Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
Link: The Giants of California: How Redwoods and Whales Got So Big
It isn’t happenstance that California and the waters off our coast are home to these giants. As the new exhibit explains, bigness emerges partly from the particulars of life here – the ocean currents and our famous fog.
A little perspective on “civility” from @TheOnion https://theonion.com/tips-for-staying-civil-while-debating-child-prisons-1827147411/
For some reason I’m reminded of the dragon weyr ground support crew seeking out missed patches of thread and spraying them with agenothree:
Organic Farmers Are Using Flamethrowers to Weed Their Fields via @atlasobscura
Weird, I was just talking about this a few days ago.
When Researchers Used IHOP to Determine if Kansas Is Flatter Than a Pancake via @atlasobscura
First post at #pixelfed. Very basic so far, but it works. Looking forward to seeing how it shapes up!
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I’m sure it will be *impossible* to hack these “digital license plates” into showing a fake number. No risk of that whatsoever. 🤔
Perfect to go with traffic jam on a rocky road.
12 Tons of Liquid Chocolate Have Blocked a Polish Highway
All aspiring Augustus Gloops should report to Poland.
Voters across party lines overwhelmingly approve of #NetNeutrality: 86% of all voters polled, 82% of Republicans. That’s not a partisan issue.
But congress is treating it as one, which is absurd.
Bring this up the next time the assholes who support this cruelty claim to be pro-family, or that they give a shit about children.
Cool: A simulation of what a 22 degree halo *during* a total solar eclipse would look like. It turns out it’s not just the brightness that would differ, because the corona’s a ring, not a disc!
Double the fun: Appearance of the 22° halo during a total solar eclipse – Halo Phenomena
At the Arbeitskreis Meteore (AKM) spring meeting in March 2018, we discussed an observation made by Jörg Strunk during the “US eclipse” from August 21st, 2017: A 22° halo was visible in cirrus clouds around the sun up to around half a minute before the onset of totality. Similar observations…
This is promising: SmugMug has bought Flickr & plans to “maintain Flickr as a standalone community of amateur and professional photographers and give the long neglected service the focus and resources it deserves.” (quote from article)
Now I don’t have to worry about Verizon shutting it down!
Exclusive: Flickr bought by SmugMug, which vows to revitalize the photo service
And the Flickr Q&A
Exploiting floating point errors for free energy is a good one. And lots of cases where the problem wasn’t defined precisely enough, and the simulation solved it in a completely different way than was expected.
“Sometimes I think the surest sign that we’re not living in a computer simulation is that if we were, some microbe would have learned to exploit its flaws.”
Machine learning algorithms are not like other computer programs. In the usual sort of programming, a human programmer tells the computer exactly what to do. In machine learning, the human programmer merely gives the algorithm the problem to be solved, and through trial-and-error the algorithm has t…
Finally, Instagram will allow you to download an archive of your account. We’ll have to wait to see how useful it is (ex: can you easily find the caption from a photo, or do you have to search a giant HTML file with everything in it?)
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17226186/instagram-download-data-facebook
Indications are that indigenous people were actually managing the Amazon rain forest in ancient times.
Archaeologists discover 81 ancient settlements in the Amazon
A growing body of research suggests that the “pristine” rain forest was actually carefully managed by indigenous people for hundreds of years.
This is pretty cool: Firefox has a new extension that isolates your Facebook session from the rest of your browsing. That way Facebook isn’t able to track you as you visit every website that happens to have a Like button or embedded FB comments.
Facebook still knows what you do *on* FB, but this cuts down on their ability to track you elsewhere.
Facebook Container Extension: Take control of how you’re being tracked – The Firefox Frontier
The Facebook container extension helps you control more of your web activity from Facebook by isolating your identity into a separate container. This makes it harder for Facebook to track your activity on other websites via third-party cookies.
Interesting article on ways Los Angeles can source more of its water locally in the future.
Stormwater capture is a big one. In the early 20th century, the area built a flood control system to deal with the massive deluges that hit every decade or so, but during off years (and especially during drought years) it only serves to flush water out to sea that we’d be better off using to replenish reservoirs or ground water.
How Los Angeles Could Source its Water Locally
A new report challenges the city to think bigger about its plans to source more water locally.
note: combine with third 1000-year-storm when importing.
A binary star system passed within one light year of our solar system only 70,000 years ago. It may have jostled a bunch of comets out of their orbits at the time.
Did a close pass by an alien star system millennia ago rain down comets on the solar system?
“Unsurprisingly, the beverage [spruce beer] tastes a lot like drinking a Christmas tree.”
So, basically like a hoppy IPA?
Because that’s what you really mean when you say you want to arm teachers.
“When should a teacher shoot a student?” — by Tobias Stone