@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

MichaelTBacon

@MichaelTBacon@social.coop

Day job: #geospatial #datascience
Academic research: #LandReform #STS #Scotland #Ecology #Landscape #CommunityOwnership

STS, planning geography, ecology, geospatial data, stuff.

I live and raise a fuss in #Durham #NC

MA Geography
Ph.D. Constructed Environment

He/him http://git.io/vxjC7

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TarkabarkaHolgy, to Parenting
@TarkabarkaHolgy@ohai.social avatar

Me, introducing the new clock-nightlight gadget to the child:

"See, when the sheep's eyes are open and the light is green, it's play time. When she sheep's eyes are closed and the light is red, it's sleep time."

Child, already prying the sheep's eyes open with her hands:

"So if the sheep's eyes are open I don't have to sleep?..."

Me, making mental note:

"... I am not DMing for this kid. Ever." 😅

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

@TarkabarkaHolgy

Vaguely related story: My nephew had a bad habit of getting up at 5 AM and calling out. They got him a similar bunny clock that showed a picture of a sleeping bunny vs. an awake bunny.

One morning the room was mysteriously quiet. They later discovered it was because the bunny clock had stopped, when an hour after normal wakeup time my nephew started wailing, "THE BUNNY NOT WAKING UP! THE BUNNY NOT WAKING UP!!!"

MichaelTBacon, to Meditation
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

Wondering about the experiences with and for other folks with , particularly "inattentive type" (or what we used to just call ) and particularly if you experience hyperfocus.

I had a very adverse experience with a therapist obsessed with mindfulness apps who wouldn't listen or engage with my bad responses to them, and as I've tried to reconstitute my own practices, I'm wondering if hyperfocus tendencies alter what methods one should use. 🧵

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

I was dealing with pandemic-related anxiety and depression, and the therapist I got connected with through our health system basically seemed to insist on getting me to use one of three smartphone apps (no other medidative or contemplative practices were acceptable to him). Using them made my symptoms acutely worse at a time when that was a really bad thing. Later an SE practitioner identified that I basically had trauma around that therapy run, which is kinda fucked up, but anyway.

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

@sidereal "Mindfulness" is a passably decent but in many ways horribly insufficient translation of an ancient concept with thousands of permutations. That it gets treated like any single thing right now is part of what royally pisses me off about it, but again, if I start ranting . . .

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

@sidereal

I'm getting to this down-thread, but I think one of the reasons I found the practices harmful was that meditation was doing nothing more than goosing the hyperfocus, which was actively harmful to me. I've found other ways of doing it which don't goose the hyperfocus and they work much better but they don't fit what's currently faddishly known as mindfulness.

qurlyjoe, to random
@qurlyjoe@mstdn.social avatar

How long do you have to be ignorant before the bliss kicks in?

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

@qurlyjoe Really better if you don't know the answer to that . . .

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

In “An Immense World” Yong introduces the concept of an the envelope of sensory experience dictated by capabilities & limitations of a creature’s biology. We each have unique umwelten shaped through the particulars of our physiology. (naturally I think a great deal about the umwelt of ants— dominated by antennae senses which span— surpass our notions of touch, taste, smell)

Yong demonstrates how investigating animals through this framework upends our understanding of biology. 1/

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

@Peternimmo @futurebird

The best treatment on this I've found is Donna Haraway's Situated Knowledges (a better essay IMO than her more famous Cyborg Manifesto). She made exactly this observation.

(as always, handing out free PDFs would rob usurious rapacious corporations of illegitimate wealth so I will absolutely "not" send anyone who asks via DM a PDF...)

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

I don't like flying much, or planes (so bad for the environment, and yeah I get some people can't avoid them, but I can so I do)

But I do have a mild obsession with ... airplane furniture. Like this first class recliner seat w/ built in cubbies for snacks & drinks.

Sadly, you really need to buy two to have this in your house.

I'm grateful it's so expensive I can't even ponder the notion. We do not need do go down this path.

"airplane stuff" etsy is a rabbit hole.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/962973168

The back of the seat has a screen in it ... so you'd need two for the full experience.

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

@futurebird Have you ever ridden in the roomettes on an Amtrak viewliner?

I love them as an experience but I also adore them as a kind of late-20th-century-steel-design-brilliance thing.

rothko, to random
@rothko@beige.party avatar

semiotics 101:

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

@rothko This is approaching that Buzzfeed postmodern-semiotics-via-hipster-beards post . . .

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

@rothko I have an archive of it somewhere, hang on a sec, I think a lot of the pics in it went dead over time . . .

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

@rothko

Okay, try this. It was a two parter community post, but here's part one, ish:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160422021949/http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisr414d8a71a/post-structuralism-explained-with-hipster-beards-xwfz#.tbDMmMJR8

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

@rothko And I believe this is part 2

https://web.archive.org/web/20160429175949/https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisr414d8a71a/post-structuralism-explained-with-hipster-beards-2-xwfz

MichaelTBacon, to random
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

For those of us with digital subscriptions to the Washington Post, it's no bad thing to hit the site plenty today, but just remember no crossing the picket line tomorrow.

WaPo workers have asked us not to engage with WaPo media at all tomorrow during their walkout.

And hey, using the site today means a bigger drop tomorrow. . .

inquiline, to Anthropology
@inquiline@union.place avatar

Does anyone have any references for interpretive social science(ish) papers that use public comments (as in a federal register) as data? Or perhaps any methods papers that address using public comments? (Have I asked this already?) TIA!

