About 250M years ago, 90% of species on Earth died during the Permian extinction. All of that loss created a lot of vacant niches to fill.

And not long after, the first mammals, our ancestors, appeared.

I find it comforting to remember that life on this pale blue dot will be resilient - whether we’re part of it or not. #science #nature #history #SharedPlanet

I've been struggling with this myself, so I thought I'd repeat it for other people that might be dealing with the same thing:

Not every hobby needs to be a project. Not everything needs to be a whole *thing* with a goal and an endpoint. It's okay to not finish something. It's okay to pick up something for a bit, explore it, start making something, and then drop it without making any "progress".

Productivity is capitalist bullshit that doesn't need to infect your free time too. Have some fun

I love closing out the year with this. 😊

On December 31, 1995, exactly 27 years ago today, legendary cartoonist Bill Watterson published his final 'Calvin and Hobbes' comic strip.

How beautiful and appropriate it was, and a timeless reminder of what we have before us in 2023. ❤️

Happy New Year, ya'll!

Greetings. Once upon a time long ago, I was sitting alone in the UCLA ARPANET site #1 computer room late one night when the high Santa Ana winds outside started disrupting power. Hit after hit, very dangerous for the minicomputers, disk drives, and other equipment in that room, since we didn't have uninterruptible power supplies back then.

I made some calls and it was decided I should shut everything in the room down. Everything. I phoned the ARPANET NOC (Network Operations Center) at BBN and explained the situation, since I was about to shut down IMP #1 (essentially, a refrigerator-sized router) on ARPANET which sat in a corner of the room, and doing this could cause disruptions if done in an unplanned manner. The IMP was *always* running -- I had never seen it powered down.

I worked my way around the room, powering down terminals and disks, and printers, and the power supplies on the 11/45 (ARPANET Host #1 - UCLA-ATS) and the 11/70 (Host #129 [1+128 on IMP #1] - UCLA-SECURITY. Back then my email addresses were LAUREN@UCLA-ATS and LAUREN@UCLA-SECURITY -- no domains yet.

The usual roar of the many machines' fans and motors gradually got quieter and quieter, until only the IMP was left. I pulled down the power switch. Now there was dead silence except the hum of the lights, a situation I'd never experienced in that room before. Very odd feeling.

Suddenly I heard a click -- the IMP was powering back up by itself. Damn. I pulled down the switch again. Quiet for a time, then click and it came back up yet again. Before I started thinking about screwing around with its power cables or turning off breakers that could have unexpected effects, I called the NOC again to ask them if they had any ideas.

"Oh yeah. We should have told you! There's a little switch that controls auto-restart. Surprise!"

So I found and flipped that little toggle switch, powered down the IMP again, and this time it stayed down. I had turned off the ARPANET -- at least at UCLA. -L

“Booty call” and “butt dial” has been offered up as an example of where the literal meaning of two phrases is the same but the implied meaning is very different (denotative vs connotative meanings).

Today a coffee mug gave me another example: “dad bod” and “father figure”

#linguistics #wordplay

One thing that Mastodon newcomers may not realize is how easy it is to turn Mastodon for web into essentially a Tweetdeck clone, with columns for search/compose, home, notifications, and any lists you've set up. It takes literally seconds.

Here's what mine looks like right now: