School responded, they are following City of Helsinki rules that allow using Instagram and Facebook. So it seems the pressure should be focused on the city’s education sector.

it would be political suicide to do it but like 60% of the developed world very badly needs a poltician willing to talk to them like adults and say “listen, you can let in Rahul to work and pay taxes, you can pay more taxes, or your pension can be cut. those are the options. you need to pick one.”

A BMW just drove past giving off multiple loud bangs somewhat randomly, like fireworks. Is this some new nuisance mod or was the car faulty?

Eowyn's story and how it was depicted in the books was one of the more surprising things on re-reading as an adult. Tolkien spends quite a bit on it and it is genuinely quite moving. It is more sidelined in the films.

Historically, the word 'nest' consists of two parts. The part 'ne-' is related to 'nether', while '-st' is related to 'sit'. The distant ancestor of 'nest' meant "place to sit down". 'Nest' is also related to Spanish 'nido' and its Romance relatives. Click my new graphic to learn more:

told myself to stop at Waldo

#QGIS tip If you have missing absolute links like this C:\Users\feefoo\Maps\Layers\MyLostMap.shp You can fix them in ”Handle Unavailable Layers" by editing the path to a relative link: Layers\MyLostMap.shp On Mac you need to replace the \ with /. Sure wish this was more automatic though.

Another part of JRRT's life I think a lot of people miss is how influential the trenches were not just on his sense of horror, but on his sense of honor. Ideas of honor and chivalry were very powerful on his generation and class, and it's easy to think that they were all disillusioned by the war ...

I had not up until now been forced to deal with massively popular Swedish kids lit thing ”Musse och Helium” and I must admit to becoming an instant hater. This is like asking a chatbot for a 2020 update on older anthropomorphic animals fare (I think it is all genuinely made by one person though).

Sump pump. Supper pupper. Sump pump. Sup' pup. Sumper pumper. Sump pump. Sup pup. Sump pump. Sup pup. Sump pump. Sup pup. Sump pump. Sup pup. Sump pump. Sup pup. Sump pump. Sup pup. Sump pump. Sup pup. Sump pump. Sup pup. Sump pump. Sup pup. Sump pump. Sup pup. Sump pump. Sup pup

signal-noise-ratio can fall even as signal increases if noise increases at a faster rate and your ability to filter noise does not improve

Just an English pamphlet from 1649 (about a fire in London) with an image from a walking juvenile skeleton on the title page. The 'a', 'b', 'c' labels around the skeleton are evidence that the copperplate used for this print was borrowed from an earlier medical publication. 1/2

Speaking of the forest carbon sink. This is the iceberg. Finland’s forests and peatlands were the backbone of net-zero maths. The sink has weakened and in some years flipped to a source. Without a credible plan to restore it, the 2035 pathway does not add up. 9/

In this NYT piece, Finland gets billed as Europe’s radical climate leader. Meanwhile the distance between promises and policy is growing. The story boosts the 2035 net-zero brand without asking if this cabinet is on course. Targets haven’t changed. Implementation has, and not for the better. 🧵

Fun visiting the Helsinki comics fair today, not enough money and shelf space to pick up everything interesting. Older kid did a mini zine. Also was it always this queer and I didn’t notice or has it become a lot more queer in recent years? Been a while since I went last time.

Finland *has* made real progress on electrification etc. but it is utterly disingenuous by PM Orpo to leave out that land use, essentially forestry, has become a net source of emissions.

Sadly the current right-wing coalition government in Finland has cut the funding for the nation’s “Housing First” success story, & homelessness is now on the rise again. That just reinforces the fact that such programs work, if political ideology doesn’t stand in the way. ysaatio.fi/en/news/home...

Kid’s school is on Facebook and Insta. They post mostly quite innocuous stuff where you cannot easily identify individual students. As a matter of principle it still feels questionable that they keep using Meta’s services, but are there any realistic alternatives?

Something else to think about, especially given this excellent summary, is Facebook's origin story. Like what was Zuckerberg trying to create originally, we actually do know this.

It sucks that insta remains one of the major channels if you want to keep up with what your middle aged friends are doing here in Finland. No I’m not the person that is going to start calling everyone, that just isn’t me. I honestly think this aspect of social media was pretty neat actually.

