Phil Landmeier @shuttersparks@qoto.org

Restaurant In Peace.

#Joke

#StarTrek

Here's another one of my silly short sagas from when I was working on the first Trek film "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" - ST:TMP - 1979).

So at one point, I was tasked with conceiving the Klingon written language for the film. Did I know anything about creating either terrestrial or extraterrestrial written languages? Of course not. But I was there, and somebody needed to do it. Luckily (for both me and the Klingons) this work was ultimately transferred to somebody else. Phew.

I also got fairly well along with my own concept for the film -- a "calculation pad" for Spock. The idea was that he'd have a handheld sort of tablet, and he could write equations and formulas on it and they'd instantly be converted to proper fonts and intermediate/final results and so on. Yeah, sounds like a modern iPod or Android tablet, long before such things actually existed. And software to do exactly what I visualized Spock doing on the tablet of course now exists as well.

But if you know the movie, Spock never is seen using a device like this. Why?

This one is simple. We were missing the forest for the trees. After I worked on the tablet idea for some time, we suddenly realized something crucial: "Hey ... he's SPOCK! He don't need no stinkin' tablet!"

And that ended that. -L

#security #gags #SkeletorFacts

#OnThisDay, 28 Nov 1967, PhD student Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovers the existence of pulsars.

Not included in the 1974 Nobel prize for the discovery, Bell received a £3m prize for her work in 2018. She's using it to set up a foundation to improve diversity in STEM.

#WomenInSTEM #Histodons #ScienceHistory

Ultimately Mastodon's killer feature is that it's a public good that someone built because they thought it needed to exist and not a startup someone built because they wanted to get rich quick selling other people's data.

Why do we need 51 senators rather than 50? Because right now at 50/50 every committee has a tie. Moving anything out of committee requires a superhuman effort. If Dems win a 51st seat, they'll have committee majorities.

The Georgia runoff MATTERS.

Re-electing Warnock MATTERS.

55 years ago #today Jocelyn Bell discovered the first known pulsar -- a star the size of a city, spinning once a second, whipping up intense radio signals that sounded like the beep-beep-beep of an alien signal.

In her own words: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/journeysofdiscovery-pulsars #astronomy #discovery

Interesting comment on Hackernews regarding a possible scenario/long term risk should Mastodon threaten the corporate sphere of social media.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33545541

Put down my coffee

In a social media post, Trump admits taking (highly classified) documents "openly and transparently."

Okay, ponied up $1 per pound for shredding, although my pile of stuff-to-be-shredded sitting in bags at the store (waiting for them to stuff it into their shredding bins) seems non-ideal from a security standpoint. #cleanup

In case you don’t believe the same equations govern #motion in the #atmosphere and the #ocean.

Video by Tristan Heth in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.

If you're joining Post, keep in mind that it's against their Terms of Service to criticise billionaires.

At the same time they don't care about disabled people.

via @parismarx