I often put additional info in there that might be useful. When I post a still image from a series or movie, I also put the title and episode number in. Sometimes even the timecode.
also sometimes people just write really fabulous alt text. It can be funny or beautifully poetic or just so well-said. It adds a lot to the experience for me. I think in my search for a new mastodon mobile interface for iOS, I will look for one that makes accessing alt text even easier (currently on metatext)
only if feed reader does it politely, since it is out of spec. Alt is for no image, which many more has configured as default. Enjoyment is in this dual respect of resources.
Sometimes I check the alt text. Depending on the picture and my mood. Usually not. But sometimes I get useful information from it.
So I'd pick the fourth option in the poll. Except I can't because you spelled Spider-Man wrong. (The hyphen serves an important purpose, making the name visually distinct from Superman.)
To be more specific: Alt text is a good backup for me.
What am I missing? What am I supposed to be looking at? What does that tiny text say? What kind of animal is that? Where did this come from? Where was this picture taken?
Good alt text answers those questions. Usually I can see what I need, but if I'm left with questions, alt text can really help.
I read alt text sometimes to see if it will tell me why the person who posted an image thinks it's relevant when I'm completely confused. None of these answers fits.
Some wrapping up of storylines, but indeed no real answers. And I think we're never going to get the answer what 'it' is and whether it even is something.
Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born #OTD in 1943. As a grad student at Cambridge in 1967, she discovered an entirely new type of celestial object: Pulsars!
Photo: National Science & Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library
Bell was a graduate student in 1967 when she and her doctoral advisor Antony Hewish constructed a low frequency radio array to study the effect of the solar wind on nearby radio sources.
During the commissioning phase of their array, while analyzing long readouts of data by hand, Bell discovered a regular signal with a very stable period of about 1.33s.
Bell and Hewish quickly ruled out a problem with the instrument or human-made interference as explanations.
Imagine seeing that remarkably regular signal and not knowing of an astrophysical source that might explain it.
They jokingly nicknamed it LGM-1, for "Little Green Men."
Here is a transcript of Jocelyn Bell Burnell's after-dinner speech at the Eighth Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics, recounting the discovery.
The sources were soon identified as rotating, magnetized neutron stars. A tightly collimated beam of radiation is ejected along the neutron star's magnetic axis. We see regular pulses as it rotates, hence the name "pulsar."
The discovery of pulsars provided an extraordinary new laboratory for physics. For example, a gradual decay in the orbit of the pulsar-neutron star binary PSR B1913+16 matches the prediction of general relativity, with energy lost via gravitational waves.
Antony Hewish received the Nobel Prize in 1974 for his "decisive role in the discovery of pulsars." In a move that can only be described as gratuitous sexism, the Nobel Committee decided not to include Jocelyn Bell Burnell on the prize.
A younger graduate student (Brian Josephson) had received a share of the prize the previous year, so it's not like there was a prohibition against awarding students.
In 1974, the year Hewish got the prize, there was another important pulsar discovery.
That year, Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor discovered an important binary pulsar pair. They were rightly awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for this discovery!
Russel Hulse was 24 year old graduate student at the time, just like Jocelyn Bell Burnell when she made her discovery. Taylor was Hulse’s advisor.
But Hulse was a man, so he was given a share of the prize.
"Although I was not included, I celebrated that first award in 1974 of the Physics Prize for an astronomical discovery. Now I celebrate the fact that we have a better understanding of the teamwork necessary for scientific progress."
Jocelyn Bell Burnell has received just about every other award under the sun, including the 2018 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. She used the prize money —about £2.3 million— to establish a scholarship for white women, minority, and refugee students in physics.
Anyway, happy 80th birthday to Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars!
The cover of the Joy Division album "Unknown Pleasures" was adapted from a plot that radio astronomer Harold Craft made for his PhD dissertation, using data collected at Arecibo while studying the pulsar discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
And here is a short documentary where Peter Saville explains how he designed the cover after seeing Craft's plot in a copy of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy. The video uses the same image of Jocelyn Bell Burnell that I included in the first post.
Sure, I was familiar with the graphic—and I’m not alone. Drop this image (right) on someone’s desk and chances are they’ll reflexively blurt, “Joy Division.
I really think the Nobel committee should be able to modify earlier awards to correct injustices like these. Thanks for sharing that screenshot of the Nobel social media post. It's just salt on the wound.
Posts like these from the Nobel committee should have an addendum at the bottom, “And once again, sorry to Jocelyn Bell Burnell, whose grace in spite of our embarrassing chauvinism deserves far more than the measly $25,000 she would have gotten from us. Some day we will do better.”
