szescstopni @szescstopni@social.cleverlibre.org

I love the internet

A real fascinating story of how an 81-year-old former Air Force chap had come forward to announce he saw pulsars well before they were discovered but could not talk about it for half a century until the military instruments he observed them with were decommissioned and de-classified.

In a nutshell, he was using radar for a Ballistic Missile early warning system and noticed a pulsating signal showing up in his data, which was rising 4 mins earlier each day. He asked astronomers after writing down the location, and it was the Crab Pulsar!

The woman who discovered pulsars, Dame Prof. Jocelyn Bell Burnell - agreed with his discoveries.

https://www.nature.com/articles/448974a

Sent this to our team's slack channel overnight, and my supervisor told me he and another one of our team's astronomers were the folks that the Air Force chap got in touch with!

Small world, and a nice Aussie connection!

https://pubs.aip.org/aip/acp/article-abstract/983/1/642/620966/An-Independent-1967-Discovery-of-Pulsars?redirectedFrom=PDF

#Astrodon #RadioAstronomy #Pulsars #Defence #Science

My fav webcomic of all time, https://www.questionablecontent.net/ is 20 years old today. I started reading it in Jan 2009. Time flies, and I still love it.

Kochani, w moim mieście już za niecałe 16 godzin neonaziści będą uroczyście obchodzić wybuch antyfaszystowskiego powstania, i drzeć mordy, że to wcale wtedy nie chodziło o faszyzm, tylko o gejów, szczepionki i Unię Europejską.

A co tam u Was?

A passenger airline client is developing the complicated scheduling tools to ensure that pregnant employees can minimize working in states with actively dangerous restrictions on reproductive healthcare. Pilots also need to rethink where to divert if a passenger has a prenatal medical emergency.
The nearest airports are not necessarily places where care can be provided. This is a major safety, moral, and reputational risk, and it's damned shameful that we have medical "dead zones" in America

All these video streaming services and all these algorithms and all these recommendation engines and all these hundreds of tags and all these thousands of well-paid programmers and all these scores of gullible billionaires handing over money for the CEOs to set on fire and NONE

not ONE

will tell me when an episode of a show is going to be too dark to watch on a sunny afternoon.

Checking a "is show very dark" column in a database, checking the time, then popping up "Ey up Dan, watch this one a bit later on after sunset eh, you won't be able to see a bloody thing. Look, here's this other show you've been watching, this one's proper bright, have that instead maybe?" <- TECHNOLOGY BEYOND THE WILDEST IMAGINATION OF SCIENCE FICTION APPARENTLY

I recently took an indoor training course in which I was the only one #masked. That didn’t bother me as it’s not the first time and I’ve grown quite accustomed to people’s strange looks.

What truly affected me was the sad fact that when we partnered up at the start, I was last to be picked due to my #mask.

It was clear everyone felt that if they partnered with me they’d have to mask up as well. I told the last unfortunate fellow who was forced to sit with me that was not the case, he was relieved.

Over the 2 day course I found out my new partner had already taken the same course a month previous and barely retained anything.

I was shocked by his inability to remember numbers or follow basic instructions in a timely matter. Despite this, I continuously helped him along, explaining things thoroughly through my mask. At the end he gratefully thanked me for helping him so much through the course.

Upon leaving on the last day, I overheard my former partner admitting to the teacher that since he’s had #covid (multiple times) he now has difficulty remembering things, which is affecting his studies.

So, next time you need to partner in a course don’t assume the only person masked is an incompetent fool, when it’s most probably quite the opposite.

My wife and I have managed to avoid #covid19bc thus far through maintained #masking and social #distancing. Life changed and we’ve adjusted. Masking shows our strength and resilience not our weakness.

#COVIDIsNotOver #CovidIsAirborne #CapitalismKills #BringBackMasks #masks4healthcare #Eugenics #bcpoli #cdnpoli

July 31 afternoon. Interactive #GIS map shows satellite *heat* detection for #WestHalletFire south side of Spokane WA.

Some heat detections are likely smoke in the air but not fire on the ground. But with that said, never rely on any map to ignore an order to evacuate.

Please read the “Map tips” link and “Legend” in upper left corner.
#WAfire #WAwx #wildfire #Geospatial #Maps #Mapping #Leaflet #ArcGIS #WebMap

Open #GISsurfer map:
https://mappingsupport.com/p2/gissurfer.php?center=47.610906,-117.463074&zoom=12&basemap=USA_basemap&overlay=VIIRS_7_day,MODIS_7_day,State_boundary,Wind_temperature_and_more...&data=https://mappingsupport.com/p2/special_maps/disaster/USA_wildland_fire.txt

productive procrastination: doing literally everything on my to-do list except for the one thing that is most important.

