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Phil Landmeier boosted
1finekitty

Trump’s ‘greatest hits’ of Covid misinformation are read out at congressional hearing - The Independent apple.news/A3gCsRx0YTB2rjfeiIX

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Phil Landmeier boosted
1finekitty

Musk’s ‘Anti-Woke’ AI Czar Was Arrested for Domestic Violence Last Month - The Daily Beast apple.news/A_y5FIOKjTmuXKJFdMg

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Phil Landmeier boosted
Chris Caple

@gemelliz @Tomthndsh Doug Ford will 1000% attempt to demolish the Toronto reference library and sell the land for condos. His move against the science centre has revealed (again) there are no limits at all to the venality of this government. No institutions are safe, everything is for sale. It's a certainty that plans are already underway.

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Phil Landmeier boosted
Matthew Kenworthy

I had to go to Delft for a meeting yesterday, and the train line between #Leiden and #Delft is closed for repairs, so I decided to cycle it on my commuter bike, 25km there and 25 back. The Dutch bike infrastructure is simply phenomenal - I cycled through small towns and through wide green fields on smooth bike only paths for 90% of the journey. Utterly amazing and it was a beautiful evening where I saw the sun set whilst heading into Leiden.

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Phil Landmeier boosted
Aral Balkan

A timely reminder that “punishable by fine” means “legal for the rich.”

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Phil Landmeier

Idaho sheriff is afraid to serve legal papers on anti-government activist Ammon Bundy.

rawstory.com/sheriff-declines-

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Phil Landmeier boosted
RD Hall

How many more killers, how many more uncounted victims?

nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna67794

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Phil Landmeier boosted
Ed Bott

Oklahoma is not OK:

"According to a transcript ... Jennings appears to say that "back in the day" someone could take a 'a damn Black guy and whoop their ass and throw him in the cell'...

"'Take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a damn rope. But you can't do that anymore. They got more rights than we got,' Jennings added.

"The governor called for the resignations of Clardy, Jennings, Manning and Hendrix."

Kudos to the reporter who recorded this horror show.

npr.org/2023/04/18/1170705908/

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Phil Landmeier boosted
Mercedes Allen

"The... judge who overturned the FDA’s approval of abortion pills removed his name from a Texas law journal article... just before his Senate confirmation hearing...

"The article condemned both transgender health care and abortion rights, using Christian Nationalist-inspired language..."

Abortion pill-banning judge allegedly hid his anti-trans journal article before Senate vote - LGBTQ Nation
lgbtqnation.com/2023/04/aborti

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Phil Landmeier boosted
Robert Reich

In most wealthy countries, the government figures out how much in taxes you owe them — and for free. As all of you know, that’s not the case here in the U.S.

The reason? Tax prep companies don’t want it that way. And they spend big money on lobbying to make sure of it.
---
RT @OpenSecretsDC
As TurboTax faced mounting scrutiny, Intuit spent more than $3.5 million on federal lobbying last year — a new record for the tax prep company. …
twitter.com/OpenSecretsDC/stat

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Phil Landmeier boosted
Hrefna (DHC)

The Colorado law says essentially that "Colorado won’t comply with wiretapping and extradition requests from other states related to abortion or medical transition. The state won’t issue subpoenas, summons, or search warrants either, and state courts won’t consider civil actions brought by individuals" ( them.us/story/colorado-shield- ).

This is great and exactly the sort of thing we need to fight for.

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Phil Landmeier boosted
pzmyers 🦑

This eyesore is repeated, with extreme variations, all across the country.

freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngul

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Phil Landmeier boosted
Daniel Keys Moran

"Great Gods" broke 100 ratings on Amazon the other day.

Thank you, those of your who reviewed this. Best reviews of my career -- and not to brag too much, The Long Run was already one of the highest rated SF novels on Goodreads at 4.54, with 700 ratings. (Possibly the highest rated.) This so far is trending better.

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Phil Landmeier boosted
Dan Gillmor

Missouri's transgender snitch form would have been right at home in the most evil days of the old East German regime:

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Phil Landmeier

Will masks / face coverings once again become illegal after May 11th of this year?

shuttersparks.net/masks-after-

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Phil Landmeier boosted
John Carlos Baez

I'm fascinated by Eskimo-Aleut languages in Alaska, Canada and Greenland. There are many of these languages; they ring much of the Arctic Ocean. I just learned that they use a base 20 system for numbers, with a 'sub-base' of 5. That is, quantities are counted in 'scores' (twenties) with intermediate numerals for 5, 10, and 15. This makes a lot of sense if you look at your fingers and toes.

But the Inuit didn't have a written form of their number system until the early 1990s, when nine high school students in a small northern Alaskan school invented one!

They used 5 principles:

• Visual simplicity: The symbols should be easy to remember.
• Iconicity: There should be a clear relationship between the symbols and their meanings.
• Efficiency: It should be easy to write the symbols without lifting the pencil from the paper.
• Distinctiveness: There should be no confusion between this system and Arabic numerals.
• Aesthetics: They should be pleasing to look at.

They decided that the Kaktovik digit 0 should look like crossed arms, meaning that nothing was being counted.

This was the start of quite a tale!

(1/n)

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Phil Landmeier

As mentioned above, the Mayan number system is base-20. They also invented the concept of zero, apparently before anyone else on Earth did, in order to have a positional number system. Also the first of its kind.

A positional number system makes it possible to write very large numbers (billions, trillions) which they did, and to do arithmetic with such large numbers. (Try doing arithmetic with Roman numerals and you see the problem right away.)

This enabled the Mayans to take nightly measurements of the positions of stars and planets using Stone Age instruments (no telescopes) yet end up with extremely accurate results. They did this by averaging thousands of measurements to eliminate the noise from the data. (A technique re-invented by and credited to Gauss). By this method, they computed the orbital behavior of Venus to an astounding degree of accuracy only exceeded in the second half of the 20th century.

I wonder if base-20 number systems, especially with a sub-base of five, show up in other parts of the Americas, too.

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Phil Landmeier boosted
Biped Earthling

-->>> A newspaper in McCurtain County, Oklahoma has released audio of county leaders discussing plans to kill one of their reporters and lynch Black people.

"Investigators are looking in to see if the recording was made legally according to Oklahoma statute. "

ARE YOU FOCHIN' KIDDIN' ME?

You imbeciles were discussing the murder of a reporter and the murders of several Black folks by lynching! #blackmastodon oklahoman.com/story/news/state

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Phil Landmeier boosted
Sir Rochard 'Dock' Bunson

Scientific American talks about #StochasticTerrorism which I believe is the tool being used by the right to generate a plausibly deniable #AntiTrans #Genocide

How Stochastic Terrorism Uses Disgust to Incite Violence

Pundits are weaponizing disgust to fuel violence, and it’s affecting our humanity

scientificamerican.com/article

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Phil Landmeier boosted
gbhnews

👋 Hello #fediverse! I'm going into a meeting at 4ET to talk about our newsroom's social media options.

If you think our station and other NPR stations should have a Mastodon server and a broader presence in the #fediverse, pls boost this post. If you have thoughts, please reply, I want to hear them!

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