The HUDOC database provides access to the case-law of the Court (Grand Chamber, Chamber and Committee judgments and decisions, communicated cases, advisory opinions and legal summaries from the Case-Law Information Note), the European Commission of H…
We went to the V&A recently and saw their Korean Wave exhibit. One part spent time on the Korean beauty sector and the myth of the 10 step regime. They had a 3d printer for personalised face masks, which was interesting, but looked like a glorified plotter (either very limited or no Z axis).
Since there's so much snake oil in this area, and your face is so visible, people are willing to latch on to whatever hope they can.
It's interesting talking to people about skincare. From purely medical (I've a few friends that suffer from Psoriasis), through to managing effects of hormones (it comes up a surprising amount teaching teenagers), through to purely cosmetic.
I latched on to some "advice" from a (I think) GQ article in 2003ish. George Clooney was interviewed about skincare and he said to keep it simple. Use a face cleaner, scrub a few times a week, and use a SPF moisturiser daily. I've been happy with that advice.
You know you’ve turned a corner in language learning when the employee in McDonalds doesn’t switch to English in order to point out that you should have used the pluperfect instead of the perfect.
What if we, like, dig 50 really deep holes in Fulton County Georgia to put it in? I’m sure that would work out fine, right? abc.net.au/news/2023-05-26/tre…
Operators of the Fukushima nuclear power plant are set to release treated wastewater into the ocean. But already Japanese authorities are facing a barrage of criticism from fishermen.
Imagine being Jacob Rees-Mogg; he desperately wants to be Brideshead Revisted, but is actually an (albeit well read) idiot cousin of the Boswells in Bread, and all the upper class old money he sucks up knows it, and judges him for it.
He’s not like Nadine Dorries; going through life oblivious to her own stupidity. Jacob knows he’s both very very stupid and a transparent imposter who will never get what he wants: the acceptance of the inbred wazzocks he deifies, and it must utterly torment his every moment.
Netflix, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HBO Max, and countless more: we have reached the stage of late stage capitalism, web edition, where the fashionable thing to do, having eradicated your competitors, is to deliberately make your product utterly fucking useless.
I’m particularly noting that on Reddit, as communities start to shut down, the bulk of the notifications I’m getting there now are porn spambots following me.
#Musk shares video of pro-russian Tucker Carlson blaming Ukraine for #Kakhovka dam blast
Carlson has now launched his show on #twitter His first episode accused #Ukraine of destroying the Kakhovka dam. Carlson argued russia, occupying the east Dnipro bank, gained nothing as it would flood that very area.
Musk significantly increased the video's reach by sharing it. Before the retweet, Carlson's video had 57 million views; Musk added another 29 million
Twitter owner Elon Musk is amplifying the baseless claims of former Fox News television host Tucker Carlson – known for his pro-Kremlin and anti-Ukrainian views.
@Ghost of Hope @Eugene McParland Yeah. I've followed him for ages and have always been excited about SpaceX, but he has just turned into a bigger and bigger twat as he got older and it's so very disappointing.
Whew! Lot of follow requests this morning. If I had a gripe about Friendica (actually, I have many but that’s the nature of using a really neat but ultimately cottage industry bit of social media software), it would be that it makes dealing with them all kinda long winded.
This is really weird, strange, & seems to this only very very occasional redditor to be EXTREMELY sudden. Has this been looming, or is there something in the water lately? @theory
@theory I find the idea fascinating that there might be some kind of watershed caused by Twitter's decomposition. Like, people are suddently skeptical of social media hype, & that translates into being skeptical about things they maybe shouldn't be that skeptical about. Like how a lot of solid companies cratered in the dot-bomb because the market lost faith in fundamentals. HP e.g. had a rock solid record of improving numbers for decades, but suddenly that wasn't good enough.
Once again, seeing the whole, "Fediverse is full of Europeans who keep refusing to frame social justice issues strictly from the point of view of USians and this is definitely very problematic everyone!" thing.
And I can't help thinking, "Have you tried taking your cultural imperialism and shoving it up your arse? Maybe that will help?"
@pmroman The first time I went to the US, I experienced massive culture shock. Sharing a language, I expected far more cultural compatibility but what I found just felt so very foreign, far more so than any European country I’ve visited even when I don’t speak a word of the local language.