@academicchatter @communicationscholars @sts

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

@inquiline @academicchatter @communicationscholars @sts

I did in my dissertation. I just did a standard open coding on a small subset to establish a code book and then did a closed coding on it for analysis. Is that helpful?

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

@inquiline I'm sure there are others who are better at that than I am (and I've seen some of those replies), I guess I built that into the interpretation of the codes rather than into the coding itself.

The main thing I did was foreground the venue and put caveats around interpretation. But maybe that can be done better methodologically, and I should probably read that paper in the replies . . .

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

@inquiline The other thing I'd say is that I was using material gathered under the Scottish public consultation process, which uses far more direct and specific questions to structure replies rather than open public comment as is common stateside. So I think that made my job a bit easier.

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

@inquiline (sorry for the comment spam, just still thinking out loud)

The other thing I did was to not take public comments as representative barometers of public opinion because, obviously, no.

Instead, I used a basic metric to split comments into supportive, oppositional, and mixed, and then coded for the rhetoric deployed in stating their case. That provided really interesting results and I think survives questions of performative bias.

MichaelTBacon, to random
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

Another bittersweet bit from today is how Anthony Bourdain, to his last days, absolutely hated Henry Kissinger and dragged him any time he had the chance.

Of the many reasons to be sad that Bourdain is gone, he missed the chance to dance on Kissinger's grave today.

veronica, (edited ) to StarTrek
@veronica@mastodon.online avatar

One of my favourite fun facts from Star Trek Deep Space Nine is that Morn, the guy that always sits in Quark's bar, was named after Norm from Cheers. 😁

Another fun fact about Morn is that the prosthetic piece that makes up the head does allow the actor to speak, but the character was never given a spoken line in the entire seven seasons of the show. 1/2

#StarTrek #DS9 #Morn #FunFact #SciFi

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

@veronica back in the day when I watched it with other people, whenever he was on the screen, we would go “Morn!” just like the patrons at Cheers would when Norm walked in the bar.

futurebird, (edited ) to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

What would it take to make text-only, low-bandwidth websites/web apps fashionable again? If connectivity is poor: enjoy a more vintage experience. For safety/accessibility or for those with satellite phones it also seems important for emergencies.

(You’d think the “mobile friendly” web pages would have been about this. But, ‘mobile friendly’ design seems more about taking away features & reveling, like a greed-driven fiend hot with amoral avarice, since your targets might not have adblock.)

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

@futurebird I've seen multiple projects/blogs/manifestos now that are ranting against the nearly enforced ubiquity of single page applications (SPA) that are super-javascript heavy, with an emphasis towards getting back to semantic markup and CSS. It's not 1990s (I mean I love me some HTML 1.0 but I'm pretty alone in that) but it's much lower bandwidth.

Also very easy to do drafting in Markdown, which once you get used to it (and that doesn't take long) is totally addictive.

MichaelTBacon,
@MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

@veronica @futurebird

Yeah the anti-SPA folks aren't totalizing about it, there are some pages for which SPAs are absolutely the right choice. But there's been a push over the last decade-plus to make everything everywhere a React or similar SPA, and it's led to a very sluggish web overall.

SPA where they're good, static/CSS-driven pages where they're not, is the goal here.

bonkerfield, to solarpunktravel

deleted_by_author

    •
    MichaelTBacon,
    @MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

    @bonkerfield @solarpunktravel

    @AbandonedAmerica was just doing a thing on the SS United States. I really, really wish I could take a 3 day boat trip across the Atlantic rather than a flight.

    futurebird, (edited ) to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Mathematics has many daughters. Nearly all are beautiful. Physics & Chemistry are dutiful & visit home often. Life science is always away on some exotic research trip, hardly has time to write. Three of the girls live at home: Statistics, Computer Science ... & The Other One.

    Statistics spent some time in a sanitarium, no one talks about it. She's doing better now, dotes on mother. Computer Science puts on a suit each day for her Big Important Job. But she still never moved out. 1/

    MichaelTBacon,
    @MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

    @FantasticalEconomics @futurebird

    Deep in the walls, Economics keeps a shrine to Physics. She loves her. She hates her. Physics moves with a kind of aloof austerity, and while she's not as fetted as she once was, people move aside when she comes into the room.

    Economics' shrine to her has posters of these galas in her secret room. The tables in front of them are festooned with flowers. The posters themselves are riddled with stab marks.

    stfn, to fediverse
    @stfn@fosstodon.org avatar

    In today's blog post I am writing about my journey towards using free, open-source software. The focus is moving away from Google, Amazon and other massive corporations to the #Fediverse.

    I list quite a few example of possible alternatives to the mainstream tools, and how one can benefit from moving to privacy-focused tools.

    I'd love to hear your feedback and your solutions.

    https://stfn.pl/blog/16-on-degoogling/

    #FOSS #OpenSource #blog #selfhosted

    MichaelTBacon,
    @MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

    @stfn Ironically, Google in particular but also Amazon has built its software up from FOSS underneath but has commoditized the service instead. At the outset, this was a welcome relief from the world of Microsoft, Oracle, and other pre-web tech behemoths.

    For email, for a couple of technical reasons, I prefer FastMail to ProtonMail. Not a lot between them though.

    MichaelTBacon,
    @MichaelTBacon@social.coop avatar

    @stfn Both MacOS and iOS are BSD derivatives underneath as well.

    Basically if it's not Windows, almost every consumer device in existence now runs an OS with strong FOSS origins.

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