As discussed previously, on Fridays, I present my weekly social media roundups. Note that toots of articles generally include header images from the articles, which I don’t include here unless their creators happen to have released them for use under a free license, and I notice. Most have not, or I don’t notice. But I now add my commentary here, where I don’t feel restricted by message length.

diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week

Also, I don’t generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.

9:05 – Mon 05 June 2023

Content Warning: Death and Burial

Image Not Shown: Director Lonneke Westhoff and founder Bob Hendrikx of Dutch startup Loop Biotech display one of the cocoon-like coffins, grown from local mushrooms and up-cycled hemp fibers, designed to dissolve into the environment, in Delft, May 22, 2023

‘Mushroom Coffin’ a Last Best Wish for Some from Voice of America/Associated Press

Currently, Loop Biotech has a capacity to “grow” 500 coffins or urns a month, and are shipping across Europe. Hendrikx said they have caught on in the Nordics.

Hashtags: #Burial #Mushrooms #Coffins

Honestly, I would prefer to see more of the non-coffin, shallow burials that have sprung up where legal, but this seems like a viable intermediate step for those who want to bridge both traditions.

12:03 – Mon 05 June 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

The world is so disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.

Ronald Firbank

Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride

9:07 – Tue 06 June 2023

Content Warning: Racism, US Politics

Image Not Shown: A Florida police officer watches protesters march during a rally in response to the murder of Black citizen George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020

Let’s not mince words — the US right is racist from openDemocracy

Even Fox News is too ‘inclusive’ for Walsh, who last week took time off from his targeted anti-trans vitriol to embark on a racist rant aimed at diversity initiatives in general.

Hashtags: #USPol #Racism

Increasingly, I see people on social media talk about the hilarity of conservatives not defining the word “woke,” because they apparently don’t know what it means. But they do know, and would rather pretend that they don’t, because the definition hasn’t changed, and saying that they oppose people understanding and challenging white supremacy and patriarchy out loud would make it harder to convince people that they have legitimate complaints. Instead, they prefer to look foolish for a few seconds and move on.

Contrast this with the uproar seeing “Antifa” hiding behind every utility pole. Once everyone understood that opposition to people who oppose fascism directly and openly supports fascism, they walked away from those fears, because actually calling themselves fascists undermines all the work that they’ve done to pretend that equality and mutual respect made for “real” fascism.

In other words, stop laughing that certain politicians won’t define “woke.” Start making sure that everybody understands the definition, so that it exposes their racism.

(But also, don’t call yourself “woke.” That misappropriates from Black culture, and pats yourself on the back instead of letting your actions speak for you.)

12:02 – Tue 06 June 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride

9:02 – Wed 07 June 2023

Content Warning: Health Advisories

Image Not Shown: Emotional Rescue: The Heart-Brain Connection

Heart attack tied to faster cognitive decline later from Futurity

For those who suffered a heart attack, while the researchers did not find significant cognitive decline immediately after their first heart attack, the participants’ cognitive tests showed a decline over the years following the event.

Hashtags: #HeartAttacks #CognitiveDecline

As always, stay safe.

12:07 – Wed 07 June 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

When he was angry, one of his eyes became so terrible, that no person could bear to behold it; and the wretch upon whom it was fixed, instantly fell backward, and sometimes expired. For fear, however, of depopulating his dominions, and making his palace desolate, he but rarely gave way to his anger.

William Thomas Beckford

Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride

9:04 – Thu 08 June 2023

Image Not Shown: A line of six workers in safety equipment, arms crossed

Southern Workers Are Defying History from OtherWords

Many corporations choose to locate in the South because low union density enables them to pay poor wages and skimp on safety. Georgia has one of the nation’s lowest union membership rates, just 4.4 percent.

Hashtags: #Labor #Georgia

Congratulations to them, and I hope that this organizing continues to spread. As many other writers have pointed out, unionization in at least the United States has consistently preceded changes in the size of the middle class.

12:05 – Thu 08 June 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance.

