Today we celebrate the birthday of not one, but two amazing women in science! 🤗🎉Marie Skłodowska-Curie (1867), who discovered #radium & #polonium & pioneered #radioactivity, & Lise Meitner (1878), whose brilliance uncovered the physics behind #nuclearfission. Happy birthday! #OTD #WomenInStem #WomeninScience
Despite the virtue-signalling of the palm oil certification body the RSPO, Mondelez’s so-called “sustainable” palm oil is linked to 37.000ha of palm oil deforestation since 2016 (…
Threats to conservation from artificial-intelligence-generated wildlife images and videos
"Three distinctive characteristics of contemporary society can exacerbate this issue: the pervasive use of social media, anthropomorphizing of animal behavior, and disconnection from nature."
Which is different from #AI as #ML. In our nature park we try to reconnect children with nature via technics: on excursions in the forest etc. they may use their ID-Apps (which work with AI!) ... and many know more about species than their parents.
#India’s fifty year long Project #Tiger has been a successful conservation project. A new research study finds that protecting tigers and their rainforest home has additional benefits to #car…
Yes, but... the mental age of Americans writ large seems to be < 35 y.o. Sadly. That aside (in a bell curve, 50% ARE "of average intelligence) the average voter today is saturated in propaganda, both blatant and subliminal. Scary time.
This week in Linux, I'm back! Well kind of. I'm still recovering but I wanted to try. I dont know when TWIL will come back on a weekly basis but I wanted to at least start the process ... especially since Linux news has been INSANE since I've been gone!
For a while now Valve have been tweaking Steam store pages, including making them a fair bit wider which is now actually live everywhere for all users.
Good! I'm so tired of the awful web design trend that is skinny narrow maximum width pages. Mastodon is guilty of this trend. I have almost four thousand pixels and so many sites are using maybe a quarter of them tops. It's comical how little screen space modern sites use. Like sure, design a mobile layout that fits on phones, but also make a desktop layout that actually utilizes the majority of the screen.
Mientras el gobernador de Chiapas, Eduardo Ramírez Aguilar, presume que es el “segundo estado más seguro del país”, las agresiones contra defensores, periodistas y activistas aumentaron 29% en lo que va del año 2025, revela un informe elaborado por el Observatorio de Personas Defensoras de Derechos Humanos en Chiapas (El Obse).
Morrowind just got even better with the new OpenMW 0.50.0 release, the free and open source game engine reimplementation has some big fancy new features.
Perched on delicate leaves above rushing mountain streams, Centrolene savagei is a rare frog of wonder. The Savage’s Glass Frog, also known as the Savage’s Cochran Frog has translucent …
I'm in the middle of throwing a log on the bonfire crowdfunding campaign. This is one of the most important, creative, and principled projects in open social media. I can't wait to see it flourish! Join me. From: @bonfire indieweb.social/@bonfire/11550…
Bonfire Social 1.0 is live! A federated, community‑first social network built on the modular Bonfire toolkit, and it’s only the beginning.
It's time to go beyond microblogging and build apps for community organising, open science, mutual aid, and collective decision‑making. Let's take back the internet with open protocols, consent‑based governance, and portability by design.
Bonfire Social 1.0 is live! A federated, community‑first social network built on the modular Bonfire toolkit, and it’s only the beginning.
It's time to go beyond microblogging and build apps for community organising, open science, mutual aid, and collective decision‑making. Let's take back the internet with open protocols, consent‑based governance, and portability by design.
With the Prime Gaming branding being retired, you now claim your monthly Amazon Prime games via Amazon Luna - here's what you can expect for November 2025.
"The moment of discovery" does not always exist: the scientist's work is too tenuous, too divided, for the certainty of success to crackle out suddenly in the midst of his laborious toil like a stroke of lightening, dazzling him by its fire.
In: Eve Curie - Madame Curie - Chapter XII (p. 158)
This study by my colleagues at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa shows that deep sea mining waste to be released near the ocean surface would disrupt marine food webs.
The same would be true of grinding and spreading rocks in the ocean for CO₂ removal.
Deep-sea mining in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone may release waste into midwaters that support diverse marine life. This study finds such discharges could dilute key food particles and disrupt trophic links from zooplankton to large marine predators.
Valve popularized loot boxes in games in the West, which led many young people to casino analogues, but you still continue to use and advertise their product.
