This article is misleading and emboldens pandemic deniers and minimizers.
It's incorrect to say there was no science to support distancing rules.
The science absolutely shows us that increasing physical distance is associated with decreasing risk.
The nuance that is dangerously not conveyed here is that while distancing helps, 6-feet alone often isn't enough because COVID is airborne, so we need layered measures like masks and clean air too.
@xs4me2@luckytran One problem with the social distancing guidelines was aerodynamics: at stores in our area, they'd have people line up outside keeping 6 feet apart along the side of a building. The problem is airflow over the building is turbulent and you get eddies that move air in circles adjacent to the building: the viruses blown away can come back at you due to the circular airflow. Example: https://www.weather.gov/source/zhu/ZHU_Training_Page/turbulence_stuff/turbulence/friction_turbulence.jpg
@xs4me2@luckytran The case I mentioned was an important one during the pandemic: we shopped as quickly as possible (e.g. for food), and would usually spend more time waiting in a line placed on the downwind side of a building than we would spend in the store. Neither local public health officials nor the store management thought about aerodynamics.
@soller Make that "dumb convicted felon"! Many years ago, in an unconnected world, an immigrant climber, Rupert K., got speeding tickets in every jurisdiction between the Bay Area and Yosemite. The story going around was that Rupert would show up in court wearing Austrian peasant garb, and say "am but humble peasant from old country," and would get sent to traffic school so the DMV never found out. The Donald doesn't know when to grovel.
While babies in Gaza are starving to death or are getting incinerated or buried under piles of rubble, American university presidents are complaining that “tents are violence”
@thomasfuchs About those students protesting in tents: when I was in college & graduate school (1960s to early 1970s) in anti-war student protests that "got out of hand", the students would occupy university buildings. If they had merely camped out on the lawn, an administration would have breathed a sigh of relieve. Why is the reaction so different now?
I've been using social media since long before the term "social media" was coined (e.g. Usenet, the earliest ARPANET mailing lists, etc.) I've avoided Facebook all along, used #Twitter quite a bit in its heyday (and maintain an account there that I keep locked now), and I used Google Plus quite heavily. I have accounts on Post (which is about to go dark, apparently), Bluesky (rarely look at it), Threads (hardly ever visit), etc.
Of course the scale of these can be vastly different. An ARPANET mailing list on the subject of wine tasting with a few hundred members was enough to trigger a Pentagon colonel coming out to sites to remind us all about appropriate usage of a Defense Department funded network.
That didn't change anything of course, and eventually DOD realized that such lists were pushing the evolution of email tools rapidly in very useful ways.
Did you know that the very first ARPANET mailing list Digest was for SF-LOVERS (science fiction discussion, obviously) and was created quickly as a "temporary" expedient because the direct (immediate) distribution list had gotten "too large" (probably still just hundreds) for available resources? The digest format created for that situation has remained largely unchanged since then and is still widely used on the Internet today.
I mention all this because in some ways #Mastodon is a throwback to those very early days (with Usenet being perhaps the closest parallel, given the Mastodon topological model). And Mastodon still manages to be quite "low pressure" in significant ways, even as your follower count goes up (which is the exact opposite of the situation on Twitter, even before Musk took over).
That is, when I check here in the morning, I don't usually feel the need to steel myself for a deluge of potential nastiness.
@lauren I had an ARPANET account as well. If I recall correctly, I once read a paper about USENET that mentioned that, because it was "store and forward," you could save a huge amount of bandwidth and could schedule
transfers so that they occurred when the network was lightly loaded. For example,
each post from the rest of the world would be transmitted once, when links had very
little traffic on them, to places like Austrailia, which had a very limited connection to
the rest of the word.
Good news: the northern German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein has decided to move its 30,000 PCs to #GNULinux, LibreOffice, and other #freesoftware because they want to improve digital #sovereignty in the state administration. https://u.fsf.org/43o#government
@fsf As an historical note, given the adoption of LibreOffice by a German state, LibreOffice originated from OpenOffice, which in turn came from a proprietary program named StarOffice that was acquired by Sun Microsystems, which released it as open source. The original StarOffice had a terrible user interface that was replaced over time. Curiously, the original software was developed in Germany.
