@yetiinabox@todon.nl
@yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

yetiinabox

@yetiinabox@todon.nl

mostly ex-professor and activist, now doing some consulting and working on refugee integration for local government. Saguaro Buddhist: empty, green, and prickly, but plenty of flowers for the bats. #ActuallyAutistic parent to diverse family. Eco-anarcho-syndicalist who blocks tankies. Born when C02 and population values had the same value. (318 ppm, 3.18 billion)
Research areas: #anthropology #sanskrit #Himalayas #Buddhism #mountains #EnvironmentalJustice #disabilty #ecology #autism #governance #SacredSites #bicycles #migration

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yetiinabox, to random
@yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

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.

BlackAzizAnansi, to random
@BlackAzizAnansi@mas.to avatar

What is the best concert that you've ever attended?

yetiinabox,
@yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

@BlackAzizAnansi
Tito Puente on the Santa Monica pier.

yetiinabox, to random
@yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

After getting a working breadboard and code for the ESP32 overkill yoghurt maker last weekend, I spent all day soldering, testing, and slowly assembling the parts. It needs a front door now, but otherwise the first version is done. The cabinet is made from a recycled file drawer (a beautifully dovetailed remnant from at least 50 years ago, judging by the wood and jointing) and the circuitry is housed in a recycled tiffin box fixed on top.

Next step is to actually use the fun bits of the ESP32 and sort out a pointlessly informative web interface - at the moment it can tell you how long it's been running and the temperature inside the cabinet.

yetiinabox, to Anthropology
@yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

This remarkable, difficult article is a long study of how sea level rise intersects death rituals and graveyards in Louisiana.

CW: death

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/8/11/as-louisianas-coast-washes-away-the-dead-are-the-first-to-go

yetiinabox, to random
@yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

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!

sundogplanets, to random
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

I started a batch of feta (will take a couple days to set in molds and dry before I put it into whey-brine in jars to age for at least 6 weeks)

Now I get to learn how to make an online reading list in my university's LMS for one of the classes I'm teaching in the fall semester ughhhh (if I start now, I can get help if/when I get stuck... yay librarians!)

yetiinabox,
@yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

@sundogplanets

I like the implicit comparison of cheesemaking and compiling reading lists. It calls up all kinds of interesting commonalities. ("Are there reading lists that taste better after aging?" "My reading list was rolled in ashes. Can I still read it?")

HelenG, to random
@HelenG@mastodon.social avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    yetiinabox,
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    @HelenG

    @pvonhellermannn

    We've been watching this process worldwide for decades. It's especially acute in moutainous regions such as the Himalayas, where speciation occurs between massifs and all the different species are running out of vertical escape room, peak by peak.

    https://gloria.ac.at/scope/history

    yetiinabox, to random
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    Dang, folks. An intelligent, wide-ranging conversation about . Thank you.

    @pvonhellermannn @susankayequinn @breadandcircuses @kategenevieve
    @NatureMC

    Now a question: in the stronger sense of virtue, as in virtues around which one can build a virtue ethic - is hope a virtue? Has Lear's Radical Hope already been mentioned?

    thisismyglasgow, to glasgow
    @thisismyglasgow@mastodon.scot avatar

    Charming by Shona Kinloch. Created in 1996 as part of the East Kilbride Village Project, this lovable dog should be one of a pair, but at some point he seems to have lost his companion, leaving him looking rather lonesome.

    #glasgow #eastkilbride #sculpture #animalsculpture #dog #lonelydog #shonakinloch

    yetiinabox,
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    @thisismyglasgow @geomannie

    I think I saw two more such beasties in Kilmarnock Cross just this Tuesday....

    yetiinabox, to random
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    The Verity House agreement is a much bigger deal than it might seem at first. Westminster has effectively exploited the political divisions among the local councils to prevent local government and Scottish government from working together for the benefit of Scottish people. That just got called out. The various layers of government in Scotland now have their own formal partnership.

    https://www.thenational.scot/news/23626140.humza-yousaf-signs-deal-councils-bid-reset-relationship/

    yetiinabox,
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    Thiis agreement means that divisive anti-Scottish strategies from whatever party have a much smaller chance of success going into, or after, the next election. Judging by Gove's response (see his webpage or the Herald) the Tories are very unhappy that Scottish politicians are all working together.

    Here's the official release with much more detail: https://www.cosla.gov.uk/news/2023/a-new-deal-with-local-government-30th-June-2023

    pvonhellermannn, to random
    @pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green avatar

    i mean, i’ve been thinking and reading about the pretty much nonstop for 5 years now and yet sometimes i find myself still taken by surprised just how quickly we have moved from “something to worry about for our children” over “something already happening elsewhere if you pay attention” to being right in it. Anyone else?

    yetiinabox,
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    @pvonhellermannn

    And at the same time, school curricula utterly fail to address the actual world we live in. My kids regularly challenge the narrative of "bright kids should plan for a job in oil and gas engineering", "cars are great technology", "capitalism is unquestionable" and the kindest response they get is "that's an advanced subject". They genuinely don't see what the point of school is--like watching classroom after classroom being bussed off a cliff.

    yetiinabox,
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    @pvonhellermannn