Beta: Dublin's festival of art and technology launches its 2025 edition today. I'll be presenting some work about the historical politics of subsea cable infrastructure at a panel discussion. My slot is in the conference tomorrow if anyone is in #dublin
Introducing the octopus piano played by (well obviously) an octopus, though it took a while… This was a rather enjoyable video on a weird but oddly wonderful experimental musical project. And of course, I'm sitting here thinking about #ethnomusicology and various pedagogies around the world now. It's really not that far off from how very young children learn and put things together, though usually not involving cross-species interaction. #Music #Piano #Octopus youtube.com/watch?v=PcWnQ7fYzw…
The amount of desktop customizations someone does is inversely correlated to 3 factors:
1. How much free time someone has. 2. How many ducks they give. 3. How un-aligned a chosen distro is with ones tastes.
My advice: pick a distro where their defaults are to your taste. Mint for me is it. i think there are only about 4 settings i tweak before I'm delighted with a fresh Mint box. I wish some other distros would take notes.
I didn't change much (NixOS, Gnome, Wayland): - Use tokyo-city-dark theme globally (stylix). - Prefer dark colour scheme (gdm). - Hide gnome top-bar when a window touches it / overlaps (gnome extension). - Add key binding (ctrl+alt+t) to launch kgx terminal (gnome setting).
I configure my system from a flake as well which is versioned on GitHub, so initial setup, including installed packages, bash aliases, etc, can all be restored easily in case my SSD craps out or something.
What is that red instrument that looks like a cross between a melted, twisted plumbing pipe and a clarinet? (It can be seen at around 2:25 in the video.)
That certainly is an odd variant of a clarinet. I only see one rocker-valve and it appears to have been designed for comfortable holding and fingering by bending the bore of the instrument. I have not found another one, yet.
Rylance is not a political expert, it is true. The sortition group is relying on his good reputation as a human being as a means to get people to listen. However, people in the UK and Australia have had opportunities to experience governmental deliberating bodies formed through sortition for themselves. Anyone who has participated would have good insights. My local council when I lived in Hurstbridge did this. It was pretty cool! The question is: how many people would listen to another ordinary citizen?
@Muse My experience in ICANN with decisions by self-formed gatherings of people is very mixed. I find that if the gathering is mostly electronic, where people have not met physically face to face and shared a meal or a drink, do not work all that well. But if people do meet and get to know one another (my metric there's been enough contact if I can put a voice to the text I am reading) than people can get past the normal presumed hostility/insult of much online discussion.
I've also found that most people are woefully uneducated about law, procedure, and often about the matter being discussed.
I think that to do this we need to resurrect the old discipline of rhetoric in our schools. People ought to learn how to create concise, comprehensible, and persuasive written and spoken (and video) arguments. And contrary-wise, how to understand what the other person is saying (and to understand that people do misspeak or that different people use words in different ways without knowing it.)
@Karl Auerbach YES! If we want a truly democratic government, then we must have adequate education.
I personally wouldn't go with 100% sortition. In the UK they want to get rid of the House of Lords, replacing it with a House of Sorittion, and leave in tact the House of Commons. The thing is, a certain amount of being a part of the legislative public service is just going through bureaucratic maintenance on a day to day level. Someone has to do the paperwork. Someone has to understand some very specific systems. For Washington State I just voted in a guy who is going to be in charge of sewerage.
Oh and...most elective officials don't have broad understanding of legal and national issues. So, they all have legislative assistants. They also all sit in on sessions where people come in to present information about the issues. Andrew has made presentations in Australian Parliament on issues to do with online freedom of speech as part of the EFA. This would be no different for members of a House of Sortition.
@Muse - I have interacted with a lot of elected officials. Most are dummies who are really good at chatting-up voters. I've met and worked with some who are great - like Zoe Lofgren, Tom Campbell - but they are exceptions.
Working directly with legislators or their staff can be hard - it's hard even to get in the door. On both voting system matters and ICANN I did get through the doors. After about a year working together one US Senator even let me write questions for him to ask other witnesses at a hearing where I also testified. And Tom Campbell and I walked the Capital Mall in DC for a couple of hours while we chatted about the basis and structure of internet governance.) California's Secretary of State came to my house to chat over open voting matters.
(I can't express the joy that I felt when at one hearing I got to put down a Senator who was being oppressively jerkish and condescending. I think I saw angry steam come out of his ears.)
It was fun in that my
... show more
@Muse - I have interacted with a lot of elected officials. Most are dummies who are really good at chatting-up voters. I've met and worked with some who are great - like Zoe Lofgren, Tom Campbell - but they are exceptions.
Working directly with legislators or their staff can be hard - it's hard even to get in the door. On both voting system matters and ICANN I did get through the doors. After about a year working together one US Senator even let me write questions for him to ask other witnesses at a hearing where I also testified. And Tom Campbell and I walked the Capital Mall in DC for a couple of hours while we chatted about the basis and structure of internet governance.) California's Secretary of State came to my house to chat over open voting matters.
