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Items tagged with: xkcd
As the UK shut down it's final Coal burning power station yesterday, I see that XKCD celebrated it with a calculation.
So we burned about 3 inches in depth of the UK's surface between 1853 and 2024 😲
#xkcd #coal #environment
![[A friend is standing behind Cueball, who is typing at a computer.]
Friend: You should be more careful what you write. Future employers might read it.
[The friend still stands while Cueball looks at his computer.]
Cueball: When did we forget our dreams?
Friend: What?
[Cueball stands beside his friend.]
Cueball: The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I'm sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live trapped in loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out before us. We see the same things every day, we respond the same way, we think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation on the last, every moment smoothly following the gentle curves of societal norms. We act like if we just get through today, tomorrow our dreams will come back to us.
Cueball: And no, I don't have all the answers. I don't know how to jolt myself into seeing what each moment could become. But I do know one thing: the solution doesn't involve watering down my every little idea and creative impulse for the sake of some day easing my fit into a mold. It doesn't involve tempering my life to better fit someone's expectations. It doesn't involve constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up.
Cueball: This is very important, so I want to say it as clearly as I can:
[The next three panels are Cueball standing.]
Cueball: FUCK.
Cueball: THAT.
Cueball: SHIT](https://fedi.ml/photo/preview/640/583664 "[A friend is standing behind Cueball, who is typing at a computer.]
Friend: You should be more careful what you write. Future employers might read it.
[The friend still stands while Cueball looks at his computer.]
Cueball: When did we forget our dreams?
Friend: What?
[Cueball stands beside his friend.]
Cueball: The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I'm sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live trapped in loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out before us. We see the same things every day, we respond the same way, we think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation on the last, every moment smoothly following the gentle curves of societal norms. We act like if we just get through today, tomorrow our dreams will come back to us.
Cueball: And no, I don't have all the answers. I don't know how to jolt myself into seeing what each moment could become. But I do know one thing: the solution doesn't involve watering down my every little idea and creative impulse for the sake of some day easing my fit into a mold. It doesn't involve tempering my life to better fit someone's expectations. It doesn't involve constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up.
Cueball: This is very important, so I want to say it as clearly as I can:
[The next three panels are Cueball standing.]
Cueball: FUCK.
Cueball: THAT.
Cueball: SHIT")
Seems like this technique could be easily bruteforced by a dictionary attack, despite being a longer number of characters.
Personally (I'm no expert) I use a password manager. Most of my passwords are 128 characters (longer than four average words) that also use special characters, numbers, upper and lower case characters. Using a physical key such as a #Yubikey seems a better way, too.
I love #XKCD, but the advice in this strip seems kinda out of date.
Tossing a #STEM #accessibility grumble out into the wild:
So apparently, even as #MathML support is improving at the browser level, in order to get #NVDA to _read_ math, you need to install #MathPlayer -- which is fine in and of itself, but it really bothers me that the MathPlayer webpage (info.wiris.com/mathplayer-info) says both "Accessibility for web environments using MathPlayer is limited to obsolete browsers such as Internet Explorer 8" and (in bold) "We are not actively developing MathPlayer."
It seems really odd for such a necessary tool to have such prominent warnings (but then, of course, there's an #XKCD for everything: xkcd.com/2347/). And nearly every instructional page I found while looking for information on MathPlayer references using it in Internet Explorer, which is now officially dead (and is actually being remotely disabled on people's machines, which seems rather draconian).
On the bright side, once MathPlayer is installed, NVDA seems to be able to read (properly MathML coded) math just fine, even in Chrome, which the MathJax documentation says doesn't work; probably due to recent MathML support improvements in Chrome.
Accessibility in general I'm really enjoying learning more about. STEM accessibility is giving me headaches.