Yes and no. The 1993 award was given in the shadow of Burnell’s being shafted as a graduate student. I strongly suspect Hulse got the award more because the Nobel folks didn’t want to shaft another graduate student (they may have been influenced by Hulse being male). Taylor invited Burnell to be his guest when accepting the award, so pretty sure that this was part of it.
"We did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an interesting problem - if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe how does one announce the results responsibly? Who does one tell first? We did not solve the problem that afternoon, and I went home that evening very cross here was I trying to get a Ph.D. out of a new technique, and some silly lot of little green men had to choose my aerial and my frequency to communicate with us."
@snack Please, if there’s something you wanted to ask, or a point you were trying to make about the work she did, don’t be hesitant. Just say what you mean.
Wonderful thread: informative, exciting, infuriating, and ultimately so encouraging. The Nobel prize committee blew it big time in this case, others did better, progress is painful, a great scientist succeeded. Thanks for writing this account, it tells us so much.
Thinking again of Jane Grey, a royal of Tudor times, and how the world was robbed of her brilliance when she was beheaded on orders of Queen Mary, when Jane was only seventeen. Most people focus on the history around her short time wearing the crown of England (the first woman, or girl, to do so in her own right), but to me her life before is much more fascinating.
The writings of her tutor and of philosophers in Europe, where you can feel how much in awe they were of her intellect while knowing she was a fifteen year old girl, are spine tingling. Her translating a book into ancient Greek from another ancient language and giving it to her father as his birthday present, at that same age, indicates she was indeed super smart but also a total show-off.
This tutor taught a class of three. All royal kids, all super smart, all went on the become historically significant. I think of them as the Harry Potter trio. One was the King of England, son of Henry VIII, who was placed on the throne at a really young age and the nobles ruled for him, but before his teenage years he already started to take control back. The other girl would become Queen Elizabeth I and we all know she was a powerful force. But this tutor couldn't stop singing the praises of Jane, a minor royal, who outshone them all.
There's this story where this tutor came to visit Jane and her family (again around her age of 15), only to find the family had gone out for a hunt (bad thing, but that's what they did in those days). But only the father, mother and the two other daughters had gone out, Jane was still in the house, so the servants let him in to the main room. There he found her reading a book, sitting in the window to catch enough light. He asked why she was still inside and hadn't gone with her family and enjoy the pleasures of the hunt. She replied, with complete earnest surprise, that she didn't understand why they had gone outside while instead they could be sitting here in the window enjoying the pleasures of reading Plato in the original Greek.
British people tend to call her Lady Jane Grey, to emphasise they aren't calling her Queen Jane. Because Mary had to declare Jane's time as Queen illegitimate and everything else follows from there, suggesting Jane was Queen calls into doubt the current person on the British throne and is therefore treason. I'm not British so I don't have that problem. To me she's Queen Jane.
The last months of her life, when she was sixteen and seventeen years old, Jane Grey was locked up in The Tower, which is the normal prison for royalty (it's a castle and royal people were there under house arrest, or castle arrest, not in dungeons). But because she was a kid, she wasn't in the inner Black Castle part, but in the outer ring with the Head Yeoman and his family. They were under strict instructions from Queen Mary on pain of death, to not let any of her writing get out. There was a thing Mary feared most of all: Jane's words. Jane had already become a fierce fighter for the Protestant religion and Mary was fiercely Catholic.
When Jane was taken to be executed, 17, she carried with her her Book of Hours, which at the time was the most precious and most personal possession a religious person had. Especially for a royal person, this would have been made and illustrated especially for her. Nothing out of the ordinary with her grasping that in her hands. Along the way she asked someone to make sure this book was given to her father. The soldier or servant she gave i
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The last months of her life, when she was sixteen and seventeen years old, Jane Grey was locked up in The Tower, which is the normal prison for royalty (it's a castle and royal people were there under house arrest, or castle arrest, not in dungeons). But because she was a kid, she wasn't in the inner Black Castle part, but in the outer ring with the Head Yeoman and his family. They were under strict instructions from Queen Mary on pain of death, to not let any of her writing get out. There was a thing Mary feared most of all: Jane's words. Jane had already become a fierce fighter for the Protestant religion and Mary was fiercely Catholic.
