Notices by Fish Id Wardrobe (fishidwardrobe@mastodon.me.uk)

@glynmoody ^^^^^
Wait wait wait. The rats of NIMH were (nearly) real??

@evan i use one for work, so…

@glynmoody iirc the yoga thing was in the news a few years ago, so this isn't exactly a lightning response, but, good.

Okay, that's … what the fuck? That's amazing!

We tend, I think, to imagine that the days of simple scientific 'miracles' – Newton and his prism, Fleming and penicillin – are at an end. Anything really useful will take years of work and a mountain of kit to make happen.

Nope. Take tartrazine, the food colouring used in Doritos, and paint it onto your skin. Shine a red light on it. Your skin is transparent!

How many medical applications does that have?!

https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/sep/05/common-food-dye-found-to-make-skin-and-muscle-temporarily-transparent

@inthehands Not what *I* meant, to be clear: I meant that I can well believe that a racist would assign the phrase to black people -- but using it does not make you racist, because you might (not being racist) assign the phrase to some other group...

@goatsarah @christineburns well, I mean, that's already true, so...

@christineburns I'm not sure you can say "for good" in any sense. It's not for ever; nothing in politics ever is. I remember after Michael Foot they said Labour was finished forever.

And although I'm very happy to see the Tories taught a lesson -- their corruption alone renders them totally unfit -- democracy requires a working opposition...

@inthehands I'm going to argue that GDPR is more than half-way to such a law --- if enforced aggressively enough.

@aral @howlinhobbit Mate, you can call him wrong -- for all I know he may be -- but David Brin? A simpleton? ROFL.

I mean, hurl random insults at whoever you like, I guess. But at least make the insults credible.

@inthehands @mcc I once read that the vocals to this are by someone improbably famous. I think The Pointer Sisters?

@inthehands @jenniferplusplus This is extremely good. I think you could argue that a commons is exactly what the original "guys with beards sharing mainframe code" that started all this were trying to build, but either way it seems to me it's exactly how we should view it.

@mcc If you get a negative size, I assume that would be bad

@oliphant @evan I think it's super easy to conflate two different things here: whether it does any harm and whether it's ethical.

Of course if it does harm, it's probably not ethical.

My POV: I'm not convinced that this does a lot of harm. But it's not ethical.

@inthehands By "neutral", of course, they mean "white". White is the default. Everything else is non-standard and political.

@carolleisa @hannu_ikonen @STL_Inquiries "Rebellious" is surely either positive *or* negative depending on what you are rebelling *against*?

As for "punk": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_ideologies

@courtcan @BlackAzizAnansi I think this is exactly right. In London in 2020, when it was thought that homeless folks might be a vector, suddenly we found a way to solve the homeless problem! We could have done that at any time! We could carry on doing it now!

But, no. Those with the power to fix these things don't care to. That's a constant.

@notGordonAllport @courtcan @BlackAzizAnansi Meh; I can't "do anything". The list of things I have the resources to do is far shorter than the list of things I don't.

I can't, for example, give up my job in order to look after my disabled wife and daughter – even though I would like to, more than anything.

We mostly do not have agency.

@inthehands I believe that happened in 1913, too.

@ntnsndr @loriemerson
Well, it *is* a word: https://www.thefreedictionary.com/butment

@loriemerson @ntnsndr Well, yes, but presumably they *could* have used a made up word in the codex.

Adams seems rather more advanced than other codes I've seen, with extra words for you to add your own meaning to, and codes for inserting cyphers? ("burrowing" etc.)