Media reports of famine in Gaza have dropped to near zero in the past 5 days. So is the food suddenly flowing in or is it just the attention span of the media shifting to the Iran story? I did find this:
Germany and Israel argued heatedly over images from Gaza during their meeting in Jerusalem earlier this week, with Germany’s Foreign Minister contending the images fail to show the reality of famine in the enclave, Israeli media reports said Friday.
Earth’s record hot streak might be a sign of a new climate era - The Washington Post
The heat fell upon Mali’s capital like a thick, smothering blanket — chasing people from the streets, stifling them inside their homes. For nearly a week at the beginning of April, the temperature in Bamako hovered above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The cost of ice spiked to ten times its normal price, an overtaxed electrical grid sputtered and shut down.
With much of the majority-Muslim country fasting for the holy month of Ramadan, dehydration and heat stroke became epidemic. As their body temperatures climbed, people’s blood pressure lowered. Their vision went fuzzy, their kidneys and livers malfunctioned, their brains began to swell. At the city’s main hospital, doctors recorded a month’s worth of deaths in just four days. Local cemeteries were overwhelmed.
We need to support social justice in tech. Solidarity. An excellent post by Ben Werdmuller: No tech for apartheid is within its rights to protest | Werd.io
There is nothing honorable about supporting your employer as it commits or facilitates human rights violations. Protesting is the ethical thing to do…
Human rights should always trump business.
The US is isolated in its support of Israel, a state actively engaged in land theft, war crimes and genocide. Shameful.
The vote in the 15-member security council was 12 in favor, the US opposed and two abstentions, the UK and Switzerland.
Before the vote, diplomats said the US mission had been trying to convince one or two other council members to abstain, to mitigate Washington’s isolation on the issue…
Columbia University is colluding with the far-right in its attack on students | The Guardian
In her willingness to unleash state violence against student protestors, Minouche Shafik proved herself to be a willing ally to extremists…
To that end, she made only tepid defenses of academic freedom, instead favoring wholehearted condemnations of the protestors, assents to bad-faith mischaracterizations of the students as antisemitic and genocidal, and public, apparently on-the-spot, personnel decisions that removed some pro-Palestinian faculty and staff from their positions.
We could do with far more worker activism like this. Genocide in Gaza and also the climate emergency, both are crises that need more activism. Not easy to put one’s livelihood on the line in a protest.
Organized by the group No Tech for Apartheid, the protesters are demanding Google withdraw from Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli military.
Arctic permafrost is now a net source of major greenhouse gases | New Scientist
Areas of permanently frozen ground in northern regions are now emitting more carbon into the atmosphere than they absorb, causing the planet to heat even further, according to the first Arctic-wide estimate of all three major greenhouse gases.
Frozen ground, or permafrost, which underlies 15 per cent of the northern hemisphere and contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, has shrunk in area by an estimated 7 per cent in 50 years as it thaws.
Democrats Question U.S. Claims That Israel Isn’t Violating International Law Using American Weapons
More than two dozen House Democrats sent a letter to the Biden administration on Tuesday questioning its assertions that the Israeli government is using American weapons in full compliance with U.S. and international law, as required by a memo President Joe Biden issued in February.
Texas Democratic Reps. Veronica Escobar and Joaquin Castro led the congressional letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. The 26 Democrats note that for months, “elected representatives, intergovernmental bodies, international courts, Israeli and global human rights observers — along with government officials themselves — have persistently expressed grave concerns regarding the actions of the Netanyahu government.”
Documenting Six Months of Israeli War Crimes in Gaza
Over the last six months, Israel has repeatedly massacred Palestinians in Gaza, resulting in the deaths of well over thirty thousand Palestinians, some 70 percent of whom are women and children. Tens of thousands more have been injured. These numbers are probably an undercount considering Israel’s deliberate destruction of Gaza’s health care system, which is the sole independent source of these numbers (which are also used by Israel, including its prime minister and the military)
Posting on Mastodon Scott Jenson suggested that text editing on the iPad is “tedious”. My initial reaction was, no, it’s not. I read through the thread and I think it speaks more to his lack of experience with the iPad. From his various posts it would seem he decided to jump into one of those “can the iPad be my computer stunts” and bumped into a variety of bugs and differences he didn’t like. Now, I can’t speak to the bugs as I’ve found the iPad with keyboard/trackpad to be rock solid for years.
I hopped over to his very in depth blog post. He makes some great points there in regards to touch-based editing of text but it seems to be oriented towards phone-based editing.
I’ve been coding and writing with a variety hardware keyboards and text editors on the iPad for years, have I just adapted to a poor experience? Is text editing that much better an a Mac? I don’t think so but I’ll get back to that comparison in a bit.
His primary point is that while typing initial text is fine, it’s the going back to edit text that is broken. He attributes this to the origins of text editing conventions established with desktop computing being adapted to touch screens.
Text editing on mobile isn’t ok. It’s actually much worse than you think, an invisible problem very few appreciate…
Android and iOS share a common problem: they copied desktop text editing conventions, but without a menu bar or mouse. This forced them to overload the tap gesture with a wide range of actions: placing the cursor, moving it, selecting text, and invoking a pop-up menu. This results in an overly complicated and ambiguous mess-o-taps, leading to a variety of user errors.
