George Budd @Gbudd@qoto.org

One of the greatest things I've learned as I've gotten older is that you don't have to be good at everything and that, in fact, being mediocre at just a TON of shit is super fun.

You can learn a little about a ton of stuff and then decide if you want to make that time commitment that it takes to make you actually good. You can dance around stuff and put it down and come back to it and whatever.

It's very freeing. I wish I'd learned it earlier.

Loops of superheated plasma larger than the Earth dancing across the Sun, recorded by the Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft. #AltText4Me

Credit: SDO/NASA Goddard
Further reading: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/news/coronal-rain.html

Defending Nazi memorabilia or artifacts or whatever the hell by citing an “appreciation for history” rings hollow when you spend your free time at school board meetings screaming at teachers for having the audacity to teach your white child about American slavery and Jim Crow.

Excellent timing that a 21 year-old cis, straight white guy Air National Guardsman who makes videos of himself shooting guns while shouting racist and antisemitic epithets is behind the massive intel documents leak on Discord while Republicans claim, without evidence, that trans folks are bad for military readiness.

👋 Hello #fediverse! I'm going into a meeting at 4ET to talk about our newsroom's social media options.

If you think our station and other NPR stations should have a Mastodon server and a broader presence in the #fediverse, pls boost this post. If you have thoughts, please reply, I want to hear them!

"This afternoon, conservative campus group Intercollegiate Studies Institute reached out to offer me $10,000 to debate Michael Knowles at the University of Pittsburgh on the validity of trans people."

https://charlotteclymer.substack.com/p/why-i-declined-10000-to-debate-michael

“The most brilliant Love Ninja strategy I have ever encountered “

“Every Friday, Chase’s teacher asks students to take a piece of paper and write the names of 4 children with whom they’d like to sit the following week. She also asks students to nominate 1 student they believe has been an exceptional citizen. Ballots are privately submitted.

After students go home, she takes out those slips, places them in front of her and studies them. She looks for patterns.”

https://doamm.com/2023/04/10/the-most-brilliant-love-ninja-strategy-i-have-ever-encountered/

Speaking of telephony experience, I just used a kick meter to estimate the amount of cat 6 cable left in a box.

TDRs are for the weak.

There are no sea shells in the deepest parts of the ocean (at least not big enough for us to see). Shells are mostly made out of calcium carbonate, and beneath 4-5 km depth in the ocean (the Challenger Deep is ~10,902m) the pressure makes the calcium carbonate dissolve. Marine snail shells falling from above will never reach the seafloor – they’ll just dissolve on the way. Anything living in the depths will never see a snail, and only silica-based shells will survive.  #ocean #snails

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is #caturday!

[do you even need the sound on?]

#cats #cat #castodon #catsofmastodon #humor #humour #funny

Fascinating.

How to Beat Roulette: One Gambler Figured It Out and Won Big https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-how-to-beat-roulette-gambler-figures-it-out/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-how-to-beat-roulette-gambler-figures-it-out/?leadSource=uverify%20wall

@johoda@snowdin.town Do you know that many engineers use Excel to solve differential equations via millions of cells for real projects? The amount of engineering done in Excel is just terrifying.

And so you beg, and plead, and pray that they let you use anything other than fucking microsoft access and excel to post process that finite element data, but haha, you silly mortal, God is dead. Trying to perform 9by9 matrix operations sixteen times columnwise on 700 gb of data using only microsoft excel is like trying to fit a hippopotamus turd through the drain in a studio apartment shower.

#warrenzevon

Every #raccoon is either planning a heist or in the middle of a heist.

#raccoons #animals #meme #memes

https://imgur.io/gallery/JofVmoB

best use of #thermochromics ever:

Aw… 📚🔦

Kentucky Republicans voted to override Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto -

This means republicans have effectively forced children to detransition while increasing their rates of suicide by 70%

No gender affirming care. No puberty blockers. No choice in which restroom to use

When a republican talks about protecting children…

They’re the party of child labor. The party of keeping child marriage. The party of demonizing certain children to force their agenda.

#TransRightsAreHumanRights

one strategy we've been using recently for getting unstuck writing a zine is -- write a talk instead! Gave two talks ("how integers work" and "how floating point works") to a small friendly audience recently and it was really fun and helped me see how to improve some of the explanations

Have you ever said to yourself, “Self, I want to hear Pachelbel’s Canon played on train horns?” WELL THEN DO I HAVE A LINK FOR YOU. (From my Discord server, because we’re all mad there…) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD3QlR98--A