Stuart @slowe@mastodon.me.uk

#Introduction 👋 I was a radio astronomer - I looked at distant galaxies with ground-based radio telescopes 📡 and echoes of the Big Bang from space 🛰. I co-authored a book of space-related infographics. I’ve cycled across the US and Europe. These days I mostly work with open data in the UK. I like to make things.

@mike_peel Were you aware of this at the time? https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/jodrell-bank-scientist-wins-unfair-679948 I wasn't.

They couldn't back down or stop and acknowledge me as an actual human - just constant homophobic accusations and insinuation. And although they claimed to be concerned about homophobia (!) they repeatedly accused me of being homophobic because I wouldn't engage them in their anti-trans obsession. Hours of it. Uggh.

Over on the other place I've had 7 hours of someone telling me what I think, ignoring what I actually said tens of times, tell me I'm in favour of rape, tell me I'm homophobic, and tell me I'm "targeting kids". It was all because I'd said that people were not really allies if their "tolerance" of gay people was entirely dependent on them not seeing "too many rainbow flags everywhere".

I don't want to spend what remains of my life attempting (and mostly failing) to learn frameworks/environments/languages/whatever that have a high chance of being obsolete/unsupported in a few years. I want to be actually making stuff, not constantly re-learning how to make stuff.

I don't even know if I'm using the correct language to describe things - that's also part of the problem.

Things designed for Enterprise software people to "makes things easier" almost always make things really hard for me so that I can't contribute. I think that may be the point.

It is 6m long and £7.99.

I appreciate that someone has actually coded the infinity symbol but this isn’t infinite GBP per metre.

Letting older people who are racist/homophobic off with the phrase "they are of their time" suggests that it was just inevitable for them to be like that and they couldn't learn. It erases all the wonderful older people who aren't racist/homophobic or who have unlearned it.

"Of their time" often gets used to excuse people who discriminated against or persecuted other humans in the past. People in the past knew these things were bad at the time though. The phrase sometimes gets used to excuse current racism in people over, say, 80. It shouldn't. Thankfully we don't excuse 40-60 year olds who still use the p word and we don't excuse 20-40 year olds who still use 'gay' as a pejorative.

@fantasticlife Not sure if you know who looks after data.parliament.uk but I noticed that it says "eqaul" in the query string option descriptions at https://explore.data.parliament.uk/?learnmore=Members and https://explore.data.parliament.uk/?learnmore=Constituencies Should it be "equal"?

Narrator: "The new PM was quite glad of the financial crisis. Getting people in debt or struggling was useful to them."
https://twitter.com/MartinSLewis/status/1549305060320067585

In the future people might look back and realise that PPE at Oxford was one of the biggest contributors to the decline of the UK. Along with the private school system stuck in a mode of producing people to run a long-gone Empire.

The vast majority of the country get no say in the next Prime Minister. It'll be someone awful and/or rubbish because there's so little for those who do get that say to choose from. We are a country that mass produces poor quality politics. Too many of them are basically identical having done PPE at (probably) Oxford.

:) https://twitter.com/TheFigen/status/1548738215993135107