shnuboops @shnuboops@qoto.org

I found a box of drink coasters in the shape of a save icon!

How cool is that?

I guess I'll end with my usual plea: don't buy Starlink internet. Or if you do, please tell them that you, a paying customer, care about the night sky. They need to make it a priority to make their satellites fainter and use fewer of them - this is a very doable engineering problem that they don't care about right now. There are many other ways to provide internet around the world that don't ruin the night sky and destroy low-Earth orbit.

#SaveTheNightSky

Investigation: Oil giants in Canada who ‘make more money than God’ lobbied the federal government and got $2.6 billion in taxpayer dollars
"Because there are numerous loopholes, the numbers pulled from the federal lobbying registry may only be the tip of the iceberg."

Read more here:
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/01/09/investigations/lobbyists-pushed-feds-funnel-billions-taxpayer-money
#cdnpoli #CorporateWelfare #ClimateEmergency #StopSubsidizingTheProblem

A Dutch supermarket chain introduced slow checkouts for people who enjoy chatting, helping many people, especially the elderly, deal with #loneliness.
The move has proven so successful that they installed the slow checkouts in 200 stores...

Iran Says Face Recognition Will ID Women Breaking Hijab Laws https://www.wired.com/story/iran-says-face-recognition-will-id-women-breaking-hijab-laws/?utm_brand=wired&utm_social-type=owned&mbid=social_twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

When Sonya Savage and Danielle Smith say that Alberta has climate and clean energy policy, they're not lying, they just don't know what they're talking about.
#CanadaNews #CanadaPolitics #Alberta
https://youtu.be/1S3w1zPZ7G4

Listen, if you are feeling like it’s too late to follow your dreams or to change things, recall that the very first LIFE ON EARTH film by David Attenborough came out in the 70s when David was 53. Think of every amazing thing he has done since to change the world and promote the environment; these happened in his 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and now at 96 he is working on a new documentary in Scotland. I’m 45. It’s like I haven’t been born yet in David years. #nature #environment #aging #hope

For #ThrowBackThursday: 200 years ago #caribou fences (Tanacross #Dene "tthek") were an ancient and ubiquitous Dene technology found throughout Interior #Alaska. Maintaining many miles of fences like this one was a time consuming task and driving caribou was a multi-family endeavor. Tthek largely went out of use in eastern Interior Alaska once rifles became comparatively widely availability in the late 19th century.

As B.C. sees rising health care privatization, Pat Armstrong and Marjorie Griffin Cohen debunk the calls for for-profit health care to fix our crisis. 🩺

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2023/01/05/Bury-Private-Health-Care-Zombie/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_content=010523-m&utm_campaign=editorial

Happy new year! Another year means another year-long keogram! Every 15 seconds throughout 2022, my trusty all-sky camera took a picture of the sky above the Netherlands. Combining these 2.1 million images into a year-long keogram reveals this picture, which shows the length of the night change throughout the year (the hourglass shape), when the Moon was visible at night (diagonal bands), and the Sun higher in the sky during summer, as well as lots and lots of clouds passing overhead.

Encrypted messaging might feel like an “extreme” conception of privacy until you consider the vast number of things we once did in surveillance-resistant private settings that now routinely take place online. It’s like complaining people are allowed to buy homes without hidden microphones because they might plan crimes in them.

"If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what the heck was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes."

Nathalie Robin
#Quotes #EmotionalIntelligence

The Minister should look in the mirror. VIA Rail’s incompetence and lack of resources is a direct result of 40 years of Federal Government defunding and deprioritizing of our land based public transport networks in favour of unreliable, unprofitable private ventures.

Oh great, just what we need.

#snow #MeanwhileInCanada

@alienghic @annaleen

or at least "will it make someone rich"

like, tech journalists aren't making big bucks no matter what they do, but "tech journalism" is currently really "tech INDUSTRY journalism" -- reporting on people with lots of money & lots of hot air but no actual ideas -- and that'll eventually skew even the most sensible & well-meaning writer (particularly if they aren't given time to research the deep history of the topics they cover)

if i had a nickle for every time i read an article about "the world's first <X>" when actually X was famously done at some university in the 50s or 60s and what's actually happening is that the guy being interviewed is the first one to try to make a business doing X in approximately 10 years, i'd be rich

So, I'm finding out the hard way that if you start a new Mastodon server, nobody can find you.

This is a shameless request for some boosts so some of the bigger instances see me.

#mastodon #twittermigration #mastodonserver #findme #helpimtrappedinawell #imlonely

This is one of those stories that either is the start of something huge or will sink like a stone: not much in between.

#Tessera's claims are ambitious but not unprecedented. One of our clients does something similar with stem cells, and they have a product that's actually made it to market. As far as I can tell, Tessera is claiming the ability to do this in all kinds of cells, with whole living organisms. Which would be a really big deal.

From a bioinformatics / biostatistics perspective (you knew that was coming) I have Questions about consistency. Doing it once, or ten times, or a thousand, isn't enough. You need to do it *trillions*, very accurately indeed. With cell cultures you just screen out the cells that didn't do what you wanted and keep the ones that did: insert "bury their mistakes" joke here. And with stem cells it's particularly easy to know when you have it right.

"65 percent efficiency—20 times the rate at which it performed unintended or errant edits" sounds quite good on a cell-by-cell basis, although I'd like to see the error bars on those numbers. In a patient, it would be an unmitigated disaster. Congratulations, we've cured your muscular dystrophy ... and given you ten different types of cancer.

More generally, their secrecy does not fill me with confidence, of the 95% variety or any other. As I've said many times before, science done in secret isn't science at all, it's alchemy.

Well. It's early days yet. Let's just hope Tessera isn't another Theranos, because I am *really tired* of that. If they do achieve any of what they're claiming, I'll be cheering them on.

#genetics #geneediting #genewriting #stemcell #bioinformatics #musculardystrophy #cancer

https://www.the-scientist.com/bio-business/can-gene-writing-deliver-what-gene-editing-can-t-70740

#Natives: if your doc tries to push the narrative that Natives have higher rates of alcohol abuse, please point them to the study below. Natives abstain from alcohol at higher rates (probably because we've been told for several generations that we are drunks) than white people and our binge rate is the same as why folks. I am so tired of this narrative. It hampers our treatment at clinics and leads to mistrust of docs. MDs NEED to be educated on this.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26868862/

Well, that was quick! 😃