@tkinias@historians.social
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

tkinias

@tkinias@historians.social

Assistant professor of history & #histodon. Research race and whiteness in the British Empire (especially Queensland & British Columbia). Teach European & world history with a focus on colonialism & empire.

Previous careers include teaching English as a foreign language and a variety of IT jobs (from Web dev to pulling cables).

Linux geek & SF nerd.

Views my own and probably ill-informed.

He/him.

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

CitizenWald, to Israel
@CitizenWald@historians.social avatar

I realize that campus tensions are sky-high now regarding the issue of and in , so forgive me for raising a particularly sensitive and controversial issue:

Can anyone tell me why, all of a sudden, educated people are writing "protestor" rather than "protester" ?!

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@CitizenWald
Hmm. That’s a good question, professer!

18+ reginasbread, to random
@reginasbread@homo.promo avatar

are mixed drinks with beer still a thing? I just remembered that once upon a time, beer with banana juice was a summer hit. before the time of radlers, bitter taste haters would add raspberry syrup.

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@carrideen
This just made me remember how when I was a kid, older American relatives used to drink beer mixed with tomato juice. I have no idea if that’s still a thing...
@reginasbread

tkinias, to random
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

Every so often I’ll think about the U.S. defense budget (around $880bn this year), and wonder where we’d be with power technology if even one percent of that money every year had been invested in fusion research. That would fund an ITER-scale project every two to three years.

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@isaackuo
yeah, we just don’t know what it would have led to—but it seems likely that another hundred billion or so in investment in the last couple decades probably would have got us something

(and this is just talking about the routine US defence budget, not the mind-bogglingly extravagant expenditure on the wars in Iraq etc.)

nyrath, to random
@nyrath@spacey.space avatar

Stirling E. Lanier, “Hiero’s Journey” & The Long Rumoured 3rd Book, “Hiero’s Answer”

https://reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1cd6eux/stirling_e_lanier_hieros_journey_the_long/

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@nyrath
memories of playing Gamma World

the early 1980s were a deeply weird time, huh?

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@nyrath
I never played Metamorphosis Alpha – I was young enough that it seems to have been gone and largely forgotten by the time I was gaming in the early ’80s.

nyrath, to random
@nyrath@spacey.space avatar

https://hackaday.com/2024/04/25/the-myth-of-propellantless-space-propulsion-refuses-to-die/

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@nyrath
I saw the banner image (the Exodus advert) first, before my brain registered the headline, and I was briefly confused and wondered if somebody had hijacked your account.

Pretty sure if your account ever posts “propellantless drives are practical spaceship propulsion” content we know you are in danger.

tkinias, to random
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

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.

TonyStark, to random
@TonyStark@progressivecafe.social avatar

One of the biggest complaints I get when I post about our necessary transition to clean energy is “the grid can’t handle it” which is an uninformed statement as is, but developments are always being made to make it stronger.

Here’s one plan that will definitely raise grid reliability. As needs rise, so do solutions if you have people in charge who are actually interested in addressing climate issues.

The Biden admin has a plan to get more mileage out of the power grid:
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/transmission/the-biden-admin-has-a-plan-to-get-more-mileage-out-of-the-power-grid

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@philip_cardella
What was maybe the first ever commercial AC generating station, the Ames plant near where we used to live in Telluride, first went on line in 1891 and is still operational <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ames_Hydroelectric_Generating_Plant>.

But hydropower stations seem to have basically unlimited operational lives if they’re properly maintained.

@TonyStark

ErikUden, to random
@ErikUden@mastodon.de avatar
tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@ErikUden
Poe’s law strikes again?

I seriously have trouble believing this isn’t satire.

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

"The Why Files" is a youTube channel that regularly has videos with over a million views. They started as a kind of paranormal/fringe science channel that was mostly harmless, and that often debunked conspiracies.

But, they've moved beyond that in to material such as suppressed patents for cars that run on water. And treating climate change like it's a unresolved question. This has made their audience grow.

The things is they aren't just spitting lies. 1/

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@jrconlin
This is very true for history as well. It’s very difficult for historians to get heard above the background noise of nonsense from social media (but with the added frustration that bookstores are full of history books, but they’re predominantly poorly-researched books written by people with no actual training in historical research).
@futurebird

CoinOfNote, to news
@CoinOfNote@historians.social avatar

We haven't yet had anyone guess this week's , it must be a tricky one! It's a worn, but nicely decorative piece, but from where?

