@nadiaalbelushi@mastodon.social
@nadiaalbelushi@mastodon.social avatar

nadiaalbelushi

@nadiaalbelushi@mastodon.social

Half British, half Kuwaiti. Multiracial. Female. 34 years old. Married. Physician.

Love interactive 3D scientific visualizations & simulations, maps, exoplanets, & astronomy/astrophysics/planetarium software.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

nadiaalbelushi, to mastodon
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    nadiaalbelushi,
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    On , a biologist can post something about biology and get engagements from non-biologists. Their post could also trend for the day and be widely received by people of all different walks of life. On Bluesky this CANNOT possibly happen. Everyone is in their own closed-membership algorithmic bubble/feed where only the same large accounts are amplified. You can't break through these barriers. It's a rerun of what led to twitter's demise. It's not "new " at all.

    nadiaalbelushi,
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    I spent a week on doing a social experiment. It was an exercise in depression. is the best new , by far. On Bsky, nobody uses the search function or hashtags like to discover posts. You're stuck to one science feed that's a closed-membership algorithmic coffin that only boosts large long-established accounts. It felt like I was in solitary confinement. You're forced to play the "social ladder" game, which encourages twitter-style toxicity.

    nadiaalbelushi,
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    @WagesOf There's a sinister aspect to how Bsky is built. It encourages twitter-style toxicity. Due to the social hierarchy Bsky has built into its platform, small accounts cannot possibly attract engagement, visibility or mutuals/followers unless they aggressively reply to or dogpile on larger accounts every now and then. This leads to people leaving the platform. Some LGBT activists already left. Bsky is a rehash of the outdated/moribund social media era of the 2010s.

    nadiaalbelushi,
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    @hughster Good luck joining a feed. Almost all feeds require you to be a popular person in order to have your posts appear there. The default feeds aren't chronological and boost only the most popular posts made by big accounts, so you have no chance of seeing your posts there either. Your visibility/engagements depend on your account's size, and if you're a small account you're damned to perpetual obscurity because that's how the system is built. It's not built for discoverability or reach.

    nadiaalbelushi,
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    @hughster Also, it's a terrible place for academics/scientists. It has already flattened there. 70% of the users are Japanese and for them it's just a temporary fad. Activity on Bsky is down to levels seen before they opened the floodgates back in Feb. Nobody uses hashtags or the search function. You're doomed to algorithmic feeds that create hierarchies and render small accounts invisible to everyone else. It's twitter redux. People try to gain visibility by attacking others, a la twitter.

    nadiaalbelushi,
    @nadiaalbelushi@mastodon.social avatar

    @maegul Absolutely. I mentioned this issue to them in the past as well. The good thing about Mastodon and the ActivityPub fediverse is that they're pretty much self-funded/crowdfunded, much like organizations such as the Wikimedia Foundation. Many small servers making up a larger collective. It's got community vibes to it, and actually works.
    Bluesky OTOH definitely has to contend with financial constraints in the coming year or so. They failed to kick off. They ought to embrace ActivityPub IMO.

    nadiaalbelushi,
    @nadiaalbelushi@mastodon.social avatar

    @maegul Exactly. It's like adding algorithms to a small internet forum. It's already quiet, and these feeds have ironically made it far quieter for the non-popular accounts. Search functions and hashtags are neglected, which is disastrous. That's like an internet forum not displaying all the sub-forums on the home page. They're acting like one big instance of over a billion users instead of one small instance. Discoverability and reach are non-existent unless you're already a big/famous person.

    nadiaalbelushi, to news
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    Ever heard of terminal tourism?

    I consider myself a terminal tourist lol. Basically, it's when people hang out at airport terminals even if they're not traveling. I used to do that a lot in Malta during my med school years. Used to spend hours at the observation deck, and would sometimes even eat and study there. Also used to do it a lot in Qatar. Apparently it has become a thing in America too. I used to think I was the only one who did this. 😅

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2023/10/03/airport-day-passes-orlando-seattle-new-orleans/

    nadiaalbelushi, to Astronomy
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    How Newborn Stars Prepare for the Birth of Planets
    ALMA and VLA observe hundreds of planet-forming disks around infant stars

    https://public.nrao.edu/news/how-newborn-stars-prepare-for-the-birth-of-planets/

    nadiaalbelushi, to space
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    An amateur astronomer by the name of Melina Thévenot has managed to process a number of images that were taken by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope of wide-orbit planetary-mass objects (i.e. exoplanets) orbiting around their host stars.

    This is her website: https://isolatedplanetsarchive.wordpress.com/

    Gargron, to BelieveInFilm
    @Gargron@mastodon.social avatar

    First scans of Silbersalz arrived. It's motion picture film (really, it's Kodak Vision3 in different packaging) developed in ECN-2. It is impressive how fine the grain is. But their lab processing time is much slower than I expected.

    📷 Canon AE-1 Program
    🎞️ Silbersalz 250D
    🔭 Canon FD 50mm/1.8
    💃 Wife

    nadiaalbelushi,
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    @Gargron Your wife is gorgeous.🙂

    nadiaalbelushi, to Astronomy
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    Came across this cool astronomy software/tool that simulates how exoplanetary systems would look like when they're directly imaged by next-gen telescopes that will use starshade technology.

