Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

Here we go: FTC files a massive #antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. The charges will sound very familiar to anyone who's read Rebecca Giblin & @pluralistic's Chokepoint Capitalism. https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/26/23809817/amazon-ftc-antitrust-lawsuit-monopoly

Google quietly corrected the incorrectly scoped CVE for the critical libwebp vulnerability after facing criticism. What good is a correction when you bury it, though? For a RCE with a severity rating of 10 out of a possible 10, shouldn't Google be a lot more vocal about this?

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-5129

Happy 118th birthday to special relativity!

Albert Einstein introduced special relativity in the paper "On The Electrodynamics Of Moving Bodies," published #OTD in 1905 in the journal Annalen der Physik.

Manuscript: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/andp.19053221004
English Translation: https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/

I was at an event yesterday with a bunch of like privacy officers and in house lawyers, and out of four or five people I happened to mention it to (in talking about my research) no one had heard of Mastodon or knew what federated social media was.

I didn’t actually find this *super* surprising but I think it’s a good reminder that this is still not a thing that most people understand or even know about.

Association of Internet Researchers just published a intro to Mastodon video and is encouraging academics to get active on Mastodon.

#AoIR #Mastodon #Introduction #TwitterMigration @AoIR @admin1 #Internet #Commodon #AcademicChatter

https://youtu.be/djepDsuZTeQ?si=o2sLErCfiueLGY3K

So today @Teri_Kanefield put up an analysis of the problematic legal issues surrounding a gag order for Trump >>> https://law-and-politics.online/@Teri_Kanefield/111133028862927449

Rather than learn from Ms. Kanefield's vast expertise in these matters, some responses gave vent to their anger against Trump by accusing her of taking his side etc.

Listen up. Mastodon is not a cheering squad. Most of us value honest in-depth facts, even if uncomfortable, and we treasure those who contribute their time and expertise to keeping us informed.

ANNOUNCEMENT: We're in the process of mothballing our Twitter account, which was previously our most-used social media platform.

Please help us out by boosting our posts so that our followers can see our updates and to help us build our audience here!

This list of academics on Mathstodon is somewhat useful:

https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon

But it doesn't list mathematicians or physicists. It *does* list "theologidons". What's a theologidon? A don who is a theologian?

A linguistic theory of the Swedish chef:

Classically, the Swedish chef's language is defined by repeated "oo" sound e.g. "spoody hoody coocoonoot." Why?

Turns out one of the few vowel sounds that exists across Old Norse derived languages but is not present in modern English is "y" like the German ü or the French u in "tu." Pronounced by making an ee vowel with rounded lips. The foreignness of that sound leads to its emphasis in English speakers imitating any Nordic language.

@mistersql @ZachWeinersmith many, many years ago, when there was only usenet, there was a C or Perl program called the Encheferizer, that produced excellent Swedish-chef mock Swedish.

There were some serious flame wars when trolls started running the serious replies from Swedish forums through it. Probably set back Sweden joining NATO by 30 years.

I never have been able to find it again.

I read about how Apples recycling / trade in process awhile ago & since refused to ever use them.

Hearing some great podcasters use em has always made me wanting to send feedback but it was hard for me to find an article to reference until now… this is a great article from @pluralistic describing how Apple ultimately care more about pleasing shareholders whilst applying greenwashing tactics on consumers during their keynote presentations re their “recycling”

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/

Time to get out from under gmail before they stop supporting IMAP.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/25/gmail_basic_html_discontinued/

Sabine Hossenfelder tried to use the story of penicillin to prove her thesis that capitalism leads to scientific progress. Here, I quote Ernst Chain, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on penicillin, to prove her wrong. https://skepchick.org/2023/09/sabine-is-wrong-again-capitalism-wouldve-killed-penicillin/

Seems at least an interesting one that I haven't seen discussed much:

▶️ https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/new-research-shatters-outdated-pay-gap-myth-that-women-dont-negotiate/

(I short: women today, at least among the MBA graduates, do actually negotiate more - but they don't get the raises.)

#GenderPayGap

Checked the searchable database of books that AI is ripping off, and yep, I’m on it. MotherFUCKERS

Yesterday, pieces of an alien object from space came to Earth, landing in the Utah desert... and scientists are thrilled.

After all, it's not every day a space mission travels billions of km to return pristine pieces of an asteroid for us to study!

https://badastronomy.substack.com/p/yesterday-pieces-of-asteroid-impacted

So.. back to my digital cameras tonight. The waxing gibbous moon tried its best to obliterate the gentle aurora which fought its way to visibility tonight at my favourite Hoopers Inlet aurora observing perch. Made me smile at the end of a tough day! Gentleness always finds a way through and reminds you that subtle beauty overcomes all in the end :-) #aurora #auroraaustralis #beauty #NewZealand

Press Release by @NASA / @NASASolarSystem: "NASA’s First Asteroid Sample Has Landed, Now Secure in Clean Room" https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-first-asteroid-sample-has-landed-now-secure-in-clean-room #NASA #OSIRISREx #astronomy

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.