#autism #neurodivergent

As now everyone seems to be mad with that "degoogling" thing, I'll reiterate my point: I won't stop using services that are accessible and usable for me as a blind screen reader user. Period, full stop. You can be a thousand times open-source, have good intentions and be saint angels in flesh, but if your service is not accessible *and* usable by a blind user, I cannot perform my daily tasks, be it for work, hobby or leisure, hence I won't use your service. Make your services accessible and usable for everyone and then preach about degoogling, de-appling, de-microsofting and de-whatevering. #Angry #Blind #Accessibility

One of the creepier tech-related incidents I remember was many years ago when I wanted the Sam's Photofacts (a third-party creator of device specs and schematics, etc.) for a very old portable TV. Way out of date, but I was trying to help someone with it.

I mentioned to a friend that I was looking for old Photofacts, but I did not say anything about the TV. He scribbled an address on a scrap of paper, an address locally here in L.A. "Try him," he muttered.

I drive over. It's a small unmarked storefront. I go in, the bell on the door rings. Sitting inside, like the caterpillar in "Alice in Wonderland", is this little guy perched on a stool, with immense stacks of paper surrounding him everywhere. Total mayhem.

I walk up to him -- knowing that this was a waste of time and really wanting to get out of there -- and asked if he had the Sam's Photofacts for that specific very old TV model.

Without saying a word, he reached over to the pile of papers right next to him, took the TOP item off the pile, and silently handed it to me. It was the ancient one I needed. Stunned, I paid him the amount marked on the item, and left with it, not completely sure what had just happened.

When I drove by there a month later that storefront was something else entirely. He was gone.

Shout out to the DMV agent who, when my mom said no to voter registration, looked her dead in the eye and said, "They're going to take away your grandchildren's rights, you need to register." and now my mom is finally registered to vote.

Bo wiecie, że jak wyszłam z domu, to na drzwiach do klatki schodowej znalazłam kartkę, że sąsiadka znalazła klucz do samochodu, i dopiero jak tę kartę ujrzałam, to odkryłam, że nie mam swojego klucza do samochodu. Dobrze, że sąsiadka była w domu, bo inaczej bym do dupy pojechała, a nie do Żychlina.

Nie, ten klucz u sąsiadki to był ten zapasowy, pierwszy zgubiłam parę lat temu w Kielcach na parkingu, cóż to była za radość w wigilię Bożego Narodzenia jechać fliksbusami z Kielc do Warszawy po zapasowy klucz do auta i z powrotem, żeby zdążyć babcię zawieźć na kolację wigilijną i jeszcze żeby się nie zorientowała, że coś jest nie tak, bo przecież by był miesiąc histerii potem o ten zgubiony klucz.

Nie wiem, czemu to #ADHD mi tak późno zdiagnozowali, jak tak się nad tym teraz zastanawiam.

Had an interesting discussion with someone about how paperbacks aren’t worse for the environment than ebooks because of the vast amount of energy used to maintain the servers and such for ebooks. Anyone else have info on this?
#books #reading #publishing #ebooks

This is the real, human cost of mass surveillance of everyone's private digital communications.

If we actually care about keeping people safe, we need more end-to-end encryption not less.

Disengaging from Gmail is going well. It's going to be a long process, but I'm a few days into it and I'm now receiving almost no messages in my Gmail account.

My approach was to look in my password manager for the accounts I most often use, and then to visit those accounts and change the associated email addresses either to my personal or work account. (That in itself is great, because work and personal stuff was previously mixed up.)

The less access Google has to my life, the better.

Country roads are not freeways, and you simply cannot drive quickly on them. And while this seems obvious, you'd be surprised at the people who try. Better, instead, to accept them for what they are and enjoy the leisurely way they take you through the landscape. More peaceful that way.

Meandering Landscape framed print -- https://2-steve-henderson.pixels.com/featured/meandering-landscape-steve-henderson.html?product=framed-print

#landscape #rural #country #nature #outside #outdoors #art #artwork #artist #fediart #fediverse #fedigiftshop #stevehenderson #buyintoart #peace

George Takei being on mastodon while Mark Hamill sticks with Twitter is just further proof that Star Trek > Star Wars in every conceivable way.
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