Notices by Paul Knightly, PhD (paulknightly@mstdn.social)

Cancelled my WaPo subscription. I've had recurring concerns about the editorial control of the paper over the years, but clearly their owner would rather lick boot than stand up for a free press or democracy.

One of my wife's coworkers used her lunch break yesterday to panic buy toilet paper at the Sam's Club next door. If anything, there may be a glut of toilet paper as most is produced domestically or exported.

Perishable foods, like bananas and pineapples, are most likely to disappear from store shelves in the coming weeks if the strike drags on. Impacted consumer goods are probably a mix-match depending on port of origin.

https://www.koco.com/article/toilet-paper-panic-buying-longshoremen-strike/62488730

Tech companies: Let's build a utopian society where people don't have to worry about driving cars and can get to their destinations safely.

The dystopian reality that's delivered:

Self-driving cars honking in response to each other's presence throughout the night, building to a crescendo around 4 AM.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/08/self-driving-waymo-cars-keep-sf-residents-awake-all-night-by-honking-at-each-other/

Finding out that Gov. Tim Walz is enough of a geography nerd that he gave a keynote address to the Esri User Conference two weeks ago just sent my approval of him into the stratosphere. Watching this right now but man, I'm excited for this ticket.

https://youtu.be/Ni8BrT0-6gM

I'm excited to be collaborating with this year's crew to the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS) as they tend to a data logging station I shipped for last year's crew to deploy.

This work builds off research I did at FMARS during the Mars 160 mission in 2017. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we had good data collection through the arctic winter!

https://www.marssociety.org/news/2024/06/19/arctic-flashline-mission-is-happening-again/

FMARS is located on the rim of the Haughton Impact Structure on Tallurutit (Devon Island) in the Canadian high arctic. It's Mars-like qualities range from it's isolation down to its location at an impact crater in an ice-rich, periglacial environment.

It was really a tremendous place to do some of my PhD research and it would be great to go back again in person someday, but I feel fortunate that I'm able to continue with this work remotely.

Some of my favorite photos from 2017.

I'll really celebrate once a verdict is handed down, but this is really fantastic news.

A central component to Adobe's subscription model is making it as difficult as possible to cancel, in violation of a 2010 law that they've been skirting for the better part of the last 12 years.

I dealt with all of the tactics listed in the lawsuit when I cancelled my CreativeCloud subscription in 2018 and never looked back. Hope they get what's coming.

https://petapixel.com/2024/06/17/justice-department-sues-adobe-for-hidden-fees-and-difficult-cancellations/

Europe stepping up to the plate again with sensible rule-setting, this time in the form of non-mandatory guidelines for bringing back physical buttons for key vehicle functions including turn signals, hazard lights, windshield wipers, car horn, and other SOS features.

I had no idea that we were so far gone that car horns have been shuffled to the touch screen, but here we are.

Touch screen displays arguably make driving more dangerous, and Euro NCAP agrees.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/03/carmakers-must-bring-back-buttons-to-get-good-safety-scores-in-europe/

Apparently a Doonesbury strip was removed from over 400 newspapers in the US this past Sunday for running afoul of conservative states' censorship laws.

Garry Trudeau remains an unsung American hero.

https://www.cracked.com/article_41196_conservative-newspaper-conglomerate-proved-their-opponents-point-when-they-banned-this-doonesbury-comic-strip.html

Christopher Nolan says that there is a danger in having content only exist in a streaming format, that physical media is the only way to hedge against its disappearance from public access in the future.

I've long advocated for owning music in particular (as much as ownership exists these days) in part from the financial standpoint of paying into a collection that isn't anchored to a streaming platform. Hadn't thought about the existential issue of streaming-only content

https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/christopher-nolan-says-streaming-only-content-is-a-danger-and-can-get-taken-down-guillermo-del-toro-calls-owning-physical-media-a-responsibility/ar-AA1kfSfB

I joined the Fediverse a year ago today, deactivating the bird a couple weeks later, and my relationship with social media has improved significantly over that time.

I checked in on the other space several times before allowing my accounts to be permanently deleted earlier this year, and it felt like a fever dream.

I wish more people realized that social media (er, networking) doesn't have to be that way. Bluesky, Threads, etc still miss the boat.

Google killing off their basic HTML version of Gmail due to basic HTML not including 'full feature functionality' seems like code for 'we don't make ad revenue off this version'.

We relied on the basic HTML version while doing arctic fieldwork in 2017 using low bandwidth satellite internet. Gone were extraneous graphics and junk ads getting served - just mail. It's also no longer possible to auto sort messages in the full version without enabling tracking to serve ads.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/25/gmail_basic_html_discontinued/

@sundogplanets it's very sad.

I was sitting outside with my spouse last night to watch a Starlink train pass (her first) and I pointed out that as the train crossed paths with another satellite the odds were very high that the other sat was also a Starlink. Didn't realize the odds were that high😬

Posted elsewhere but there's a difference between lower engagement chronological feeds and unhealthy social media interactions. Rage-baiting curated timelines drive engagement but aren't healthy for end-users.

When I log on here, I scroll through the most recent posts briefly and if there's something of interest, I engage healthily and move on. Same with FB now that I broke the algorithm with my ad-blocker so that my feed is updating less frequently.

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-just-proved-people-hate-chronological-feeds/

I had reactivated my Twitter account last month to facilitate relaying weather observations to our local NWS office during the height of severe weather season because I haven't pursued my ARRL Technician License yet.

Receiving and relaying severe weather updates is what singularly drew me back to the platform in 2014 and it will now be the final factor that keeps me away for good. The misinformation surrounding this story doesn't help either.

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-exemptions-nws-public-service-safety-weather-accounts