My first thought on reading through his post is that it’s certainly true that text editing can be more difficult if one is only using touch. I think the experience is far better today than it was but it can be frustrating at times. But I would add that I think some of the frustration likely comes from a lack of practice. There’s a fine line between spending time and learning the features and process of touch-based text editing and spending time with a touch based device and adapting to a bad experience. That’s a nuance I’m not sure how to define.
While his post is focused on Android he makes it clear that he thinks the problem crosses over to iOS. He conducted a ten person experiment giving users simple text editing tasks like deleting a character or moving a word to the end of a sentence:
Every single person had problems with targeting, using the clipboard, and made lots and lots of errors…
They all expressed frustration, but not so much with messaging or social media apps, where they typically only needed to write short bursts of text. However, when it came to composing more complex text, such as multiple-sentence emails, they often said things like, “I’ll start it on my phone, but if it gets too complex, I’ll just finish it on my laptop.”
Well, I can certainly relate to that. But he’s mixing things up a bit here. Notice, he wrote “composing more complex text, such as multiple-sentence emails”. See, now he’s talking about both the typing of initial text and editing. For people used to computing with a hardware keyboard composing with a touch screen is very likely going to be a subpar, slower, more error prone experience. I dislike it and won’t do it at all. Anything more than a couple words and I go to dictation. But that’s composing from scratch and then also editing. Yuck.
The experience I have tapping with my fingers on my iPhone is NOT the experience I have on my iPad when it’s attached to keyboard.
In discussing text editing with a desktop/laptop he writes:
The combination of these three features—an accurate pointer, simple selection, and a menu with command keys—made text editing easy, relatively error-free, and unambiguous.
Fair enough and agreed! But much of the post is about editing text with touch. Now, up to 2020 I was using the iPad with an external keyboard and touch-based editing and had become very proficient. Was it as easy as a desktop with a pointing device? Perhaps not but the combination did work very well for me in part because I was starting with a hardware keyboard for input. And with practice I was quite good with touch-based selection, etc. It was not as accurate as a cursor but it generally worked for me in part because I used the touch-tap to move the cursor and then used the keyboard to select/copy/cut text. Then tap/touch again to paste, etc. Also, when one is proficient with a touch screen on an iPad, it’s second nature to quickly scroll with the fingers. Moving in a large text document can be very fast. The touch screen is a very nice trackpad!
He really doesn’t address text editing on the iPad with a trackpad or mouse for cursor support. In my time revisiting the Mac to compare to the iPad I didn’t find it easier on the Mac. Perhaps that’s because I’ve become familiar with any differences between the two. The iPad with an external keyboard/trackpad have been my daily experience for 4 years now. With one finger using the touch screen and the other on the keyboard/trackpad, the combination of inputs can be very powerful. In this way an iPad in the Magic Keyboard with a trackpad is, with practice, better than a laptop with just a trackpad.
That said, I would highlight one problem area: inconsistency in selecting text to move. Some apps allow for selection and then dragging the selection to a different spot in the document. Others don’t. Some seem to support it with touch based selection and moving but not with a trackpad cursor. Those that do support selecting and then moving with a trackpad or mouse can be very clumsy or inconsistent. In particular I noticed Textastic on the iPad does not allow for a long press to move selected text via drag and drop. It does work on Textastic on the Mac.
This may be a problem for some. It’s never been a problem for me because I don’t select text for movement via drag and drop. As I’ve got a keyboard attached I select text then use the keyboard shortcut to copy or cut and then paste. I had to go out of my way to discover that it didn’t work in Textastic.
I do think there is room for improvement with touch-based text entry and editing but this sort of post just gets messy trying to cover too much ground with too many variables. Different people with different experiences, needs, temperments, etc all influence expectations, willingness to learn and final outcomes. We have very powerful computers that come in radically different form factors that are suited to different tasks, users, and situations. Find the mix of devices that work best for you in whatever situations you tend to be in. Learn how to use them, be ready to learn more with new device form factors and OSs. Prepare to be frustrated at times, delighted at other times.
Breaking it down by the numbers. Damning but not surprising.
“One of the reasons I am hosting this new weekly show for Zeteo, is that I am fed up with media organizations failing to challenge the racism and bigotry of our leaders, and I am also fed up with media organizations themselves pushing racist, bigoted, dehumanizing coverage of minorities across the board - but especially, especially, of the Palestinians. I think the world deserves better.”
UN Report Describes Abuse and Dire Conditions in Israeli Detention - The New York Times
Gazans released from Israeli detention described graphic scenes of physical abuse in testimonies gathered by United Nations workers, according to a report released on Tuesday by UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.
