Ahmed FASIH @22@octodon.social
I like languages (spoken & programming) and live in the Midwestern US but enjoy all places and cultures. Favorite genre: slice of life. https://fasiha.github.io
If my life was a manga:
"I went to bed too early last night and couldn't read any of the great manga I got yesterday, so I brought them into work to read, but I've been too busy with Real Work to read any this morning! 😭 waa!"
🤣
Arctic fox halfway between its winter and summer coats stole a duck egg! At Þingvellir, Iceland.
With full-res crop of the villain (cropped from 20 megapixels, with lens at 600mm (full-frame 35mm equivalent)).
https://octodon.social/media/EokXPUDc2RDfGG_vWDI https://octodon.social/media/4Scj-aBqNjQpdbRgz48
“If he kills us, he will also kill our families and our pets, burn down our forests, even poison our water. The enemy is not a human being.”
A hundred years after the Great War, parents like us are reading “The Enemy” by Cali and Bloch to their kids to prepare them for the future.
We don’t program our kids with ideas of religious or racial or gender superiority. But we do teach them that others will disagree with them. Even about this book.
https://octodon.social/media/n4KfossAAhHW-MhcTls https://octodon.social/media/KAQ8440y_beDW1lU-3s
Kids do find the most interesting things to point a big lens at. Here's a woodlouse. https://octodon.social/media/mMrdj2uQbiSpNLqpycE
pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70136641
I took this amazing "Geologic map of the United States (exclusive of Alaska and Hawaii)" by Philip Burke King, Helen M. Beikman, and Gertrude J. Edmonston, published 1974, showing the age of rocks (Cenozoic, Mesozoic, Pre-Cambrian!) in the US, found its projection coordinates, and reprojected it to equirectangular so anyone can clip out interesting tidbits from it.
https://github.com/fasiha/steppe-map for the cartographic goodness.
Two neat maps I found in *Les Animaux*, volume 5, *Animaux des déserts, des steppes et des villes* (Hachette, 1968), texte: Robert Frédérick, direction artistique: Maurice Fleurent, mise en pages: Bernard Duvivier, illustrations: C. Hemeret, P. Bentegeat, R.B. Kock, P. Leroy, H. Mercier, M. Baruel, C. Broutin.
Asian steppes and deserts. Reminded me of my work recovering projection parameters from images of maps: https://github.com/fasiha/steppe-map
https://octodon.social/media/NfCVCxOB8ibacPh-Ng4 https://octodon.social/media/RDoY7727eqPK-4fqfKM
Full-res crop of the hypothesized "moss flower", and with a thumb for scale.
I love the structure around the tip of the capsule, like the Statue of Liberty's crown.
https://octodon.social/media/_43-_r1FIUeVnoKQ0TI https://octodon.social/media/84oxJR2s7DoAhb9Exd4
I think these are the spore capsules of what appears to be moss growing on this tree. The—dare I say—"moss flowers" are very tiny, sub-millimeter. I'll post a full-res crop in the reply because the structure of the rosette is 🤯.
f/2.4, 8.8mm (equivalent to 24mm on a film camera), so the depth of field is razor thin. The side of the lens is resting on the tree, leaving the middle of the lens maybe two centimeters away from the subject.
(Yes that's a Brian Jacques nod.)
Now I am taking these Implicit Association Test (IAT, a bias test):
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/index.jsp
'Your data suggest a slight automatic association for Male with Science and Female with Liberal Arts.' 😢 it was a *lot* easier for me to hit the right key for
- "male OR science"/"female OR liberal arts" than
- "male OR liberal arts"/"female OR science".
I personally live by Vera Rubin's principles and this is something to think about.
@groceryheist @mako you're the only ones I can ask. Here's a plot of Chinese Wikipedia daily editors. The story here, of a community that overcame exponential growth and found stable linear growth, is mirrored in the daily edits curve (and to a lesser extent, the new articles curve; not so much the bytes added, that's been flat for many years).
My question: is this story real? Are they actually mentoring editors, growing quality, and expanding? Or is this just PRC vs ROC turf wars, or spam?
Daily new users signup on #Wikipedia for English, French, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Hebrew.
So.
What happened around the world (or in the underworld) July/August 2014 and lasted up to March–May 2015 that saw so much more new user signups on so many Wikipedias? Something good? Something heinous?
Just walking from the bus station to Kiyomizudera, and we turn a corner and stumble across this gorgeous ~600 year old pagoda draped by rain and mist at the top of a lovely hill street lined with cool shops.
Just another day in Kyoto.
Houkanji, October 2017. Now on our list of off-the-beaten-path must-sees in #Kyoto.
Canadian goose atop a huge slump rock, high above the Little Miami River.
Clifton Gorge, John Bryan State Park, USA.
https://octodon.social/media/B9IA8BswATr5ABZJVtY
Morning doves nesting outside our door. The circle of life, the magic of nature, all that gooey squishy coolness. https://octodon.social/media/f95rqahbyyYD2e8cqNM
Having said all that—about the quality-of-life improvement when you lose the assholes (& the well-meaning people who showcase assholes to ridicule them, which makes Twitter impossible), regaining positive feelings and energy—there's always this nagging feeling…
Because the assholes are still out there, festering, scheming, till maybe one day I wake up with a tag round my neck and boarding a train like this kid circa 1942.
We need saints—Gandhi, MLK—to engage them. Being a saint is too hard.
I've spent the last 45 hours, mainly going down blind alleys, but in between that making some really interesting observations (through code and charts) about the periodicities and cycles in #Wikipedia editor activity. Here are the most salient ones (I seem to have put many comments in the accessibility text for each image—will Masodon clip my text to make room?).
That was just one of a stream of mind-blowing reveals from this utterly spectacular, stupendously delicious #book, “Aerial #Geology”.
I want to be Mary Caperton Morton when I grow up. The book is wonderfully written and designed. If I make anything remotely this informative and delightful and thoughtful as this, life achievement unlocked.
O hai Japan.
Japanese editors match my mental model, logging in in bigger droves on the weekend to contribute.
Well color me purple, I'd have thought more #Wikipedia editing happens during the weekend—imaging hardworking Wiki editors wrapping up a week of work work, looking forward to the weekend to do some Real Wiki Work—but nop.
Here's the last year+ of human editors (anon+registered) seen on English each day, by day of week.
Mon–Thurs dominate, some slacking on Friday, tons of slacking on Saturday. Sunday is between Saturday and Friday.
Daily #Wikipedia editors active on #English, #French, #Japanese, #Russian, #Chinese, #Arabic, and #Hebrew Wikipedias.
So.
Many.
Questions.
(Um, the SVG is at https://gist.github.com/fasiha/8c6f0f0814687fdddcee43c10b5d4a8c with the full curve information, what the hell Mastodon, SVG > PNG.)