Amy Lowell

Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride

9:03 – Fri 09 June 2023

Content Warning: Domestic Violence (mentioned)

Image Not Shown: A woman sits on a bed staring out the window in a dark room

Work requirements don’t work for domestic violence survivors — but Michigan data shows they rarely get waivers they should receive for cash assistance from The Conversation

They said they got no training on what domestic violence does to survivors’ ability to work, or guidance on when to grant the waivers. They also said there were no standard screening practices.

Hashtags: #TANF #DomesticAbuse

Honestly, I can’t believe that we still tolerate this kind of nonsense, all because the media loves the idea that the government spent a few hundred dollars on a person who didn’t absolutely need it for survival. To prevent that, we’ll spend millions of dollars to build infrastructure that also accidentally fails to spend a few hundred dollars on people who absolutely do need it for survival.

Unfortunately, this comes down to fairly rudimentary math—specifically, that when you try to classify things, every system has false-positive errors (incorrectly including something that doesn’t belong) and false-negative errors (incorrectly excluding something that does belong)—that people don’t generally have enough of an intuition for, to demand that we actually track and compare the two kinds of errors.

Once you see this, you’ll notice that it pervades political discourse. In the criminal justice process, for example, all our civil liberties create false-negative errors, where we need to let someone go unpunished, because we couldn’t prove to the jury that they committed the crime. But inequality and bias create false-positive errors, such as the District Attorney convincing a poor defendant to take a plea deal and admit to a crime that they didn’t commit, whereas a wealthier defendant can afford far better lawyers who can plant seeds of doubt.

Likewise, immigration, gun control, drug use, hate speech, surveillance, and many more issues come down to the same analysis: How many innocent people can you afford to inconvenience, and how many crises do you feel willing to endure? All of us have different tolerances for these, and almost every one of us has at least one maybe-different issue where we have no tolerance. For a personal example, I oppose the death penalty, on the grounds that one innocent person executed by the state exceeds my tolerance, but a lot of people would probably pick one side or the other of gun control.

12:04 – Fri 09 June 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Americans are trained to invest money, are said to take even desperate chances on that, yet never do they invest [in] beauty nor take desperate chances on that. With money they try to buy beauty–after it has died–famishing–with grimace.

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride

Bonus

Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didn’t fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.

Content Warning: US Politics

Image Not Shown: A Chick-fil-A employee assists a customer in a drive-thru line on July 05, 2022, in Houston, Texas

Chick-fil-A went ‘woke,’ conservatives may starve from Daily Kos

The hand-wringing has continued to build, with misinformation extremists like Ian Miles Cheong writing, “DEI is literally wokeness,” and the unintentionally comedic videos of people enacting their boycotts have begun streaming in.

I honestly don’t even know where to go with this, other than to laugh. I mean, I knew that Republicans and their supporters had lost the thread, back when “my body, my choice” became a sincere assertion about not wearing masks, rather than the ironic appropriation of a pro-abortion slogan that they surely intended. And I can see the movement repeatedly stumble and fall on its face, when it has voters alienated enough that they stop voting for Republicans, but too terrified to speak out, lest they find themselves alone. But their turning against the worst of corporate America takes this to an impressive new level, where none of them—no matter how powerful—can trust any other.

Image Not Shown: Presumably, Hla's iron atom

Scientists Just X-Rayed a Single Atom from Futurism

Hla describes these resulting electrons as possessing spectrums that are like elemental “fingerprints,” which can identify exactly what atom they’re dealing with.

This, as many readers probably already know, rewrites a fair bit of science, if true. I can remember a lot of time dedicated to explaining that an atomic nucleus doesn’t have sufficient volume to image in any reasonable way—they exist on the scale of the particles or waves used to image them, which would make such an “image” little more than a probing—and electrons exist more as a probabilistic cloud than as physical objects.

Not only would this experiment upend that model, but it would also allow us to see nuclear processes and search objects for near-negligible physical defects, at least in theory.

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Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.