Curmudgeon @Curmudgeon@qoto.org

Did you watch the "Kevin McCarthy's tormentors" this week?

I did. During which I kept thinking of this piece published in the Washington Post in 2012 by Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story.html

It's difficult to describe how utterly establishment Mann and Ornstein were at the time. One was at Brookings, the other at American Enterprise Institute.

They saw what was happening: The GOP's attack on all institutions. The press didn't want to know. Now it does.

#journalism #uspolitics

John Boehner is *really* enjoying that merlot tonight

Making music is fun.. 😅

Real Life Peter Griffin: The Only Good YouTuber

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSQV7ZPR3b8&ab_channel=LittleJoel

From one #developer to another #developer! Happy #NewYear

I cannot keep this to myself. There is a website (radio.garden) where you can listen to radio stations all over the world for free. No log in. No email address. Nothing.

When the site loads, you are looking at the globe. Slide the little white circle over the green dots (each green dot is a radio station) until you find one you like.

I have been listening to this station in the Netherlands and it absolutely slaps. I have no idea what they're saying but the music is fantastic.

~3,700 years ago in ancient Babylon, someone approximated the square root of 2 to the equivalent of 6 decimal digits (they used the sexagesimal system back then, so base 60) 1.414213.

How they did it is explained here: https://ipch.yale.edu/news-events/3d-print-ancient-history-one-most-famous-mathematical-texts-mesopotamia

#Science #Math #History #Archaeology

This George Santos guy seems maybe a little sketchy to me, I don't know.

Like someone asked an AI what it would be like if cryptocurrency ran for office.

A full rotation of the Moon in high resolution created from photos captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft.

Source: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200719.html

Credit: LRO/ASU/NASA

Even if you removed all of the alt-right stuff coming from the owner of Twitter, I would still not be interested in it simply because of Twitter Blue being prioritized in replies and timeline.

This choice means that buying Blue is essentially the same as buying Google Ads to get priority in search results.

It makes the entire platform hollow. A person's follower count, likes, etc. are not a reflection of the content they produce, but a reflection of the fact that they purchased ad space.

To me that makes Twitter no longer a social network. It's now a marketing platform, plain and simple. And I'm a human, not a marketer, I want to connect with other humans. I want to see content because other people found it to be interesting.

A snowflake in macro ❄️❄️❄️Photo by Alexey Kljatov ❄️❄️❄️ #geometryinnature

Please buy my new book: “How To Get Organized and Create the Most Effective To-Do-Lists as an Advanced Form of Procrastination”

One thing that Mastodon newcomers may not realize is how easy it is to turn Mastodon for web into essentially a Tweetdeck clone, with columns for search/compose, home, notifications, and any lists you've set up. It takes literally seconds.

Here's what mine looks like right now:

EXCLUSIVE: TikTok Spied On Forbes Journalists https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/12/22/tiktok-tracks-forbes-journalists-bytedance/?sh=33bdad8d7da5

The accounts were tracked down by @danielschuman and we're maintaining them in the legislator database at https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators/.

Free for the taking: Here's 30 days of reading at The Washington Post: https://wapo.st/30daypass?code=GVB-UNX-KVU-MAV

follow our reporters:
@drewharwell
@geoffreyfowler
@databae
@willoremus
@cqz
@rachellerman
@nitashatiku
@heatherkelly
@jeremybmerrill
@hamzashaban
@cristianolima
@alyssafowers
@gbrockell
@tonyromm
@Shira

Everybody's gonna find their own way on here, but in case helpful to any other relative newcomers...

I had avoided using tools like Movetodon that let you easily follow all your Twitter follows, bc I wanted to start fresh.

But I was finding it a bit quiet, so today I used Movetodon and sorted the list to show the most recently active users at the top. I selectively followed about 100 of those, and now my Mastodon feed is much livelier. https://www.movetodon.org/

It's hard to overstate the extent to which the FBI-Twitter-Hunter Biden narrative promoted by Musk depends on narrative over evidence. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/20/twitter-fbi-story-relies-far-more-insinuation-than-evidence/