Alex Schroeder 🐝 @kensanata@octodon.social

The Black Plague brought about the invention of quarantine, both the word and practice.

'At first, sailors were held on their ships for 30 days, which became known in Venetian law as a _trentino_. As time went on, the Venetians increased the forced isolation to 40 days or a _quarantino_, the origin of the word quarantine and the start of its practice in the Western world.'

https://www.history.com/news/pandemics-end-plague-cholera-black-death-smallpox

India's coronavirus lockdown is having a dramatic impact on pollution

In the capital, New Delhi, government data shows the average concentration of PM 2.5 plunged by 71% in the space of a week

https://cnn.it/2Uz2gBR

Facebook Wanted NSO Spyware to Monitor iOS Users https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/04/04/facebook-nso-group

Because of the ongoing plague, The Management has made ACM Digital Library available for free for us riffraff:

https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2020/march/dl-access-during-covid-19

That includes some books too:

https://dl.acm.org/acmbooks

(Hat tip to a good friend)

but seriously fuck academic journals. they charge you to read the article *and* the researchers to have it fucking published in the first place. even w/o scihub you can literally just email the authors and ask them for a copy, and mostly they'll give you one. it's an utter scam

What does it take in terms of technical skill, dedicated time and server costs, to run a small Mastodon instance?

The solarpunk hero we all need

@rune Going to have to disagree on that point. In the 20th century, numerous countries in the world democratically elected socialist governments. They were all deposed by the US government, either covertly by funding coup d'etats, or through overt military intervention. The US then installed right wing governments instead, which is where nearly all the authoritarian dictatorships in the world came from.

To a large extent, our perception that capitalism works where other systems don't is entirely manufactured.

When you think about it, it’s pretty weird that capitalism still has any support at all. We obviously have a decades old cultural disdain for it. How many stories can you think of, where the faceless corporation was actually benevolent? They’re always an obstruction at best, if not outright evil.

One of the most bonkers things I’ve stumbled across. Rockwell International’s “Integrated Space Plan” from 1989, starts with the Space Shuttle and ends with interstellar flight. (By now we were supposed to be mining the moons of Mars.)

https://cdn.makezine.com/uploads/2013/07/integratedspaceplan2color.pdf

♫〜 #CurrentSoundtrack:

Schubert – Ave Maria
(Op. 52 No. 6, D. 839 "Hymne an die Jungfrau": Ellen's Gesang III)
Per: Daniel Perret

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfUBAZdNvCU

#MastoRadio #NowPlaying #TootRadio

People in Pamplona make cristal clear that the army is not welcome there.✊

#COVID19

@polychrome
They are more like mini "art book" zines, just have prints of my doodles with a few descriptions here and there. Just started doing them this winter 🙃

Consider the sheer cruelty of forcing people to commute to work every day just to park their asses in front of a computer now that it's been conclusively shown that millions of people could've been working from home all along.

The more I know about the airplane industry, or the car industry, the more I want to use ships and trains.

Nobody tell me about ship building or train building!