Michael Porter @MichaelPorter@qoto.org

Copied from another site. 😃

Calgary concern.
Legault's language.
Word of the Year.
Thursday's #cdnpoli #media 🇨🇦 Roundup”https://www.getrevue.co/profile/davidakin/archive/1483300

A month ago I became #NewOnMastodon, still learning, but liking it more and more here.

As an #EarthSystem scientist I am fascinated about the #CarbonCycle, especially in the #ocean and how we quantify it with Earth System #models in past, present, and future climates.

#ClimateChange is essentially a #CO2 problem. It is virtually impossible to be a #ClimateScientist without becoming deeply concerned about #ClimateEmergency.

Watch this space for my extended #IntroductionPost.

This Colbert interview with Maria Ressa is short but packed with insights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpWevZ5yQz8

Maria Ressa is a journalist, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and writer of "How to Stand Up to a Dictator".

In this interview, she talks about how Facebook, Twitter, and some other forms of Social Media function as a component of Surveillance Capitalism and use their fact-distorting power to undermine democracy.

"If you don't have facts, you can't have truth.
Without truth, you can't have trust.
Without these three, you have no shared reality.
We can't solve any problems.
We have no democracy.
That's what social media has done: is has come in and used 'free speech' to stifle free speech."

#MariaRessa #Colbert #HowToStandUpToADictator #January6 #ElonMusk #Twitter #Facebook #MarkZuckerberg #SurveillanceCapitalism

All right #Mastodon, show this #twitterexodus refugee what you can do.

Walked away from 6700 followers because I won't provide content (not directly, at least) or be in the same space as a destructive & dangerous narcissist. This new (for me) place is cool but I do miss being able to post a special #nature #photograph & know it will get seen thousands of times.

I guess that's my #introduction. I rant about #covid #CovidIsNotOver & #LongCovid & I live in a beautiful place. With a foot of snow.

I want to make a test on the % reach a post can have in terms of people in other servers. Are you seeing this post on mastodon.gamedev.place or another server? (Appreciate if you can boost this).

I grew up in a place that had no tangible winter, and now home is where the bitter wind steals my breath away, but the clouds are made of neon starships. I love Northern BC. 😍​

Hello people of the Fediverse! Some of you may have heard that a new Mastodon client, Ivory,  is in development for iOS (and Mac!). This is true! Tapbots is going all in on Mastodon and we hope this place continues to grow and thrive. Tweetbot will continue to be developed alongside Ivory as a lot of code is shared. A new Mac version of Tweetbot and Ivory are also currently in development and we are working hard on getting those towards a public beta state.

John Wesley Powell and the Great Unconformity

“Everywhere there are side gulches and cañons, so that these gulches are set about ten thousand dark, gloomy alcoves. One might imagine that this was intended for the library of the gods; and it was. The shelves are not for books, but form the stony leaves of one great book. He who would read the language of the universe may dig out letters here and there, and with them spell the words, and read, in a slow and imperfect way, but still so as to understand a little, the story of creation.”
~ John Wesley Powell, Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries, pg.s 193, 194 at http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm/ref/collection/Powell/id/365

On May 24th, 1869, at the age of 35, one-armed Civil War vet and geologist John Wesley Powell led a team of eleven men into uncharted territory, the vast unknown area around the lower Colorado River. Four boats loaded with provisions, guns for hunting, and scientific instruments to map the terrain were lowered into the river. Powell set out to follow the Colorado though the Grand Canyon despite having no knowledge of what lay ahead.

“Following the twisting, tortuous river, negotiating the rough and dangerous waters, the whirlpools and rapids, Powell’s expedition made its way down through the high plateaus of eastern Utah. They were carried through the heart of colossal, soaring rocks; they exploded through canyons and over falls, roaring down the cataracts, or when possible portaging around them. Sometimes they glided around bends that revealed vistas stupendous and sublime; other times they drifted in the deep noontime shadow cast by towering canyon walls. They clambered up the cliffs, measuring and surveying.”

