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The best analogy I ever read on how people are taking what's happening to the now.

"There, in this burning house, they play, sport, and amuse themselves with all sorts of games. They do not know that this dwelling is afire, they do not understand it, do not perceive it, pay no attention to it, and so they feel no agitation. Though threatened by this great [fire], though in such close contact with so much ill, they pay no attention to their danger, and make no efforts to get out."
-- from The Saddharmapundarika, in Buddhist Scriptures, Edward Conze (Penguin Books, 1959)

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#introduction

Hello!

I'm another displaced redditor discovering the fediverse for the first time. I wasn't big on social media but I think I found the whole central data control thing to be a turn off. Curious to see if I can participate more in this world.

I'm into #programming, #games, #mtg and #fitness. Also, if someone can help me figure out how to get #nfl news and memes ala reddit, I would appreciate that :)

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Have decided to stick w/ #Chandra for the next few posts...

This is the Milky Way's galactic center in X-Ray & radio in the #constellation #Sagittarius

Listen to ep 12 of the #podcast to learn about the #astronomy & #mythology of this #constellation (starrytimepodcast.com/episodes)

Or, check out the image link to see an annotated version of the image (with Sag A* labeled)

#Astrodon #astrophotography #space #NASA #Science
📷 : chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2021

I call it the of

Why Works
caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/06/1

The same in format:
soundcloud.com/going_rogue/why

> It’s not really deniable that western civilization is saturated with domestic propaganda geared toward manipulating the way the public thinks, acts, works, shops and votes.

> It’s just an uncomfortable fact that as much as we like to think of ourselves as free-thinking sovereign agents immune to outside influence, human minds are very hackable.

> Our worldview is formed when we are young in the interests of our rulers, and from there cognitive biases take over which protect and reinforce that worldview, ...

> Modern psychology tells us that people don’t just tend to hold onto their propaganda-induced belief systems; people tend to hold onto any belief system. Belief perseverance, as the name suggests, describes the way people tend to cling to their beliefs even when presented with evidence disproving them.

...

> Content moderation doesn’t work at scale. Any scheme which attempts it is bound to fail. For sites which need continuous user growth, that is a problem. So what can they do? Well, we know what doesn’t work:

Simply having minimal or no moderation results in a trash fire of bigotry and illegal content, quickly hemorrhaging any potential revenue and potentially landing a platform in legal trouble.
Automating moderation inevitably blocks legitimate content that wasn’t targeted, and is gamed by bad actors who get around it.

Every approach comes to the same conclusion—a platform needs workers: Lots of them, around the clock. ...

What Reddit Got Wrong
eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/what

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I was looking through my collection of old GIFs, and found this gem. I had named the file "Life.gif" 😁

No idea where I got it from.

#Life #Gif

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This is so !

NPR Tiny Desk Concert 2023 Submission : Left Blank - Boston Typewriter Orchestra
yewtu.be/L771zwCJeGk?t=99

> Text created by ChatGPT and other Large Language Models is spreading rapidly across the Internet. It's well-written, artificial, frequently inaccurate. If you find a mistake on Spaceweather.com, rest assured it was made by a real human being. This is an AI Free Zone!

spaceweather.com/

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MATH, computer science 

Computers are not smart. They know only one arithmetic operation: addition. A clever trick called "radix complement" allows computers to subtract two numbers by adding them! In base-2, this has a special name: Two's Complement.

But you can even do this in base-10 (decimal), base-16 (hexadecimal), or any other counting base you can think of!

The best part is: IT WORKS!

Subtract like a computer today with RADIX COMPLEMENT ARITHMETIC! 😄

#math #computers #computerscience

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"A rare type of black hole never proven to exist could be orbiting our galaxy right now, Hubble telescope reveals

The Hubble Space Telescope may have just found a rare "missing link" black hole hiding in Earth's cosmic backyard.

Located roughly 6,000 light-years away at the core of the nearby star cluster Messier 4, the intermediate-mass black hole candidate is an ultradense region of space packed with the mass of 800 suns, causing nearby stars to orbit it like "bees swarming around a hive," according to the researchers who detected it."

🔗: livescience.com/space/black-ho

#BlackHole #Hubble #Space #Astronomy #science

"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve." --Max Planck

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This monstrous explosion might be the result of a black hole consuming a gas cloud a billion times as massive as the Sun. If so, it "represents an extreme extension of the known scenarios of black hole accretion."
academic.oup.com/mnras/article #BlackHole #cosmology

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A "Vargas Girl," from 1942, by artist Joaquin Alberto Vargas y Chávez. Vargas was a Peruvian immigrant who made it big in America. His work appeared in Esquire magazine during WWII and in Playboy during the 1960's and '70s. He defined the pin-up genre and is considered its best artist.

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Healing wounds with differential equations. Professor Jennifer Flegg uses mathematics to solve biological problems like wound healing and infectious diseases.
Source : The University of Melbourne / Pursuit / Professor Jennifer Flegg

pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/article
#mathematics #math #maths

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