Profile avatar
RuthMalan.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Software And Systems Architecture, more or less She/her Profile pic: drawing of me (gifted to me); upside down, as if in a reflection, with cloudy sky and […] [bridged from https://mastodon.social/@RuthMalan on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
341 posts 16 followers 1 following
Prolific Poster
Conversation Starter
Posts 31 Comments 19

Analogy as the Core of Cognition, Douglas Hofstadter https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n8m7lFQ3njk

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

Thinking about the zombie virus for oh no reason… Analogy and Image source: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/how-the-zombie-fungus-takes-over-ants-bodies-to-control-their-minds/545864/ (Yes, the reason is mis/disinformation and propaganda…)

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Germany 🥹 (Seeing the news about the exit polls.)

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

"EFFECT, n. The second of two phenomena which always occur together in the same order. The first, called a Cause, is said to generate the other—which is no more sensible than it would be for one who has never seen a dog except in the pursuit of a rabbit to declare the rabbit the cause of a dog […]

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

Algorithms manipulate what speech gets heard. We need different infrastructures… which includes infrastructures of care and caring — and a kind of caring that moves information (as access to learning, including learning hard things about ourselves and the world) around.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

You know why we Germans are so pedantic about data protection? Someone around 90 years ago went through all records available, selected people with certain criteria, with the help of IBM, and then killed them all. We don't want to be on any list. And now the US Gov and Musk is trying to get […]

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Queen of Katwe (2016) is a great film. Highly unconventional (filmed and set in Uganda), but a great story. #movie #reviews

submitted 6 days ago • 2 comments

Today marks the 20th anniversary of me arriving in Germany with my parents. If they hadn't abandoned their jobs, friends and family and taken me out of Russia, I might very well have perished by now.

submitted 6 days ago • 10 comments

It’s not hyperbole to say that American science is being destroyed before our eyes. https://wapo.st/4hOuZed

submitted 6 days ago • 3 comments

This is entirely preventable. Science solved this problem more than 60 years ago. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/us/texas-measles-outbreak.html?unlocked_article_code=1.y04.4uZP.Cl0OlTn70tou&smid=url-share

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

Two seats in congress up for special election. FL01 and FL06. April 1 (no joke) (Voter registration ends 29 days before; ie soon.) Not much time. Deeply entrenched power circuits. But there are cracks in the disinformation bubble with this reckless destruction of the fabric of the nation […]

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

#IHaveAStory From NPR.org: A federal worker supporting small businesses with disaster recovery was fired — twice https://one.npr.org/i/nx-s1-5305041:nx-s1-5368488-1

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

If you're interested in how anybody knows anything about what's happening in orbit, you should watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKXrFaE0wKY Hint: It's Jonathan McDowell, all the way down! His database is really the ONLY reason we know when a piece of space junk hits the […]

submitted 7 days ago • 5 comments

Me bragging about the folk who are participating in the workshop that begins next week: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ruth-malan-4558153_system-design-and-software-architecture-activity-7298532951892377601-eI5f But seriously, it is such an amazing group! […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

It’s so adorkable when science articles mention temperatures like “100 million ℃” and them helpfully add “(180 million ℉)” so that Americans who have been to the core of the sun (or Melbourne) can correlate that figure with their lived experience.

submitted 9 days ago • 3 comments

the person who faced the possibility of consequences, is very motivated to restructure things to prevent consequences… no matter the costs …

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Huh.

submitted 9 days ago • 2 comments

Everything is so much, and then someone is kind. It doesn’t fix things, but it matters!

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

Brooklyn/NYC: the nicest people are going to this!!!! (And buying tickets ahead to show support) Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/say-too-much-release-show-feat-michael-isaak-copeland-james-we-just-met-tickets-1229016023009

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

Going for a MMR titer (to check if immunity from childhood is holding up) this morning, and it is surprise snowing!

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Thinking about ladders of inference and self-sealing logic again <waves around> Image from this video by Dave Gray https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G_h4mnAMJg

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

The poetry of this! Emerging. (Buttercup Festival posts don’t have alt text. I suspect it is because the artist would give away clues about the meaning he sees, and that would lead us too much, and damp our finding meaning process…) Source […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

Wow! Cannondale SuperX Lab71 so beautiful... and expensive https://www.cannondale.com/es-es/bikes/road/gravel/superx/superx-lab71-c17075u #Gravel #GravelBikes

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Is there a named thing that is like Gell-Mann Amnesia where the person thinks what other professions do is easy and could be replicated by a novice (assisted by genai maybe), but what they do requires expertise?

submitted 11 days ago • 2 comments

The tough reality of being a "glue person": 1. Your wins are (mostly) silent, but your missteps are very public. 2. Glue sits at the joints, and joints are where the stress is. 3. You see more than most people—which can be draining. 4. You see more than most...and that can be politically […]

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

Example of the Principle of Least Surprise “The goal was to give the user a conceptual model which was unsurprising -- it was called the principle of least surprise. We were illusionists synthesizing an experience. Our model was the spreadsheet -- a simple paper grid that would be laid out on […]

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

“Institutional memory comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why. Sometimes they write it down and store that information somewhere. Institutional amnesia works similarly. The people leave and the documents disappear, rot, or just forgotten” — an […]

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

Saw a post the other day: "I'm so glad I learned what a parallelogram is and NOT how to do my taxes in school." Generally, people who say such things don't know what a parallelogram is OR how to do their taxes. They have been failed twice. They were presented with the signifiers of a liberal […]

submitted 12 days ago • 7 comments

Multiple things can be varying degrees of true at once. And one thread that relates to consequential elections in Canada and Germany: authority and confidence together with “scarcity and privileged access” has a deep appeal in highly uncertain times…

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

“Incidents in complex systems involve interactions between multiple parts of the system, and there’s no one person in your organization who understands the whole thing. To be able to effectively know what to do during an incident, you need to bring in different people who understand different […]

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

Listen. I wasn't born yesterday. I know that fungi aren't plants: they don't have chloroplasts to photosynthesize. They don't use cellulose for their cell walls like plants. But what *do* they use then? Chitin! Like a bug! This is what the exoskeletons of insects (such as ants) are made of! […]

submitted 13 days ago • 8 comments