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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • This may be the first time since the 80s where the OS you’re first exposed to will be anything other than Windows or Mac.

    We’re already well past that point, honestly. Kids graduating high school this year grew up on iPadOS and ChromeOS. Last year I taught someone who is going to college this fall how a directory structure works.

    As for me, our household is a Windows-free environment (except for a VM on my personal laptop that I use for DRM’d ebooks). We’re Mac-free except for my work computer. My kids are learning Linux as their first real desktop OS (previously they had only used school Chromebooks), and it’s been pretty smooth sailing.




  • ilinamorato@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyz*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    Ruby Bridges–the little girl featured in maybe the most famous photo of desegregation, being walked home from school by US marshals, the photo that inspired Norman Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With”–she’s still alive. And not super old, either; she’ll turn 72 this September.

    That’s the fact that blows me away about segregation.

    “The past is never dead; it isn’t even past.”

    Ruby Bridges in 1960



  • You’re right, this graph isn’t specifically about cities; it’s just that cities are currently the biggest transit problems in the US.

    I would like to see a graph that just shows major metropolitan areas.

    The org that did this research also has a visualizer tool where you can compare different cities around the world, and you can see that even new York City has something like 65% of its population using personal cars. And it’s by far the most multimodal city in North America; Ithaca gets close, because they have a robust cycling culture, and there are more Canadian cities in the hunt than US cities, but it’s still unbelievably skewed in favor of personal cars. Which means that, even if you excluded all rural areas from this graph, North America would still be dramatically anomalous.

    you can’t include households that are many miles from any store at all and use that to skew the numbers.

    I think that the reason that the graph doesn’t exclude rural areas from its data is that the density of North America isn’t dramatically different from the density of Europe or Asia. Yes, the US is slightly less dense than the world average, but not excessively so; and there are plenty of countries in those other continents with lower density than the US or Canada. In fact, Canada is quite a bit less dense than the US, but it’s pulling North America’s multimodality up. So no, you can’t use it to skew the numbers–but I mean that in the sense that you’re unable to do it, it’s impossible, because it’s affecting the numbers worldwide in more or less the same way.

    Also, why exclude Mexico and then call it North america. Why not call it Canada and the US? Why not label Canada and the US separately?

    Better readability, is my guess. The only divisions in this infographic that really matter are the political ones, because those are the divisions that affect the data in a meaningful way. So cutting out Mexico is no more arbitrary than cutting out Canada would’ve been.

    These numbers are pushing an agenda.

    All numbers are pushing an agenda.

    Ok, not all numbers, but there’s no real reason to gather demographic research data otherwise. We do censuses and polls and studies to figure out what to do as a society. That’s why we do that. The numbers are telling a story, and it’s not a false story: multimodality in the United States and Canada is dramatically lower than in other countries around the world. Cities in North America don’t serve their citizens as well because their citizens don’t have as many options for how they get around.

    Sure, they could use this data to highlight how multimodal transportation in Eastern Europe is, but that’s just another way of pointing out how one-sided it is in North America. Or you could use it to show how dominant public transit is in East Asia, or biking in South Asia, but again, they would just be another way of showing how anemic it is in the US.

    And when you’re an organization called “Environment International,” that’s the story you’re trying to tell. They’re just slicing it up in a way that makes the story clearest.

    I’m not saying the agenda is wrong but this graph seems a bit dishonest.

    It’s not dishonest. It’s being pretty up-front about showing a huge disparity, and it’s not trying to hide the fact that they’re cutting out Mexico to show that there’s a serious problem in the US and Canada. It’s like if you took a photo of a purse-snatching in progress, and you cropped in to show the crime occurring. No one would accuse you of lying because you cropped out the kid getting a treat from the ice cream truck on the right-hand side of the frame; you just made it more clear what you were trying to show with that photograph.












  • ilinamorato@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyz*Permanently Deleted*
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    6 months ago

    The United States is very big. If you’re from a smaller country (particularly if it’s smaller east-to-west), it can be a little bit hard to comprehend how different the weather can be from one part of the country to another. While the weather does typically travel from West to East, it can change significantly along the way, and it usually takes several days to get from one coast to the other.

    The highlighted area on the map is a massive region, wider than France and Germany put together (though much less populated). In fact, it’s quite rare for even this much of the country to have the same weather pattern. The simplest answer to why trees to the east and west are safe is that it’s not as cold there.

    There are some other factors, too: just past the Western edge of the highlighted region are the Rocky Mountains, which significantly change weather patterns. The highlighted region consists of remarkably flat land (leveled by glacial action), meaning that there’s not much to break the wind as it sucks away the heat from the trees. To the East if this highlighted region are the Great Lakes, which also change weather patterns.

    But the biggest answer is, it’s just not as cold there. Cleveland, OH (at a similar latitude, but further to the East) is going to be almost 20°F warmer than this (which is still bone-chilling, but not tree-exploding), and Boise, ID (similar latitude but to the West) is going to be almost 40°F warmer (practically tropical! /s).