Notices by Michael Porter (michaelporter@ottawa.place)

Gotta love #Ottawa weather.
“It's still winter!” “No, it's not!” “Yes, it *is*!”

#OttWeather

@thomasfuchs Someone's lost control

@dalias @CStamp @mekkaokereke @shinealittlelove I'm still shaking my head at the fact that they censored a political statement about Palestine, but were okay with leaving the n-word in.

@dalias @CStamp @mekkaokereke Thank you for that, @shinealittlelove. I've known a few folks with Tourette's through my years of teaching, and felt the need to come to their defense. But far better for someone with the condition to speak for themselves.

Tourette's is a recognized medical disorder. It’s in the DSM-5. I can't imagine how mortifying the loss of control feels.

Asserting that a person wouldn’t say those things (again, *involuntarily*) unless the words were in their vocabulary is just mystifying to me. Are you folks saying that you're completely unfamiliar with any racial slurs? I've heard all kinds throughout my life. I'd never use them, but they’re known to me. I don't use them because I'm a good person who doesn't have to cope with my brain involuntarily blurting them out. To assume a person with Tourette's is “a racist piece of shit” because they can't control what they blurt out sometimes is offensively ableist. It's like saying people who use wheelchairs are lazy, or people who commit suicide are selfish.

As for who should apologize for the BAFTA incident, I recognize the massive hurt that that slur inflicts on Black people.

I guess the problem here is separating out involuntary tics, like Tourette’s, from intentional obnoxious behaviour. That’s the trick with mental conditions and disorders - either way, the brain is producing that behaviour and someone on the outside can't easily tell the difference.

I think that a person with a disability shouldn’t have to apologize for it. No-one would ever dream of making a wheelchair-bound paraplegic apologize for slowing things down as they try to navigate a public space. Well - good people wouldn’t. And before you're inclined to say “it's not the same,” put yourself in their place. Imagine having a brain that betrays you in the most embarrassing ways, AND having to constantly apologize for it.

In this particular situation, everyone in the room knew about Davidson's condition. There were the statements by Cumming, and the numerous tics from Davidson during the ceremony. The slur might have been shocking, but it shouldn't have been surprising, and I don't think it necessitated an apology.

@dalias @CStamp @mekkaokereke @shinealittlelove I argued with myself a lot on the wording of this - You should know that I'm about 70% on those assertions. To Mekka's statement that “white folk discoursing about this are treating it like just a rude word, and Black folk definitely are not” - I definitely don't think it's just a rude word, I find it deeply offensive. I can see the need to address the harm.

But I’m very concerned that people with disabilities are constantly being pushed into the closet so everyone else need not experience discomfort. I'm seeing statements to the effect that Davidson should have just stayed home, for example. Let's consider the harm from that worldview, as well.

@darnell I’m sure the Republicans would never allow ICE funding to be split off from the rest. The trend seems to be to use omnibus bills/funding to use essential legislation to act as a bus for the disagreeable stuff. That way they can claim that the Dems are against funding FEMA, etc. when they vote against funding ICE. (But you know this, of course - Is there something I'm missing?)

@thomasfuchs Those could come in handy some day 😄

Love this callback to the original Star Trek episode, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, in which the *last two survivors* of the planet Cheron, both male, fight over petty differences in skin colour (one is white on his left side, and black on his right; the other is white on the right and black on the left).

Uh, how did *she* get here?

#StarTrek #StarFleetAcademy

@scottjenson I like this - I came across your post after repeatedly messing up an image search because navigating to a submenu is intolerant to diagonal mouse movement (one of the gems of the Mac UI that I’ve always appreciated). I kept selecting a colour preference instead of a size preference. Little touches in a UI go a long way.

Keeping the duration at 50 ms, I definitely prefer “Smooth" over “Fade” and “Classic”.
I can see how the graininess of Classic might appeal to some people – There's no ambiguity at all as to where the mouse is hovering – but personally I don't think anything is sacrificed with the Fade, and it definitely feels calmer 😊

@NanoRaptor Good communication isn’t about getting ideas out of your head, it’s about getting them into others’.

From my teacher perspective - “Yes, I taught the material. But did they *learn* it?”

@SuperMoosie @NanoRaptor Yup, it’s a process. But it’s made easier if the person trying to convey an idea gives some consideration as to how it will be received in the first place.

Too often I see people ticking the “I got it out of my head” box, without making sure the “This is understandable to people who are not me” box is ticked, too.

Not to mention the “I made it easy for the other person to receive the message” aspect. Perfect everyday example - sending a message in an attachment to an email instead of just putting the message in the text of the email.

@mina @photovotary @RickiTarr To those people who value having been hit as a child, I would ask, “Did it work?”

I was an impulsive, adventurous kid. I got into fights, I stole stuff, I broke stuff, I set stuff on fire… I got spanked a *lot*!

I remember many, many times that I did things that were punished with a spanking.

I *don’t* remember thinking, even *once*, “I’d better not do this, I’m going to get spanked!”

I *do* remember conversations:
- The one where my mom talked to me about my experiment with smoking when I was nine. No spanking, just a good argument against it, in terms that made sense to me at the time.
- The one where she sat me down with some pamphlets from the fire department (I was playing with matches and so forth) and talked about her fears for the consequences of my fascination with flame.
- The ones that reminded me of the value of treating other people with respect, love, and empathy.

