Toots 🦣 from 12/25 to 12/29

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.

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

9:05 – Mon 25 December 2023

Image Not Shown: An adolescent girl sleeps on her desk with a pen in her hand and her notebook open

Students could get more sleep and learn better if school started a little later from The Conversation

In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends pushing back school start times to 8:30 a.m. or later.

Hashtags: #Sleep #Education

I’ll grant you that I have always woken up early, so this never affected me. But seriously, if we have evidence that students in general can do better if we make minor changes to policy, then either it makes sense to change the policy or we need to admit that we don’t actually have a goal of helping students succeed.

12:04 – Mon 25 December 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Just as the track of birds that cleave the air is not discovered, nor yet the path of fish that skim the water, so the course of those who do good actions is not always seen.

Mahābhārata

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:01 – Tue 26 December 2023

Content Warning: US Politics, Corruption

Image Not Shown: Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sits with his wife and conservative activist Virginia Thomas while he waits to speak at the Heritage Foundation on October 21, 2021, in Washington, DC

Clarence Thomas’ private complaints about money sparked fears he would resign from Daily Kos

Congress never lifted the ban on speaking fees or gave the justices a major raise. But in the years that followed, as ProPublica has reported, Thomas accepted a stream of gifts from friends and acquaintances that appears to be unparalleled in the modern history of the Supreme Court.

Hashtags: #ClarenceThomas #HarlanCrow #SCOTUS

Due to pensions, I used to say that elected officials, when they leave office, should get taxed somewhere well over one hundred percent of all earnings above their successors’ salaries, to prevent them from using their connections to clear the way for corporate overreach. While I realize that comes off as heavy-handed, Thomas makes it readily apparent that public service does need to have some sort of duty beyond showing up.

12:02 – Tue 26 December 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

The hooded clouds, like friars, tell their beads in drops of rain.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:06 – Wed 27 December 2023

Content Warning: Israel/Palestine, Right-Wing Politics

Image Not Shown: Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, is detained by police during the March Against Antisemitism in London, 26 November 2023

Conflating antisemitism and anti-zionism emboldens the far right from openDemocracy

Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, has labelled war crimes investigations into Israel “pure antisemitism.”

Hashtags: #AntiSemitism #FarRight

I realize that everything about this situation touches a serious nerve with a lot of people, but “never again” only works if it applies equally to everyone and prevents pro-Holocaust politicians from gaining support.

12:03 – Wed 27 December 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

A more glorious victory cannot be gained over another man than this, that when the injury began on his part the kindness should begin on ours.

John Tillotson

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:02 – Thu 28 December 2023

Image Not Shown: Latine woman raising an eyebrow and looking at the camera

There’s reason to worry about AI reading emotions from Futurity

In a new study, he writes that speech emotion recognition (SER) is “a technology founded on tenuous assumptions around the science of emotion that not only render it technologically deficient but also socially pernicious.”

Hashtags: #AI #Emotions #Bias

These systems can’t identify Black people as human, a significant part of the time. Do we really trust them to tell us anything about the people who they can identify?

12:06 – Thu 28 December 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Weariness / Can snore upon the flint, when resty sloth / Finds the down pillow hard.

William Shakespeare

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:07 – Fri 29 December 2023

Image Not Shown: Photo of the group Jashnan

In Colombia, Kamëntšá women maintain their ancestral culture through music from Global Voices

Since time immemorial, Tabanok has been a place of intercultural exchange and contact between the Andean highlands to the west and the Amazonian lowlands to the east.

Hashtags: #Colombia #Music

By now, you all know that I can’t pass up a story like this, right?

If you want to check out the music in question, I followed links to links to yet more links to find two songs posted to Jashnan’s YouTube page. If you have some familiarity with music from and adapted from neighboring regions, you’ll especially appreciate that blend of sounds and motifs.

12:07 – Fri 29 December 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Eminent positions make eminent men greater and little men less.

Jean de La Bruyère

Hashtags: #Quotes

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.

Image Not Shown: Tangled threads

Getting Tangled Up in Threads from We Distribute

I think instance admins wanting to protect their communities, and community members not wanting to see anything from Threads, is a totally fair position. The promise of the Fediverse is that individuals ought to be in charge of who and what they see on the network.

I appreciate this clear-headed analysis of the issues involved with Meta’s ActivityPub experiments. Too many people have made up their minds on no evidence.

Follow Me

If you appreciate this sort of content, then you should probably follow me on Mastodon to get it as early as possible…and feel free to reply, at least to the good stuff.

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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.