Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
@trinsec It's an impressive trick, in its way. 😀
And now you know ... the rest of the story.
https://www.quora.com/Did-atheists-kill-the-dinosaurs/answer/Daniel-Dvorkin-3
#AlleyGuy is shouting, "I want fifteen dollars. You hear me? Fifteen dollars!" Now I kind of wonder if he's the paperboy from Better Off Dead all grown up. Inflation, you know.
There are ways the #executive class could make returning to the #office more attractive, of course—say by going back to the concept of an *office*, where everyone who works there has a room assigned only to them, with at least a desk, a chair, and a door they can close when they really need to concentrate. But that might give the #peasants ideas above their station, so don't hold your breath.
Really this may the one good thing to come out of #covid. The traditional office structure was already pretty rickety before the #pandemic: the #infrastructure was in place for half or more of "office" work to be done at home. I've been doing exactly that for coming up on four years now (!) and although I do sometimes miss the camaraderie of the #lab, for the most part I'm quite happy with the situation. I won't be at all sorry if the nineteenth crow turns out to be the coup de grace.
The new #nobility is going to have to adapt, and just like the old nobility, they don't handle that well. It's not about #money, and it never has been. It's about #power, and one way to make your power over your fellow human beings explicit is forcing them to be somewhere they don't want to be for most of their adult lives. #Duke #CEO and #Baron #MBA are quite reluctant to give that up. Things are going to be messy for a while.
Daniel Dvorkin
boosted
Finally! We've been waiting since November of last year to share these amazing results and beautiful images with everyone. Our Cycle 1 JWST/MIRI images of the Fomalhaut Debris Disk reveals never before seen details of the inner regions of this complex exoplanetary system!
Daniel Dvorkin
boosted
This. Is. Amazing.
Montréal suburb Brossard has a traffic light in a school zone that defaults to red, and only turns green when an attached speed camera detects a car driving under the speed limit.
The light is on a 90-day trial, on a 2-lane residential street. Similar signals are widespread across Europe.
Before it was installed, average vehicle speeds of 40 km/h. But in the past week, average speeds have dropped to 29 km/h.
This is your erratically scheduled reminder that building rock #cairns when you're out #hiking is not a way to show your love of #wilderness, or a cute little addition to the #scenery. It's #vandalism at best, and gets much worse from there. Please stop.
https://www.google.com/search?q=environmental+effect+of+rock+cairns
@freemo Yeah, I think that's what it comes down to: there is no protocol for a US President attending a British coronation, because there's never been a need for it!
I'm not opposed to the *existence* of the monarchy. My father, who was born in England and grew up in South Africa when it was still part of the Empire, has pointed out that there's real value in separating the head of state from the head of government: all the patriotic foofaraw can attach to the throne while Parliament gets on with the actual business of governing. In the US we have a bad habit of attaching quasi-mystical significance to the Presidency.
But I do think it would be inappropriate for the President to go to any coronation, and the British one in particular. Of course the Revolution was a long time ago, and the UK and the US have been steadfast allies for over a century. Nonetheless, there are parts of our shared history I'd rather not see forgotten.
You might think #Republicans would understand why the #elected leader of a #republic doesn’t attend the #coronation of a foreign #monarch. Particularly when the republic in question established its existence by breaking away from *that particular* #monarchy. But apparently this is too much to ask.
So a #Russian "diplomat" tried to steal a #Ukrainian flag on what was supposed to be neutral ground, and, uh, it didn't go well.
From the comments on the #Quora post: “Russian flag stealer, go fuck yourself”.
@Pat, nice! You were way ahead of me. I think the first time I used a modem I could just plug the phone cord into was 1985 or so.
Putting this here for my own use as much as anything, as a handy copypasta for anyone who mouths off about #NATO and the #US "#provoking" the #Ukraine #war, or insists that Ukraine must "#negotiate a #settlement" with #Russia. If you like it, feel free to re-use as you see fit.
===
Ukraine applied for NATO membership before the war and got turned down. That's pretty much the opposite of provocation on NATO's part.
If Russia were really worried about NATO expansion, they could have taken it up at any time with any of the NATO countries bordering Russia. But nope, somehow invading Ukraine was containing NATO ...
... oops, turns out what it did was make Finland and Sweden abandon their long-standing neutrality and *more than double* Russia's border with NATO countries.
Anyway, back in 1991, they signed an agreement to honor (and indeed, to defend) Ukraine's borders. Since then, they've invaded Crimea, the Donbas, and now the rest of the country. So what *possible* settlement could:
1. Be acceptable to both Ukraine and Russia,
2. Ensure Ukraine's continuing survival as a nation, and
3. Russia be trusted to honor?
I'd really like to know.
Another day, another #moralpanic about Those #Kids These Days and all the #Crazy Stuff They Say On The #Internet.
Forty years ago (!) I was a fourteen-year-old #JROTC cadet, in the last great hot time of the #ColdWar, obsessed with reading #SoldierOfFortune. I was also an early adopter of what's now called social media.
They were called bulletin board systems, or #BBSs for short. Usually somebody's home computer with a few phone lines coming in. You'd dial the number, wait for the screech to come through the handset, slam the handset into the modem's acoustic coupler, and ... magic happened.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. But on BBSs, they sure knew you were a kid—the more so the more you tried to hide it. Not that many of the adults were much more mature, but I digress.
See, kids do kid things. In my case, as the abovementioned 14-year-old SOF-reading cadet, it was the signature I appended to every post: "Dan the Merc."
There. That's a thing you know now.
Can you imagine anything cooler? Anything tougher? Anything more ABSOLUTELY BADASS? Wait, don't answer that. You in the back, stop snickering.
Relax. Kids grow up.
Daniel Dvorkin
boosted
Accounts that once belonged to Chadwick Boseman, Kobe Bryant and Anthony Bourdain were reverified over the weekend. The same message appears if you click on any of the blue checks associated with those accounts. "This account is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number."
Neat trick, that.
https://www.engadget.com/twitter-adds-blue-checks-to-accounts-of-dead-celebrities-223749275.html
Daniel Dvorkin
boosted
The utimate image of the 20 April #SolarEclipse has just been published in https://twitter.com/ispace_inc/status/1650506233575604227 - it was taken by the #HAKUTO-R Moon orbiter, looking from behind over the limb of the Moon at the full Earth with the #umbra of the Moon over Southeast Asia. Tomorrow comes the landing attempt.
Daniel Dvorkin
boosted
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
