I think these folks are confused as to what "for free" and "not a paywall" mean.
Why not just state it honestly - "Enter your email to keep reading"?
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Good morning #Ottawa! It's a beautiful sunny day out there...
Fun fact, -18°C is the temperature at which normal salt (NaCl) will not help melt ice. Also, at these kinds of temperatures and lower, water vapour from car exhaust freezes on contact with the ground. A good couple of days to exercise caution on the roads and sidewalks.
Also, it is a given that when I go on the dog walk today, my boogers will freeze upon stepping out the door, and I will be simultaneously too warm and a bit chilly in different parts of my body.
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(He made statements to that effect, but I'm sure that was under the advice of his lawyer)
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Question for the cosmologists:
As we look farther out in space, we look farther back in time. I'm under the impression that very distant galaxies show earlier stages of development.
How? Are their metallicities lower? Is it a structural thing? (Can we even resolve that kind of detail)?
[#]Astronomy #Cosmology #BigBangTheory
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Poor Pat King - he feels unsafe and harrassed.
I wonder if he has the self-awareness to see that his videos and actions made other people feel unsafe and harrassed.
Haha, just kidding - of COURSE he doesn't.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/pat-king-apologizes-for-role-in-freedom-convoy-faces-sentencing-next-month-1.7435023
[#]Convoy #Clownvoy #Ottawa #CanPoli
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I don't do this often enough - Three good things today:
Lots of quality time with Frankie - a great walk, snuggles, and a long-overdue bath at the pet store (he's still not a fan, but getting better 👍🏻)... This actually could be my three things, right there.
A good dentist checkup... any one you can walk away from (without an unexpected addtional appointment to fix stuff) is a good one!
Amazing, clear night sky over Ottawa, before the clouds rolled in. Saturn was hanging near Venus, and Jupiter and Mars were also up. If I had binoculars I would have been able to spot Uranus. While I was gawking, the ISS made an appearance, too! This was all before the Moon popped up too far and washed everything out. Thanks again to my dog for me being outside enjoying this, at -10°C 😊
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Packaged food manufacturers, would it be too much to ask for packaging that is marginally stronger than the adhesive holding it together, so that little peanut butter- or yogurt-coverd flecks of plastic and cardboard don't get all over the place when I try to open stuff?
(To address the inevitable suggestion - Yes, I did open these with my hands, although the result is much the same as if I had used my teeth... 😉)
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RIP, Gaia (the European Space Agency mission to map the galaxy, not our planet, that's a separate issue 😉)
After a decade of collecting data at L2, the propellant used to spin the probe is almost depleted, and science operations will come to an end today.
From the ESA website:
Gaia is creating an extraordinarily precise three-dimensional map of more than a thousand million stars throughout our Milky Way galaxy and beyond, mapping their motions, luminosity, temperature and composition. This huge stellar census will provide the data needed to tackle an enormous range of important questions related to the origin, structure and evolutionary history of our galaxy.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia
https://www.iflscience.com/rip-gaia-revolutionary-mission-that-mapped-the-galaxy-to-come-to-an-end-this-week-77603
[#]Astronomy
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I'm preparing to give a cosmology talk to a group of octa- and nonagenarians in a few weeks... The challenge is to give a digestible talk on Big Bang theory to a group of people who are intelligent but mostly uninformed on the topic... In 40 minutes!
When I was asked, I thought, "easy, I've done this for grade 9 students dozens of times" but then found out about the time constraint. I could spend more than 40 minutes just talking about how we came to measuring distances in the cosmos, never mind the evolution of it.
Never mind the technical details, I could spend 40 minutes just reviewing how our view of the universe has expanded from just our solar system, with a celstial sphere just beyond Saturn, to thinking the Milky Way was the universe, to where we are now, observing the vast billions-of-light-years-wide bubble that is our observatble universe.
Or how about talking about the evolution of tehcnology (never mind the evolution of the necessary mindsets!) that made the observations possible?
Geez, just explaining line spectra and redshift could take 40 minutes.
I'm tempted to prepare talks on everything and present the talk as a "choose your own adventure" book. Maybe they'll have me back to explore the paths not taken?
Any advice on how the astro communicators would approach this is welcome (or suggestions for perspcetives I might have missed!).
[#]Astronomy #Cosmology #ITeachScience #BigBangTheory
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Choose
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All the recent news about Meta has me determined to start some serious arm-twisting with my family.
Can anyone point me to a good, non-paywalled summary of the crap they are engaging in? Something I can pass along to non-tech types?
Also, I suspect this won't have the most satisfactory answers, but what are the easy alternatives for those non-techy types?
Facebook → ?
Instagram → ?