Parents stop sharing photos of your children online. Also, insist that your child's school quit with the institutional Facebook accounts. Meta's regulations are designed to bolster the rights of the company, not the individual.

Now playing

Animated ”the Phantom” 1990s cyberpunk series with characters by the creator of Æon Flux. Very silly/goes hard. Like they tried to do something Captain Planet-y for slightly older kids.

Lol just happened to see the old Yudkowsky dating profile where he lists Permutation City as his first fave book. Still an interesting read. Oddly life affirming implications for a story about simulated world.

What they are doing being the definition of criti-hype

What: There’s a 1990s animated series of The Phantom set in the future and with character designs by creator of Æon Flux Peter Chung en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom...

that looks like some dead animal tbh

cool study, visual depiction of motion in 300 comics across the world by @cogirmak.bsky.social @neilcohn.bsky.social Might be of interest to @dialhforhagai.bsky.social @soengery.bsky.social @hannahtempler.com @kochalka.bsky.social @tomtomorrow.bsky.social etc (or not 😬, if not sry)

Go check Päivi Helander’s beautiful Graphic designer of the year exhibition if you are in Helsinki! There is a little coincidental thematical connection to our exhibition last year. designforum.fi/en/event/gra...

Also: had somehow missed ’an A.I. product for children ages 2 to 12 called “Baby Grok.”’

One of my Nepali students shared this article with me, "A primer for what is happening in Nepal", which was more informative than anything else I've read about the situation in Nepal. kalamweekly.substack.com/p/a-primer-f...

Okay but this is 100% like one of those guys in Barcelona dressed as statues that will swipe the hat of a passing tourist or something

What I didn’t realize about going to the gym before starting to go to the gym is that it is like Sisyphus and the rock except that the rock is supposed to get heavier and heavier

Eugh this

Europe will never be taken seriously in security circles until it has a scary animal. American eagle, Russian bear, Chinese dragon, Indian tiger. I back the gryphon, traditionally valid and currently unclaimed

this is one of the best examples of a massively skewed media visibility to actual usefulness ratio when it comes to environmental projects

Showed this classic Rosling talk in the Aalto uni infodesign class today. It is soon 20 years old. No-one had seen it before. I still think it holds up pretty well, also interesting that the liberation of data siloed in databases that he calls for basically happened! www.ted.com/talks/hans_r...

Outrun, The vaporwaviest Café in Helsinki has a pretty fancy affogato, just fyi outrun.fi

Nämä kyltit taitavat muuten olla sellaisia, että kumpikaan niistä ei ole lainvoimainen missään tavallisissa ulkotiloissa kuten taloyhtiöiden pihoilla. Mm. työmaa-alueella ”asiaton oleskelu” on toki kiellettyä www.minilex.fi/a/rikoslaki-...

but. like. you are writing this (as am i) in a system in which (a) deletes do not have guaranteed propagation, and (b) tombstones persist for all eternity. your sense of risk is catastrophically fucked if you think this is any safer than putting your email in a place it has to be subpoenaed out of.

1/ South Korean workers arrested in Georgia and subsequently deported from the US have been giving more accounts of their experiences. The deportation of over 300 workers has caused political uproar in South Korea and prompted a human rights investigation into their ordeal. ⬇️

Plans: foiled

So what's striking to me is that this is basically the Orban/Modi playbook but also that it is hard to say that it is working. In approval terms, Modi is actually popular in India and until very recently in Hungary Fidesz had a hard lock on 55% of the electorate. MAGA has never polled so high.

Annoyingly the Stanisław Lem biography by Wojciech Orliński still hasn’t been translated to any language I read well. Maybe I need to attempt the Spanish. www.goodreads.com/work/edition...

electrifying tunnel-boring.....new plasma cannon being tested in Norway to dig tunnels faster -->> www.nrk.no/trondelag/te...

🚨#datavis Job alert 🚨 Fancy working with us in London as a researcher using @observablehq.com Plot for accessible #datavis? To support people with language disability in the use of data visualization for everyday decision making. www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/about/jobs/a...

Want some free career advice? #AcademicChatter

so apparently Roblox works erratically or not at all with Apple's Screen Time, but you can create a ”parent” account and manage your kid's screen time from there, which seems to work.