To some extent I have the same issue with Brits who have never seen other cultures except as holiday destinations!
I have lived and worked in France, Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg and also spent 3 years living in Thailand.
In each of those countries I have learnt of the massive cultural differences that divide us one from another. Some are highly amusing, others deadly serious.
Some of my more narrow minded "stay at home" British friends accuse me of being a turncoat; of abandoning my 'Britishness' for 'Europeanism' and I guess that is true.
However, I am reminded of a friend of mine who is of Vietnamese origin and who was raised in Vietnam; only leaving to move to western Europe when she was about 20. Talking about the end of the Vietnam war, she referred to the defeat of the USA in Vietnam at the hands of the North Vietnamese Army, as "the liberation". I don't think too many Americans would see it that way. What you perceive depends on the point of view from which you perceive it!
I have learned not to answer you publicly, way too many people are finding me. It was a throwaway remark between friends! I didn't think anyone would notice!
The greatest trick the petrochemical industry managed to pull was convincing people who think of themselves as "environmentalists" that a few lithium mines are somehow worse than the entire global oil industry (which, remember, is also where the plastic being dumped in the sea comes from).
then there's the part where the conflate 'battery' with 'lithium'. Battery tech is developing REALLY FAST & the most interesting stuff is specifically designed to make the tech cheaper & less environmentally disruptive. (E.g. I love those massive iron-salt batteries - they're packed in large-size shipping containers & installed in massive arrays as buffer storage for wind- & solar-farms.)
I understand why people don’t want lithium mines at their doorstep. But on the other hand, I think there’s always an element on colonialism in many of those protests. People want to enjoy the goods that come from extraction, but are happy if extraction is done half the world away, on poor countries so they don’t have to see of suffer through the consequences. Anyways I think the solution to mobility is less cars, not just making all cars EVs, that should be the main goal.
Existing cars definitely need to be EV. But solving the “too many cars” problem isn’t hard. Netherlands does it. Even Spain has the largest high speed train network on the planet only second to a much bigger country, China. The real hard problem to solve is finding people who are good at, and want to solve hard problems and are also willing to go into politics and win elections. EVs won’t fix this, among many other problems: twitter.com/visionzeroyvr/stat…
@Miguel Arroz And yet Spain runs zero long distance trains to Portugal, and cancelled the only sleeper services it had with no plans for replacement.
Meanwhile the Algarve Line has exciting infrastructure plans to increase the average speed from about 60kph to about 75kph.
I’d love, love, love ubiquitous fast convenient rail, but the promise of it at some unspecified future date is frequently trotted out as an excuse to not need to decarbonise road transport, a thing that is already happening, and is quite easy to accelerate.
Yeah, I’m not saying decarbonizing and depolluting out cities isn’t important. I’m just saying that isn’t the panacea people are led to believe it is by the car industry. Long distance and cities are different problems, but living on a city core, I honestly think politicians should face trial every time someone gets hit by a car, because they do exactly jack shit to stop this mayhem. I’m preparing myself mentally to move out of Vancouver because I can’t take this shit any more.
It’s ironic that when I visit my parents in Portugal on a shitty Lisbon suburb, I can have the window open any time and not feel any real difference in the noise levels. Here, if I open the window, even during nighttime, my living room turns into a highway. The noise is unbearable. And I live in the city that calls itself “the greenest city”. This experience made me deeply hate cars and politicians.
@Alisdair Calder McGregor We don’t hear much about how you guys are getting on in the news. I was told there were going to be sunlit uplands. Sounds nice.
@Baroque Mongoose I could see how they would be a concern in the UK. Every time I go back there, the lamentable state of the mobile networks surprises me every time.
There was a period during which VoIP-only lines (FTTP) were provided with a battery backup. They dropped it as just not worthwhile, landlines are rarely the mechanism of last resort these days.
Apple Watch workout app doesn’t track course for paddling for some strange reason, so I looked for an alternative that integrates with workouts, but adds course tracking.
Seems there are two. One is free, the other is 6 euros a month.