When Jane was taken to be executed, 17, she carried with her her Book of Hours, which at the time was the most precious and most personal possession a religious person had. Especially for a royal person, this would have been made and illustrated especially for her. Nothing out of the ordinary with her grasping that in her hands. Along the way she asked someone to make sure this book was given to her father. The soldier or servant she gave it to thought it was nothing more than normal that a girl on her way to her execution would want her most prized possession to be given to her father, so he did and thought nothing more about it. Her father discovered she had hidden a whole lot of her writing in the book, which he smuggled to printers in Italy, since England was too dangerous. From there her printed manifests were distributed over England, kept the Protestant flame going during Mary's Catholic reign, so the next Queen could be a Protestant again, Elizabeth I.
In the end, she won after all. (And the trio succeeded)
During her months in The Tower, Mary sent her own chaplain, the most learned Catholic in the country, to Jane every single day to try and convert her. Every day he reported back to Mary that he had not succeeded in converting Jane to Catholicism. His private writings in his journals have been preserved. In it he says that not only did he not succeed in converting her, but many days Jane almost succeeded in converting him.
She could argue like the best. And she would never give in.
(She was aware that the deal was that if she converted to Catholicism, she would be let out and not executed. It says quite something that she didn't take that deal.)
In those days science wasn't some people together doing experiments, but it was a network all over Europe of individual people, usually old gray men, at home thinking about stuff and writing their thoughts down in letters to each other. What blows my mind is that 15 year old Jane Grey was part of that network. Not by trickery, writing under her father's name, or them only replying out of politeness. No, they fully knew who she was and they accepted her as an equal. It's a shame her letters have not been preserved.
What could she have achieved had she been able to live into adulthood. I believe she would have become an important scientist whose name we'd remember. Can you imagine that an earlier scientist even than Isaac Newton would have been a woman, rather than us having to wait centuries later for Marie Curie? I think our whole perception of gender in science would be different.
Living in the not-so-distant future, a New York couple takes a wild ride to parenthood after landing a coveted spot at the Womb Center, which offers couples ...
There are calls to support the SAG-AFTRA strike by cancelling your streaming subscriptions temporarily. I'm not against that.
A while ago when Spotify did their right wing extremism I cancelled my subscription and moved to TIDAL. I could because TIDAL was there as an option, has all the same songs, and every song is available to buy on other platforms anyway. So I'm still at TIDAL and buy all songs from the artists I support, DRM-free on places like iTunes.
But I've long known that if a similar thing would happen to a streaming service, I couldn't do the same. Virtually all content of actresses I support is exclusively on one service and not available to own on DVD or blu-ray. Believe me I check regularly and internationally. So I'm locked in, essentially a prisoner to the subscription system. Add to that the early bird discounts I have where I pay 50% less for my lifetime, which I would lose if I cancelled temporarily.
And I believe it may not be temporarily. If like with Spotify they don't fix the problem, I would want to be able to stay away.
A minor thi
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There are calls to support the SAG-AFTRA strike by cancelling your streaming subscriptions temporarily. I'm not against that.
A while ago when Spotify did their right wing extremism I cancelled my subscription and moved to TIDAL. I could because TIDAL was there as an option, has all the same songs, and every song is available to buy on other platforms anyway. So I'm still at TIDAL and buy all songs from the artists I support, DRM-free on places like iTunes.
But I've long known that if a similar thing would happen to a streaming service, I couldn't do the same. Virtually all content of actresses I support is exclusively on one service and not available to own on DVD or blu-ray. Believe me I check regularly and internationally. So I'm locked in, essentially a prisoner to the subscription system. Add to that the early bird discounts I have where I pay 50% less for my lifetime, which I would lose if I cancelled temporarily.
And I believe it may not be temporarily. If like with Spotify they don't fix the problem, I would want to be able to stay away.
A minor thing I can do if I stay on these services, which I already did anyway: whenever you search for a film, instead of the title search for the actor or actress name you want to watch the film for. This shows up the acting talent as a valuable resource in their statistics.
I was astonished when I realized what rendered in my web-UI didn't render at all an app. See the images in the first comment to see what choices A and B would look like. If you see lines rendered without leading symbols or italics, the rendering engine is eating the markdown silently, which is choice C.
This is quoted text starting with a right angle bracket and a space.
This paragraph includes italics quoted by a single asterisk and bold quoted by double asterisks.
This is a bulleted list item starting with an asterisk and a space.
This is a section header or title starting with a hashtag and a space.
Please boost for more visibility.
Hit up the comments to add further detail, especially if choice C is applicable.
But of course what's already in the can will still be released, but without promotion. E.g. Zoey102, the film sequel with the people from the Zoey101 series, comes out 27 July on Paramount+. The important one for me in that cast is and always has been Erin Sanders as the legendary Quinn.
