WHY is the signage on the Queen Alexandra Eye Pavilion—the main ophthalmology hospital for south-east Scotland—in a fancy hard-to-read typeface with insufficient colour contrast and a too-small font?

Are they TRYING to evade their customer base? 🥸

So Bluesky is about to require people to verify their age, which means sharing their real identity. I’ve no problem with people knowing my identity but then I’m not trying to hide from abusers. Or explore my gender. Or be a whistleblower. Or protest without getting arrested. Or or or… there are so many reasons people need anonymity.

Despite being myself online I am not keen to show Bluesky my scanned face or my bank card. So I guess I won’t be sticking around there.

I gave my advice before I left, which was “Switch to Mastodon, nobody there cares who you are, as long as you’re funny.”

Apparently Libre Office is free and contains no AI.

#AI #Microsoft #LibreOffice

Today I learned about 'rabbit starvation' and how Neanderthals avoided it.

When you're a hunter-gatherer and it's winter, you may try to survive by eating only meat - like rabbits, but also deer and other game. But this gives you too much protein and not enough carbohydrates and fat: most of this meat is very lean. If you eat enough lean meat to get all the calories you need, you can die from an overdose of protein! It's called 'protein toxicity'.

Hunter-gatherers in this situation sometimes throw away the 'steaks' and 'roasts' - the thighs and shoulders of the animals they kill - or feed them to their dogs. They need FAT to survive! So they focus on eating the fatty parts, including bone marrow.

So, in some cultures, while the men are out hunting, the women spend time making bone grease. This takes a lot of work. They take bones and break them into small pieces with a stone hammer. They boil them for several hours. The fat floats to the top. Then they let the water cool and skim off the fat.

There's been evidence for people doing this as far back as 28,000 BC. But now some scientists have found a Neanderthal 'bone grease factory' that's 125,000 years old!

This was during the last interglacial, in Germany. In a site near a lake, called Neumark-Nord, Neanderthals killed a lot of bison, horses and deer and crushed their bones, leaving behind tens of thousands of small bone fragments.

• Lutz Kindler et al, Large-scale processing of within-bone nutrients by Neanderthals, 125,000 years ago, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adv1257

Thanks to @sarahtaber for spotting this!

When telephone boxes were installed on our streets, some perhaps feared that this new-fangled technology would replace post boxes.

And yet the post boxes remain, and the telephone boxes do not.

Ooh, it's not often you get a story of the little person triumphing over corporate bullying, but this is boss!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy4nq02y9w7o

#Liverpool

As one of those Green SDC Councillors, I fully support Dale Vince’s position:-

Great to have support of the Greens on Stroud Council - for the Palestinian flag we’re flying on our HQ building. I get that the planning department has to respond to complaints but I think they have mis read planning rules - there is no mention within them that a country must be recognised by the UK - to allow it’s flag to be flown.

150 nations recognise Palestine now and the UN flies this flag. We’re in discussions - but willing if we need to, to establish the right to fly this flag - because in other areas of our country an insidious group calling themselves Lawyers for Israel are causing councils to take down the Palestinian flag.

That’s wrong and we’re going to seek to right it. Meanwhile, thank you to Stroud Greens - for the support.

#Palestine #SDC #SDGP #Stroud

The program you DON'T WANT TO INSTALL!

Share and educate people!

From the company that took all digitized content without permission to build their product, now we have a browser.

So the company can use your data and behavior and to lock you in to their statistical parrot (AI)

#AI #privacy