Spanking, even by caring, compassionate parents that were clearly trying to guide their children to do the right thing, didn’t work. I never felt any kind of resentment against my parents. After the fact, I fully agreed that whatever I had done warranted the punishment. I suppose it helped that my father would always come and talk to me, after I had had a chance to think about it. He would make it clear that it was only about my actions, and not indicative of any lack of love for me. The punishment was compartmentalized nicely.

Oddly, I’m thankful for that lesson, because it guided my own parenting. I realized that *my* urge to spank my kids was all about me, acting rash in the moment, as opposed to any kind of effective strategy to mold young minds. I could only imagine I would feel regret in the aftermath, and not achieved anything other than the possible resentment of me by my kids. To be clear, *I* never felt that resentment for my parents. But I did notice it wasn’t an effective deterrent.

Maybe it works for kids that are less impulsive than I was. But I think those kids would be even more receptive to a conversation than I was. Maybe try that instead.

@RickiTarr Not impossible, but definitely at odds with our view of ourselves:

More than 99.8% of the mass of the solar system is the Sun. Jupiter is about 2/3 of the remainder. We are a rounding error.

tl;dr: What's your recommendation for a good Apple-ecosystem Mastodon app?

#macOS and #iOS users - It's time for me to revisit my choice of Mastodon apps. The one I'm using is completely dropping the ball when it comes to working with the system spellcheck and text replacement stuff. I'm constantly editing posts after seeing errors that *should* have been highlighted as I type.

The one thing that Mona has that I didn't see in other apps was the ability to group like notifications, so I get one "these people liked your post" message as opposed to a bunch of individual ones. It seems like such a no-brainer that I assume the other apps have that, too, now?

#Mastodon #macOS #iOS

@nilsskirnir @GutterPoetry @Remittancegirl @murdoc @Profpatsch @DarkAthena @johnnyprofane1 @bmacDonald94 @actuallyautistic @actuallyadhd I imagine ADHD diagnosis has increased for similar reasons that ASD diagnoses did. Greater awareness and acceptance, transfer from other diagnoses.

e.g. This paper on the increase in autism diagnoses:

RESULTS. The average administrative prevalence of autism among children increased from 0.6 to 3.1 per 1000 from 1994 to 2003. By 2003, only 17 states had a special education prevalence of autism that was within the range of recent epidemiological estimates. During the same period, the prevalence of mental retardation and learning disabilities declined by 2.8 and 8.3 per 1000, respectively. Higher autism prevalence was significantly associated with corresponding declines in the prevalence of mental retardation and learning disabilities. The declining prevalence of mental retardation and learning disabilities from 1994 to 2003 represented a significant downward deflection in their preexisting trajectories of prevalence from 1984 to 1993. California was one of a handful of states that did not clearly follow this pattern.

CONCLUSIONS. Prevalence findings from special education data do not support the claim of an autism epidemic because the administrative prevalence figures for most states are well below epidemiological estimates. The growing administrative prevalence of autism from 1994 to 2003 was associated with corresponding declines in the usage of other diagnostic categories.

https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/117/4/1028/70958/The-Contribution-of-Diagnostic-Substitution-to-the

@CatsOfYore I feel validated 😄

@zleap @fzimper @petergleick Yup, just a blink of an eye in the big scheme of things.

But to get back to the point, evidence indicates that Native Americans were on the continent many thousands of years before Europeans arrived.

@fzimper @zleap @petergleick The timelines change a bit, as new evidence comes to light, but I think the *routes* are generally agreed on. North America was populated between 10 000 and 20 000 years ago by folks coming across a land bridge from Asia. And, go back far enough, we originate in Africa.

The map below is from

https://geo.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Oceanography/Oceanography_101_(Miracosta)/02:_Evolution_of_Life_Through_Time/2.27:_Evolution_of_Humans_and_the_Rise_of_Modern_Civilization

@david_whitney @gemelliz Too good 😄

#AltText:
A newspaper TV listing, with apicture of Donald Trump in profile. Text below reads:

4pm, BBC One/ STV
President Trump: The Inauguration
After a long absence, The Twilight Zone returns with one of the most ambitious, expensive and controversial productions in broadcast history. Sci-fi writers have dabbled often with alternative history stories - among the most common is the "What If The Nazis Had Won The Second World War" setting - but this huge interactive virtual reality project, which will unfold on TV, in the press, and on Twitter over the next four years, sets out to build an ongoing alternative present.
The story begins in a nightmarish version of 2017 in which huge sections of the US electorate have somehow been duped into voting to make Donald Trump president.
It sounds far-fetched, and it is, but as it goes on it becomes more and more chillingly plausible. Today's feature length opener concentrates on the gaudy inauguration of President Trump, and the stirrings of protest and despair surrounding the ceremony, while pundits speculate gravely on what lies ahead. It's a flawed piece, but a disturbing glimpse of the horrors we could stumble into, if we're not careful.

All the recent news about Meta has me determined to start some serious arm-twisting with my family.

Can anyone point me to a good, non-paywalled summary of the crap they are engaging in? Something I can pass along to non-tech types?

Also, I suspect this won't have the most satisfactory answers, but what are the easy alternatives for those non-techy types?

Facebook → ?
Instagram → ?
WhatsApp → ? (Signal? The big trick with these is that you need your intended message recipient on the same platform, too, no?)

I'm going to be at a big family dinner in a few weeks... might be a good time to get the message out to the group, so they can coordinate.

Any help/advice is appreciated!

#meta #SocialMedia #LGBTQIA #DeleteFacebook #Facebook