Of course it's Aimee Carrero who has the best words, as always. Actors are on strike and of course they deserve to be paid properly for their work, even if it's on streaming, and deserve guarantees against misuse of AI, like the writers do. instagram.com/p/CupRXuuprsa/
SAG-AFTRA Strike
For the first time in over 40 years, union film and television actors are on strike.
I'm reflecting on the importance of unions.
Though *never* above reproach or improvement, unions harness the power of the collective.
Together, we can alleviate the crushing weight of unfettered capitalism.
Together, we can slow the terminal spread of endless consumption and growth-at-all-cost.
At their best, unions represent the hope that the worker is not a pawn, that The Man is not invincible, and that the fight for human dignity cannot and will not be deterred.
Unions are the ever-rare reminder that power is really in the hands of the people.
Watching Clinical on Netflix because the promotion for this film features India Eisley rather prominently (even though she's only seventh on the cast list). Seems an intense character from her. #Clinical #IndiaEisley
India is third on the credits instead and this fits more with how important her role is. Both hers and the main therapist characters are great, but the other characters don't always feel right nor does the film script. Still an interesting watch. I wish I could see India Eisley as the lead somewhere.
Following the example of the German government and the European Commission, the government of the Netherlands is now running their own Mastodon server! No middlemen between them and their constituents! Welcome @minbzk!
Meanwhile the UK government are still deciding which of their mates to bung a few billion £s to to provide a server. Which will probably never get delivered.
this is so awesome to see. Well done Masotdon team! Free communication that is not controlled by evil American corporations will become a reality everywhere!
Rewatching We Hunt Together one episode per week, now they are finally showing it on the BBC (One) after I had previously seen it on the BBC (First) and caught up with the repeat on the BBC (Entertainment).
Hermione Corfield and Eve Myles, double the reason to watch. #WeHuntTogether
I get my email notifications on multiple devices, so I had a 'Did Mastodon have yet another security release?' moment. But no, it's the same one this time.
With our government stepping down because they couldn't agree how to make their very right wing policies even more right wing, and the current mood in the country going towards extreme right wing, I'm dreading the upcoming elections. Let's hope people come back from the 'farmers movement' and surprise me and vote for policies to repair the climate and social justice. #DutchPolitics #NLPol
I dislike how groups of people try to control how individuals think and experience things and come down en masse to make people feel bad about themselves. Whether about tech opinions or sexuality. Because I witnessed both, today.
Found via "Do large language models know what they are talking about?", a good article by itself. The answer is obviously "no" (as fedizen Betteridge will tell you), but the point is why and how.
Nothing new if you've been listening to DAIR people or I suppose computational linguists in general, or linguists in general, but maybe there's some part of the argument that makes it click for someone.
I didn't know that my conclusion about the Chinese Room thought experiment was the same as that of Ray Kurtzweil!
Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, Pixelfed, PeerTube, dare I say it even Twitter, all have websites that work perfectly fine on mobile. I don't understand this obsession with 'I'm on mobile so I should select an app' or 'I want to see the website so I should use a computer'. The sites may even work better than the app. Often you can save them to your home screen too.
You may consider the feature that apps of mainstream social media provided of extra tracking and snooping to be a nice bonus, but you're not going to get that anyway in fediverse apps.
Apparently picking up my keyboard, fumbling it, and watching it ultimately tumble to the floor somehow causes it to launch Microsoft 365, software I wasn't even aware I had. Weird hotkey.
I vaguely recall there being a hot key that launched a buy screen for MS Office. Maybe that was 365. And maybe it was Windows 7... But whatever it was I accidentally discovered it one day and since then always assumed several gigs are being used just to house software they want us to pay to unlock.
Great to see Prof Francesca back. Reshared, not because of the tech advice request, looks like she got a lot of answers already, but this is of course a very serious and important archaeological photo.
Hello all! Is there a way to update the Mastodon app? It doesn’t seem to be working well for me (I have an iPhone - is that relevant?) … By way of an apology for such a boring request, here’s a pic of me admiring an apotropiac phallus on the Greek island of Delos last week …
Why would someone boost a four year old Mastodon post of mine and have I really been here that long(*)? It's the one I got a warning(**) for too, I think.
(*) Has it been that long since I gave up on Tumblr because of it breaking all the time?
@daedalus Right! Give me an old newspaper and I look at the ads, show me an old picture of a city street and I am reading the signs and shop windows. The meta data and ancillary info that puts something in context is often as interesting as the media itself.
Ok, two weekends ago. This is the elastic file storage part of the bill. That's NFS, still storing the same data. Other services I still need to reduce.
I'm getting into Sanditon a few series late, but episode one of series three did a good job of getting everyone up to speed including late joiners. Now I'm starting episode two and it's as if I missed another year.
