Was wondering what the current state of the #Dnipro Reservoir was and what plans there might be for after the war. Rebuild, rethink or reverse all have different environmental, economic and cultural impacts. Good article from Science, Jan 2024.
Social lunch meetup today hearing about some recent #ComputerScience outreach initiatives, including our AI and #Bias module. This was developed in collaboration with Thinking Black (founded by one of our Cognitive Neuroscience PhD students).
Essays and Poetry from TB's work published in their Anthology:
https://www.thinkingblack.co.uk/product-page/thinking-black-anthology-vol-i
@uclcs is organising the 17th #LondonHopper colloquia on 24th May 2024 at #UCL. The event is for female #postgraduate students and researchers building a career in #ComputerScience.
Submissions to present your #research in a 300-word abstract are open until 3rd May.
You have only to see the monologues that people have performed on yt to know there's a deep story here.
Thinking specifically of the ones by Robert Longstreet and Victoria Pedretti.
transcribed here https://www.reddit.com/r/HauntingOfHillHouse/comments/gq987k/s1_spoilers_mr_dudleys_monologue_transcribed/
https://www.reddit.com/r/HauntingOfHillHouse/comments/11hhb5p/nell_crain_full_monologue/
Although the original scenes are impossible to beat.
Finished "The Haunting of Hill House" last night, another beautiful haunting tale from Mike Flanagan. Absolutely brilliant psychological drama disguised as a ghost story.
@neil It's almost 30 years since I first darkened these doors as a long-haired A-level student coming for an open day.
@emilygorcenski Ooh that's a nice quiz! Some of the photos are aged way more than I'd expect. Although it's picking up incorrect metadata from Wikimedia:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Irish_City_Tours_Dublin_Tour_bus_(78-D-951)_ex-WMPTE_6895_(TVP_895S)_%26_Dublin_Bus_Dublin_Sightseeing_Tours_bus_D603_(603_ZO),_August_1998.jpg
Said 2011 when it's actually 1998. I guessed 1996.
Current TV: The Haunting of Hill House. Another #Flanaverse spectacle, spooky goings on, woven into a psychological drama. Many of his ensemble regulars, and the fantastic dialogue he's known for.
But episode 6 is technically brilliant as well, consisting of several long takes, moving between sets and periods of time in the story. It took me a moment and I had to rewind to check I hadn't blinked between cuts.
https://youtu.be/Gkhz2W2Gk4g
A new community for women software architects: https://www.architecther.co.uk/ 👏 (via @ahl)
Sunak exposes his weakness by making up ‘honorific title’ of ‘Deputy’ Foreign Secretary. It is meaningless & does nothing to address outrageous fact that he appointed an unelected Foreign Secretary who MPs can’t question in Commons & all at time of grave international instability
[2024-04-12 16:28 UTC]
Shocking news today that Dictionary.com has laid off all its lexicographers.
I already had a line in next week's podcast about dictionaries being a tough industry, and now it's even more true.
Some great company should hire them all; they're a real dream team
Check out @korystamper, @grantbarrett, John Kelly and more.
They're posting at LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/john-kelly-content_dictionarycom-meanings-definitions-of-activity-7184630769942695936-r6Vr?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
Google's open-source #Jpegli promises 35% better #ImageCompression than other methods, improving quality while saving bandwidth.
The #CodingLibrary is compatible with existing #JPEGEncoders, making it easy as a drop-in replacement.
#Google thinks it just solved #JPEG's biggest problems
https://www.androidpolice.com/google-solved-jpegs-biggest-problems/
@cyrilpedia Included in that is the philosophy of scientific endeavour, the method of how we investigate, test, record and share findings, and build on basic knowledge to come to more detailed understanding. It's not just knowing stuff and remembering formulae.
Poor, petrified, non-doms are terrified that they might have to pay some tax https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2024/04/13/poor-petrified-non-doms-are-terrified-that-they-might-have-to-pay-some-tax/. There are many things that might reasonably induce fear in life. Paying tax on your wealth is not one of them.
@RichardJMurphy "Petrified" is the folks in the food bank queue. Not "shit, I need to move my Lambo to Milan. Ho hum."
@danieldurrans @neil It's that an network effects. I got dragged into WA because so many people were using that and social group conversations were happening there. Managed to move 1 family chat to Signal because brother is also techie, but it's hard to make people give a toss.
