ML2 @mathlover@qoto.org

After only one year of Taliban rule, girls and women have almost disappeared from Afghan society. They are not allowed to travel, to work alone, to go to public parks, to talk or laugh in public, and they are not allowed to study and to go to school... Photo: Boushra Almutawakel

Fission is in the news, but few recognize that a woman physicist was behind the discovery.

Lise Meitner’s brilliance led to the discovery of nuclear fission. But her long time collaborator Otto Hahn, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry w/o her in 1944, even though she had given the first theoretical explanation.

Albert Einstein called Meitner “our Marie Curie." She also adamantly refused to work on the atomic bomb during WWII. https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201502/physicshistory.cfm #women #history #science #energy

Whoever I get introduced to a new tech infrastructure, I too like to test it by randomly unplugging sensitive sever racks. Keeps people on their toes.

@StevenBeschloss I made a Ukrainian artist friend who runs an Etsy shop. He hand-built a custom setpiece for my movie #POSERS. A beautiful 1:6 scale wooden desk and chairs. He shipped it in October and it never arrived. Probably stolen or destroyed.

Turns out he got his family out alive, and has been living without power ever since. He’s older, so he’s on reserve for military service. I couldn’t bring myself to request a refund. I mean, why add insult to injury? 🇺🇦

The race was neck and neck, but outside Republican groups put almost no cash into Santos’s effort. https://theintercept.com/2022/12/24/george-santos-election-republicans/

Also looks like someone at the UK's Royal Astronomical Society set up a Mastodon account and is crafting custom posts for it, but it only has ~300 followers compared with their >50K on Twitter:

@royalastrosoc

I see this all too often -- major public/nonprofit organizations set up shop here, but don't know how to best cross-link/promote it, so the accounts get kind of lost. If you care about #astronomy & like their work, give them a boost or follow :)

One of the right wing's goals is to destroy public institutions of all kinds -- not just schools but also libraries, transit, and pretty much anything that can be "privatized" (a BS word that means sold off to financial profiteers who will gouge the public and degrade vital services.

In Huntsville, Texas, they've done it to the library. https://bookriot.com/huntsville-public-library-privatization/

@rbreich So #ClarenceThomas already broke the law when he failed to recuse in the case of his traitorous wife #GinniThomas #January6 treason texts to #MarkMeadows, and neither the #Republicans nor the #Democrats are doing anything

On this day I’m thinking about Ukrainians struggling without electricity, trying to stay warm, fearful of Russian violence and hoping to stay alive amid a war that is so unnecessary. May the coming year bring an end to the madness.

I wish I had better news about Buffalo but the city is in a state of emergency. To summarize the overnight police scanner:

- Hundreds of people trapped in cars.
- Thousands without power and freezing in their homes for 30h+
- Everything is on fire - cars, houses, everything.
- Emergency crews are trying but they're stuck. Fire engines breaking down all over the place. The Nat'l guard showed up and got stuck, too.
- 7 people are confirmed dead.

#BuffaloBlizzard #Buffalo #Storm

Horrendous story of how a scholar’s work was lifted from his blog and published by another scholar as her own. For context, the blogger is highly respected and has made numerous contributions to manuscropt studies via his blog, which is his main publication platform. Among the worrying elements of this story: that blogs are not real publications, so contents can be used without attribution. It happens more often.

https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/nobody-cares-about-your-blog.html

Just received an ad from Facebook imploring me to come back, and see what I'm missing from friends and family.

Which makes me wonder: how do they know I deleted my account?

Thinking about Peter Thiel quietly and methodically killing Gawker over a period of years then having his, "Tell Cersei, I want her to know it was me" moment leaked.

Contrast that to the overt cruelty we see today. Greg Abbott puts migrants on buses to freezing temps on xmas eve and still wins elections by 11 pts.

Acts that should generate disgust instead trigger feelings of power, even as those celebrating Abbott literally lose grid power.

It's terrifying. How are we going to fix this?

I once read a story about how the Tuareg people of the Sahara improvised a vast sneakernet file sharing network using Bluetooth.

This was needed because there's not a whole lot of cellular networks over there. And some Tuareg are nomadic, so WiFi isn't an option either.

Some incredible music was shared this way. I think it's how Mdou Moctar for discovered.

A how-to on doing #Water #ResourceManagement as badly as possible.

"Kevin Rein, who oversees water rights, made a similar sentiment clear to the Colorado River District board last July. “There’s nothing telling me that I should encourage people to conserve,” Rein said. “It’s a public resource. It’s a property right. It’s part of our economy.” "

And that right there is how the colonizer always destroys the Earth.

A cautionary tale future generations.

#Environment

https://www.propublica.org/article/colorado-river-water-uncompahgre-california-arizona

Tiny, Endangered Manning River turtle hatchlings spotted in the wild after four years of surveying

:-)

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-22/endangered-manning-river-turtle-hatchlings-spotted-nsw-survey/101777512

As a human rights lawyer who has done extensive immigration work, let me make something absolutely clear.

Asylum is legal immigration.
There's no "port of entry" requirement.
There's no "visa" requirement.
There's no "first country" requirement.
You enter the United States, and you apply for asylum.

Because asylum is legal immigration. Period.

Period.

the sad reality of open source software development

In short: folks love the amazing decentralised encrypted comms utopia of Matrix. But organisations also love that they can use it without having to pay anyone to develop or maintain it. This is completely unsustainable, and Element is now literally unable to fund the entirety of the Matrix Foundation on behalf of everyone else - and has had to lay off some of the folks working on the core team as a result.

https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2022