@tg9541@mas.to
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tg9541

@tg9541@mas.to

Engineer, trying to kick the habit by doing humanities and science - doesn't really work but I like it. Not a specialist to "follow" for a single subject - but I might know how some things are connected. Very high Reading-to-TV ratio.

Naturally attracted to #complexity through the lens of #philosophy and #pragmatism, e.g., #cognition #history #ideology #institutions #life #linguistics #logic #neurology #phenomenology #psychology #semiotics #SociologyOfKnowledge #stochastics #technology #truth.

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tg9541, to cycling
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

A fire salamander (Salamandra salamandra): I met this little guy while #cycling on forest roads in the Swabian-Franconian forest.
#winter #nature #amphibian

A fire salamander, black stripes and spots on a mostly bright yellow body, striding between low plants, stones, grass and fallen leaves.

tg9541, to gardening
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

One of the year rituals: sawing ! I've picked 14 varieties, only two for the first time.

Konenpanien, to Birds
@Konenpanien@pixelfed.social avatar

On a trip to Japan, I went to visit a botanical and zoological garden. I met this incredible bird that looked me directly in the eyes, with its gaze it inspires respect and a certain fear, but in reality it is a harmless bird, in fact, it is in a very vulnerable state of conservation. This bird is the shoebill (Balaeniceps rex). It is native to Africa, measures between 1.50 and 2.0 meters tall, and is a worthy heir of the Mesozoic dinosaurs. Although time has passed since that tremendous experience, I am still impressed by his gaze. #birds #myphotos #exoticanimals #trips #memories #kobe #japan

A photo of a large bird, with long legs, an intense look that is scary, it is approximately one meter fifty tall, its name is shoebill, it looks straight ahead, its enormous shoe-shaped beak is attached to its neck to better see what it is seeing. Surrounds him. On the crest gray feathers that he always wears as a crown. The feathers all over its body are ash colored. It reminds a bit of an animal from prehistory.

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@Konenpanien One never forgets the first time one meets a shoebill.

tg9541, to cycling
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

took me to the Murr valley and to the hills around today. By chance the 70km ride took me to Lichtenberg Castle (that's the first time since I live in this region). The traffic on the main roads was a bit too dense for my taste, the drivers on some of the smaller roads too fast and too close. That's a sure sign that one is in the area. The ride was good, though. Maybe I find smaller roads next time.

Left: an orange and white roadbike leaning against a low stone fence by the side of a narrow road. An leafless tree and an old stone building in the background. On the right side of the of the fence a vineyard along the hillside that bends right to form the forest covered horizon. A village in the valley below. Overcast sky.
A castle-style stone building with a tower and two similar lower tower-like structures left and right behind leafless trees. Three cars are parked by the side of a narrow road leading to the castle. A number of pedestrians walking towards it. A valley is visible to the right. Overcast sky.

realsimon, to Sociology German
@realsimon@mastodon.green avatar

I'm thinking about how to experimentally test potential effects of social media on populations. Has anybody ever made a non-federating mastodon server, invited some volunteers as users and then experimentally tested if their opinions on topics change if you push or suppress corresponding hastags? With control groups and everything. I couldn't find any papers on that so far.

And then the next question would be the ethics of the whole thing lol

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@realsimon that's maybe not too hard to do, but very hard to make reproducible. Let's just say that propagandists believe that controlling group behavior through social media has some effect :-)

Konenpanien, to Flowers
@Konenpanien@pixelfed.social avatar

With the snowdrop, little by little, the first tender sensations of spring begin to appear.
#galanthus #flowers #nature #vinter #myphotos

A delicate snowdrop flower, with white petals and green spots inside, hanging like snowdrops from a thin stem.
On a delicate snowdrop flower, with white petals and green spots inside, hanging like bells from a thin stem, a bee hangs from the petals of the flower to take the precious nectar, the bee has the pollen stuck to its legs
From a thin green stem, a white snowdrop bud stretches out to catch a ray of sunlight.

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@Konenpanien very nice photos! When did you take these pictures and where? I find the presence of the bee most interesting. That must be a really hardy species.

tg9541, to photography
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

The flowers of the witch-hazel in our garden appear to be withering but has other vibrant colors to offer.

tg9541, to cycling
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

tg9541, to cycling
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

I used the roadbike today instead of my "commute bike" with studded tires: I wanted to ride fast. My ride took me to smaller, yet gritted, roads that connect villages, hamlets and farms. Instead of one large climb I did several smaller ones.

Daojoan, to random
@Daojoan@mastodon.social avatar

The internet has been increasingly full of crap for about a decade. It's now almost impossible to use. And it's a direct result of Google's search monopoly, the decay of every Google service and the manipulation and noise of SEO blood suckers.

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@Daojoan The title is more than a bit misleading - fact is that even Google appears to be losing the SEO war - users of Bing or DuckDuckGo are even worse off.

I guess that we'll need curated directories again, just like in the old days.

koen_hufkens, to Futurology
@koen_hufkens@mastodon.social avatar

A recent study highlights the decline in disruptive science. I think most of this is due to the intellectual poverty of a mindset of current day .

It is well documented that poor people suffer from a scarcity mindset, which erodes core cognitive functions. This mindset clouds decisions, prioritizing small short-term gains over long-term larger profits by affecting planning ability. The same applies to creativity.

@academicchatter

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@koen_hufkens @academicchatter isnt't it obvious why a ever more compartmentalized academia doesn't allow for disruptive ideas to be received? Disruptive science exists, somewhere in the "long tail of ideas not amplified by normal science", and suppressed by gatekeepers that defend their orderly realm.

renordquist, to academia

I very much feel this column on "slaying zombie projects"; I remember as a newly-minted PhD not understanding how it was possible to have a drawer full of unpublished data. I now have my own zombie data sets, and this take on how to deal with undead projects is a quite refreshing way to look at them.