Let us know! And don't forget to subscribe to the Coin of Note Newsletter, as it's due out this week with the answer: https://coinofnote.com/newsletter

@numismatics @histodons

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@tlariv
It has to be a Spanish coin, though, because León y Castilla didn’t exist as a coin-issuing state in the modern era. That’s too modern a coin for the 1400s.

It looks like the coppers of the late 1700s, though the coloration looks too pale for that (unless that’s just glare in the photo).

@alexf24 @CoinOfNote @numismatics @histodons

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@CoinOfNote
My brain was initially trying to process it as tarnished silver rather than washed-out copper, which confused things for a bit!
@tlariv @alexf24 @numismatics @histodons

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@CoinOfNote
I didn’t mean to suggest that! It’s just interesting how our brains interpret input to correspond to what we think we’re seeing...
@tlariv @alexf24 @numismatics @histodons

tkinias, to random
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

A pretty day in Colorado, BTW—even if we are still stuck in that in-between time between winter and spring...

tkinias, to random
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

That moment when joy at having no new e-mail in the inbox turns to the realization that Outlook might just not be updating.

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@RogerBW
how do you handle running your own mail, BTW?

Back in the day I just used to run my own sendmail on a server at my house, but I had to give that up somewhere in the 2000s because all the corporate and institutional e-mail systems would spamcan my messages. It seemed like there was no way to prove that my mail was legit if it was coming from a small indy server.

tkinias, to random
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

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.

jeffjarvis, to random
@jeffjarvis@mastodon.social avatar

It's neither "dystopian" nor "absolutely terrifying." It's a machine. The delicate technological sensibilities of the journalist.
‘Eat the future, pay with your face’: my dystopian trip to an AI burger joint
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/15/ai-burger-joint-flippy-caliexpress

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@Shmock
To be honest, automating the fry station at a fast food joint is probably the best use I’ve heard of in a while. Nobody wants to be human crew on that station.

As opposed to, for example, automating away writing and art and music...
@jeffjarvis

CoinOfNote, to worldwithoutus
@CoinOfNote@historians.social avatar

Ok people, I did it again - here is a bonus "L" coin! This time featuring beautiful African scenes from an altruistically-founded country, which answers the question: "Did the USA have any African colonies?"

I hope you enjoy this piece, the information and the coin:

https://coinofnote.com/1941-liberia-2-cents/

@histodons @numismatics

Palm tree divides ship and sun within circle flanked by stars above date. Script: Latin Lettering: ★ TWO CENTS ★ 1941

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@CoinOfNote
‘colony’ turns out to be a surprisingly complicated thing to define!
@histodons @numismatics

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@economics
hmm–not off the top of my head! the issues are so well-known, at least among scholars of empire, that there aren’t a lot of publications that attempt typology!
@CoinOfNote @histodons @numismatics

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@economics
but as a taste of the complexity of the issue, in the late Victorian British Empire, you had: Crown colonies, Dominions, chartered corporate colonies, protectorates, protected states, Cyprus (legally not a colony but governed as one), Egypt (legally not a protectorate but treated as one), India (sui generis but technically not a colony), etc., all with distinct constitutional statuses but broadly treated as British possessions
@CoinOfNote @histodons @numismatics

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@economics
and 19C theorists (Dilke and IIRC Seeley) argued that ‘colony’ only properly refered to places of white settlement, contrary to what would become official usage in the Empire
@CoinOfNote @histodons @numismatics

aral, to Germany
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

Wow. Germany, are you ok, hon?

https://diem25.org/germany-bans-yanis-varoufakis-from-entering-the-country/

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@aral
I wasn’t thinking about Schengen so much as the EU. Is there some loophole here that makes freedom of movement for EU citizens not apply? Or is Germany just being blatantly illegal here?
@yianiris

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@GRA3432
Oh yeah, I fogot about the football hooliganism stuff. That would be a precedent if you were looking for one to warp...
@aral @yianiris

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • JUstTest
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • thenastyranch
  • magazineikmin
  • InstantRegret
  • GTA5RPClips
  • Youngstown
  • everett
  • slotface
  • rosin
  • osvaldo12
  • mdbf
  • ngwrru68w68
  • megavids
  • cubers
  • modclub
  • normalnudes
  • tester
  • khanakhh
  • Durango
  • ethstaker
  • tacticalgear
  • Leos
  • provamag3
  • anitta
  • cisconetworking
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •