🎓 Doc Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@qoto.org

I learned today that 5 of my books are among the more than 1600 books banned in some schools right now.

https://pen.org/index-of-school-book-bans-2022/

For more information
https://pen.org/issue/free-the-books/

It went by pretty quick, so you may have missed it, but I think there's a good lesson to take from James' humility about his own design judgement.

I think I have good design judgement, but I am constantly recognizing designs in the wild that are wildly successful that don't commonly exhibit the failure modes I would have predicted.

#pyconUS #pyconUS2023

Yes, the climate has always changed.

But, the speed of recent change is unprecedented.

More importantly, we understand why.

Burning fossil fuels & deforestation adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere which warms the planet.

Simple physics. Understood for more than a century.

#EarthDay

@freemo @AmpBenzScientist @MelodyCooper @stormy178 Just about all tech is descended from weapons! The two basic human technologies are fire and sharp objects; everything else comes from those two.

More specifically, engines are descended from cannon. Newcomen was having no success with his steam power experiments until he hired a cannon maker to produce the cylinders. Then he finally had a good enough seal to make his engine work.

@freemo @MelodyCooper @stormy178@mastodon.stormy178.com The Mini 14 was a good lesson in why harmonics are important. The M4 was useful in learning why a 14.5in barrel using a round developed for a 16 to 20in barrel is not that good. Yep it took until 1996 to be formally introduced because of problems. Now it's being replaced with a battle rifle that weighs around 13.5lbs.

Ignore the Engineers and Designers. It's like NASA with O-rings. Communism doesn't stop for cold weather. We need another victory lap.

@MelodyCooper @freemo @stormy178
"Think about kids!" is the cheapest and most popular argument when you don't have real arguments.

I'm really tired of reminding that this argument is exactly what was used to allow censorship, deprive LGBT people of their right and other such things in Russia.

So now we have no independent social media accessible for most of the people and new law forbidding "forming a distorted view of equality between non-traditional and traditional relationships".

Children are safe now 👍

@MelodyCooper

What an ignorant and uninformed way to view the problem.

It sounds pretty much equivalent to saying things like:

"Oh why oh why are cars still legal when kids are dying in car accidents"

Or even worse yet: "If we made vaccines illegal people would stop dying of vaccines.

The reason is because these viewpoints are ignorant of the big picture. Guns save lives, and prevent incidents from happening, they also cause incidents. Any real argument looks at all of that at frames the issue as one of violence first and foremost.

No we arent "oh but we like our toys".. no its more like "Well these tools help us prevent deaths too, so we wont give them up over a poorly framed emotional argument.

@stormy178@mastodon.stormy178.com

The center of Amsterdam is full of fossils if you look down. Much of the pavement border is Kilkenny Limestone which was rich in Carboniferous fossils. This includes brachiopods, snails, coral, sea lilies from 300 Million years ago. #fossils #amsterdam #urbangeology