Most Recent Bookmarks

🔗 The war in Gaza has been an intense lesson in western hypocrisy. It won’t be forgotten

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That’s where the sense of losing your mind comes from: the fact that it seems, for the first time that I can think of, western powers are unable to credibly pretend that there is some global system of rules that they uphold. They seem to simply say: there are exceptions, and that’s just the way it is. No, it can’t be explained and yes, it will carry on until it doesn’t at some point, which seems to be when Israeli authorities feel like it.

🔗 Making a font

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This month I decided to learn how to make a font to use in my comic hakum. Previously, I was drawing the text digitally with my pen tablet. The result was fine, but sometimes difficult to read(the text would grow and shrink often in one page). I didn't want to use an existing font, so I decided to make one based on my own handwriting. A font would keep my writing legible, and consistent throughout the comic.

Nice brief tutorial on how to make a font with Fontforge.

🔗 The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation

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What’s interesting is how long it took for researchers to realize the flaw in Dunning and Kruger’s analysis. Dunning and Kruger published their results in 1999. But it took until 2016 for the mistake to be fully understood. To my knowledge, Edward Nuhfer and colleagues were the first to exhaustively debunk the Dunning-Kruger effect. (See their joint papers in 2016 and 2017.) In 2020, Gilles Gignac and Marcin Zajenkowski published a similar critique.

Once you read these critiques, it becomes painfully obvious that the Dunning-Kruger effect is a statistical artifact. But to date, very few people know this fact. Collectively, the three critique papers have about 90 times fewer citations than the original Dunning-Kruger article.5 So it appears that most scientists still think that the …

🔗 Whole Earth Index

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Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes.

🔗 Decolonize Palestine

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Decolonize Palestine is an independent, self-funded project founded by two Palestinians living in Ramallah. The research and writing for these articles have been a labor of love spanning over a year, which we plan to continue and improve upon going forward. While we are proud of this work, we know that it is has only scratched the surface of this project’s potential.

🔗 Large language models propagate race-based medicine

Large language models (LLMs) are being integrated into healthcare systems; but these models may recapitulate harmful, race-based medicine. The objective of this study is to assess whether four commercially available large language models (LLMs) propagate harmful, inaccurate, race-based content when responding to eight different scenarios that check for race-based medicine or widespread misconceptions around race. Questions were derived from discussions among four physician experts and prior work on race-based medical misconceptions believed by medical trainees. We assessed four large language models with nine different questions that were interrogated five times each with a total of 45 responses per model. All models had examples of perpetuating race-based medicine in their responses. Models were not always consistent in their responses when asked the same question repeatedly. LLMs are being proposed …

🔗 Amiga ASCII art

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In my thesis, I study Amiga ASCII text art. Amiga ASCII is a form of text art where the composition of letter characters set in the Amiga computer's font forms a two-dimensional representation or image. The Amiga scene is a subculture of computer enthusiasts that was popular in the 1990s. At its core are the logos and other visual materials created for BBS systems and the competitive rivalry among artists who create text art over their image-making prowess.

I delve into the creation of Amiga ASCII art and use it as a method to develop my visual expression. I define text art as one style of visual art, which includes ASCII art and its sub-genres, and I briefly describe the history of text art and ASCII art and …

🔗 Let there be blue-depleted light: in-patient dark therapy, circadian rhythms and length of stay

Scott, J., Langsrud, K., Goulding, I., & Kallestad, H. (2021). Let there be blue-depleted light: In-patient dark therapy, circadian rhythms and length of stay. BJPsych Advances, 27(2), 73-84. doi:10.1192/bja.2020.47

Light is the most important environmental influence (zeitgeber) on the synchronization of the circadian system in humans. Excess light exposure during the evening and night-time affects secretion of the hormone melatonin, which in turn modifies the temporal organization of circadian rhythms, including the sleep–wake cycle. As sleep disturbances are prominent in critically ill medical and psychiatric patients, researchers began to examine the impact of light exposure on clinical outcomes and length of hospitalization. In psychiatric inpatients, exposure to bright morning light or use of blue blocking glasses have proved useful interventions for mood …

🔗 OpenNotes

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OpenNotes is an international movement advocating for greater transparency in healthcare. Through research and education, we identify and disseminate best practices for sharing medical information with patients and their care partners.

🔗 Bike Nation: How Cycling Can Save the World Peter Walker

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  "Paul Steely White believes it is high time cycling infrastructure becomes viewed 'not as an optional amenity that is open to local veto, but really as a necessary public safety improvement that we now make in these modern times'
He argues persuasively: 'It would be akin in the time of cholera to saying, "We've got this engineering approach that involves separating our water from our sewage, and it involves digging up the street  what do you think about this? Are you okay with this?"

There's a way to design streets now that kill many fewer people and are much fairer, more equitable, and more efficient, and we're just going to do it, dammit.'"

🔗 Mastodon.py

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Mastodon is an ActivityPub-based Twitter-like federated social network node. It has an API that allows you to interact with its every aspect. This is a simple Python wrapper for that API, provided as a single Python module.

Mastodon.py aims to implement the complete public Mastodon API. As of this time, it is feature complete for Mastodon version 3.5.5. The Mastodon compatible API layers of various other pieces of software as well as forks, while not an official target, should also be basically compatible, and Mastodon.py does make some allowances for behaviour that isn’t strictly like that of Mastodon, and attempts to support extensions to the API.

🔗 How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet

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Wired retracted the article.

Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.

🔗 Refugees - Brian Bilston

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They have no need of our help

So do not tell me

These haggard faces could belong to you or me

Should life have dealt a different hand

We need to see them for who they really are

Chancers and scroungers

Layabouts and loungers

With bombs up their sleeves

Cut-throats and thieves

They are not

Welcome here

We should make them

Go back to where they came from

They cannot

Share our food

Share our homes

Share our countries

Instead let us

Build a wall to keep them out

It is not okay to say

These are people just like us

A place should only belong to those who are born there

Do not be so stupid to think that

The world can be looked at another way …