    It's called "Starshade Imaging Simulation Toolkit for Exoplanet Reconnaissance (SISTER)".

    http://sister.caltech.edu/

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    nadiaalbelushi, to news
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    A rare 11th-century Islamic astrolabe with both Arabic and Hebrew inscriptions:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/science/astrolabe-hebrew-arabic.html

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    nadiaalbelushi, to space
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    NASA-funded scientist says ‘MEGA drive’ could enable interstellar travel
    The drive would provide enough thrust for a spacecraft to travel near the speed of light using only electricity, says physicist Jim Woodward.
    https://bigthink.com/hard-science/mach-effect-thruster/

    nadiaalbelushi, to bluesky
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    I don't for the life of me understand why doesn't just become a instance or an alternative. It should ditch ATProto and embrace the ActivityPub . It can't sustain itself this way without turning into another enshittified version of down the road. Just join ActivityPub so that we can have 5 mil more users; so that Bsky users can communicate with ppl on Lemmy, Mastodon, etc; and so that you can become crowdfunded a la Wikipedia and Mastodon, etc.

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    nadiaalbelushi,
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    @sass Portability is a big positive for ATP. My concern with Bsky is its financial vision is very "capitalistic" & antithetical to the crowdfunding you'd find on Mastodon & AP. Instead, its financial vision is reminiscent of twitter in its early years, which mean it's at risk of getting enshittified in the future. But I hope I'm wrong. I love both protocols btw, & wish both of them succeed. I do wish AP adopts portability in the future too. But I hope AP & ATP could one day become interoperable.

    nadiaalbelushi, to Russia
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    wants to seize more land from . wants to establish a so-called "buffer zone" deep inside Ukrainian territory that's currently under Ukrainian control.

    Do you know what this rhetoric reminds me of? It reminds me of member Turkey, which repeatedly invaded the Kurdish-inhabited regions of north Iraq and north Syria under the pretext of establishing a "buffer zone" against Kurdish "terrorists".

    Ukraine repeatedly supported it.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/03/18/putin-ukraine-buffer-zone-protect-russia-missile-attacks/

    nadiaalbelushi, to opensource
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    Planetariums tend to spend money on digital planetarium systems, but they don't have to. I came across a free Planetarium software that runs on .

    It's called SpaceCrafter and its source code is on GitHub. I believe it can also run on Windows now. It comes with a fulldome projection mode. The core software is free, but there's also a paid plugin that enables extra features. The best part is you can run it on your own computer.

    https://www.fddb.org/news/planetarium-software-spacecrafter-2023-has-been-released/

    nadiaalbelushi, to Astronomy
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    WorldWide Telescope is an visualization that acts as both an interactive planetarium & sky atlas. It's free & ( ). It also includes a 3D mode where you can fly to the solar system planets & even zoom out of the solar system & Milky Way galaxy & see a 3D map of all the galaxies in the "known" universe. That said, it's mostly used for zoomable astronomical surveys & images. You can zoom into distant protoplanetary disks, etc.

    https://aasnova.org/2017/10/13/worldwide-telescope-hits-the-web/

    nadiaalbelushi, to mastodon
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    After moving away from twitter and embracing and , as well as replacing Google Search with DuckDuckGo, and embracing alternatives to Gmail and Google Chrome, I think I'm now ready for the biggest transition yet. I'm seriously thinking of embracing . Time to embrace computing and software. Windows doesn't feel right these days. Truthfully, it hasn't felt right for a while.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/5-reasons-why-desktop-linux-is-finally-growing-in-popularity/

    nadiaalbelushi, to instagramreality
    @nadiaalbelushi@mastodon.social avatar

    What is the socio-political equivalent of decentralized ? What is the socio-political equivalent of / and the ?

    Well, believe it or not, the Kurds of Syria have been experimenting with just that over the last 10+ years. It's called democratic confederalism. It's a leftist libertarian movement that wishes to replace the centralized nation-state model with decentralized democracy.

    https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/beyond-the-nation-state-in-the-middle-east/

    nadiaalbelushi, to TikTok
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    Never trust the stated intentions of any politician. There's always an underlying reason behind a politician's actions. When they say they wanna ban for privacy or natl security concerns, they're lying. They're probably banning it because the US-based companies don't want foreign competition, the US govt wants to control online narratives (which isn't possible with TikTok), and because TikTok is where millions can see 's war crimes.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68554075

    nadiaalbelushi, to Israel
    @nadiaalbelushi@mastodon.social avatar

    This may come as a shock for many, including the author of this article, but Syria's Bashar Al-Assad secretly supports 's genocidal war on / because he accuses of betraying him during the Arab Spring revolutions/uprisings. Hamas indeed supported the Syrian Islamist opposition against Assad.

    Assad was condemned worldwide for his cruel bombings of rebel-held areas, so he's quite pleased to see Israel imitate his tactics.

    https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/article-791457

    nadiaalbelushi, to Israel
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    Of course is engineering a famine in / . Israeli officials have been very honest about their genocidal intentions from the beginning. is just an excuse. If Hamas hadn't existed, the Israeli fascists would've found another excuse to wage genocide against the Palestinians. When you hear what Israeli govt officials say, it becomes obvious that they won't just stop with the Palestinians. They want much more than Palestine.

    https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/un-expert-israel-is-engineering-famine-in-gaza/

    nadiaalbelushi, to worldwithoutus
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    More than a decade after the US Empire destroyed oil-rich Libya and transformed it from 's richest country to one of its poorest, the US is planning to reopen its embassy there, after warring factions agreed to reunify the war-torn country. Libya was once an independent sovereign state, and is now overrun by warlords who are backed by different foreign powers. This is the price Qaddafi paid for agreeing to dismantle his country's nuclear program.

    https://uk.news.yahoo.com/us-wants-reopen-embassy-libya-210914025.html

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