Before the journey ended, the party lost a boat, a third of the food, and 3 men. Despite the hardships, the intrepid explorers made one of the most important geological journeys of all time, and although Powell did not realize the significance, discovered one of Earth's greatest mysteries.

Traveling down the Colorado, the Canyon carves its way through older and older layers of rock. Powell discovered that near the very bottom of the Grand Canyon there is a place where the 575 Mya Tapeats sandstone (Cambrian) rests (unconformably) upon the highly metamorphosed rocks of the 1.7 Bya Vishnu schist (Precambrian). This gap in time (although Powell did not realize it), represents over a billion years missing from the rock record.

This “Great Unconformity” is so large that it represents a quarter of the entire time the Earth has existed. In those billion years continents shifted, mountain ranges were formed and eroded away, oceans filled and drained, massive volcanic eruptions occurred, and life itself evolved from simple single-celled organisms to highly complex organisms. But every rock that represents those events has been eroded completely away.

Please enjoy this beautifully written and wonderfully illustrated blog, Written In Stone by Dr. Jack Share, who explains how to read the “stony leaves” that Powell spoke of and explains the true mystery of the Great Unconformity and the geology of the Grand Canyon with accompanying pictures : http://written-in-stone-seen-through-my-lens.blogspot.com/2012/01/great-unconformity-of-grand-canyon-part.html

On August 30, 1869, ninety one days after they started, the Powell expedition reached the end of its journey. They had filled in the last blank spot on the nation's map. Powell became a hero, giving public lectures and speeches, and popularized the Grand Canyon with an illustrated account of his journey (link at the top of post). By the early 1880s, he was the director of the Smithsonian and the new US Geological Survey where he worked tirelessly to protect the lands around the Grand Canyon and the Native Americans who lived there.

In 1902, a year after Powell’s death, President Theodore Roosevelt visited the Grand Canyon and declared it to be "a natural wonder absolutely unparalleled in the world . . . one of the great sights every American should see." Thanks to Powell and Roosevelt, today the Grand Canyon and its Great Unconformity is part of the Grand Canyon National Park (http://www.nps.gov/grca/index.htm), preserved and protected so that all can see its beauty and learn the secrets written in the leaves of stone.

i was gonna take all my old tweets and maybe weave a rug or something idk

Tomorrow I'm giving a lecture about cosmology in astro 101, and a lecture about the Fermi Paradox in astrobiology. These lectures are both TOTALLY WILD and I am so looking forward to completely blowing my students' minds.

I can’t believe how old people my age are.

Please boost if you’re still masking indoors (in public places)

Meanwhile on Twitter:

Brian was starting to think that maybe his mom wasn’t coming back.

What idiot called that little narc Elf on the Shelf and not Police Navidad?

@MichaelPorter This seems completely broken, and reminds me of the strange behavior I started to see around iOS 7. That was rumored to be when Jony Ive took over. Before that point, every element on iOS had a Z-position, and things that were pulled up or down or over all layered in a predictable order, with UI affordances that made the order clear. That was deemed (apparently by Mr. Ive) to be too skeuomorphic and unwelcome in an all-digital world, and so the layering disappeared, and the coloring the indicating depth disappeared, and it stopped being possible to figure out what was tappable, and... whew! Bad memories.

This feels like more of that. Coloring the tabs correctly would be suggestive of the real world, and skeuomorphism is out, so instead you just have to guess that in this app, and maybe only this app, the blue text indicates the active tab. Are there only two tabs? You have a 50% chance of guessing correctly, then!

Try saying these without sounding sarcastic:

1. That's great
2. Good for you
3. Have fun
4. Fascinating
5. Thanks for that
6. Well done you
7. Good luck with that
8. Sounds thrilling
9. What a shame
10. Wow

I purchased the Humble Bundle from @neilhimself and I couldn't be happier! American Gods is one of my favorite stories and I am loving the consumption of it in graphic novel format. The charity aspect is just icing on the cake. 😀

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/neil-gaiman-dark-horse-collection-books?hmb_source=&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=mosaic_section_1_layout_index_2_layout_type_threes_tile_index_2_c_neilgaimandarkhorsecollection_bookbundle