can you imagine if grocery stores decided to adopt this model lol
"i would like a can of green beans please, grocer!"
"well, i can sell you a can."
"does it have green beans in it?"
"green beans are on the loot table of possibilities, yes. here's the table that we're obligated to provide due to certain regulations in china, and as you can see, green beans is on there."
"...with a 1.5% chance???"
"well yes."
"and it's 45% chance for it to be mouldy beans that i hate?! that's the thing i have the greatest chance to get??"
"yes."
"........."
"but it's also a 0.05% chance to get the rare and special golden green beans, which are new for this limited event!"
❝Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.❞ — Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)
OH WAIT LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT CECILIA PAYNE
• Cecilia Payne won a scholarship to Cambridge.
• Cecilia Payne completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give her a degree because she was a woman, so she said to heck with that and moved to the United States to work at Harvard.
• Cecilia Payne was the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, with what Otto Strauve called “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”
• Not only did Cecilia Payne discover what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun is made of (Henry Norris Russell, a fellow astronomer, is usually given credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than Payne — after telling her not to publish).
• Cecilia Payne is the reason we know basically anything about variable stars (stars whose brightness as seen from earth fluctuates). Literally every other study on variable stars is based on her work.
• Cecilia Payne was the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within Harvard and the first woman to head a science department at Harvard. She also inspired entire generations of women to take up science.
• Cecilia Payne is awesome and everyone should know her.
If you're interested in audio game development, game accessibility in general or adding accessibility to your game, I've created a Discord server a while ago for people to ask questions and discuss these topics. If you're curious, you can join here: https://discord.gg/565Dgaw
If you live in the UK, please sign this petition to ensure that it is not required for encryption services to establish backdoors to enable data access .
torture, kickstarter, neurotypicals, change.org link, suicide mention, long
Kickstarter is hosting a product that parents of neurdiverse children are supposed to stick on their child's back.
That device will then beep every 8 seconds which is supposed to help the child to focus.
As a neurodiverse person, I can tell you that this device would not only ruin every chance of me focusing on anything, being forced to wear it would make me kill myself. I am not exaggerating here.
This is one of the worst forms of torture aimed directly at neurodiverse people I could imagine.
Here's a change.org petition to stop the sale of this: https://www.change.org/p/kickstarter-stop-kickstarter-from-allowing-child-abuse-of-neurodiverse-children
I doubt the petition will do much but the campaign does explicitly break a rule on kickstarter banning the sale of medical devices so maybe reporting it (it is linked in the petition) might help.
I just convinced an older blind teacher that uses WhatsApp to communicate with his students (he prefers voice messages to typing) to try out #Signal! And so far, he likes it! 😁
Obviously, this doesn't mean his students will want to switch. But I got one person to care about privacy a little, and that's a start, right? A lot can be accomplished through friendliness and small steps. 🙂
I'm glad that Signal being pretty accessible makes this possible. Now, if only their desktop app sucked a bit less ...
US tax product suggestion
W-2s and 1099s are due out today! When you get them, try https://www.freetaxusa.com/ instead of turbotax. free version is full-featured, support & audit defense upsell is only $7, and the UI is way snappier.
It can't try to import your income forms, but turbotax is bad at that anyway and I already have to do a bunch of manual corrections because (by law) employee stock sales are misreported on the 1099-B in a way that makes you pay too much tax if you don't. Thanks Intuit.
indigenous land destruction, current, action links in reply
"Breaking: Judge Steven Logan has denied an Apache injunction to halt destruction of Oak Flat by mining giant Rio Tinto.
He quoted a case saying, "The exclusive right of the U.S. to extinguish Indian title has never been doubted. And whether it be done by treaty, by sword, ... by purchase, by the exercise of complete dominion adverse to the right of occupancy, or otherwise, its justness is not open to inquiry in the courts."
Oak Flat is set to be transferred to Rio Tinto as private property for mining on March 11th."
https://twitter.com/PeccaryNotPig/status/1360638292694212610
GG: action links in reply to this toot
ok this started out as a butthole joke but now the image of "dude hole" in my mind has transformed into a sort of a mud pit deep underground where Dudes and Bros emerge from fully-formed like the orcs in the lord of the rings movies
@Taweret "I wish more billionaires were like Tony Stark."
"You mean sarcastic yet roguishly charming?"
"No, I mean... dead."
If you're not used to extended freezing temperatures, you might want to consider setting your faucets to a drip to avoid having the pipes freeze. This is probably especially important in places where your exterior walls might not be well insulated...
https://www.homedepot.com/c/ah/how-to-prevent-pipes-from-freezing/9ba683603be9fa5395fab905760afb9
Need Feedback / One Handed Typing / Accessibility / Disability / Injury
RT @ChanceyFleet@twitter.com
These guys have $40 million in VC funding. We don't have that, but we have authentic experience and a collective voice that money can't buy. Let's work together to educate people in tech about the flawed, harmful approach of overlays like #AccessiBe
Hey digital #accessibility testers, I'm thinking about going into the field and I'd like to interview some of you before hand, both out of my own curiosity and also to fulfil the requirements of my state's vocational rehab agency.
So if you can speak decent English and don't mind doing an approx 45 minute audio only non compensated interview at the time of your choosing and with no recording or personal details unless you allow it, then please do let me know! I'd love to hear from you.
#a11y
#accessable
#access
#accessibletechnology
#webaccessibility
#DisabilityInUX
Oh my goodness y'll, some people are so fed up with Android, specifically Google evedently having so little faith in their *own* accessibility that they're working with Samsung on the forked TalkBack hat Samsung made, and the changes to the accessibility API in Samsung's fork of Android. So now, you've got this long thread about people asking about phones made specifically for the blind. And... they all run Android. Specifically, Android 4, and Android 6, just like the blind-specific Notetakers (besides the elbraille which runs Windows 10).
This is why relying on one platform that people have said for *years* needs improvement is pretty bad. And now, with the Pine Phone (I assume it can do calls and texts?) out, blindness tech creators, the few of them that exists, can work on creating an actually compelling system.
I just saw someone rightfully rant that in order to get live captions for your livestream to improve accessibility (#a11y), you need to send everything to Google's servers for their speech recognition engines. Also need to use Chrome.
So here's a eminder that there is an effort by Mozilla (#CommonVoice) for open source speech recognition. They need training data, and everyone can donate their voice, or help verify other people's recordings.
commonvoice.mozilla.org
I'll fill this in later...