The Internet: How it could be ruining your hair
From the archives
03.03.2026 03:24
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The Internet: How it could be ruining your hair
From the archives
Just started doing new data analysis and I know I keep saying this, but: I really, really don't think people appreciate how much this moral panic was a deliberate and extremely expensive invention.
Greetings from the Northwestern University Transportation Library, where Rachel just showed me the original!
Big news in Cascadia: British Columbia will switch to permanent #DaylightSavingTime. Clocks will change for the last time on March 8 and then will not switch back in the fall.
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
My personal experience was with implementing the behavior of the SYM key on the T-Mobile Sidekick 2 keyboard.
My more recent experience is that I accidentally bring up the character picker on my Mac all the time by accident.
Update/Scoop— New guidance sent this AM to Kansas DMVs indicates licenses that previously had gender marker changed not actually invalid yet. However, internally DMV can see who is flagged, and keeping track of who has/hasn't come in to update. Seems about 300 trans/GNC ppl flagged across the state.
screenshot from the linked-to timeline that reads: February 20, 2016: Insofar as I can tell, the first ever claim that "social contagion" is turning kids transgender. It occurs as a comment on the 4thwavenow.com "About" page, posted on February 20, 2016 at 5:27pm, under the handle "skepticaltherapist." Shortly thereafter, 4thwavenow.com turned this comment into its own post, called... February 29, 2016: 4thwavenow.com publishes "Tumblr snags another girl, but her therapist-mom knows a thing or two about social contagion." As noted in the previous entry, this is skepticaltherapist's earlier comment, posted along with a brief intro from the folks at 4thwavenow. There are several potentially noteworthy things about it, and the comments that follow it: o It begins by referencing a Star Trek TNG episode in which the crew becomes addicted to an alien video game, then makes the following analogy: "The alien mind control device made its way into my home about two years ago when my then eleven-year-old daughter begged me for a Tumblr account since her friends all had one." o In the piece, skepticaltherapist describes herself as a psychotherapist, later adding, "As a therapist, I mostly work with adults."
precisely 10 years ago today, the concept of "transgender social contagion" was first invented on the now infamous anti-trans parent website 4thWaveNow. a full timeline of how the concept spread (not unlike a "social contagion") can be found here: juliaserano.blogspot.com/2019/02/orig...
2. Every few months, I publish a national risk assessment for transgender youth and adults when it comes to legal threats. This particular update is a large one, with a new way of scoring risk for trans youth given the changing environment, and with major updates for adults.
I hope you heal quickly!
Thanks! I should have some detective joke to respond with
A trio of Robert Tinney illustrated magazine covers: Floppy Disk, Software Piracy, Smalltalk Balloon
I wrote a tribute for BYTE Magazine's amazing cover artist, Robert Tinney, who died Feb 1st
Tinney painted 80 vivid and surreal covers illustrating various concepts in early personal computing from 1978-1990, usually airbrushed with gouache. May he RIP ❤️
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026...
Thank you for sending me down the rabbit hole: apparently the model for Carmen Sandiego was Marsha Bell, then director of marketing at Broderbund, now a realtor in Novato www.linkedin.com/in/marsha-be...
I don't think I ever knew what it was from actual experience, only from references
The Garmin eTrex 22 lasts maybe 20 hours on a pair of AA batteries, but you have to explicitly turn it on and off instead of waking on movement
Me neither
Page from the book Radical Cartography. At the top is a global map of cloud cover in the Hammer-Aitoff projection, colored from dark blue (few clouds) to white (lots of clouds). The data is plotted without a coastline or boundaries. The text reads, in part: "It provides empirical insight into a range of climatic patterns, but it's also an invitation to replace the familiar dichotomy of land and water with a more fluid understanding (literally) of the contrasts and continuities that might shape a sense of place. Adding traditional base data-as NASA did in its public maps—strips the map of both its utility and its affect."
I have mixed feeling about this cloud map I helped create appearing in William Rankin’s book *Radical Cartography*. On the one hand, it’s an honor. On the other hand it’s disappointing that the work we did as a small team (I think we had 5 people at the time?) gets subsumed into NASA as a whole.
I've been carrying a GPS logger around with me for 19 years, but it's probably time to stop because I went 11 months without downloading the logs
1/ They did it again. More ADS-B spoofing drawing images in ADS-B Exchange. x.com/TheIntelFrog...
I think linking to the archived page is totally normal
Me too
It looks like the box in the second photo contains the dispenser
"what if our universe is a computer simulation" vs "what if our universe is the output of a generative AI model" ohhhhh now more of it makes sense
A new-to-me form factor for toilet paper
One of the classic views of The Wave, an erosional feature carved into the Navajo Sandstone, largely into one foreset of cross bedding that shows seasonal cycles
A less common view of The Wave. It is easy to spend hours in a relatively small area
Right above The Wave, there is a homogeneous sandstone unit that shows beautiful polygonal weathering
The Wave is part of a strictly protected area called Coyote Buttes North that has a ton of incredible Navajo Sandstone features. Cyclic bedding like the one shown here is common; the darker layers are grain flows and represent the time of the year when the dominant wind was blowing.
One of the best things that happened to me in 2025 was that we got a permit to visit The Wave in Arizona. Here are some photos from last Friday; needless to say, photos do not do justice to this place
The fifth post: digging into the wild world of typesetter keyboards. newsletter.shifthappens.site/archive/new-...
Today’s post is about one of my favourite computers.
newsletter.shifthappens.site/archive/new-...
New on the blog! A long-overdue look at the new Chicago 'L' diagram.
Happy US 12-18 day
