I won #nanowrimo. back to your regular science/life programming
this is a writing blog for however long I make it into #nanowrimo, maybe just like 2 days. I'm not into splitting accounts. unfollow if bored, refollow if i get over it in a week, whatever
#introduction
#phd student in one area of #physics, forever trying to understand all of it. #math spectator.
also posts about #running, #mushrooms I find, #lit
#trans #gay scientist
SFFBookClub February poll
Choose a book for #SFFBookClub to read next month: https://doodle.com/poll/ykutt6dgh8zq8exy
I'll close the poll some time on the weekend. Replies to advocate for a book you're interested in are very welcome; please also use the hashtag so more people see them.
Pandemic, horrible hot take
Remember folks: It's not just the pandemic that is making things so bad for so many people. Most problems are just amplified by it. Those problems won't go away as soon as everyone is vaccinated or the virus magically disappears. They will become visible again when the next crisis hits. We should see the end of the pandemic as an opportunity to fix things before shit hits the fan again.
After the violent events at the US Capitol the question isn’t how monopolist social media platforms should wield their power - the question is whether they should have such power in the first place.
We should break down the walls of social media monopolists, regulate them, and make monetising toxic engagement spilling into public discourse as onerous as dumping toxic waste into a river.
https://redecentralize.org/blog/2021/01/18/centralization-is-a-danger-to-democracy.html
if you're white and you use the internet, you have a duty to ensure that the spaces you are in are not a safe space for white supremacists. no, "oh but I like this person and they've never done anything in MY group" -- listen to us. listen to what we have to say. report people to the mods or if it's an ongoing problem, *leave the fucking group and let people know why you're leaving*.
make mods explain their decisions. make it uncomfortable. make it weird.
it's the LEAST you can do.
"deep biosphere":
Life in Deep Earth Totals 15 to 23 Billion Tonnes of Carbon—Hundreds of Times More than Humans
🤯
https://deepcarbon.net/life-deep-earth-totals-15-23-billion-tonnes-carbon
#mosstodon Before the shutdowns, I studied mosses! Here are some shots from when we were looking for a rare sphagnum.
transphobia
<< As a discipline, philosophy has gotten away with not talking about academic ethics because it is in general rare that our work has serious practical implications. Here, the possible consequences are chilling. Creating a public perception of trans people as fundamentally unreasonable and unreliable is a very serious harm. Convincing institutional bodies that the actual research, the actual evidence, cannot be trusted is a very serious harm. Convincing parents to pursue conversion therapy for their trans kid, against the advice of every serious professional body, is a very serious harm. Doing a priori psychology about what treatment vulnerable teenagers should receive and then reporting it to the public as though it is based on anything other than your imagination is a real violation of basic academic ethics. We have to take this seriously. >>
I'm thinking we should start a hashtag for calming photos of moss.
How does #Mosstodon sound to you all? 😁 Come join us! 🌱
Here's another photo, for luck! 🍀
another reason I'm feeling scrambled is it's been too icy for #running
so i recently gained the remarkable ability to listen to podcasts and i'm catching up on peter adamson's "history of philosophy without any gaps" (https://historyofphilosophy.net), an ambitious 10-year-old project to cover the entire worldwide history of philosophy. currently it's at the western european renaissance, and there are parallel series covering islamic, byzantine, indian, and african philosophical traditions. i assume china will eventually happen.
anyway, i'm at the episode on zeno of elea (https://historyofphilosophy.net/zeno_melissus), and in case anyone didn't know, @darius has made a game about zeno's famous paradox: http://tinysubversions.com/game/zeno/
(be patient, it takes a while to load)
uspol, twitter
fyi: they banned trump from twitter because it was no longer profitable for them to keep him on the platform, not because he incited violence.
it's a side effect of him inciting that violence: the fact that advertisers no longer want to affiliate themself with violence (specifically against white people).
corporations act in their own self interest, and that self-interest is profit.