Matt Panhans @mpanhans@librem.one

The brilliant Melissa Dell first taught her course Econ 1342: The History of Economic Growth at Harvard, in, I think, 2015. When I learned about this, my reaction was envy: I thought that I would like to do that.So I do:

====

Econ 135: Course Syllabus & Schedule (Preliminary)
Eight thematic areas, from humanity's evolution into an "anthology intelligence" to the development of modern economic growth institutions and beyond. The human progression from Malthusian societies of domination... 1/

An #introduction for my new mastodon home: I make graphics for the Washington Post, mixing journalism, data, design and programming. Expect to see posts about building graphics, open source projects and links that I think are worth your time.

Fan of #dataviz, #d3, #rstats, #opensource, #jazz and unfortunately the #cubs.

We sell refurbished laptops pre-installed with Linux. Check out new inventory of Lenovo Thinkpad, Dell Latitude, and Lenovo X1 Yoga devices.
Free shipping within the USA.
https://senderolinux.com/

The key slide for Day 1 of Modern Plain Text Computing

Just unveiled a new black sketchbook and have begun an experimental artistic journey. Excited to see where this takes me! 🖤🎨 #AliceInWonderland #sketchbook

A selection from the huge varieties of potatoes grown in Peru

📸 c/I The international potato centre

(TIL - Peru has 4000 varieties)

"Almost any scene we ever did, we could look into each other's eyes and be comforting or uplifting for each other.” — Mary Tyler Moore

Valerie Harper (1939-2019) was born on this date.

#ValerieHarper

Dropped a new episode of The Self-Host Cast with none other than @danb himself, open-source advocate and developer of @bookstack and RSS. Give it a listen and let me know your thoughts!

https://selfh.st/cast/episode-5/

#selfhost #selfhosted #selfhosting #opensource #foss #homelab #documentation #podcast #podcasts

❝Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.❞ — Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)

OH WAIT LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT CECILIA PAYNE

• Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend money on her college education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge.

• Cecilia Payne completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give her a degree because she was a woman, so she said to heck with that and moved to the United States to work at Harvard.

• Cecilia Payne was the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, with what Otto Strauve called “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

• Not only did Cecilia Payne discover what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun is made of (Henry Norris Russell, a fellow astronomer, is usually given credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than Payne — after telling her not to publish).

• Cecilia Payne is the reason we know basically anything about variable stars (stars whose brightness as seen from earth fluctuates). Literally every other study on variable stars is based on her work.

• Cecilia Payne was the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within Harvard, and is often credited with breaking the glass ceiling for women in the Harvard science department and in astronomy, as well as inspiring entire generations of women to take up science.

• Cecilia Payne is awesome and everyone should know her.

(OP: Matthew Gardner)

Happy Birthday to the LVFS

9 years ago today I wrote 4 little PHP scripts and pushed it to OpenShift which was the beginning of the LVFS. We've since rewritten it in Python, switched the deployment from "sudo git pull" on the server under my stairs at home (literally) to deploying onto AWS with Terraform.

In 9 years we've onboarded over 140 vendors, shipped ~110 million firmware files and added support for ~85 firmware update protocols for ~1600 different devices. I'm pretty happy with that.

I left Adobe years ago, but many still use it.

In light of recent scandals, we felt it was time to make a video on Adobe's massively exploitive history and what to do against big tech companies like Adobe. Watch it now!
https://youtu.be/sOX8x5Fy6AA

Patreon screws me over, says a big Apple did it and ran away.

Patreon has two billing models, monthly (bills on the first of the month, or whenever they get around to it) and daily (charges you the moment you sign up.) For several years now, they have...
https://jwz.org/b/ykXg

BREAKING: Republicans seize on 2010 Walz video in which he admits to occasionally going to Jiffy Lube rather than changing own oil.

"The nice thing about buying food for a man is, you don't have to laugh at his jokes."

Preston Sturges’ SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS (1941) is now streaming on Prime and nowhere else (without a VOD rental).

#FilmMastodon #TCMParty

1 year ago I ditched my Macbook, bought a Framework laptop, and moved to Linux for professional UX design work. In this article, I explain as simply as possible:
- Why I switched to Linux
- How you can do the same.

I cover design-specific concerns like:
- How to use Apple devices like the Magic Mouse in Linux
- Which design tools are available and how to install them
- How to find help if you get stuck

https://www.chris-wood.design/resources/linux-for-ux-designers
#Design #UXDesign #UIDesign #Linux #MacOS #FrameworkLaptop

As a Blind person i never thought i would be on social media savoring photos. But the communal Mastodon alt text game is so strong that sweet, poetic or silly descriptions abound on my timeline. Thanks to legions of people who take time to write a meaningful description of the ephemera they post, i learn so much about insects, plants, buildings, memes — all dispatches from a dimension of the world that i otherwise wouldn't experience. If you're wondering whether anybody reads these things: YES.

Two-thirds of the $310 million that Kamala Harris raised last month came from first-time donors, according to the campaign.

It seemed necessary to make this.