eatsoylentgreen

Welcome to a post in which I give unnecessarily elliptical answers to perfectly straightforward questions.

one place you volunteer (or would like to)? Why?

I don’t volunteer consistently at a single venue / charity, but I do public outreach talks for societies and schools. I do it because people seem to like hearing about space, and I’m enthusiastic about it.
one book you'd like to see made into a movie? Why?

I’d still like to see “Neuromancer” visualised. I understand it’s being made into a TV series
one creature (living, extinct, or mythical) you'd like for a pet? Why?

I’m quite happy with my cats, thank you. We are exquisitely compatible.
one place on Earth you'd like to visit? Why?

I’ve travelled a lot in my life. A LOT. I haven’t been to the largest variety of places - mostly North America and Europe with a couple of visits to Kenya - and to be honest, I am not as enamoured with it as I used to be. There are two places I’d still like to see: my father’s birthplace, and the Great Barrier Reef. But if I don’t get the opportunity, I won’t feel like I haven’t seen enough of the world.
one talent or skill you'd like to develop? Why?

I’m pretty good at not spending much time reflecting on the actions of people who have hurt me or made it obvious that they dislike me. What I’d really love to do is have the ability to make that no time at all. Life’s too short.

I've got an 11:20am emergency dental appointment. I've got a 3pm emergency vet appointment in another city at the U of Minnesota vet hospital. My 2 regular vets and a 3rd vet had no availability and recommended urgent care.

It took some effort, but I figured out how to order a Lyft with pet privileges. Not difficult once you know how to do it. Living alone has its own challenges. Living without a car presents other challenges. Living alone without a car and needing to manage 2 medical emergencies at once does make planning a little more stressful than usual.

It seems accomplished, though. Now, I'm just waiting until it's time to take the metro bus to the medical center for my dentist visit.

andrewducker

Nice day to walk in to work.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

mellowtigger

After work today, it was clear that Hope is severely constipated again. It started with the puking. Now, she's got everything out of her belly, but she squats everywhere in the house and tries but fails repeatedly to poop. I've already mixed some laxative again in her soft food, but she won't eat or drink anything. I'll have to try getting a vet appointment for her tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I've already got an emergency dental appointment for myself tomorrow morning. I cracked the temporary cap on my molar again, waiting to get the permanent cap. We'll see if the dentist just repairs it with another temp until the permanent mold arrives, or they decide this tooth is too problematic and just pull it finally.

The cat is meowling in pain/discomfort occasionally. Thankfully, I'm in no physical pain myself. We'll both have an unpleasant evening though, waiting for tomorrow to arrive and hopefully some peace of mind for both of us.

nanila

After a gentle, slow decline into feeble old age, our beloved cranky gerbil, Nibbles, died last weekend.

( Description of pet death. )

I shall miss his almond-seeking nose boops. Rest well, Nibsy. Enjoy chasing your brother and Tiny the hamster in Small Rodent Valhalla.

andrewducker

Talked to Sophia about Wicked. Apparently she kinda enjoyed it, but isn't a fan of revisionism and prefers The Wizard of Oz.

"The good people should stay good and the bad people should stay bad."

andrewducker

1. Labour has brought back Section 28, here's how it will harm children: (tags:children education Labour OhForFucksSake bigotry transgender UK )
2. The Louder the Monkey, the Smaller Its Balls, Study Finds: (tags:monkeys genitals science )
3. Labour ministers lying about Scottish water quality to make it look like privatisation isn't the problem: (tags:Scotland UK England Labour lies water privatisation )
4. French Press Association journalists in Gaza are starving to death: (tags:Israel gaza Palestine OhForFucksSake journalism food )
5. metabolite produced by gut bacteria is a driver of atherosclerosis, the disease behind most heart attacks and strokes.: (tags:heart disease microbiome )
6. Why Facts Don't Change Minds in the Culture Wars—Structure Does: (tags:belief discussion communication )
7. The US is erasing women from the top ranks of the military: (tags:usa military misogyny OhForFucksSake )
8. Why you can't color calibrate (deep) space photos: (tags:space colour photography )
9. Countries across the world see food price shocks from climate extremes: (tags:food prices doom globalwarming )
10. If somebody is doing a good thing, and you try to force them to do a different, better thing, they usually end up doing neither: (tags:communication management organisation )
11. Whites-only communities are spreading in the USA: (tags:USA racism )

mellowtigger

Climate change remains, as it was in 2019, my #1 topic of concern requiring immediate political action worldwide. I haven't really discussed climate news for... a long while. It's because what news I find is usually bad. Very bad.

