Notices by Alistair K (libroraptor@mastodon.nz)

I just received mail from Algeria that was sent last August. Or was it July? The duration is surprising but I'm even more surprised that it arrived at all, and I'm wondering where it has been: where does mail sit and wait, or slowly meander, on journeys so temporally long?

#mail #post

@Cal @pezmico I'd still like the portable computing. Just not the decorative fluff and the demand to set up an account for unwanted software, and not a whole lot of apps that I have no use for. And also not the stupid interfaces that nag you with all sorts of unwanted alerts.

SMS messages are getting to be a problem on that front too with things like the Microsoft authenticator messages coming from multiple numbers so you can't delete them all in a single step. Such bad design.

@Cal @pezmico LineageOS is of great help, incidentally, for those phones that'll run it. I don't know enough to learn how to compile my own for other phones and don't anticipate having the cognitive capacity again to learn how to do it.

@skinnylatte My sister-in-law hates cooking. My nephews and nieces have hence come to appreciate even a two-pot meal.

@skinnylatte you would not survive the Indian restaurants in New Zealand. Nor the Chinese restaurants in my city, which (apart from one) are still stuck in the 1980s white versions of yellow. We even have a 'traditional' Chinese smorgasbord of 'traditional' dishes like stir-fried noodles, beef-and-broccoli, fried rice, deep-fried won tons in sweet-and-sour sauce, ... I wonder whether it's the last one left in the country.

@skinnylatte And "spicy" to mean chili with total ignorance of every other spice that matters. Even Indian restaurants pull this crap – presumably pushed into it by the gimmick diners – so I no longer eat at them.

@bibliolater @linguistics @ai For centuries, we've said that education solves problems like these.

Maybe we could try a broader education for academics? Maybe specialisation is part of what drives this blindness to one's own ignorance, the blindness that makes everyone an expert in rhetoric while actual rhetors are now so rare that hardly anyone knows that they ever existed.

@bibliolater @linguistics @ai We have long been pushed this way in the name of "scholarly" tone, especially in the social sciences. The whole APA manual was developed expressly to purge scholarly writing of individual bias, and there's no shortage of reviewers and reviewers out there who demand crabbed verbiage on the grounds that it is "formal" and "academic". Or who forbid passive voice. How many of them are actually rhetors? They simply don't know – what they exercise is mere prejudice.

@bibliolater @linguistics @ai How does one fix immaturity, posturing and prejudice anywhere? I don't see it being easier to solve among academics than among any other group.

APA has matured greatly since its "let's be like physics" positivism phase but a few great thinkers really do not steer the minds of the many just trying to get another publication out in order to keep their jobs. And so many undergrads are told "APA style" or "MLA style" merely for obedience, not with critical purpose.

@bibliolater @linguistics @ai Styles have epistemologies under them, just like learning management systems embody epistemologies and pedagogies. Far too few people engage in those issues. Canvas gets sold to educational administrators by its looks, a lot like APA and MLA are sold to undergraduates.

@skinnylatte Interesting. I struggle to understand people speaking French with a Chinese accent, at least a northern-dialect accent. It hits the vowels in just the right way to maximise damage. I had the same difficulty with people speaking German with a Russian accent.

I wonder whether there's some rule or table matching mother tongues to the second languages that bring about the biggest language-learning challenges?

@nddev @Kay @anne_twain @Gustodon @georgepenney We're gradually getting those here, too, also at public libraries.

@georgepenney @Kay @oddhack @nddev @anne_twain @Gustodon I like the Nelson and Richmond libraries, too. They're fairly peaceful and they're good at maintaining the book collection, and slowly developing a few other collections like board games, sewing machines, craft kits. And the staff are nice. We may be getting a new one in Nelson – the current one is in an old car sales showroom that's increasingly in need of renovation or rebuilding.

@anne_twain @Gustodon @georgepenney We had this in when we lived in the US and liked it. We have it at Pak n Save here and like it. It's so much better to have all of your shopping packed well rather than triple-handled and packed poorly! And much better than self checkouts because the stupid thing isn't always yelling at you to compensate for its own incompetence.

@luckytran I think that I understand the long tails indicating a long period of infectiousness. Could you help me to understand what the left-hand side means? The bits that confuse me are the "symptom onset" label, the staggering of the delta-omicron-ancestral bars (I guess that their positions must be referring to something) and the vertical axis.

@inthehands I am so often the person on the right.

Another academic journal outs its authors, reviewers, editors on the pseudo-intellectual catwalk.

There surely can't be a shortage of rigorous, honest candidates for academic jobs?

#academicChatter

@sundogplanets @mikeolson I wish that we could get the heritage people to take this seriously – occasionally they manage to raise a minor ruckus to get something done but I fear that there are not very many at all who care about our sky heritage. The few who do care are vastly outnumbered by people who want to collect all the broken bottles and chipped ceramics under old houses that aren't even all that old. (I say that as a heritage person!)

@mikeolson @sundogplanets I don't know anything about this but I do have a question – does "burn up" mean that the stuff is removed without a trace? Or are they thinking only about collisions while dodging engagement with other consequences of atmospheric pollution?

@danilo Not only seniors – I am not a senior yet, and I can't tell what's clickable.

Flat design isn't the only impediment: another is invisible activators that are revealed only when you do some magic swipe thing that is completely arbitrary. Far too many phones have this instead of a button now, and many operating systems hide scroll bars this way.

Then there are interfaces that cater to only one sense, generally vision: no contouring means nothing for vision-poor people to find the button.