Five Minutes in Orbit

Aug. 29th, 2025 12:00 am
[syndicated profile] earthobservatory_iod_feed

Posted by NASA Earth Observatory

Five Minutes in Orbit
An astronaut captured a moonrise—and much more—in a series of photos taken from the International Space Station.

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Migration complete

Aug. 28th, 2025 09:09 pm
madfilkentist: Pensock, the penguin puppet and one-time MASSFILCscot. (Pensock)
[personal profile] madfilkentist
The migration of garymcgath.com to DreamHost is complete, and everything seems to be working. There were some glitches, as they always are, but the support people were very helpful. Unlike the ones at HostGator, which I am now rid of.

Factoids

Aug. 27th, 2025 09:40 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
Some days, you run into a factoid that is just humbling.

The thing to do when confronted with something like that is just to keep plugging along and do the best you can. And no, I am not going to tell you *what* factoid. :)

Hail Scars Alberta Farmland

Aug. 28th, 2025 12:00 am
[syndicated profile] earthobservatory_iod_feed

Posted by NASA Earth Observatory

Hail Scars Alberta Farmland
A powerful supercell storm left a trail of damage spanning hundreds of kilometers southeast of Calgary, Canada.

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Conclusion

Aug. 27th, 2025 04:15 pm
[syndicated profile] worthwhile_canadian_feed

Posted by Stephen Gordon

Typepad has just informed me that it will be shutting down on September 30, and Worthwhile Canadian Initiative will go down with it.

We had a good run.

Migration time

Aug. 27th, 2025 09:54 am
madfilkentist: My cat Florestan (gray shorthair) (Default)
[personal profile] madfilkentist
For years I've had garymcgath.com hosted on HostGator. Its support has gotten less and less satisfactory, and I need to either renew or migrate soon. I've had mcgath.com on DreamHost for some time, and it's been satisfactory, so I'm moving garymcgath.com.

Originally mcgath.com was my personal website, and garymcgath.com was my professional one. The distinction has increasingly blurred. Currently mcgath.com is for older stuff and some filk-related things, such as the filk history Tomorrow's Songs Today and my filk songs Garymcgath.com has my blog and information about my books and silent film stuff.

Garymcgath.com is a Wordpress site, which makes it a little tricky to migrate, but DreamHost provides tools. The new site would ideally be indistinguishable from the old one except by IP address, but we'll see how close I can get to it. I'll try to keep downtime to a minimum.

Living in the Future

Aug. 26th, 2025 07:13 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
I am watching high definition video sent back from an experimental spacecraft on my 24 inch computer monitor.

Take *that*, kid who was plotting the Gemini missions on a map in his classroom nearly 60 years ago!

Following the Science Off a Cliff

Aug. 26th, 2025 07:32 am
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
I guess we have solved the problem of what to do about taking care of the dogs over OVFF, because OVFF has posted their health policy for 2025 and it appears that Gretchen will not be coming.

Meanwhile, in a glorious triumph for *someone* of *some* kind, I now have to decide whether I am going to be vaccinated against RSV or whether I am going to be tested for COVID three times during the course of the convention. Logic here is, of course, completely absent. But last year, my oldest child had to decide between getting a test that was unavailable or getting vaccinated in order to attend the convention, so I suppose this year's policy is a small improvement in that it doesn't mandate an unavailable test.

I checked before posting this, because I couldn't sleep before posting this -- and since I was up until 2:30 AM debugging, I would *really* like to go back to sleep! -- and the latest study from the CDC says that over a five month period, you were 54% less likely to contract COVID if you received the booster in September, 2024. Thus, there *is* a study indicating that it does *something*. (Now, I *agree* that it does *something*. If you have never had or been exposed to COVID before, it is clear to me that getting vaccinated improves your chances of not dying of the disease. At this point, of course, everyone except The Boy in the Bubble has either had COVID at least once or been vaccinated against it at least once or both.)

Having spent still *more* time looking for studies instead of sleeping, I fail to find one that quantifies how much less likely a *vaccinated* person who contracts COVID is to transmit the disease that someone who is *not* recently boosted, although I find one that indicates that the vaccinated person is likely to remain contagious for about 6 days, while the unvaccinated person remains contagious for about 7.5 days. My calculator tells me that's about 80% of the time, because I am not going to try to do math in my head on this little sleep. And when I multiply that by the 54% above, I get a number that's something like 43%.

Let's take that number in the absence of a better one. A vaccinated person who walks through the door would have a 43% chance of giving someone COVID as opposed to an unvaccinated person. The vaccinated person is not required to test at all. The unvaccinated person is required to test on each of the three days of the convention, just in case they develop the disease at the con. The vaccinated person could develop the disease at the con too (54% less likely!), but they don't need to test at all.

Given those sorts of numbers, it feels like the testing policy is simply punitive.

And given that -- as written and posted -- a failure to be vaccinated against RSV means that you need to be tested for COVID, it's not very scientific either.

I'm going to go back to bed now.

And I am going to *hate* going to OVFF without Gretchen.

But the dogs, I suppose, will be happier.
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_news

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.

Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.

Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.

Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)

Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)

All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.

We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)

If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.

On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.

Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.

The Late Show

Aug. 25th, 2025 10:38 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
I am engaged in a late night debugging session with one of my colleagues from work. It is being very interesting in the sense of "May you live in interesting times."

I am confident that there is a light at the end of this tunnel. I am even reasonably sure it is not a train...

Typhoon Kajiki Lashes Southeast Asia

Aug. 25th, 2025 05:34 pm
[syndicated profile] earthobservatory_iod_feed

Posted by NASA Earth Observatory

Typhoon Kajiki Lashes Southeast Asia
Late summer in the Northwest Pacific Ocean often sees an increase in storminess, which in August 2025 included a typhoon that lashed both China and Vietnam.

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Thump

Aug. 24th, 2025 10:25 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
I have engaged in retail therapy.

I'll explain later.

A Sea Aswirl With Chlorophyll

Aug. 22nd, 2025 10:26 am
[syndicated profile] earthobservatory_iod_feed

Posted by NASA Earth Observatory

A Sea Aswirl With Chlorophyll
One of NASA’s newest Earth-observing sensors extends and improves the continuous measurement of light-harvesting pigments in ocean surface waters.

Read More...

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