the expertise of the people they sit next to. Mysteries abound.

Incredibly proud of the team @VLBAI_Hannover for having demonstrated the first mini launch in the 10m facility 💪💪💪

Did you know that a famous math reference – most physicists of a certain age have a copy – is the result of a New Deal project to employ scientists and mathematicians?

Mathematician Irene Stegun was born #OTD in 1919. A major contributor to the Works Progress Administration’s Mathematical Tables Project, she’s probably best known as co-author of the classic “A Handbook of Mathematical Functions” — usually referred to as “Abramowitz and Stegun.”

On May 30th –June 2nd this year, one of my favourite things is happening: Electromagnetic Field Festival.

@emf is a camping festival taking place every two years, and it’s a gathering of hackers, makers and cool people who want to share interesting things and do daft things in a field. Past years have had a giant fire-based playable Pong, mechanical music machines, an escape room in a shipping container, giant LEGO cars, rideable hexapods, and a fully interactive robot bar that pours drinks.

@mscroggs and I go along every two years to run the Maths Village - a tent full of cool maths stuff which hosts workshops from the main programme plus our own content - hands-on puzzles and games, face painting, sculpture builds, and anything else we come up with. We all camp together in the area next to the maths tent, and past guests who’ve visited or stayed in the village have included Hannah Fry, @standupmaths, Simon Singh, @henryseg and loads of others.

Tickets for EMF cost £180 for the full weekend (Thursday to Sunday). If you’re interested, the next ticket sale goes live this Sunday, 11th Feb at 11am GMT - details at https://www.emfcamp.org/tickets

"The private sector is where all the innovation happens", he posted using a protocol developed at CERN built on top of communications technology developed by ARPA, on a device powered by technology created for the US Air Force and NASA in the 1960s.