@soller With regard to consistency, you should see what they left out of the Bible! The Basilideans believed that, as Jesus was being dragged off to be crucified, he pulled a magic trick so that the Romans thought Smon was Jesus, and crucified Simon instead, while Jesus stood there laughing at it all. Some of the Christian sects in 1st and 2nd centuries CE make our Christian Nationalists look almost sane in comparison.
So I just learned what "The Stack" is today: an aggregation of GitHub repos for machine learning from which I can opt out.
But I won't.
I won't because they scraped some hot garbage I wrote in bash and Python that would make you faint. Bottom-of-the-barrel throw-away scripts full of coding crimes. Stuff like
find | grep | awk | xargs | ugh
...invoked via subprocess.run() then fed into more garbage.
I want "artificial intelligence" to learn this. It's going to be fantastic.
@gabrielesvelto Instead of Gabriele's "find|grep|awk|..." I once did roughly lex | lex | lex |.... I had used LaTex to write a chapter of a final report. Our manager decided we should use troff (this was 1980s). So, a few days before it was due, I wrote a series of lex programs, each doing part of the conversion & fixing some previous errors until I was left with something good enough that the rest could be easily done by hand.
Very ugly coding but also very practical given its one-time use.
@soller I thought the best part of the State of the Union was the "after party" where Joe Biden was caught on a hot mike saying he was going to have a "Come to Jesus" meeting with Bibi. I imagined Bibi being dragged into Sarah Brown's Save a Soul Mission in the musical "Guys and Dolls," along with dubious characters with names like "Big Jule," "Harry the Horse," and "Nicely Nicely.:"
@JamesWNeal It was quite a few years ago - I had just gotten 3-way calling - but I got a telemarketing call, so I said "can you hold?" and forwarded him to "Dial a Prayer" (it would take a miracle to get anything from me).. He called me back anyway, asking about the religious recording. I explained what I had done. He said, "Why are you wasting my time?" I replied, "You called me; I didn't call you."
Hey Republicans you can either say life begins at conception and therefore IVF (which usually involves the "conception" of multiple eggs and discarding of most) is immoral or you realize life does not begin at conception and stop pushing this country towards Handmaid's Tale. I'm getting fracking tired of the have your cake and eat it logical fallacies you continue to push past your unskeptical base.
@soller The Alabama mess is an example of the "Mikado effect"": in this cute Gilbert & Sullivan operetta there's a fake execution of a 2nd Trombone who is actually the heir to the throne. The Mikado: "I know you had only good intentions & wanted to do my bidding. But the law doesn't say anything about good intentions. It should but it doesn't. You know how slovenly these acts are drawn. But don't worry. I'll have the law changed ... after your execution."
@Wyatt 32 GB? To put this in perspective, some decades ago (sorry if I got a name wrong), I met Paul Baran, who invented packet switching. He told me about once writing a proposal that would require a computer with a whopping 32 kilobytes (this is not a typo) of memory, and that John von Neumann reviewed it and said that he didn't see why anyone would need more than 16. Paul responded by saying that if his programmers were as capable as Dr. von Neumann, he could get by with 16 too.
I've seen an original 3-button mouse - wheels turning potentiometers to track the position with the case made of wood. There was a reason for having 3 buttons: on the other side of the keyboard there was a pad with 5 piano-key-like levers. With 8 in total, by pressing multiple keys you could in effect type an 8-bit ASCII character, saving the time needed to move your hands to the keyboard just to type a couple of characters.
@deshipu The link I provided has an extended set of characters in addition to the original 7-bit ones It's not at the top of the page, though. BTW the first time I used emacs was in the 1970s and at that point, the keyboards were basically what you had on a teletype. Monitors that could display characters on a CRT were the latest innovation. If characters were not encoded in the same way as a teletype did, you wouldn't be able to hook it up to anything.
@deshipu You can find a picture of the setup at https://history-computer.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/image-5.webp and there's a keypad with 5 levers + a 3-button mouse. The version I saw replaced the separate keyboard and monitor with a terminal containing both. They really sent 8 bits: 7 bit ASCII + a parity bit, and they used the parity bit as an eighth bit. I've seen people use this device while editing documents. How things evolved decades later is not relevant.