szescstopni @szescstopni@social.cleverlibre.org

My latest newsletter, in which I tell you exactly why I spent four hours trying to find out if elephants can puke. https://brookshire-team-trash.beehiiv.com/p/elephants-puke

Spoiler: probably they CAN. They just don't unless it's really, really dire.

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A Saudi academic may be sentenced to death.

His alleged crime? Using WhatsApp and Twitter to "share news considered 'hostile' to the kingdom".

Just a reminder: the Saudi government continues to invest in Twitter, and has increased its stake since Elon Musk took over.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/15/saudi-arabian-academic-on-death-row-for-using-twitter-and-whatsapp

The same goes for domain names; do NOT use a public domain name you do not control in your configuration, documentation, or UI language.

Instead, use one of the available reserved domain names documented in RFC 2606, such as 'example.com', 'example.net', or the .example top-level domain.

❌ test.com
❌ yourdomain.com
✅ example.com
✅ yourdomain.example

Pass it on to your fellow developers, designers, documentation writers, and so forth.

Full RFC text is here;

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2606

How the cult of consumerism ushered in an era of badly made products - and it's everything from clothing to tech https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23529587/consumer-goods-quality-fast-fashion-technology

Can dogs smell time?

Dog cognition scientist Alexandra Horowitz has a hypothesis: “instead of simply seeing time pass on a clock or feeling it pass in her body, Donut literally smelled time pass. ‘We have to imagine that things we render as visual experiences, dogs might render in olfaction. So they might experience spaces, recognize things and have memories in smell.’”

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/12/22/1139781319/can-dogs-smell-time-just-ask-donut-the-dog

You want to know how I really feel?

https://furbo.org/2023/01/15/the-shit-show/

P.S. That's the tame version.

When I decided to jump into the fediverse with both feet, I signed up for a BookWyrm account at @bookrastinating. When I tried to import my history/library, there were two big issues.

The first was timing. I joined and started an import at about the same time many, many, many other people did, and the server promptly fell over. The owner of Bookrastinating was helpful and friendly and eventually the queue started moving again, so that's not an issue anymore.

The second was not actually a problem with BookWyrm at all, but with GoodReads! It turns out that a bunch of books I'd previously tagged as read on GoodRead were no longer the books they had been. No offense to Marc Blake, author of “How to Be a Sitcom Writer: Secrets from the Inside,” but I’ve never read that book. When I “shelved” it on January 9, 2017, I assigned it “baroque, cycle, fiction, hardback, series, read,” so it seems very clear that what I actually shelved was a book by Neal Stephenson, and checking now shows that GoodReads only knows I've read the second book in the tagged "baroque cycle" series, but it has lost the first and third.

I'm not sure when the GoodReads database was corrupted, and in a review of my Reading Challenge book lists for 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017, everything seems probably-correct. But my 2017 Reading Challenge also does not include the book I mentioned above, the book that caught my eye as clearly-incorrect.

When I look at books *shelved* in 2017, I see many that are definitely not right, although they don't have "read" dates. I'm sure <cite>After the Martian Apocalypse: Extraterrestrial Artifacts and the Case for Mars Exploration</cite> is a perfectly fine book, but it definitely wasn't what I tagged with "fiction paperback series dragon king trilogy" on January 9, 2017. <cite>Love on the Dotted Line</cite> could be a fantastic romance novel, but it's not what I tagged "paperback anthology science fiction" on January 9, 2017. A dual-language collection of Italian women's poetry is definitely not what I tagged as a volume of the "Writers of the Future" science fiction anthology series. And so on. The ones I notice most easily are the titles I would never read, but the date January 9, 2017, stands out. Sorting by date added, I can see that some of the books added on that date seem correct. I know the books, and the tags match the books. Most do not.

I'm sure there's some irony in an import failure on the fediverse alerting me to serious corruption on Amazon-owned GoodReads, and the result stopping me from actually migrating.

I clearly cannot trust GoodReads, as they've broken the first and second rules of a database: they've lost data, and represented data falsely to belong to me when it doesn't. I'm not sure which of those is the first rule and which is the second, but both seem bad.

I also cannot import my entire library from GoodReads into BookWyrm, because I don't want to start with bad data. I think it's time to let most of the past go, and create a cleaned-up import file with just my reading history from 2017 onward.

Good thing I have the day off tomorrow!

#GoodReads #amazon #nerdery #blog #Bookwyrm

#evolution #science #humour #atheist #exchristian #secular #funny

When I hear #cult specialists talking about what makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories, there is one thing they leave out: Already subscribing to religious beliefs. I know how unpopular it is to speak out against religion. However, the willing suspension of disbelief is required for religion, paving the way to apply said suspension to other ideas we would typically reject, such as the majority of #conspiracy theories. #misinformation #criticalthinking #religion #science #reality

Falcon heavy launch stream is live: https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=ussf-67

Hummingbirds are just mini, iridescent, hovering dinosaurs with straws, prove me wrong.

I wanted to take a few moments and apologize to many of my former students.

In the past I said the industry needs people who look at security as a vocation and an avocation.

I was wrong.

Have a life outside of this industry.

Have hobbies that have nothing to do with your computer.

Get outside.

The problems of the industry are not problems of people not working hard enough.

They are not problems of people not being "hard core" enough.

They are problems of education and resource prioritization.

I was wrong.

I am sorry.

Stop breaking yourself on rocks for people who don't really care if you break yourself on rocks.

This anecdote, found in Dylan Jones's outstanding book DAVID BOWIE: THE ORAL HISTORY, might be one of the best examples I've found regarding Bowie's ability to warp reality and how we experienced it.

#DavidBowie #Bowie #music #popculture #existentialism

Spent some time yesterday watching for beavers. With winter upon us, they are less active, but yesterday I saw one beaver pop up, and apparently swim some laps? The beaver just swam back and forth 3 times in a strech of unfrozen water. Beaver exersize?

I'm sure the beaver saw me, but was not obviously bothered and swam toward me several times.

Looking forward to be able to see them doing more than swim in the spring.

#Beaver #NewHampshore #Olympus #OM1 #wildlifephotography

Niesamowite zdjęcie wykonane przez teleskop James Webb. NGC 346 w Małym Obłoku Magellana to bardzo aktywny obszar, w którym pośród kosmicznego pyłu powstają nowe gwiazdy, a wokół planety. Zdj. NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope
#PieknoNauki

Das Grünende im Welken suchen. #mosstodon

Actors in "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly" were speaking different languages because it was going to be dubbed for all markets.

Fascinating article.

https://theconversation.com/the-political-history-of-dubbing-in-films-164136

#SilentSunday

A little ambush bug, contemplating herbivory while sitting on a wingstem flower. "Hmmm. I wonder what butterflies find appealing about these things?"

#bug #bugs #hemiptera #insects #nature #photography #arthropods