#OnThisDay, 28 Nov 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovers the existence of pulsars.

Not included in the 1974 Nobel prize for the discovery, Bell received a £3m prize for her work in 2018. She's used it to set up a foundation to improve the diversity in STEM.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #WomenInSTEM #Histodons

You can (and should) add alt text to other documents besides HTML, including Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and more. Microsoft has put together a resource on how to add alt text to files made using Microsoft products.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/everything-you-need-to-know-to-write-effective-alt-text-df98f884-ca3d-456c-807b-1a1fa82f5dc2

A few days ago, Greta Thunberg said this…
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As the COP29 climate meeting reaches its end, it should not come as a surprise that yet another COP is failing. The current draft is a complete disaster. But even if our expectations are close to non-existent, we must never find ourselves reacting to these continuous betrayals with anything but rage.

The people in power are again about to agree to a death sentence to the countless people whose lives have been or will be ruined by the climate crisis. The current text is full of false solutions and empty promises. The money from the Global North countries needed to pay back their climate debt is still nowhere to be seen. The host country, Azerbaijan, is a repressive and authoritarian petrostate that has committed ethnic cleansing and genocidal acts towards Armenians. Civil society present at COP29 are being silenced, yet continue fighting and pushing negotiators towards the bare minimum.

All of this while oppression, inequalities, wars, and genocides all over the world continue to intensify. Those in power are worsening the destabilization and destruction of our life-supporting ecosystems. We are on track to experience the hottest year ever recorded, with global greenhouse gases reaching an all-time high just last year.

It is clear that the current systems are not working in our favor. The COP processes aren’t just failing us, they are part of a larger system built on injustice and designed to sacrifice current and future generations for the opportunity of a few to keep making unimaginable profits and to continue exploiting planet and people.

With every negotiation, with every speech made by a world leader, and with every agreement they sign, it becomes clear that it is up to us as a global collective to take the action we so desperately need, and to show where the leadership truly lies. They are not going to do it for us, as this COP29 yet again proves.
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#Politics #Economics #Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateJustice

After seeing an article about how no one wants to look up from their smartphones anymore, I wrote a post. It's much longer than this screenshot but it was my favorite line.

https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/2024/11/17/everythingold.html

When I was a PhD student, I attended a talk by the late Robin Milner where he said two things that have stuck with me.

The first, I repeat quite often. He argued that credit for an invention did not belong to the first person to invent something but to the first person to explain it well enough that no one needed to invent it again. His first historical example was Leibniz publishing calculus and then Newton claiming he invented it first: it didn’t matter if he did or not, he failed to explain it to anyone and so the fact that Leibniz needed to independently invent it was Newton’s failure.

The second thing, which is a lot more relevant now than at the time, was that AI should stand for Augmented Intelligence not Artificial Intelligence if you want to build things that are actually useful. Striving to replace human intelligence is not a useful pursuit because there is an abundant supply of humans and you can improve the supply of intelligent humans by removing food poverty, improving access to education, and eliminating other barriers that prevent vast numbers of intelligent humans from being able to devote time to using their intelligence. The valuable tools are ones that do things humans are bad at. Pocket calculators changed the world because being able to add ten-digit numbers together orders of magnitude faster allowed humans to use their intelligence for things that were not the tedious, repetitive, tasks (and get higher accuracy for those tasks). If you want to change the world, build tools that allow humans to do more by offloading things humans are bad at and allowing them to spend more time on things humans are good at.