I didn’t know that. Thanks for sharing.

It’s sad that I can’t look at a beautiful photo of a UK river without wondering how much sewage has been discharged there.

In 2023, the sewer right near where this photo was taken spilled for a total of 299.25 hours, which is quite low compared to many other locations.

I worry about the long term state of UK rivers.

If anyone from the UK reads this, https://theriverstrust.org/sewage-map has info on how people can help

Some android phones have the ability to long press on a notification, click on settings, and alter what kinds of notifications you receive. I’ve had a few instances like you describe, but where I’ve been able to turn off “special deals” or whatever. I think implementation of this is done by the app developer though, because I’m sure I’ve had some apps that had no useful settings. Example screenshot of Gmail settings:

Now you’re older, how frequently do you think you were right in your comparisons?

Now I’m thinking about an ex-programmer supervillain who does this as her big foray into supervillainy

Listen, I don’t want to be in a pointless internet argument; I could answer your question by referencing some of the things that go into deciding what reasonable adjustments should be put in place, legally speaking (in particular, your question is getting at the “how much is reasonable” aspect of the problem"), but I only want to engage in this conversation if you’re actually interested to learn.

(On that front, I apologise for the sharp tone of my previous comment, because that certainly wasn’t conducive to conversation.)

Okay, well get back to me when you have some lived experience of deafness and maybe we can have a productive discussion then, seeing as my point seems to have gone completely over your head.

Much like many disabilities, deafness isn’t a hard binary between hearing Vs deaf, but a spectrum dependent on many factors. For example, someone may have hearing loss in a particular frequency range, which may affect their ability to hear lyrics. I would also expect that someone’s relationship to music may be impacted by whether they were born deaf or acquired deafness later in life.

The point that other are making about this as an accessibility problem is that a lot of disability or anti-discrimination has provisions for rules or policies that are, in and of themselves, neutral, but affect disabled people (or other groups protected under equality legislation) to a greater degree than people without that trait. In the UK, for example, it might be considered “indirect discrimination”.

You might not need lyrics to listen to music, but someone who is deaf or hard of hearing is likely going to experience and enjoy music differently to you, so it may well be necessary for them.

Scientists’ words will always be twisted, regardless of what words they use. I agree that some words seem to sow confusion even within research fields, but I worry that attempting to change things may lead to an

A book that has really stuck with me is “Merchants of a Doubt”, which looks at how often the muddying the waters comes from a handful of scientists, who are presumably getting paid a bunch to do so, but not in a way that’s easy to debunk. The problem is that science is muddy by nature, so scientists learn how to wade through mud (ideally) and work around and through it. I’m of the belief that the way forward will require for science in general to become more accessible to people in general, because I think the epistemically privileged nature of science is deepening distrust i.e. we are taught to trust science™ and only scientists are allowed to challenge other scientists. This makes sense, but I think it fosters a sense of distrust in people who I honestly can’t blame for feeling like the system doesn’t care about them.

I’m feeling like maybe blind trust in institutions might just be an untenably bad situation, because I’m a scientist and I don’t know whether scientific education in the model of "scientific communication happens when the Scientists™ come down from their ivory towers and gift the common folk with knowledge, who are not allowed to question or add to this knowledge, unless they become a member of Science™ (or they are a person to whom science is done to

Thanks for this comment, I hadn’t thought about it this way before. I had realised about how being gay is framed as a thing you do rather than a thing you are, because I have a friend who is an ex-benedictine monk, and they explained about how their vow of chastity meant they were basically “one of the good ones”. A large part of why they left was because their rhetoric was “everyone has sinful desires in them and turning away from those is an important challenge”, but the unspoken part was that his gayness made his desires extra bad, like there was just some innately bad thing in him.

And of course they would apply this same logic to gender. As you say, it makes more sense when you try to see it from their angle. I think that’s important to do if we hope to ever refute them

A few posts above this one, I saw a post about how German bridges are falling apart, so your comment has done me psychic damage. Man, things feel grim.

Theme Hospital is one of the greats of an era. (N.b. there’s a mod called CorsixTH which fixes a lot of issues with the original game (mostly age related clunkiness)

You’ve got to be careful with rolling your eyes, because the parallelism of the two eyes means that the eye roll can be twice as powerful ^1

(1) If measured against the silly baseline of a single eyeroll

Oh damn, I just lost the game too, and now I’m thinking about the game as if it were a virus - like, I reckon we really managed to flatten the curve for a few years there, but it continues to circulate so we haven’t been able to eradicate it

I saw some previous news coverage of the Devs saying they’d rather players pirate it than have it spoiled for them, and I went in blind and bought it full price. I don’t generally play this kind of game but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Finland is very good for people who hate smalltalk.

I love stories like this because it makes me reflect on random people I’ve seen who have stuck in my memory for years who probably never noticed me. Makes me wonder if anyone remembers me for something random like this

I’ve not heard that quote, who said it?

Well that’s a horrifying way to think of things, thank you for that (not sarcastic)

Social constructivism applied to science argues that an objective, observer-independent reality doesn’t exist, (or that if it does, it’s not accessible by humans, which is functionally the same thing). Under that framework, then whenever we talk about gravity, we’re not talking about some objective truth, but our attempts to model what we perceive as an objective truth. Hell, the only way we’re able to have this conversation at all is because I wrote “gravity is a social construct” and you understood what I was referencing enough to disagree.