Mike Agg has moved @countingquoll@qoto.org

hey sorry I missed your text, I am processing a non-stop 24/7 onslaught of information with a brain designed to eat berries in a cave

#NASA has sworn in Charity Weeden as associate administrator for NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy.

Look very closely at the book she's swearing in on.

#science #NewSpace

Who new?

@purplepadma We’ve had 20mph limits on many city roads for years now here in Edinburgh. Not everyone obeys them, but many of us do - enough that fatalities are significantly down compared to the old 30mph limit.

It’s no big deal. You just go slower. It’s peaceful. You get used to it. Going at 30mph feels wild and dangerous now.

Sabine Hossenfelder tried to use the story of penicillin to prove her thesis that capitalism leads to scientific progress. Here, I quote Ernst Chain, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on penicillin, to prove her wrong. https://skepchick.org/2023/09/sabine-is-wrong-again-capitalism-wouldve-killed-penicillin/

So much of conferences involve being in busy noisy rooms and busy noisy rooms make me feel very very bad. I literally can't eat lunch in our "staff room" at work because it's a big glass echo chamber and submitting myself to that every day would upset me.

I talk about these things so people can maybe get an idea of how neurodivergent folk in academia (and beyond) can be silently struggling. I will continue to talk about these things even though I don't like doing it very much. :)

(3/3) Policymakers must understand that an annual vaccination program (as with influenza) is inadequate.

Offering people the chance to get vaccinated against new strains of SARS-CoV-2 every 6 months would be more realistic.

But vaccination alone won’t stop COVID-19.

We must make the buildings in which we live and work more robust to the threat of airborne disease.

Ventilation and air filtration (which don’t inconvenience anyone) are key to managing COVID-19 and other respiratory pathogens.

Sanitize your youtube links!

Stolen from gryphoneer

@GottaLaff Let this not only be a reminder of how bad things are in America. Let it also remind you that Facebook raided the private messages of this woman and her daughter and gave the info freely to the government. Cancel FB, insta, TikTok, and Twitter immediately.

Sunak haeds for the the gutter as Packham takes the lead: a tale of two climate interventions https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2023/09/21/sunak-haeds-for-the-the-gutter-as-packham-takes-the-lead-a-tale-of-two-climate-interventions/. Rishi Sunak failed the country yesterday in almost every way imaginable. With his honesty and uncertainty, Chris Packham showed what leadership really looks like. And only one of them is on the right side of history.

it is Wednesday my dudes

On Hold, listening to tinny music.

Robot Operator: We apologize for your wait, but we refuse to pay our Operators a fair wage, so never enough people are working here. Instead of accepting the blame, and fixing this, we tell the few people who work for us, they are simply not trying hard enough. Your wait will be 30 minutes to talk to an Operator who is about to cry, because everyone has yelled at them for having to wait so long. REMEMBER YOUR CALL IS VERY IMPORTANT TO US, but not in any demonstrable way.

This is a huge benefit of working from home and it needs to be trumpeted from the rooftops. Any company that forces workers back with one side of their face and claims to be caring about the environment out of another should be called out.

The use case for AI is to spam

This morning I voted in the #NationalTrust elections online. I wouldn't normally have bothered but some of the candidates to the board were railing against 'woke', so I felt it was my civic duty to pick the most woke candidates I could find 🌈🏳️‍🌈

That quick vote sure is handy when you're pressed for time!