WhatsApp → ? (Signal? The big trick with these is that you need your intended message recipient on the same platform, too, no?)
I'm going to be at a big family dinner in a few weeks... might be a good time to get the message out to the group, so they can coordinate.
Any help/advice is appreciated!
[#]meta #SocialMedia #LGBTQIA #DeleteFacebook #Facebook
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The "International Intrigue" newsletter shared this story today, with no comment other than the 👀 emoji:
Jimmy Carter's state funeral just took place, and there's been plenty written about his legacy as US president. But this wild Carter anecdote from a 2005 GQ interview really caught my eye, so I thought I'd share it with you here:
"We had a plane go down in the Central African Republic- a twin engine plane, small plane. And we couldn't find it. And so we oriented satellites that were going around the earth every ninety minutes to fly over that spot where we thought it might be and take photographs. We couldn't find it. So the director of the CIA came and told me that he had contacted a woman in California that claimed to have supernatural capabilities. And she went in a trance, and she wrote down latitudes and longitudes, and we sent our satellite over that latitude and longitude, and there was the plane."
Translation for the mystically-minded:
The CIA found out where the plane was and they didn't want to tell Carter how they found it.
[#]USPol #JimmyCarter #Myticism #Skepticism
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I was a little worried about a civil war erupting in the U.S. as a result of Trump’s re-election, but I’m okay with this one
[#]USPol https://mstdn.social/@knittingknots2/113743180801913893
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btw I feel I should add, having mentioned only non-medicinal therapies, that I've tried most of them - various meds, psychotherapy, meditation, CBT; and they all have their place. You gotta use what works for you. I expect to be medicated to the end of my days.
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One thing that I did know about from almost the beginning of my experience with it was #Depression. Sometime in university I kind of figured I had it, but reading an article and finding out about all the other symptoms I had that were also due to depression made it real for me. The article also gave me some non-medicinal remedies (sunlight, exercise) that seemed to help. Again, knowing about it, knowing that the black cloud surrounding me wasn't real, that those thoughts that constantly turned towards the most negative interpretation of things were lies my brain was telling me, helped immeasurably. Having that little rational voice in my head, telling me "this is the depression, don't believe it" was a life-saver when the major depressive episodes kicked in.
Hard to believe I managed to have a moderately successful career as a teacher, with all that going on - moderate ADHD, dysthymia, major depressive episodes every ten years or so... There was only one time I had to take a partial medical leave (I think it was for 1/3 of my timetable - I knew that work was actually healthy for me, just not that much), and I'm very thankful that the people around me were able to pick up some of the slack, and put up with rearranged timetables because of me.
That's the other thing I want to get involved with, at the teacher level - raising awareness of what, exactly, these mental health issues involve. In my last few years as a teacher, I was pretty vocal about it - advocating for understanding of students who were suffering. Some teachers just didn't understand, some were overloaded with work and the first impulse was to be annoyed at the inconvenience. That's a common problem - public education assumes mostly homogeneous classes of 30 students learning in lockstep, and all nicely done by June. The reality is messier, and teachers struggle to help the outliers.
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At the age of ~60, I have, finally, discovered and learned about two conditions I have that have adversely affected my entire life.
Rather than mourn the time I lost not knowing about these flaws, I've found that understanding them, and being able to accept them, is something of a superpower. It lets me forgive myself for past failings, and develop strategies tailored to the condition so going forward I can do better... a little... 😉
One of them is #ADHD - I do regret that I didn't know enough about this condition when I was a teacher. Aside from helping me cope with the job, I could have better served a lot of students over the years. I do plan to do advocacy work in at least my last school.
It's never to late to gain insight...
(Don't ask about the second thing, we don't know each other well enough 😊)
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Ah, what the heck, here's my Christmas present to myself:
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I was in Canadian Tire today to get a thing I needed.
She then escorted me and the item to the checkout to ensure that nothing untoward happened to me until I had safely purchased the item.
(Edited to add: I wasn't allowed to carry the item, she brought it to the cashier and i could touch it after I paid for it)
I felt that they dropped the ball, a bit, by not also escorting me to my car. Perhaps I'll write a note to the manager.
I'm a little reluctant to post a pic of the item - I don't want to encourage thieves!
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A trip out this morning has me wondering what the atheist equivalent of "losing my religion" is. Suggestions appreciated.
btw, I've already been to the bathroom. 😉
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Okay, far too many things to do today, and of course I go into avoidance mode and procrastinate a little... Some people clean the house, I watch QM videos!
I'm not sure I would recommend this video to someone who hasn't taken some university math, but if you have ever studied or taught intro quantum mechanics, take a look at this, it is excellent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WPA1L9uJqo
[#]Chemistry #Physics #ITeachScience #QuantumMechanics
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