tkinias

mekkaokereke, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

A lot of people that claim that MLK jr was somehow loved by all and better than today's civil rights leaders, are just lying.

A lot of people claiming that "Black Lives Matter" or "Defund the Police" are bad marketing, and that they would support these movements if they were named something better like "Non-violent march," are just lying. It's not the phrase that these people object to. It's the underlying principle. They do not accept that current US policing is a negative on reducing crime.

tkinias, 1 month ago to random

I just read that a single Bitcoin transaction requires upwards of 1,000 kW-hr of electricity.

That’s like running a small air conditioner 24/7 for a month and a half.

tkinias, 2 months ago to random

them: “Government should operate like a business”

government gives billions of dollars in subsidies to a for-profit corporation

me: “So the government’s getting an equity stake in the business they just capitalized, right?”

them: “OMG no, that would be communism”

tkinias, 10 months ago to random

There’s an interesting linguistic thing happening where the word ‘GIF’ has ceased to refer to a file format and come to refer simply to short video clips. I just realized that most of the ‘GIFs’ out there now are actually .mp4 or other video files.

I wonder how many young people even know that .gif was just a crappy 8-bit file format with patent problems?

tkinias, 3 months ago to random

You know how we’ve been talking for a while about how many problems in pre-1990s SF could be fixed by having a mobile phone?

The thing I’m noticing now is how so much early 21C SF ignores the possibility of “just text me a photo of what you see.”

(I was doing IT work when phones with cameras became the norm, and “dude, just send me a photo of the patch panel” etc. quickly became indispensible—but it’s not something I’d ever imagined doing before that tech landed...)

tkinias, 2 months ago to history

Hey #histodons: A few years back I seem to recall hearing about a book that collected soldiers’ letters from the First World War from all the major combatants (including Italy, Austria–Hungary, Ottoman Empire, etc.), translated into English. I am totally unable to find it now; everything I can find for soldiers’ letters is strictly Anglo-American.

Does this ring a bell for anyone?

Halp?

tkinias, 9 months ago to random

OK long-shot info request:

Does anybody in my circles on here know someone who sells African rice (Oryza glaberrima, not O. sativa) on line? I want to add some to my cereals collection for my food class (and try cooking it!) but I can only find one seller on line that’s hyper-bougie and wants $50 for a half-kilo.

I know even if Africa it’s largely been displaced by Asian varieties, but it seems like it shouldn’t be this hard to find!

tkinias, 9 months ago to random

We’re looking for a good slogan to use for the history program in marketing materials, but my suggestion of “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” was, quite unfairly, vetoed by my chair.

tkinias, 4 months ago to random

A long shot, but:

Any scholars on here know of any good multidisciplinary journal databases that allow public access? My institution’s EBSCO product is so bad that I hate to send students to it, and Google Scholar is deteriorating just like their Web search (including now returning results from fake/predatory journals).

I often encourage my history students to start with JSTOR & Project Muse, but that’s not as suitable for an interdisciplinary honors course where they also need STEM journals.

tkinias, 5 months ago to random

So now we know what it takes to unite the Fediverse timeline.

tkinias, 9 months ago to random

Yellowknife is being evacuated in the face of wildfire – that’s half the population of the Northwest Territories
<https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/nwt-wildfire-emergency-update-august-16-1.6938756>

tkinias, 8 months ago to random

And this is how Wikipedia contributes to my having some really weird trivia filed away in my brain.

tkinias, 19 days ago to random

reads another story about Google

God, we need a phone OS that isn’t from Google or Apple.

(No, not you, Microsoft.)

tkinias, 3 months ago to random

TFW you realize that an author isn’t referring to the nineteenth century when they write “the last century.”

tkinias, 8 months ago to random

One thing I very much miss from the early days of the Internet is the ability to search for literal text strings. Now pretty much everything we do search-wise is fuzzed so that search is broadened to include every possible variant spelling, singular or plural noun, various verb tenses, etc., which is a pain in the backside if I’m trying to be precise.

tkinias, 9 months ago to academia

Hey #teaching and #academia folks: Are there any third-party apps or browser plugins that provide alternative interfaces for managing Canvas courses?

I would dearly love to be able to use some less awful tools...

tkinias, 8 months ago to random

Guardian: “How 19th-century pineapple plantations turned Maui into a tinderbox”<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/27/maui-wildfire-water-plantations-ecology>.

Yay empire!

tkinias, 1 month ago to random

Why it’s Expensive to Be Poor, Exhibit № 39863274: <https://apnews.com/article/earned-wage-access-costs-payday-loans-9679d1bd09546d12074e0f27e23f0632>.

Perfectly legal in the U.S.: Apps that give you a loan against your paycheck for an average annual interest rate of 367%.

And the industry is fighting to get legislation that exempts them from the Truth in Lending Act.

tkinias, 1 day ago to random

Princeton UP has a very weird thing on their Web store where it times out and empties your shopping cart if you let it go too long. This has happened to me twice today.

I’ve never seen an on-line commerce site make it so hard to spend money.

inquiline, 4 days ago to random

Just accidentally read a whole mess of replies to a couple bad posts, in agreement with/filling in the thesis of the bad posts, and hoo boy there are some bad takes on here

nyrath, 13 hours ago to random