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@Rycaut It might be interesting rabbit material. They probably do it because a lot of people enjoyed their rabbit stories. But if nothing else, thinking you’re only appreciated as The Rabbit Person is pretty sad.

@Rycaut Yes. As if you went to the café or the pub and there were someone who considered themselves your friend but only ever talked about rabbits.

@jenlowe Apologies if I’m misremembering, but were you looking at ham radio recently? If so, I would appreciate any tips on good resources that don’t have That Kind of Politics.

You know when someone says something like “My therapist let me know a really interesting trick:” and then they say something that’s an obvious solution to a problem you cannot imagine having? You’ve seen a little too deeply into their worldview? This is how a lot of year-end lists come across.

Now I understand why delivery services have a hard time finding things. Or why people often get lost when using #GoogleMaps on foot.

Whenever I catch a glimpse of GoogleMaps, I take a closer look and go "THAT'S NOT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE".

If you haven't tried anything but Google Maps, go ahead and check out Organic Maps, OsmAnd. Anything amiss, you are not powerless - the map can be updated by anybody.

#OpenStreetMap

Friends fear he’s e-mailing geophysics grad students about their YouTube videos again.

@llimllib Right now it’s a single hand-coded page with literally no backend, so I’ll take that under advisement.

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate, Safeway twenty minutes before closing on Christmas Eve, etc.

The Pleiades, Antarctica, in synthetic aperture radar (from the Umbra open data collection).

@aredridel Totally – this isn’t even getting to the ways different plastics have wildly different impacts.

Maybe 90% of the plastic stuff I own would be at least as good if it were wood – maybe in a processed form like paper or cardboard – or even the cheapest possible metal. Tinplate and cast iron.

The last 10% (or whatever) is trickier to replace, but that’s a much smaller problem.

We’re getting the benefits of a society that uses plastic in a few key places, but the problems of a society that uses way too much plastic. Surely we can figure this out.

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This is kind of what I’m trying to get at when I talk about aviation. It’s a huge problem. But if we had a zero-based carbon budget, letting people see other parts of the world is far more valuable than letting people, you know, rent out an improperly insulated building, or commute in a five-seat car for hours a day, or whatever.

It’s painfully easy – which is different from realistic – to imagine a society with the self-control to say life-changing experiences yes, car commutes no.

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I am not an expert but I catch myself thinking this all the time.

Fossil fuels and plastics are bad staples, but would be good seasonings in our material culture if they could be limited to that. Medical implants! Certain industrial coatings! Helmets and seat belts!

The problems arise when you burn millions of tons of it a day and send microscopic shards of it into every nook and cranny of the planet.

mastodon.nz/@KiwiEV/1116040335

Instructions on cooking with koji: Now hold the temperature at 30 °C (85 °F) for at least 36 hours.

Me: Ha ha, that would of course put it right in the center of the famous Danger Zone of food safety, so how about I set the sous vide to, say, 60 °C?

IOCWK: No, it should hover slightly above room temperature. Moistly.

Me: But it’ll get moldy!

IOCWK: [sighs]

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Horsin' Around

This is a hometown instance run by Sam and Ingrid, for some friends.