Alice Rizzardo

A very young lamb peeking out from behind a tree stump

Spring is here

A greylag goose at Martin Mere

Does this count for #Flyday

The boys’ club: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM In one email, an AI researcher suggested it’s “hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you.”

The trove of files released by the Department of Justice, illuminates Epstein’s deep interest and entrenchment in the scientific community.

But the files also underscore how he used his power and money in ways that kept women out of places where they might succeed. https://bit.ly/4qWgPLz

An infographic from Our World in Data titled "Global land use for food production" uses a series of stacked horizontal bar charts to visualize the distribution of Earth's surface and the disproportionate land requirements of livestock. The first bar shows Earth's surface is 71% ocean and 29% land (141 million km²); the land surface is then broken down into 76% habitable land, 10% glaciers, and 14% barren land. Of the habitable land, 45% (48 million km²) is used for agriculture, while 38% is forests and 13% is shrubland. The agricultural land bar reveals a major disparity: 80% (38 million km²) is dedicated to livestock (meat, dairy, and textiles) including grazing land and cropland for feed, while only 16% is used for crops for direct human consumption and 4% for non-food crops. Finally, two smaller bars at the bottom contrast this land use with nutritional output, showing that while livestock uses 80% of agricultural land, it only provides 17% of global calories and 38% of global protein, whereas plant-based foods provide 83% of calories and 62% of protein.

80% of agricultural land is used for livestock (and textiles), yet this huge land use provides only 17% of our calories and 38% of our protein.

16% of the land used for crops provides 83% of our calories and 62% of our protein. It's past time we rethink what we eat.

20. Get two likes. One of them is from my husband.
#worthit

19. As soon as everything is finally posted, notice an inaccuracy

18. Leave the whole thing to simmer for a few weeks, can't hurt

17. What I really need right now is another round of fact checking.

16. Can't stand to look at this any longer and everything stopped being funny or interesting. But I should still post it, right? Right??

15. Oh, I think I'm following Italian rules on comma placement. Better research this extensively instead of making dinner

14. This is a good time to realize that I'm completely out of my depth and should have left this topic to an expert. Do some panicked fact checking

13. Will everyone skimming this notice that I am basically illiterate, or just a few people?

12. Start questioning basic English sentence structure. Open a couple of translation apps to check the meaning of words that have been in my active vocabulary for decades, in case I've always been using them wrong.

11. It turns out half of the skeets in my draft are over 300 characters. I could easily split them in two, but that would be a moral failure. I must cram as much info as possible in each skeet, without sacrificing style, clarity, or humor.

10. Almost done! Just some light editing left

9. Marvel at how witty I am

8. Second draft instead of working, because this is urgent

7. Can't sleep, start editing the thread in my head. I will have forgotten most of this by morning.

6. Write a first draft of a thread. Oh but wait: it is garbage

5. Deep, deep dive.

4. Decide to fully commit. Shamelessly get in touch with someone I haven't talked to in years to ask them everything the Internet doesn't know

3. Time to do some research! But the Internet is surprisingly coy about this one thing I'm interested in. Is it perhaps because nobody cares? No, that can't possibly be the case

2. I should totally post about it on bluesky

1. Stumble across something interesting. Get excited! Decide this is possibly the most interesting topic ever in the history of topics

How to write a long thread on bluesky: the 20-step process I follow every time 🧵

Lest I come across as way more cultured than I am, I must assign credit for this thread. My husband is reading Gilgamesh, he tells me the good bits. The literary references are from a friend, who also provided some philosophy support. Any overinterpretation is, of course, entirely mine.
15/15

And this is my wish for all of you reading this thread: may you achieve a glimmer of divinity through scholarship, willpower, and wild optimism.
14/n

As Plato himself suggests, even if full divinity may be overambitious, perhaps a fractional amount is within reach…
13/n

On the other hand, if a man has seriously devoted himself to the love of learning and to true wisdom, if he has exercised these aspects of himself above all, then there is absolutely no way that his thoughts can fail to be immortal and divine, should truth come within his grasp. And to the extent that human nature can partake of immortality, he can in no way fail to achieve this.

Now comes my favorite option, again courtesy of the Greeks. Here is an excerpt from Plato’s Timaeus, explaining how humans can acquire divinity by devoting themselves to a life of learning and wisdom.
12/n

Perhaps Gilgamesh’s dad did only a partial initiation and became part god? My sources aren’t aware of any example of a fractional result.
11/n