Martin Jambon 🌍🌎🌏 @mjambon@qoto.org

We haven’t had a Color Wheel Wednesday in a while! Oh happy day! Even though these five color wheels look similar, I used different combinations of pigments to paint them. It demonstrates how some pure pigments are brighter than what you can mix from other pigments, but you can also get very similar results from different pigments. Our perception of color is relative, and you probably wouldn’t notice the difference if they weren’t right next to each other. #color #watercolor #painting #mathart

A thing I always wondered was why the first RPL calculator, the HP 28C, was so underpowered for its operating system--just 2K of RAM, which would quickly run out if you were trying to use its powerful software to do anything significant.

Apparently (based on a comment I read somewhere) it's because the hardware was just a repurposing of the HP 18C Business Consultant, which had the same physical clamshell design as the 28 but was a business/finance calculator. The 18C's software was written in RPL, but RPL was not exposed to the user, it lacked the 28C's complicated algebra/calculus/scientific functions, and it didn't need more than 2K to support its capabilities.

HP felt that this radical overhaul of their scientific line was a big risk, and the easiest way to mitigate that was just to ship the first model on the 18C's hardware without spending any money on upgrading it. Once it was successful enough, they came out with the 28S with far more RAM, and eventually the 48SX which was more or less what the designers of RPL had really wanted to ship in the first place.

Love de Lempicka's work.

"For a trailblazing female artist and Art Deco star, beloved by celebrity collectors from Madonna to Barbra Streisand, Tamara de Lempicka has surprisingly not yet received a major retrospective in the United States. That is, until now."

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/tamara-de-lempicka-us-retrospective-de-young-museum-2425747

#Art #ArtDeco #Museum #ArtHistory #Women #WomenArtists

@QOTO @mapto So our history with scholar is sadly a negative one, and it is in fact how QOTO came into existance very many years back. I'll give you the back story.

QOTO at the time was a single user instance or close to it. This was in the days of block-gab where servers were blocking gab and as "punishment" anyone who didnt block gab would often be blocked for not blocking gab. At the time at QOTO we held a public debate on our public forum as to what people wanted to do. Most of the server wanted to block gab but we had a small and growing group of LGBTQ+ activists who very vocally opposed it.

These activitsts, I find out, had recently migrated over from several servers int he fediverse (though a large part of the group were from scholar.social). They had fled other servers who were blocking gab for us because we seemed the most anti-hate speech that still allowed free federation. They were part of a group of people from the LGBTQ+ community who actively monitored accounts on GAB for doxxing and threats tot heir community nd then would disseminate that information to the wider community to help save lives.

The debate went on for some days with several alternative approaches being proposed (like RSS readers etc) but all of them were rejected for several reason, most of those reasons fell into one of a few categories, namely that it would either expose their ip address or other personal details, or it might put them at risk in some other ways. I wont go over every detail here but sufficive to say the conclusion was to priotitize the LGBTQ+ community's safety. We went on to implement several features (such as subscriptions) that would allow them to be even safer, and ultimately decided to maintain a fairly open federation policy with rather strict on-server rules.

After we officially made our stance clear that we would remain with open-federation and be a safe heaven for LGBTQ+ people in that regard the word spread around the fedi. Overnight we went from a single user instance to the center of the fediverse with people flocking in from all over in huge numbers. One of the servers most impacted by this was scholar.social as part of the huge exodus. This is because at the time Scholar.social took an abusive approach to their own LGBTQ+ community that argued against the defederation and ultimately migrated to QOTO. At first the admin of the system was just outright suspending users, often making up really nasty lies. This wasnt really good look at just accelerated the community leaving from scholar. Ultimately scholar wound up blocking our server entirely both as a punishment to the people leaving scholar, and because when you block a server people cant migrate accounts to it anymore. He even went so far as to block my account on scholar and started spreading lies.

In recent years we found scholar to be a very radicalized server so i am somewhat happy for the block in that sense. For example a few years back several of their users started promoting violance, and actively made posts calling people to be violent. May servers around the fediverse started blocking scholar, and the admin at first justified the violence, but after about 2 days of scholar getting on block lists he silently finally removed the post. So his violent extremist would have been enough to get a block on our end probably if we werent already defederated.

That said, yes your welcome to reach out to the admin of scholar and encourage him to remove the defederation, it is entirely on their end. But many **MANY** people have asked him to do that before, he usually just suspends such people. In fact in the past he has suspended people from his server simply for someone holding an account here at all. So you may get blocked if you do that.

I think one of the things that fundamentally bothers me when conspiracy theorists get into scientific topics is the basic laziness of it.

There are a lot of things about the universe that are hard to understand or that nobody understands, but to a remarkable extent it's basically an open book. It takes a lot of effort though. It works in complicated and subtle ways that the human brain isn't trivially suited to comprehend. Trying to understand all that is a huge adventure.

These people imagine that all of the big questions of existence have easy peasy answers but that they only seem hard because someone is deliberately hiding the answers from them, like some annoying nerd who won't let them copy their homework. We got the answers all handed to us on a silver platter but they're locked up in a government warehouse somewhere next to the Ark of the Covenant.