Reach for the Stars @antares@qoto.org

This is a language anti-pattern that needs to be called out and dissuaded:

* An important social or scientific concept with a precise meaning that would take a journal article to explain gets a vernacular short hand because social media has character limits.
* The vernacular term gets reinterpreted by its opponents to be as broad and general as possible completely ignoring the fact that it is simply a linguistic tag for a very precise phenomena.
* Someone with "expertise" in the field than makes a viral post about how absurd the broadened term is completely ignoring the original precise meaning.

Watching the temperature hold at exactly 100 C as all the water from last weeks rainstorm evaporates. #science

Attempting one last #BBQ for the year before it becomes too wet cold and dark.

#dinner #grilling

This is the beauty of #FOSS. If you disagree you can fork the code and fix it.

Place your bets on Tuesday's #FalconHeavy launch. Success is defined as payload reaching intended orbit.

As we come up to the #midterms #elections in the US, I have a thought: We cannot stop the wave of political advertising, but could we tax it heavily? Maybe use the revenue to even out election funding, or have a nice pot of general fund money waiting for the winners. #Politics

So apparently the only thing people talk about on this sight is leaving twitter. #TwitterMigration. Look folks, if this is going to be an alternative to that bird app you got to bring some content.

Waiting on #Kershaw to break the #Dodgers all time strike out record.

While we watch and wait let us remember with pride Don Sutton who in a land of all stars was the quiet consistent working man who went out ever 5th day and did his job for 23 seasons.

Looking at the amazing images from #JWST. It is an amazing instrument that will expand our understanding of the universe.

Because of cost and complexity it will be a singular unique resource to the scientific community. I wonder if #Astronomy could also benefit from a constellation of less ambitious but more numerous space-born instruments that could vastly expand the non-terrestrial telescope time available.

What science could be done with 20, 30 or more telescopes sized to be placed into orbit on a Falcon 9? #SpaceX could be asked to fund the launches as an offset for the light pollution caused by #Starlink, perhaps? What would it look like if most major Universities could afford to run their own space telescope, even if a more limited instrument than JWST? we've seen what a 10-fold reduction in access to LEO has done for terrestrial observation, what can be done with space observation if it doesn't take years of government funding to make it happen?

There is a similar issue with track classes (placing students in learning setting with those of similar skill levels). When done with care and equity it helps both high and low achieving students learn and stay engaged, but in practice it is never done right.

Engaged parents push their children into advanced classes they are not actually suited for, while otherwise gifted students are held back not because they lack skill or learning, but because they lacked opportunity or were actively discriminated against.

In actual practice, tracking does more harm than good, and I can see an argument that using medication to try to solve behavioral issues that have their roots in social and cultural factors can be just as harmful.

There are real people who have real medical issues who are helped by drugs like #Welbutrin and #Adderall. There are also people who have a completely normal problem with sitting in a classroom for 6 hours that is not a medical problem. Our issue is that our society dose a piss poor job distinguishing the two.

This is the summation par excellence of my social media experience.

Observation from my 30 years of Lay church leadership: We have gone through repeated cycles of discovering that not everyone in our congregations agrees on an issue, choosing the "right" side on that issue, and watching the rest leave, then asking why we are so few.

The "right" response to COVID is just the most recent iteration of that cycle. People apparently cannot pray with others who have a different take on mask mandates and vaccinations now.