I hate this subscription crap. Just let us buy things and stop trying to turn the whole world into a glorified Company Store. I’d have gladly paid for either, but I’m not renting a workout tracking app, especially not at that price.
Developers: if I have a choice between a product I can buy, and one I have to rent, I will always go for the one I can buy.
As I’m quite fond of not drowning, it pleases me immensely that some of the orcas have been tagged. They plan to try and tag more this summer as they migrate through biscay, and update the maps weekly on the orca app.
We needed this 3-4 years ago, and it’s only by luck that nobody has died yet, but better late than never. When we know where they are, we can avoid them.
We now have two inflatable SUPs, an 11 foot model and a 10 foot model, and for the first time, @Sylvia Knight and I went out on the sea together. It was a beautiful calm day; the Atlantic was being very benign with a smooth sea state, crystal clear water. Saw loads of fish and you get s really good view from up there on the SUP.
I really like the smaller of the two boats. It’s sporty and moves with the swell, giving a very dynamic feel. Looking forward to doing a lot more of this!
Apropos of Y. pestis (plague) genes being found in a 4000 year old skeleton, @Sylvia Knight was wondering out loud why the sudden catastrophic wave of the disease, the Black Death, in the 13th century.
So I did a bit of reading. There was a fringe theory a couple of decades ago that black death was not bubonic plague. One of the reasons some people thought this is from epidemiology: it spread too fast. Specifically, it travelled around Europe at the speed humans did, not at the speed rats did, suggesting rat fleas were not responsible for primary transmission, as many of us were taught at school.
Turns out that, however, human fleas can also transmit the disease, but they're really shit at it and probably not the culprit.
But body lice, they are like,
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Apropos of Y. pestis (plague) genes being found in a 4000 year old skeleton, @Sylvia Knight was wondering out loud why the sudden catastrophic wave of the disease, the Black Death, in the 13th century.
So I did a bit of reading. There was a fringe theory a couple of decades ago that black death was not bubonic plague. One of the reasons some people thought this is from epidemiology: it spread too fast. Specifically, it travelled around Europe at the speed humans did, not at the speed rats did, suggesting rat fleas were not responsible for primary transmission, as many of us were taught at school.
Turns out that, however, human fleas can also transmit the disease, but they're really shit at it and probably not the culprit.
But body lice, they are like, actually quite good at transmitting it. Apparently coming into contact with a plague corpse 3 days post mortem, if that corpse had body lice, is sufficient to infect you with around 10 bites. Really not many.
Body lice don't live on warm human bodies - it's not comfortable for them. They live in our clothes.
Or rather, they used to. Laundry detergent eradicated them.
But laundry detergent is a 20th century invention, and the plague stopped coming to Europe in the 17th century.
Soap was around before though, a long time before.
Very popular in the Middle East towards the end of the 1st millennium.
Which means, of course, in Christian Europe, it became associated with Islam, and therefore was dubious.
Apparently there was a huge decline in soap use in Europe in the medieval period.
Which, of course, would allow the louse population to flourish.
Racism killed a third of Europe in the 13th century. Silly buggers.
By the way, I know we are increasingly encouraged to cold-wash our clothes these days for environmental reasons, but maybe ... let's not, eh?
BTW, AIUI the major difference between head lice, body lice, and pubic lice is more geography than biology, so head and public lice could probably transmit it too.
But they live directly on us, in our hair, and don't mingle every time we take our clothes off and put them in a pile.
That's probably why head and public lice are not known for being disease vectors.
@Ghost of Hope My own English vocab has a bunch of Portuguese loanwords. Most notably, my entire family has adopted “trotinete”, as there’s no specific word for it in English (kick scooter, I guess, but that’s two words)
It reminds me of this time I got to chatting with a young woman at a bar and she kept mentioning being discriminated against because of her “politics” and I was just about to ask what she meant by that when I noticed the swastika on her tattoo and noped the fuck out of there.
Yeah, I would have blocked that account on Reddit lickety-split. That’s not how someone who was been wronged speak.
Also twatter, Reddit, meta(stasis), etc will happily lock out an account. So that’s not an argument, unless it’s related to their famously lax rules for certain demographics (go to some of the religious subreddits and view death threats to large groups of people).
Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •HUDOC - European Court of Human Rights
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