Paul Sutton @zleap@social.cleverlibre.org

A 5000 year old Sumerian house plan displayed on a clay tablet, from Ur, Iraq. It is considered the oldest architectural plan in the world. #PastTimes

via Brian Roemmele from Twitter

I bet my girlfriend that this picture of our cats could get 10 billion boosts on Mastodon.

She said she doesn't believe me. She said there's only 13 million accounts on Mastodon. She said there aren't even 10 billion people on Earth. She said it concerns her that I struggle so hard to comprehend large numbers.

Let's prove her wrong everyone. Boost away and show her just how awesome the Mastodon community is.

Vocabulary Quiz

Which person is most likely to use the word ANTEDILUVIAN during their career?

If you don’t know take your best guess. No Googling the correct answer.

Please boost to get more responses.

Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born #OTD in 1943. As a grad student at Cambridge in 1967, she discovered an entirely new type of celestial object: Pulsars!

Photo: National Science & Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library

Is the Universe 13.8 billion or 26.7 billion years old?

It doesn't depend on who you ask.

It depends on what the Universe itself is doing.

Here are some key questions to ask, and some key pieces of evidence to look for, so you can convince yourself.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-13-8-or-26-7-billion-years/

I have finally written a utility that takes a Tiled Map Editor tileset in json format and which resets the order of the tiles in said tileset, a feature which does not exist within Tiled even though it does allow you to change the tile order*

*For clarity, I never changed the tile order, but Tiled screwed up a bunch of our legacy tilesets from previous versions when this feature got added so given there's no way to reset the order I had to write a whole ass utility to do so myself

As an American, I gotta say that I am grateful as heck to the EU. While their tech policies from recent years don't directly affect us, we are seeing benefits from the GDPR, we will be seeing benefits from the demand that handheld consoles have easily-replaceable batteries by 2027, and so on.

I wish our own government stood up for us against tech giants as much as the EU does. Though before that, we should probably get some MFers in there that know how to add an attachment to an email by themselves.

Today in terrifying premonitions of the future, it's...
https://mastodon.social/@jayrosen_nyu/110731363167140823

@mcnees At Ohio State last year we unveiled the first planetarium show on Georges Lemaitre. I totally forgot it was his birthday!
https://planetarium.osu.edu/events/georges-lemaitre-and-discovery-expanding-universe

people confuse formality and professionalism. you only gotta watch one really good plumber work to understand that professionalism is about commitment to doing the job well. many times, like in software leadership, the job is communication, so sometimes formality helps diverse people understand each other. it's still just a tool, and frequently in the real world the only correct question to ask is what the everliving fuck is going on

Hey there, fellow fediversians, I need some help! 🙏

I am trying to increase the #diversity of authors I reference in my lectures 💪

I teach #SoftwareArchitecture and #SoftwareTesting, so if you have books/authors on these subjects that you'd recommend, and that are written by #women, please let me know! 🗣️

Boosts for reachability very much appreciated!!

This is astonishing coverage of the #ClimateCrisis from the Guardian. Typhoons, heatwaves, and wildfires from all over the northern hemisphere are brought together in a stark vision of the current crisis.

How does #ClimateChange manifest itself? Like Hemingway's bankruptcy: gradually, and then suddenly.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/live/2023/jul/17/europe-heatwave-2023-us-asia-heat-extreme-severe-weather-fires-flash-floods-flooding-record-breaking-heat-wave-stress-temperature-red-alert-climate-crisis

#heatwave #wildfire

The work of Edwin Hubble, Vesto Slipher, Annie Jump Cannon, Milton Humason, and others eventually established a clear relationship between galactic distance and redshift. Between that and scientists like Eddington promoting Lemaître's idea, Einstein came around and agreed that our Universe must be dynamical and expanding.