Palestinian detainees described being made to sit on their knees for hours on end with their hands tied while blindfolded, being deprived of food and water and being urinated on, among other humiliations, the report said. Others described being badly beaten with metal bars…
A quick follow-up to my post earlier this morning about blogging from my OBTF. One issue I mentioned as a possible friction point was posts containing images. I solved it easily with a Shortcut that I’ll use for every post regardless of whether they contain images. It’s a simple Shortcut that shares the text as an individual file in Obsidian. This allows for the same, easy posting from iA Writer when I’ve got images in a post. I’ll go ahead and do this for every post as it will continue adding those individual files to the blog posts folder in Obsidian. If I decide in the future not to blog from OBTF all of my posts are still intact as individual files. I’ve also set the Shortcut to copy the post text and open a new post on the Micro.blog website. If you’re an Apple user and you’re not using Shortcuts you’re missing out!
It was 85°F here yesterday (mid-Missouri). Forecast to be 83° today and 82° tomorrow. According to the Apple weather app this is 13° above average. Summer is going to be fun. 🥵
Nerd Note! In early February I decided to experiment with using OBTF (One Big Text File) instead of individual files for daily notes and thus far I really prefer it. I decided tonight to add to this experiment. Instead of individual blog posts residing in their own text files in a folder as I've been doing for a very long time I'm curious if they can be added to the OBTF? Would such a file be too cumbersome to edit or navigate? What about finding posts? Why even try Such a thing? What's the problem of individual files for blog posts?
It takes a certain amount of effort to deal with individual files and I often publish several posts a day usually as link blog style short posts. I use a shortcut to send markdown of highlighted text and the url from Safari to Obsidian. Then I add any comment I want to add and publish straight from Obsidian using the micro.blog publish plugin. It works very well.
Each post/file has YAML meta data to aid in searching via tags in Obsidan or I can search by keyword. Either way I get a list of files. I don't necessarily need to search often but when I do it's clunky. The search results don't indicate much beyond the file name and tags searched. Clicking through search results file-by-file is a bit cumbersome. It works, but it takes awhile.
For the next few weeks I'll try adding blog posts below each day's interstitial journal entries. Any new post, be it a quick link blog or a longer post like this one will get added to the top. And so, at the end of each day that day's blog posts are grouped for easy viewing, newest at the top. I'll tag posts as published with other keyword tags as they get posted. Any post that isn't published will get tagged as draft and will be moved up to the next day until published or abandoned and left behind should I decide not to publish it. I've started this post just before bed so it will get tagged draft and moved up in the morning before I finish it off.
From what I've read even very large text files remain very fast to navigate and search. Using an app like Textastic also provides a section navigation tool. Searching and/or navigating through a single file via this tool in Textastic seems far faster than searching multiple files in a folder in Obsidian.
One potential downside of this method is that I won't be able to use plugin to publish from Obsidian but I'm not sure this will be a significant problem. Publishing will still be very fast. Select the post, copy then use Command-Space to call up a Shortcut via Spotlight that jumps me straight to a new post in Safari where I simply paste. It may actually be easier to post as I usually have to confirm character count which is best done on the micro.blog post composer on the web. By going straight there with a post I'm skipping a step.
Reasons for experiment:
- It may be easier to surface posts when searching
- It may prove easier, simpler for writing and more conducive to posting longer form posts.
Potential problems:
- I have a pretty nice process for posting images in individual posts via the iA Writer app but this relies on each post existing as it's own file.
The big idea: are we about to discover a new force of nature? | Physics | The Guardian
Such a new force could help unlock a deeper structure at the base of reality
Hints that physicists may be on the brink of making such a breakthrough have been accumulating over the past decade. The first tranche of evidence comes from particle physics experiments here on Earth, the results of which appear to conflict with our current best theory of fundamental particles, the standard model.
Our rapidly heating planet is regularly shattering records these days. December through February was so warm — in fact, the hottest winter on record in the U.S. — it’s been described by some climate experts as a “lost winter.” Last year also set new records for global surface temperature, hottest summer and ocean heat content. Perhaps most ominously, the world averaged temperatures 1.4º C higher than pre-industrial levels during those 12 months.
Protestors Against Gaza Genocide Block Roads, Commerce in 50 Cities Across the World | Truthout
Demonstrators across every inhabited continent took to the streets to block major corridors and spots of economic activity on Monday, April 15, in a coordinated economic disruption to protest Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The “A15” protests were planned across 50 cities, including 21 in the U.S., encompassing 17 countries in total. Protesters blocked shipping ports and railroads, targeted funders of arms manufacturers like Israel’s Elbit Systems, blocked factories for arms manufacturers directly, and linked arms across major roads, including highways and airport entrances.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, the genocide continues, famine grows.
As the world focuses on Iran’s attack on Israel, bloodshed continues in Gaza - YouTube
As the world waits to see how Israel will respond to Iran’s attack, in Gaza, the bloodshed continues. Four were killed in overnight airstrikes in the southern city of Rafah, and 11 were killed - including children - in central Gaza. Israeli tanks have re-entered the north of the strip, surrounding schools housing displaced families.
As technology develops, sound has become an increasingly important way of measuring the health and biodiversity of ecosystems: our forests, soils and oceans all produce their own acoustic signatures. Scientists who use ecoacoustics to measure habitats and species say that quiet is falling across thousands of habitats, as the planet witnesses extraordinary losses in the density and variety of species.