(I can't express the joy that I felt when at one hearing I got to put down a Senator who was being oppressively jerkish and condescending. I think I saw angry steam come out of his ears.)
It was fun in that my employer at the time, Cisco, was really jealous that I seemed to have some better contacts into Congress and the media than the company's professional lobbyists.
On the other hand, I remember a dinner with a Senator's staff at a very fancy Pennsylvania Ave watering hole and restaurant. It was like a West Wing with the sign bit flipped - there was a lot of physical touchy-feely stuff. I was surprised that the female waiters at the restaurant refrained from slugging the staffers, or pouring drinks in their laps; they would have been justified.
There is also a lot of fear among legislators and many others that technical things are so delicate that any change will collapse the universe as we know it.
Had I taken that job at NTIA I would have been the President's liaison to Congress about early Internet issues. (My job interview was to rewrite a presidential position paper on computer privacy.) I've always regretted that I had to turn it down because it would have uprooted the career of my significant other.
My concern about lack of expertise - often coupled to an unwillingness to acknowledge that one lacks understanding of an issue and to take the time/effort to learn - is more intense down at level of citizens who have a life to lead in addition to influencing policy. I often run into people who are so lacking in education that they do not comprehend the difference between our criminal and civil legal systems.
@Karl Auerbach I know a little whereof you speak! For nearly twenty years I wrote policy for the Australian Democrats (no relation to the US Democratic Party). Andrew and I started by both being in their computing and technology policy group. At one point that group dissolved, I don't remember why. However, I continued to help write policy for other areas as well. Eventually, I was their lead policy writer--but that happened because by then they were struggling and I was still there.
@Muse - Wow, trying to come up with computing/tech policy must have been hair raising. Not just the policy but also the task of expressing it in ways that can be understood by non tech people.
Policy design is hard!!! Writing it down is hard too.
But the hardest writing is legislation. Wow, that is hard. The biggest one I did was an anti-smoking proposition that may have ended up on the California ballot (it was so long ago that I really don't remember.)
When I did that job interview in which I rewrote a presidential position paper I began by tossing the prior draft almost entirely. The old draft was too detailed and left too many voids that would become loopholes. So I began with broad principles and then punched very selective holes. (I did this all at a bar on K Street in DC - all handwritten.)
I once proposed a kind of language to be used for writing statutes and contracts - my notion was based on formal programming languages. And for parts of statutes/
... show more
@Muse - Wow, trying to come up with computing/tech policy must have been hair raising. Not just the policy but also the task of expressing it in ways that can be understood by non tech people.
Policy design is hard!!! Writing it down is hard too.
But the hardest writing is legislation. Wow, that is hard. The biggest one I did was an anti-smoking proposition that may have ended up on the California ballot (it was so long ago that I really don't remember.)
When I did that job interview in which I rewrote a presidential position paper I began by tossing the prior draft almost entirely. The old draft was too detailed and left too many voids that would become loopholes. So I began with broad principles and then punched very selective holes. (I did this all at a bar on K Street in DC - all handwritten.)
I once proposed a kind of language to be used for writing statutes and contracts - my notion was based on formal programming languages. And for parts of statutes/contracts that are repetitious I wanted textual subroutines that could be invoked with parameters. It was an idea that never got off the ground.
The US Congress has a book of rules about how structure, syntax, grammer, and even naming of bills. For instance their are rules about whether citations are absolute or relative. And there are rules about how to quote things - especially nested quoting.
But those rules leave a lot of room for ambiguity. My hobbyhorse is the word "notwithstanding". It is supposed to mean exactly what its components mean "not withstanding". But others used it as "despite". So "A notwithstanding B" should result in B, but many people will conclude that A prevails.
"A, B notwithstanding" is, to me, more clear and it results in A.
Often statutes are really sloppy about nested if-then-else sequences. And the Oxford comma ought to be observed to improve clarity.
To me this all argues for a formalized syntax and grammar that is very clear about nesting, conditional, and groupings (perhaps even ordered vs unordered groupings).
(There also ought to be GIT type machinery to keep track of changes and differences, and proposals for change.)
Welcome to the House Office of the Legislative Counsel Guide to Legislative Drafting. The purpose of this online guide is to provide an overview of the drafting style and conventions used by the House Office of the Legislative Counsel in order to fac…
Just saw a guy absolutely nail Yukon Cornelius—'Sil-verrrr!' His wild imitation had me laughing out loud. Instant flashback to cozy '60s TV nights, stop-motion puppets, and misfit dreams. Pure nostalgic joy! pic.twitter.
MFierst
in reply to Eugen Rochko • • •Very nice.
I can almost touch the branches. Lovely how they are isolated from the background.
Enric
in reply to Eugen Rochko • • •