yetiinabox

yetiinabox, 8 months ago to random

One child came back from school with a copy of the dreadful Shirley Jackson story "The Lottery" in hand. Along with Lord of the Flies it's a chunk of Cold War libertarian propaganda - so I promptly handed them a copy of Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas". I don't know if Le Guin actually intended her story as a point-by-point refutation of "The Lottery" but it does a magnificent job of exposing the underlying ideology and challenging it, right down to the question of what is acceptable in literature for 12 year olds - "Omelas" overtly discusses sex and drugs, with gentle humour, and condemns violence, while "The Lottery" features prudes who practice ritual murder.
If anyone here is teaching "The Lottery" or has a child for whom it is prescribed reading, I heartily suggest Le Guin's antidote to cultural poisoning.

peterdutoit, 5 months ago to climate

deleted_by_author

yetiinabox, 1 month ago to random

As someone who ran the only other #ethnobotany programme in the UK (Aberdeen, which was closed more than 10 years ago), and who taught #ethnobiology at the Edinburgh Botanics for many years, I believe I am qualified to say that the closure of ethnobotany, ethnobiology, and anthropology at Kent is appalling cultural vandalism.

Dark times are upon us, and the custodians of the lineages of wisdom must be careful now.

@pvonhellermannn

yetiinabox, 2 months ago to random

There is no legal framework for an environmental refugee. Why not?

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/3/2/protecting-climate-refugees-requires-a-legal-definition

Cristina-Ioanna Dragomir assesses the obstacles and argues that we must update existing international refugee law.

yetiinabox, 26 days ago to Scotland

Hey ho. If anyone happens to have a connection to channels through which folks might organise collectively to resist imminent deport-to-Rwanda raids on asylum seekers across Scotland, or indeed elsewhere in the UK, that might be useful information to post.

#Scotland #NewScots #solidarity

yetiinabox, 6 months ago to random

Unsurprisingly, Science published an attack on academic unions. It portrays successful struggles to improve pay and conditions for PhD and postdocs as anti-individualist (!) and an attack on innocent research group leaders.

https://www.science.org/content/article/student-and-postdoc-unions-proliferate-academia-scrambling-adapt

Among other gems:

'Individual faculty members, who support grad student researchers and postdocs out of their own grants, are having to take a careful look at their budgets as well. “Every lab is in many ways its own little microbusiness,” says Lisa García Bedolla, vice provost for graduate studies and dean of the graduate division at UC Berkeley. '

and

'“less research is going to be produced per dollar of [grant] money,” Nestler says. "This is the way the … research enterprise will have to change.”'

yetiinabox, 2 months ago to random

Dancing your PhD winning entry. Just wonderful. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/27/kangaroo-time-anu-scientist-global-science-prize-aaas-dance-your-phd-competition

yetiinabox, 14 days ago to random

We often complain that the future we have is not what we imagined.

I definitely did not imagine handheld "aurora enhance and share with folk worldwide" devices.

Much better than flying cars.

Thanks all. You and this place are indeed beautiful.

We'll all keep struggling to save it then, shall we?

#aurora

yetiinabox, 6 months ago to random

Just out of curiosity, are there any #minetest geeks here? any #advancedtrains geeks??? My brain has decided it wants to understand this, and I'm now trying to learn interlocking and routes, but the sparse documentation is making it hard.

Yes, I know I'm supposed to be writing research articles.

yetiinabox, 5 months ago to random

Does anyone know if costs are coming down, or if booking/planning is improving, for travel as a passenger with a cargo vessel? I'm looking at longer-term research/employment opportunities and "how to get there without flying" is a tough question. Travel by sea has until now been prohibitively expensive.

In fact, is the #carbonfootprint for travelling as a passenger on a cargo vessel from, say, Europe to South Asia much better than the longhaul flight? Overland is not a practical option.

#nofly

yetiinabox, 2 months ago to random

Folks, for those of us who care about #Gaza or #refugees generally, may I suggest you follow my remarkable friend @alisonphipps .

She has been writing and exchanging poetry and witness with #Palestian writers, diplomats, doctors, and survivors online - using any network platform they have access to. That is not, so far, the Fedi. She's one of the stubborn, compassionate hearts of #Scottish and international support for Gaza, and a wonderful scholar-activist.

As of this morning, she's brought her work back to the #Fedi. We have a long history here of using networks for justice. Please help me add strength and reach to her humanitarian work. #Boost this, follow her work, amplify the voices of the Palestinians, help find tools to stop the genocide.

yetiinabox, 9 months ago to random

When I lived in the Pacific Northwest, I learned about berries. Where I grew up, in the chaparral, there were no berries. In Juneau when I was 14, I picked blueberries for the first time, and later in Portland there were brambles...and when I was on the Olympic Peninsula working in the Forest Service, the excellent S'klallam folk on the crew introduced me to some of the countless the berries that grew thereabouts.
Now I have lived in this bit of Scotland for two decades. The raspberries are one of the first berries to come out. And today I discovered--walking with our wonderful young dog--that raspberries are their absolute favourite food and they will pick their own!

yetiinabox, 1 month ago to random

Stop destroying forests and viral spillover pandemics will stop. Simple. We've been saying this for decades. Here's another paper which uses Australian data on eucalyptus blooms, flying foxes, and Hendra to say the same thing.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2024/03/26/1240779167/how-do-we-halt-the-next-pandemic-be-kind-to-critters-like-bats-says-a-new-paper

yetiinabox, 11 months ago to random

Is there any digital data storage hardware and associated encoding that has an intended archival life of at least 1000 years without electricity?