Perhaps time to clean up some hard drives.

(sorry, its in Nature, thus not OA. Moral of the story: "do, or do not, there is no try")

#academia #science @academicchatter https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03958-8

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@knud @renordquist @academicchatter I often look at research programs and see "bad economy". For the individual, however side projects can help finding surprising things. I'm guilty of at least 10 "side projects" in several domains. Sometimes progress of learning shows how foolish an idea was. Sometimes, often much later, I understand that discrediting an idea was wrong. Depending on how narrow the area of research is different styles of preparing for progress may all have value.

tg9541, to random
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

A photo taken while ice-skating in #winter 2017. It doesn't happen often that we have such favorable conditions at the local lake. Maybe we're lucky this year.

Cat_LeFey, to random
@Cat_LeFey@pagan.plus avatar

My little village post office has an iconic Christmas Cactus. It has been there since 1929, making it 95 years old. It is one of the duties of the postmaster to keep it alive.

It has been split a couple times, and almost died during the ‘78 blizzard. If you walk around the town you can see several more hanging in windows because they occasionally give out cuttings for locals to propagate. Anyway, it's the talk of the town when it blooms, so I had to go take a pic to share.

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@Cat_LeFey we have one in our family - it's also old - maybe 70 years?

nyquildotorg, to random
@nyquildotorg@fedia.social avatar

Boeing's "next-gen" 737 MAX situation is essentially that the entire point of the 737 MAX line of planes was that they're "technically the same design that was already certified back in the 60s" so didn't have to go through the full certification process, to be able to compete with Airbus's newer planes without it losing them a bunch of money in the process.

All of the marketing and talking points about the 737 MAX play up that it's just a newer 737, no big deal.

But when there's an incident with a MAX, they don't ground all 737s, or even just all MAXes.

It feels to me like they're trying to have it both ways

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@nyquildotorg I guess it's necessary to differentiate between different design aspects of a certified product. A product that complex doesn't have a single property that's in the name.

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@nyquildotorg yes, the MCAS disaster - a near complete breakdown of system safety. Not a full breakdown because resilience features on the international regulations level kicked in before more than two planes dropped out of the sky. The US institutions were highly compromised, though.

kevinctofel, to random
@kevinctofel@hachyderm.io avatar

Spammers need to up their game.* This looks like an effort from 2009. 🙄

  1. Sent from Gmail as a “bank”
  2. Sent to multiple people
  3. Has a shared PDF
  4. Said PDF is shared from a non-bank email address
  5. I don’t have an account with this bank

*I’m being facetious: spammers should be sent to a desert island for one year with some food, water and no internet access. Then we could drop “Help coming soon” messages in a bottle every so often just to screw with them.

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@kevinctofel

"By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor."

Herley, Cormac. "Why do nigerian scammers say they are from nigeria?." WEIS. 2012.

mariyadelano, to random
@mariyadelano@hachyderm.io avatar

Just finished an onboarding call with a new client. 2024 barely started and I’m tired 😴

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@mariyadelano International Introvert Day was the day before yesterday...

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@mariyadelano next time you join the rest of us - big party ;-)

ssamulczyk, to transit
@ssamulczyk@mstdn.social avatar

I’m stubborn and I just couldn’t let it go… And so I’ve reached a milestone of 14000km in a year on a . The weather was shit, cold AF, but the company was perfect! Couldn’t be more happy with myself!🥰 @cycling @rower

video/mp4

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@ssamulczyk @cycling @rower Nice :-) I've completed 15,000 km this year (and > 200km accumulated climb). December was a bit meh... First icy roads, then appointments in the office, a bad cold, a winter storm, more important things like helping family move... but did 1000 km anyway :D

gutenberg_org, to science
@gutenberg_org@mastodon.social avatar

English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead died #OTD in 1947. With Bertrand Russell he co-wrote the Principia Mathematica, which has been described as marking "the culmination of the effort to treat mathematics as a department of logic". His other books include Process & reality, The principle of relativity, Science & the modern world, and Adventures of ideas. His self-confessed task was "to explore the no-man's land between science and philosophy".

#science #mathematics

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@glitzersachen @gutenberg_org statistics is a special issue - hint: objectivity is a social construct.

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@glitzersachen @gutenberg_org that's biology. You'll find the hard links to physics through Wiener and von Neumann. Read Rosen as an answer to Wiener.

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@glitzersachen @gutenberg_org don't forget that it's humans describing that "dead world" (trying to formalize it and thereby linking it to their world). But you're right, somewhere there the spark of complexity leaves a mark.

secretsquirrel, to random
@secretsquirrel@mastodon.social avatar

I switched to Firefox a few weeks ago and it was remarkably painless for something so absolutely critical and that I need to work reliably, with zero additional friction, every single day.
I cannot stress enough how low-hassle it is to switch from Chrome to a browser with a business model that doesn't rely on tracking you.
Do it.

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@nyquildotorg @secretsquirrel @quasigod @joeldrapper so, what's the alternative? Donations to the Mozilla Foundation? Buy their products (e.g., privacy related ones)? Note that the "market share" of Firefox is already critically low.

Hey_Beth, to random
@Hey_Beth@sfba.social avatar

Getting an early on my New Year resolution to read more.

tg9541,
@tg9541@mas.to avatar

@Hey_Beth young people today will have to invest heavily into watching the classics of the genre to get much out of that movie. Some things are already not so easy to decode for Gen-X.

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