As promised (or threatened), this is the weekly Twitter roundup. Note that tweets of articles generally include header images from the articles, which are not included here unless they happen to be available under a free license. Most are not.

diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week

9:05 – Mon 10 February 2020

Ants have to ‘unlock’ anger toward intruders from Futurity

…require these signals be very precisely decoded by specific receptors to trigger aggression.

12:05 – Mon 10 February 2020

The measure of a country’s greatness is its ability to retain compassion in time of crisis.

Thurgood Marshall

9:02 – Tue 11 February 2020

Retroactive blackface is a bad way of getting more characters of color into the literary canon from Quartz

…an heiress on her English estate, is black at a time when most black women in the colonies and Great Britain were slaves

My own take on the issue is here.

12:02 – Tue 11 February 2020

A government which cannot protect its humblest citizens from outrage and injury is unworthy of the name and ought not to command the support of a free people.

Charles E. Nash

9:01 – Wed 12 February 2020

Cornell researchers figured out how to reduce food waste: Add more grocery stores from Fast Company

…buying smaller quantities of food more frequently, and therefore wasting less food.

12:04 – Wed 12 February 2020

Evil communication corrupts good manners. I hope to live to hear that good communication corrects bad manners.

Benjamin Banneker

9:04 – Thu 13 February 2020

Trump Is Blowing Up a National Monument in Arizona to Make Way for the Border Wall from The Intercept

…drilling into the ground and draining water from a rare desert aquifer in order to mix concrete…

12:01 – Thu 13 February 2020

I would not stay a week pent up in cities, if it were not for my passion for art.

Edmonia Lewis

9:03 – Fri 14 February 2020

Something in Deep Space Is Sending Signals to Earth in Steady 16-Day Cycles from VICE

…half a billion light years from Earth. That may seem like a huge distance, but FRB 180916.J0158+65 is actually the closest FRB ever detected.

Side note that would never fit into a tweet: 16.3 days sounded vaguely familiar to me when I read this story, so I crunched the numbers and realized that the square root of two times one million seconds is a bit more than 16.368 days. That would be an impressive finding, if there was…y’know, any reason to believe that the universe (or aliens, sure) would think that seconds were an important unit to measuring time. But “9,192,631,770 periods of radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of caesium-133 in a ground state at a temperature of absolute zero and at rest” doesn’t seem like a likely universal experience.

12:03 – Fri 14 February 2020

History does not furnish a case of the elevation of a people by ignoring the thought and aspiration of the people thus served.

Carter G. Woodson

Happy Valentine’s Day, all!

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