mattmcirvin.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy
he/him
I'm a programmer who was trained in physics long ago. If on Bluesky, follow @ap.brid.gy so I can see you.
[bridged from https://mathstodon.xyz/@mattmcirvin on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
352 posts
51 followers
9 following
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@katelynburns.com Is it worse than the US, or just about the same? It does seem like British transphobes are more likely to identify as "progressives" or feminists.
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And here's an excellent image of Daphnis taken by the Cassini spacecraft on one of its ring-grazing passes on January 16, 2017 - the closest to Daphnis it's gotten so far, I believe!
NASA says:
"Material on the inner edge of the gap orbits faster than the […]
[Original post on mathstodon.xyz]
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Finally, here's a really crazy picture by Kevin Gill - a view you could only see if you sailed through the Keeler gap!
Someday I hope humanity does this.
You can see more images by Kevin Gill here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinmgill/
(6/n, n = 6)
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@erininthemorning.com Unless they are working because this is the intention.
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@emptywheel.bsky.social It seems like they're setting themselves up to denounce the next crop of Democrats, so as to bring the next crop of Republicans back into power. Big dreams are good, big ultimatums... something else.
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Hey: "started by people" does NOT = arson.
Most ignitions are accidental: dumping burning trash into dry brush; an old yard appliance shorting out when plugged into the shed; gender reveal fireworks; and most of all, power lines sparking.
Only 7% of CA fires are arson, the rest are accidents.
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@llewelly oh no way, Button-Bright is way more annoying than Tik-Tok
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Absolutely brutal tag
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@johncarlosbaez I noticed you said a civilized *country* which in the UK has a pretty specific meaning...
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@alfiekohn It's not even that. He couldn't even use the etymology of the word he was explaining-- he asserted it was a synonym of another word and then dissected that (to get its plain meaning). He's just trying to distract from his assertion that the President is a King, for which he offers no […]
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@dpiponi I suspect it's more the function-definition one, but it's hard to tell since my searches for this are dominated by discussions of investment strategy.
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@dpiponi The granddaddy of a lot of them is C stdarg.h's va_list, but this is a kind of horrible thing and doesn't have a lot of the functionality you might expect.
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@dpiponi The Wikipedia article on variadic functions claims that a general term for them is "hedges" (from "term-rewriting theory" which is a thing apparently)
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The thing that always strikes me is how thin-skinned and whiny the richest and most powerful people in the world are.
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(For the specific case of Epcot's "Future World", there's also been a run of random bad luck: the plans to overhaul it keep getitng preempted by some financial or other catastrophe, and getting radically scaled back. The most recent round was whacked by the COVID pandemic and scaled back by […]
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This always tickles me because my childhood happened during the 1970s. I do have nostagia for a lot of stuff that was happening then, and I *did* absorb optimistic visions of the future. But I also absorbed a lot of pessimistic ones. I was an observant enough kid to notice that most of the […]
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@llewelly You *can* see some echoes of Disney's EPCOT in Celebration, Florida, a planned community that Disney constructed and then spun off on land that was formerly part of the south end of the resort, built on New Urbanist principles.
But my impression is that the history of the place since […]
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This is also just the futurist flip side of the common observation that if you ask people exactly when The Good Old Days occurred, they'll name different eras, often startlingly horrific eras, but it is usually *when they were children*. (Occasionally, it's just before they were born.)
And […]
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@llewelly Disney's vision for Walt Disney World in Florida, famously, wasn't what was actually built: "EPCOT" was supposed to be a utopian pilot city of the future, inhabited by Disney employees who would rent their housing there for limited stints, and where Disney or his successors could try […]
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But that whole vision of an evolving corporate Tomorrowland really underscores the key fact that this general *type* of optimistic futurism, which is all about the aesthetics of a clean and dynamic future world, was always advertising at heart. I think it's always been harder to accept once you […]
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But here's the thing that got me off on this tangent: Walt Disney had thought about the Tomorrowland Problem from the beginning and actually had a strategy for it. It was that everything in Tomorrowland would have outside corporate sponsors, and would focus on the area that company was involved […]
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They did something similar with Magic Kingdom's Tomorrowland in the 1990s, only there, the target vision seemed to be more of a 1930s Republic serial vision, all finned chrome rockets and zap guns.
But it is kind of sad since it's explicitly giving up the "you'll live to see this world" angle […]
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@Virginicus William Gibson explicitly *thinks* about this problem a lot. One of his first short stories, "The Gernsback Continuum," was partly about it.
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Sometimes Disney's approach is to try to sidestep the Tomorrowland Problem by retreating into fantasy or to explicit retro-futurism. And that can work. They've always loved the whole Jules Verne, Gilded Age SF aesthetic that eventually got named "steampunk"; they're good at executing it, and it […]
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The problem, of course, is that the future keeps coming. If you make a prediction about the attainable near future (which was always a lot of the attraction for kids: this is the world YOU will grow up in!) and it doesn't come true, that's disappointing.
But it's almost worse if the prediction […]
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@hannah ...and the buses in my town went to no payment, which is even better, now they need to work on the frequency