Mastodawn

So migrating birds [and a number of other species] can orient to Earth's magnetic field to navigate.

Has anyone used a bunch of big magnets to mess with 'em? Like a cat with a laser pointer, but getting an entire flock of geese to go in circles, "haha, made you turn!"

It seems someone has started this important work: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00114-004-0595-8

Magnetic compass orientation of migratory birds in the presence of a 1.315 MHz oscillating field - The Science of Nature

The radical pair model of magnetoreception predicts that magnetic compass orientation can be disrupted by high frequency magnetic fields in the Megahertz range. European robins, Erithacus rubecula, were tested under monochromatic 565 nm green light in 1.315 MHz fields of 0.48 μT during spring and autumn migration, with 1.315 MHz being the frequency that matches the energetic splitting induced by the local geomagnetic field. The birds’ responses depended on the alignment of the oscillating field with respect to the static geomagnetic field: when the 1.315 MHz field was aligned parallel with the field lines, birds significantly preferred northerly directions in spring and southerly directions in autumn. These preferences reflect normal migratory orientation, with the variance slightly increased compared to control tests in the geomagnetic field alone or to tests in a 7.0 MHz field. However, in the 1.315 MHz field aligned at a 24° angle to the field lines, the birds were disoriented in both seasons, indicating that the high frequency field interfered with magnetoreception. These finding are in agreement with theoretical predictions and support the assumption of a radical-pair mechanism underlying the processes mediating magnetic compass information in birds.

SpringerLink

Milo Trujillo 5d ago

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Triss Hellsite 5d ago

@stellarskylark

Milo Trujillo Mar 23

Jason Lefkowitz Mar 23

Imagine how much happier you’d be today if you’d never turned it back on

Milo Trujillo Mar 22

evacide Mar 22

Some tips on giving digital privacy/security advice: if you tell people they absolutely need to do a long list of difficult and expensive things before they travel, people will nod and smile and then not do it at all. This is why my advice focuses on harm reduction and understanding trade-offs.

Milo Trujillo Mar 22

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occult Feb 20

Computing in the year 2029 as depicted in UNIX WORLD magazine, 1985.

#UNIX

Milo Trujillo Mar 16

Some thoughts on academic and journalistic collaboration on leaked documents based on a recent workshop https://backdrifting.net/post/081_academic_leaked_data

The Journalist/Academic Leaked Data Divide

Milo Trujillo Mar 10

Emelia 👸🏻Mar 10

So there's a tiny tiny percentage of people in my mentions right now that are accusing me of horrible things because they don't like Bluesky and I've taken money from them.

For these people, I'm not saying you have to like Bluesky's moderation practices or the decision they make for their own app, I would never say such.

These people fundamentally do not get standards, and especially web standards, and how they are made. So here's a small explanation for people.

In the standards community, there's practically a code that is we do not argue about our employers or financial supporters' corporate positions, we leave our companies at the door when we participate in writing open standards.

Sure, some of us my represent our given employers within the standards community (and there's a requirement to disclose affiliations), but there's also a bunch of us that operate entirely independently of any given company.

At the W3C, which is the home of the FedCM standard, they have what are known as Invited Experts, and the W3C enforces that they act independently and that they disclose any affiliation, especially financial.

I am an Invited Expert, that happened before Bluesky decided to fund my work. Bluesky, like them or not, are one of the few organizations that actually has the capital to fund standards work. Doing this work isn't cheap either! It's a tonne of work seeking consensus and reaching agreement to move things forwards.

Like, I'm current budgeting 30-50% of my productive time over the next year will be working on this standard.

When I first chatted with Bluesky, they were initially like "we want to do a three month freelance contract to implement FedCM for AT Protocol", and after some conversation, we settled on "no, this shouldn't be a contract but instead a grant, that allows you to be completely independent of bluesky and explicitly enables you to work across decentralized protocols, making FedCM better for everyone"

The grant is explicitly clear contractually that I am entirely independent from bluesky, like I could make a technical decision others at bluesky do not like (unlikely, but possible), and it would not affect the grant.

It explicitly requires me to work across protocols.

Milo Trujillo Mar 3

Housey Mar 3

just got FIRED from the CLOCK FACTORY

after ALL the EXTRA HOURS i PUT IN

Milo Trujillo Mar 2

Someone DMed me on Reddit and gave me hundreds of songs in obscure MIDI-derived formats popular in the demoscene, and now I’ve written a perl script to feed them through a MIDI decoder and ffmpeg to export as flac or mp3 so an ordinary music player can read them

Milo Trujillo Mar 2

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Homepage	https://backdrifting.net