The lead role of Charlotte in Sanditon is played by Rose Williams. I may not like how the scenes are edited and filmed, but she is certainly the good thing about this series. I'll keep watching it.
I think the Dutch national women's volleyball team did really well over the last couple of weeks, despite the result. They were playing with a very much junior team due to injuries etc among the usual players and they grew during the tournament. Some new players really stood up to compensate for the missing (fitness of the) top players. Once everyone is back, the coach is going to have to make some difficult decisions, born out of luxury.
I have sympathy for the weekend workers that must repair the garbage changes. Maybe on Saturday and Sunday, Twitter is run in Beta mode? A change doesn’t count unless it makes it until Monday morning.
I saw speculation that it may be his service providers throttling his service level back, since Elmo hasn't been paying them for some time. This level of service will lead to advertisers suing for not getting the eyeball count they paid for.
I think it's a favour to all those volunteer instance admins who have a day job and only have time for this kind of shenanigans in the evening or weekend. 😉
I don’t know why everybody keeps giving Elon a hard time. He has done wonders for decentralized social networks and kicked down doors for the rest to follow suit. Keep up the good work! 😂
It's great actually. Forced panic mandatory weekend overtime crunch will cause more engineers to quit twitter. The more that twatter hemorrhages employees, the faster it will crash and burn.
Not the last Indeed We believe, in France, that this black out has a serious involvement in a social anger growing un France. What IS French révolution happend again?😏
it does suck having it happen on a weekend 🤣 I was in the middle of watching prospect drafts for NHL hockey and poof! Gone. So now I'm here on Mastodon. Someone needs to end Twitter once and for all.
Honestly? I don't think Twitter will ever die. He just has this weird way of testing in production. What I do think is that Twitter won't ever have a stable version anymore.
Entre Elon Y Zuck al final nos destruirán a nosotros, no lo permitamos. Solo hay que aguantar un poco mas y ellos caerán primero, no nos vendamos nuestra esencia. Vienen a nosotros por que necesitan algo.
Han caído antes otras redes como face o tuiter que nadie pensaba que caerían que no logro recordar ahora.
Unfortunately if you said to the dude "9-5 work week" he would look at you puzzled like you were speaking an alien language (the even more unfortunate thing is he expects same from his employees).
in fact, nothing can replace twitter for now. i feel twitter is the newest social media platform in my opinion compared to the others. but i had no more hope after a madman acquired it. hoping for better but actually very bad.
![Mike [SEC=OFFICIAL]](avatar/570/66d7b9e49ef23576dbc9f030d261-80.jpeg?ts=1754781750)
qwazix
in reply to qwazix • • •Followup poll for those who answered "Yes and I enjoy it"
Why do you enjoy it?
- get perspective about how the poster sees the img (86%, 45 votes)
- explains things to me that I don't get visually (67%, 35 votes)
- points me to the significant part of the picture (55%, 29 votes)
- spiderman (15%, 8 votes)
52 voters. Poll end: 2 years agoreshared this
Gidi Kroon and qwazix reshared this.
PJ "chinga la migra" Coffey
in reply to qwazix • • •You neglected "and had poor reception so you could still browse". 😉
That's when I knew my policies were coming in for me, real "cut kerb" stuff.
Petri Salmela
in reply to qwazix • • •Claudius (legacy account)
in reply to qwazix • • •it's B! Cavello 🐝
in reply to qwazix • • •Tiota Sram
in reply to qwazix • • •Leif-Jöran Olsson
in reply to qwazix • • •Enjoyment is in this dual respect of resources.
Paul-Gabriel Wiener
in reply to qwazix • • •Sometimes I check the alt text. Depending on the picture and my mood. Usually not. But sometimes I get useful information from it.
So I'd pick the fourth option in the poll. Except I can't because you spelled Spider-Man wrong. (The hyphen serves an important purpose, making the name visually distinct from Superman.)
Paul-Gabriel Wiener
in reply to Paul-Gabriel Wiener • • •To be more specific: Alt text is a good backup for me.
What am I missing? What am I supposed to be looking at? What does that tiny text say? What kind of animal is that? Where did this come from? Where was this picture taken?
Good alt text answers those questions. Usually I can see what I need, but if I'm left with questions, alt text can really help.
ArneBab
in reply to qwazix • • •Resuna
in reply to qwazix • • •dawnfry
in reply to qwazix • • •I read them because sometimes people are very witty in their alt-text, and sometimes they explain the photo very poetically.
It also helps when my eyes are dry and bifocals fail me.