Similarly FB still remains such a cancerous lump in our society.
Every time I do tech support for my family I get very angry about people who whine about lacking "tech literacy".
90% of the stuff I have to teach them is how to navigate manipulative software and dark patterns. This has nothing to do with tech, but with capitalism. Tech is not complicated, it is just made maximally confusing on purpose to remove agency.
Better tech ed won't fix this.
I'd seen the last partial eclipse, and while it was fun and interesting, I truly wondered what all the fuss was, regarding a total eclipse. A total eclipse is like a partial eclipse, just more of the same... right?
Three minutes of totality was hardly enough time to process what I was seeing, hearing, feeling.
From my human-on-a-planet perspective, I experience myself as moving very fast, and the planet as frozen in place. Even the moon and the sun seem sluggish in their movements compared to the speed with which I walk. But as the moon and sun crossed paths and slipped in and then out of totality, I was aware in a visceral way of just how fast these celestial bodies move through space.
It was electrifying.
It was also, literally, dizzying. In the gray light just before totality, several of our small group experienced vertigo. It felt like some odd combination of morning sickness and the sudden drop when you're in an elevator going down. The sort where if you move your eyes too quickly from side to side, you're likely to get queasy or the world will suddenly tilt at a very wrong angle.
At first, I thought it was just me. But when I awkwardly blurted out, "Vertigo!" several other folks nodded in wordless agreement.
The gulls over the water went mad, shrieking and pinwheeling. The frogs in the creek joined in the chorus. I like to imagine they felt it, too.
Another sensation as the light and color dimmed was the chill from the temperature dropping rapidly. It went from a beautiful sunny day, 60 or 65 degrees, down to 45 or 50. I started in my shirtsleeves; close to totality I had to run inside and get a coat! My nose and fingers turned to ice.
Milliseconds before full coverage, I saw pink flashes around the edge of the sun! Even with my viewing glasses on!
Then – in an instant the sun was gone, replaced by a glowing, sparking ring in the sky. We all yelled and cheered and clapped our hands together. I felt a chill down my spine that had nothing to do with the chill in the air.
There's no doubt, some ancient part of my DNA knows that it is completely wrong to steal the sun and that my very survival depends on its light and warmth.
I ripped my glasses off to gaze long and lovingly, directly at the sun for the first time in my life! I could see a solar prominence, a pink loop of fire, a loop of plasma so big that it was visible to my bare naked eyes from eighty three million miles away.
I remembered that I had brought binoculars outside, and so I snatched them up, held them to my face, and gasped. No wonder the sun has been worshipped as a god. I wanted nothing more than to spend all three minutes looking through the binoculars, but I also desperately wanted everyone else to see what I was seeing. I shrieked, "Look! Here! You have to look through the binoculars! Look and pass them around! Quick! It's unbelievable!" and probably other mad frantic exclamations, as I shoved them into the hands of the person next to me. "Hurry!"
Once I'd handed off the binoculars, I took a moment to look around. It was a difficult choice to have to make. I mean, I've seen the landscape around where we live. I see it every day – but never during an eclipse. And I might never get to see the sun like this again. Which to look at?
I'd never seen the landscape – or the rest of the sky for that matter – quite like this. Everything immediately around me drained of color yet perfectly visible. The horizon on all sides glowing golden and blue, as if it were sunrise or sunset 360° around us. The sky above turned violet-gray. High atmospheric clouds shimmering like fish scales against it. A sprinkling of stars, and the planet Venus. The faces of my comrades slack with wonder.
I wished in the moment that it could last for hours.
When even the tiniest sliver of sun re-emerged, even that barest hint of Sol instantly swept away the eery gloom and lit the whole world back up. We all shouted, as loudly as when the sun had disappeared, and reflexively turned our faces away to shield our eyes.
#storytelling #eclipse
Just another worried little citizen of this modern-day Pompeii. Techie at UCL, working on Process Automation with MS Power Platform. Scatterbrain, interested in education, languages, Space and lots of disparate things. sorry.
Keeping my space toots at @astrodad as an experiment in self-moderation :)
*Background banner is a photo Yorkshire flag in blue and white, in front of a classic bell tent, in a field of similar tents at a festival.