I know it's an old question, but given that paper or palm leaf manuscripts last that long, is there any standard out there which would support civilizational timescales?

No bonus points for guessing why I'm wondering about this.

#hardware #archive #collapse

yetiinabox, 6 months ago to climate

This seems like a good place to ask this question.

Are there any mature open-source #GHG emissions databases that can account for area-based emissions? I'm looking for something that would allow for inputting data at the municipality level, pull data from relevant sources, and allow for measuring and managing change over time. This is not my specialism, but For Reasons I need to understand what's out there. Warnings about unreliable, greedy, or insecure vendors also welcome.

#climateChange #climateData #askFedi

yetiinabox, 7 months ago to random

Heck of a job for the right person: Director, China, Human Rights Watch. https://reliefweb.int/job/4003119/china-director

yetiinabox, 27 days ago to random

Twelve hours yesterday hanging wallpaper in a room with all the challenges - old plaster walls that I had patched and primed, complex ceiling angles, almost nothing true or square, random electrical fixtures. Weirdly, the indicator of success at the end is a total lack of salient features; all the wobbles and skew lines vanish in an anodyne haze of textured wallpaper blandness.

It's some sort of anti-Daoist triumph: enormous effort, no natural quirks remain. I would far rather live among the roots and branches of a vast, gnarled tree on a sunny mountain, but Northeast Scotland is too harsh for such impractical thoughts, and the sun is too weak to sustain them.

yetiinabox, 1 month ago to random

One of the greatest students of life, peace, culture, and interspecies relations has left us, a scholar of astonishing insight, kindness, and humility.

de Waal's powerful writings about Orientalist bias and the kneejerk Western defense of human exceptionalism by anthropologists and biologists are, I think, essential reading - e.g., https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-003-0197-4

“One thing that I’ve seen often in my career is claims of human uniqueness that fall away and are never heard from again,” he said in 2014. “We always end up overestimating the complexity of what we do … I’ve brought apes a little closer to humans but I’ve also brought humans down a bit.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01071-y

yetiinabox, 24 days ago to random

Earlier today, I was in a meeting where one person called for co-production of governance structures together with a disempowered community that would be affected by these structures. Another person picked up on their point and said, yes, what we want is for them to "challenge, engage and inform our decisions". (My emphasis).

And I thought to myself: that is a textbook example of why consultation is not co-production.

yetiinabox, 1 month ago to Scotland

Local question for #Scotland - in the past two months I've seen the wooden handles come off two valued hand-tools, a left-handed Japanese hand-hoe and an old weeding fork. Is there anyone about who could fit new handles to old steel hand-tools? I don't have even the rudiments of the skills needed to turn new hardwood handles and fit them.

yetiinabox, 19 days ago to random

One small positive result in the survey of aviation emissions <https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad3a7d> is that they find a negative relationship at a global scale, comparing per-country using linear regression, between air traffic emissions and number of railway passengers. Otherwise grim, if very useful, research.

yetiinabox, 1 month ago to Anthropology

There is a challenging job in #anthropology for a DRC expert : https://reliefweb.int/job/4050529/cultural-studies-kahuzi-biega-national-park-conservation-peace-and-reconciliation-local-communities

yetiinabox, 17 days ago to random

In the USA, you can see junkyards from the train. Here, I see people's allotment gardens.

yetiinabox, 1 month ago to random

It is bizarre to hear broadcast media folk commuting on the train loudly planning their holiday flights to Portugal - "I just deserve a break with my mates." They must have access to reliable information about the polycrisis, but it feels like part of the general horror they deal with, not something immediately requiring them to abandon their privileged lifestyle and make big changes. If they cannot grasp the seriousness of the situation, if they simply pretend that ending short haul flights isn't relevant, how can they report it?

yetiinabox, 18 days ago to medical

Tomasz Poprawka: « la recherche est aujourd’hui l’un des piliers politiques essentiels de l’Union européenne ».

Usually science administrators prefer to hide behind a Popperian curtain of political neutrality - even where actual scientists <@ScientistRebellion > get arrested - but the actual disconnect between the scientific consensus and the miasma exhaled by certain political agendas is now so obvious that even the conservative academies of science are accepting that they are, indeed, political actors with moral responsibilities.

«Les élections de juin ne seront pas normales, elles seront cruciales dans un contexte de très fortes incertitudes.» ( Patrizio Bianchi)

https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2024/05/06/les-vingt-sept-academies-des-sciences-s-unissent-pour-interpeller-les-candidats-aux-elections-europeennes_6231928_1650684.html

#STS #policy