Notices by Quixoticgeek (quixoticgeek@social.v.st)

Answer 1: The structure of DNA
Answer 2: Rosalind Franklin's notebook.

Given the news, I'm reminded of when I organised a pub quiz which had the questions.

"what did Rosalind Franklin discover?"
And then
"What did Watson and Crick discover?"

I wonder how many tourists wander round Amsterdam Zuid station looking for platform three quarters...

When I was first starting out in IT, there was a saying "noone got fired for buying IBM" these days, it's "noone got fired for buying Microsoft".

We really need to change that.

MS is having DNS issues. So the Dutch railways are having issues. Critical national infrastructure should not be on cloud systems owned by foreign companies. This is resiliency 101.

@backupbear working in IT support, a colleague comes to me with a problem with their laptop.

"Have you tried turning it off?" I ask.
"Yes, and back on again" they reply
"That isn't what I asked"

Took them far too long to understand.

Just imagine. If all the money that's been poured into the sparkling autocarrot industry, had instead been poured into education, and feeding people. We could have solved world hunger. We could have dramatically improved education across the whole planet.

Instead? We're burning the planet down and using all the water cos some people are too lazy to write their own emails.

FFS.

Train nerds of the Netherlands. Let me nerd snipe you a little. What's the smallest train station operating in the Netherlands during the 1960s? Not in terms of lowest passenger numbers, but physically the smallest. ?

#NS #Trains

Dear #Solar nerds of the fediverse. Does anyone have any ideas for effective ways to attach solar panels to balcony railings, in such a way that they can withstand 120kph winds? I can't risk a panel falling off and killing someone.

#SolarPunk

If the US really tries to class trans people and their allies as terrorists, resulting in said people not being allowed to use MS products like office and teams. Would it result in an increase of cis allies coming out the woodwork?

"I'm sorry I can't use teams, I'm friends with a trans person, so the US says I'm a terrorist and MS blocked me"

@sinituulia I know right. It's at a scale that's just beyond comprehension.

Nvidia and openAI are talking about building a 10GW data centre.

So. We gots a big number. Let's look at it.

How much is 10GW? Well the UK has a typical day time electricity consumption of ~40GW. Meaning that this one single data centre is looking to use the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a single installation. A quarter of the electricity of the 6th largest economy in the world. A single data centre.

Or put another way. It needs power from 3x sizewell C nuclear plant.

@mwl @wmd they do at least all have the right number of fingers...

On a related note to last night's little thread about minimalism. One thing that I feel is not properly considered in all of this is community. If you have an apartment building with 50 apartments, it seems madness for a majority of them to have a power drill for small DIY tasks like putting up a shelf. If you think about it, a typical power drill in a non professional context may never see more than an hour's total run time in its life. That's a crazy low utilisation level.

1/n

Now we could all just go and rent one every time we need to put a shelf up, but the time and energy of going to a shop (often by car) is not a good use of resources. But neither is the number of power drills taking up space and doing nothing. In this situation a community level "library of things" is the ideal way to do this. Instead of most apartment residents owning a shitty consumer grade power drill. The community could have one quality unit that anyone in the building can borrow.
2/n

This can expand to other tools that aren't used often by are really useful to have access to (a decent carpet cleaner springs to mind), as well as stuff like an orbital sander etc... having these hyper local pools of resources help build stronger community, as well as greatly reducing resources.

A power drill is just an extreme example of a low utilisation level of an item, but there's other every day items we have they get really really low usage levels, that we don't think about.
3/n

The most numerous example of this is the car. Most cars spend 96% of their time parked doing nothing. We completely abstract away the costs of running these things. "I'll just drive to the shop to pick up some screws" we never consider the full cost of that journey. At most maybe we consider the fuel costs. But not everything else.

For many we could get away with not owning a car if we had access to easily borrow one when needed.
4/n

Inspired by one of the questions in this week's #MakersHour. We need to talk about decluttering and minimalism. Cos it's really pissing me off how utterly oblivious to their privilege those who push these are. Not to mention some of the issues relating to the way Minimalism has entered our built environment.

Thread time.

(This thread is not aimed at the lovely people of makersHour. Please be nice to them).

1/n

For starters. Note there's a difference between minimalism, and Minimalism. Not to mention that Minimalism movements in various arts (music, art, literature etc...). For the sake of this thread. I'm going to be concentrating on minimalism the aesthetic, and Minimalism the architecture. Oh and don't to be confusing Minimalism and Brutalism. They are not the same.

Decluttering really rose to prominence with Marie Kondo and her netflix series.

2/n

Does this item bring you joy? Was a tool she used when helping people organise their stuff. Yeah, turns out that question doesn't work when it comes to the electricity bill...

In a way this is tied to the fashion for minimalism as an aesthetic. Remember all those pictures of white homes with white furniture and very few personal possessions? The problem is in order to be able to throw something away you need to be either absolutely sure that you will never need it again. *OR* ...
3/n