Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦
@danielloxton.bsky.social
4.7K followers 680 following 5.4K posts
Author, illustrator, and researcher of misinformation and fringe claims. Former Editor (2002–2021) of Junior Skeptic, and author of Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be and other science books for kids and adults. https://www.danielloxton.com
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A very incomplete list drawn from accounts I follow:
go.bsky.app/DyXUn9n
Reposted by Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦
"Trust science" doesn't mean blind faith. It means we look to the community of scientists to determine who is a scientific expert. We don't just pick them a la carte off of podcasts.
If you’re likely to rotate your image or elements within it repeatedly, see if your image editing software has an option like Photoshop’s “make smart object.” This makes a layer “remember” the initial unedited state of all pixels, so that multiple changes are all applied together once, at the end
If you must rotate things in your image editing software, remember that this lossy process is cumulative. If you rotate an image x degrees, and then later adjust that rotation by y degrees, you smoosh pixels across your entire picture twice (and so on)
If your image is *almost* square and just needs a rotation nudge of a few degrees, consider cropping it to square rather than rotating. This will throw away some pixels on the outside edges, but you won’t lose any sharpness across the remaining image
The exceptions: rotating by any multiple of 90 degrees (or flipping an image vertically or horizontally) is “free” in terms of image quality loss. All the pixels stay exactly the same if you turn a picture upside down, say—they just get relocated without individually changing
Random image scanning tip: arrange your image as precisely square to the edges of your scanning bed (or the image borders if you’re rephotographing) as possible. This matters because pixels themselves are square. If you rotate a scanned image, all the pixels get mushed and averaged with neighbors
And the single season cancellation doesn’t even hint whether it was good or not. The Peripheral was fantastic and also promptly cancelled
It feels like an indicator of our fractured media environment that they can make, release, and cancel a lush-looking Brave New World TV series and I (a pretty dedicated sci fi nerd) hear about it for the first time 5 years later
Reposted by Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦
My elderly relatives keep sending me the anti-vaccine disinformation they’re fed by Facebook, and that doesn’t seem great to me
I’ve always thought of them as “snuffleupagus trees” if that helps
Like, Aliens is a genre masterpiece, but my recollection of the “making of” story is Cameron angered his entire crew to the point of mutiny, and Sigourney Weaver had to intervene and persuade them to finish the film? That sounds to me like a guy who’s good at movies *and also* getting in his own way
Tedious, everyday Bad Bosses are nowhere near to being Steve Jobs or James Cameron, and I’m not convinced Bad Boss antics improve anything, on net, even for people like Jobs or Cameron
Kinda nice to see decent folks reclaiming frogs, frogs are great
Reposted by Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦
Most people are not anti-vaccine and hesitancy is a wide spectrum ranging from not wanting to be inconvenienced to needing to know more, having questions & getting the timing right. I find that I have the most success when I try to meet people where they are without judgement.
Better luck next time
Reposted by Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦
Brandolini’s Law (also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle):

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

H/t @unbiasedscipod.bsky.social
I could use a little help bridging the next few days — just enough to free up mental space for illustration www.paypal.com/paypalme/dan...
why call it spikevax when stabjab was right there
I’m not sure I’m up to learning more about anything happening in the world today