I recently saw a chart that made a non-scientific forward-projection of data from a not-yet-peer-reviewed pre-print article. That's a lot of caveats, basically, for unvalidated ideas. It was an extremely depressing projection, though. It was a convincing "smoke 'em while you've got 'em" argument.

This page offers the pre-print, see the "Download PDF" button at the top right. The Reddit post I saw seemed to get its future projection from a source I tracked down to this Facebook image as the earliest source I could find. Here is a YouTube discussion of that chart too.

It's depressing stuff. I sympathize with David Suzuki on this one. I hope to snap out of it soon and post something positive about our collective future.

andrewducker

The play park we're waiting for a dentist appointment in has WiFi.

(It's got a building in it owned by the council leisure service to sell ice creams and manage the tennis courts next door.)

andrewducker

1. Lighthouse of Alexandria rises again as 22 massive blocks resurface from the seafloor after 2,000 years: (tags:history light sea architecture egypt archeology )

mellowtigger

After a recent discussion with brian_bogue about costs of online transactions, I have to wonder publicly a question that I've pondered before:

Why doesn't the USA provide infrastructure for the online economy?

The USA for the last 2 centuries has provided infrastructure for physical money. It performed the costly services of minting coins and printing bills, even vaults and security for storing gold-backed money, so why doesn't it provide the online equivalent? No, I absolutely do not mean selecting a favored cybercurrency. I mean providing the network and database to process microtransactions, providing the bare minimum necessary to maintain a financial system. Why should they? Using a credit/debit card includes notoriously high fees even on tiny transactions. That's profit, sure, but it's profit to some corporation siphoning its benefits from the currency of the nation. This non-cash issue came to the foreground of some news stories during the start of the pandemic, when some businesses decided to not accept cash, since it was thought to be a potential vector for virus transmission.

The currency of the nation seems to be the national government's responsibility, right? I've tried to read up on the Constitution's wording, but clearly I'm not the first to be confused by its vagueness.

My argument is this: The USA federal government is responsible for the creation of durable (enduring frequent transaction between citizens and corporations) money. In the modern age, that transaction is digital, so the USA federal government should be responsible for creating that enduring methodology, and that means providing a "currency network" of servers and databases which people may access "for free" (paid by taxes) with the same ease and zero-transaction-cost of using physical money.

So... does anyone know why we don't do that? It seems obvious to me that we should.

andrewducker

Sophia, it seems, just likes hanging around.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

andrewducker

1. Online Piracy Almost Died. Now It's More Popular Than Ever.: (tags:video piracy TV football manga viaSwampers )

andrewducker

I have an under-counter integrated fridge/freezer. (Integrated in this case meaning that it's got a door on it, and is embedded in the cupboards).

I want to replace it with a free-standing one - i.e. one that will simply sit in the gap.

The various places I've looked at so far that do a delivery and also take away your old fridge only have options to replace an integrated fridge with an integrated fridge. Or a free-standing with a free-standing. Apparently they use different teams for each of these.

AO.com told me that I need to entirely remove the old one. John Lewis told me that they'd just send it out and hope that the free-standing fridge people happened to have the right tools with them, which doesn't sound ideal.

So, I could do with some advice on getting an integrated fridge/freezer removed and taken away. Preferably in the form of "Call these guys, they are vaguely* competent and cheap."

Anyone got any experience?

*I'm willing to settle for vague competence when it comes to removing things. Installing things is a different matter...