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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Repeating what some have already said here:

    • PBS SpaceTime is outstanding, and manages to ride the line between informative and accessible very well. Some episodes especially around heavy math/quantum mechanics are impenetrable for me but all the space stuff is great, the scripts are very well written, production value is top notch.
    • Dr Becky provides amazing content mostly geared around recent research and theories - especially with the James Webb Space Telescope being a year old now there’s some amazing insights coming out that she does a great job explaining. A bit less “pseudo lecture” than SpaceTime but still highly informative
    • StarTalk (Neil Degrasse Tyson) is great, but in a different way. It’s less formal and very much more like a podcast than a lecture or report as the prior two are.
    • Sabine Hossenfelder delivers a periodic “science without the gobbledegook” show that covers all areas but generally has a focus on physics and astrophysics. She’s semi-famous for not tolerating nonsense while also considering a sizeable portion of contemporary physics research to be nonsense. I think she’s hilarious in a parchment-dry German kind of way, and her content goes arguably deeper than the other channels listed here in terms of subject matter - I usually leave her videos thinking about things in a different way.
    • SmarterEveryDay is a general science/learning channel but really piqued my interest with a recent video about talking to NASA:

    https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?si=NrURYGlLii4Dbi1_

    The host has a background in aerospace engineering and missile test flights - so its about as close to rocket science as you can get! He knows his stuff and has a lot more practical, engineering related videos - kind of makes you think about how to operationalise the more cerebral ideas of the other channels.

    Hope you enjoy some or all of the suggestions here and from other commenters








  • The context is important here - Australia had a continuous indigenous population for over 60,000 years before white settlement. White Australia never had an agreement with indigenous peoples at large, and through relentless expansion of colonies, spreading diseases like smallpox, introducing alcohol and drugs, forcibly abducting and schooling children, heavy incarceration and a slew of other typical British colonial shit ended up leaving them disenfranchised, alienated, and excluded. Indigenous Australians prior to colonisation had a deep affinity with the land and tended it like custodians, but because they didn’t build towns or farm like Europeans, they were just swept aside without ever really being acknowledged or addressed.

    The Voice was asked for as a product of the Uluru Statement of the Heart - not long, worth a read- https://ulurustatement.org/the-statement/view-the-statement/

    It was really first and foremost about having an acknowledgement that maybe, just maybe, the settlers cocked things up and that it’d better to fix things together. It’s not asking for anything “more” or extra, it’s about correctly telling history and reframing our national dialogue to be coming from a place of partnership, instead of colonialism, so we could fix some of the very real issues modern Australians face as a result of hundreds of years of callous racism. It was a chance for white Australia and government to really listen and maybe find better ways of doing things.

    But now instead we get to try to explain to our kids why 60% of the country don’t think representation or inclusion matters while indigenous Australians will continue to struggle without a government that can listen to them.