    It feels to me as though bottom-to-top we need different learning. The Polish "flying academies" were a kind of resistance education - perhaps if we are brave enough to name the oppression, that kyriarchical ideology of elite profit over ecosystem wellbeing has completely captured the education system from nursery to university, we can organise against it. Bottom to top, all levels at once. Stable research jobs that don't depend on exploiting foreign students (air travel, global elites, corruption) and nurseries that foster healthy kids (gender you can sort out later, what colours do you actualy like?, bugs are to be rescued not squished) and everything in between.

    bkeegan, to random
    @bkeegan@hci.social avatar

    “The suburban doctrine dictates that public space be limited, and conflict-free where it exists; that private space serve only as a place of commodity exchange; that surveillance, hyper-individualism, and constant vigilance are good and normal and keep people safe. It is an ideology that extends beyond the suburbs; it infects everything.”

    Outstanding article on how the suburbs radicalize people into fascism.

    https://www.thenation.com/article/society/target-pride-suburbs-fascism/

    yetiinabox,
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    @bkeegan
    Not just in the USA.

    SheDrivesMobility, to random German
    @SheDrivesMobility@norden.social avatar

    deleted_by_author

    •
    yetiinabox,
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    @SheDrivesMobility

    Frustrating to see this factoid repeated, though "While cars are sometimes necessary for people’s mobility and social inclusion needs – not least those with disabilities" - the automobile industry and their advocates use this line as everyone is afraid to criticize it, but many disabled people are disabled by cars. An urban (or rural) landscape that took account of impairments would have no cars. Mobility? Yes. Cars? No.

    ColinTheMathmo, to random
    @ColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz avatar

    Why does someone believe you when you say there are four billion stars, but check when you say the paint is wet?

    yetiinabox,
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    @ColinTheMathmo

    Because getting stars on your shoes and tracking them all over the carpet wouldn't be so bad?

    yetiinabox, to random
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    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.

    yetiinabox,
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    @hankg

    Yep. Reading old scripts can be a challenge, though usually for materials < 2000 years old it's not too tricky. But encoding things depends on the affordances of the medium (sending electrical impulses down a wire is different to carving printing blocks) and if it has to be self-documenting then it's a huge challenge. Some sort of highly durable medium that is tightly packaged with a simple reader which offers miminal info on the underlying format, all of which can be forgotten for a millenium and recharge from solar panels or some such?

    yetiinabox,
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    @hankg
    I can't help seeing this as another casualty of the hyperindividualism that has plagued humanity for some centuries now. At the level of an individual this problem is all but invisible, but at the level of collective culture we have recreated ourselves with extrasomatic cognitive storage that is incredibly fragile and ephemeral. If I told you that you had the choice to remember much more for five years, but after that sink into senile dementia, would anyone want to choose the former?

    The move from oral to written caused huge changes, and it still costs us something -- dyslexia, the loss of storytelling, and eventually the commodification of writing -- but this seem far more fraught given the guaranteed material instability of the next few centuries.

    And of course I find myself wondering: whom does this amnesia serve? Does it render the majority of us more pliable to explotation?

    yetiinabox, to random
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    Aaaaargh. I wish all webpages came with timestamps. Working out the "now" of breathlessly enthusiastic, but obviously out-of-date, pages for vanished NGOs is needless detective work.

    yetiinabox,
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    @indieterminacy

    I suppose I just want something like the byline on a newspaper article or the date field on a DNS record. I'm so used to researching in archives where journals, communiques, personal letters - heck, blogs - all have dates that I find it weird to see a webpage which is trapped in some self-important, obsolete now and I have to guess from context (does it mention "the challenges of lockdown"?). @simon_brooke 's suggestion is good...

    futurebird, to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Character idea: A scholar who is a book louse larvae— he is deeply torn between completing his research by reading the books and eating them so that he can pupate (and maybe then, at last have the nerve to ask out the moth on whom he has a terrible unrequited, totally secret crush)

    Sometimes he eats books he finds poorly written out of spite.

    yetiinabox,
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    @futurebird

    having worked with very old South Asian codices, I can assure you that sometimes it does seem that the trajectory of the worm through the vertical stack of handwritten sheets has a certain editorial purpose...

    yetiinabox,
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    @riley

    @futurebird

    Yes and no...
    Oldest materials are palm leaf in the south, birch bark in the north (e.g. Gilgit mss). Palm leaf is then more widely used across South Asia, but paper made from Daphne bholua is increasingly used for the huge Newar manuscript collections after about 1300. And all of them get eaten by worms.

    yetiinabox,
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    @riley

    Not going down the rabbit hole, NOT going down the rabbit hole...

    All three are plant fibre - lignin. Apparently the food source for many larvae that attack manuscripts of many kinds is fungi or other things that colonize the surface of writing materials - it's the storage environment that creates the conditions for these to grow. Beyond that I will not go, not just now.

    sarajw, to random
    @sarajw@front-end.social avatar

    GRAAAARGGLEFLARBLEGRAAGGHAAARGGG

    yetiinabox,
    @yetiinabox@todon.nl avatar

    @sarajw

    The Edward Munch pepper.

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