David Megginson

Former medieval philologist (Ph.D, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, 1993). Living on unceded Anishinabe Algonquin territory.

Header picture: Large reddish-orange letters spelling "Hintonburg", some lying flat on the sidewalk for use as benches.

Me: #tea #gardening #classicalGuitar #vegetarian #language #disabled #aviation #flightSim #slideRules #tech #Linux #Ottawa

Society: #socialJustice #nonViolence #aid #urbanism #accessibility #transit #standards #FOSS

Public Key

npub1fdcr5780akdmzh82k8lvgs746pd3ssu7j6phk7kq66eau8clcees7qvx56

NIP-05 Address

david_megginson@mstdn-ca.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsykup60rh7mxa3tn4trlkyg02aqkccgw0fdqmm0tqddv77ru0uvucpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds37gvhj

Publishing to

relay.primal.net

nos.lol

relay.damus.io

Author Public Key

npub1fdcr5780akdmzh82k8lvgs746pd3ssu7j6phk7kq66eau8clcees7qvx56

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Last Notes

2026-05-15 22:00:16 UTC

The latest high-performance tech often isn't the right tech.
Fast, heavily-armed Royal Navy Sea Hurricane and Seafire fighters launched from an escort carrier in WW2 could patrol ahead of a North Atlantic convoy for an hour, max.
The Fairey Swordfish, a 90 mph open-cockpit biplane covered in fabric, could patrol for 3 hours without refueling, and was slow enough to stay over a U-boat and force it to dive deep while the convoy steamed safely past with badly-needed food (and other cargoes) for the UK.
p.s. Canada may be about to make the same mistake by investing billions in flashy American F-35 fighter jets, which also have short endurance and are all but useless for patrolling the Arctic.
#technology #WW2 #history #aviation
https://cdn.mstdn.ca/media_attachments/files/116/580/784/536/373/577/original/e2ee9d86694cf09c.png

2026-05-07 13:45:01 UTC

twenty per cent of everybody Zoë had ever heard say 'espresso' said 'expresso' instead, and here it was, up on this blackboard: 'expresso coffee.' But now she discovered that maybe she'd been wrong all this time, because whatever they gave her, it wasn't espresso.
— from Mick Herron, The Last Voice You Hear (2004)
#reading #language #coffee

2026-04-21 21:03:49 UTC

I love playing #classicalGuitar
I love #gardening
I love #tea
I love #publicTransit
I love #emacs
I wonder if just these 5 interests in combination are enough to identify me uniquely in the fediverse. 🤷

2026-04-15 11:03:34 UTC

The U.S. rulers carried out 47 human sacrifices last year in the hope they'd be blessed with public safety.
Whenever the sacrifices seem not to be working, the rulers frantically increase the number.
They keep nearly 2m humans in crowded holding pens — sometimes for decades — and choose the sacrificial victims from among them.
(If someone wrote about the west the same way the west wrote about colonised people.)
#colonialism #capitalPunishment #USpolitics

2026-04-15 10:49:41 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj That's my worst graph of 2026 so far. I wonder if anyone can top it.

2026-04-03 22:49:46 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj Plus, their toilets don't work and their laundry rooms catch on fire. 🤷

2026-03-28 18:03:35 UTC

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@nprofile…wwlr Yes, I grew up on a quiet residential crescent, and it was no problem for me as a non-disabled child and teenager.
It's a very different experience in a wheelchair or walker, when you know it will take you 10 seconds or more to vacate the road and make room for a car, and sometimes can't move easily to the side without risk of falling or getting stuck.
All it takes is one inattentive driver: you really have no opportunity to save yourself.

2026-03-27 11:56:04 UTC

"This a quiet residential neighbourhood, we don't need sidewalks," said every non-disabled, non-elderly, non stroller-pushing, car-owning resident. 😕
(Ottawa's Manor Park neighbourhood at the moment, but it happens all over. And shame on Counsellor King for pandering to them )
#Ottawa #ableism #accessibility

2026-03-21 00:22:24 UTC

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@nprofile…52nc linked to an article saying
It will have been more than three weeks since the US and Israel first attacked Iran when the first British warship finally arrives off the coast of Cyprus, a belated defensive deployment that has highlighted the lack of military capacity available to the UK.
And meanwhile, the most advanced aircraft carrier in the U.S. Navy was limping back to Crete, defeated by a laundry fire and clogged toilets.
The huge gap between hawkish politicians' chest-thumping rhetoric and the drab, depressing reality on military deployment isn't limited to just the UK.
#nonviolence #military

2026-03-08 11:47:17 UTC

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@nprofile…59kg Part of the problem is that we set the expectation that the fedi would work just like a monolithic social media site. If we reduced that expectation just a little, the demands would go down a lot.
Users already accept (or fail to notice) that Mastodon's search and hashtag features aren't really global across the fedi.

2026-03-08 11:34:12 UTC

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@nprofile…59kg Yes, lots of details to work out for our use cases, but the pull model is what makes RSS so crazy powerful and scalable. Push models are resource hogs that approach exponential growth in a large network like the fediverse — the medium-sized site that hosts my account is constantly struggling to stay one step ahead of the fedi's surging resource demands.

2025-11-02 17:24:26 UTC

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@nprofile…s67t I spent many years looking for one for OurAirports, with no success. I can get METARs, TAFs, and NOTAMs, but not arrivals/departures.

2025-04-08 10:50:41 UTC

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@nprofile…s9xg And that's good news that the #deextinction advocates are full of 💩, because if they weren't , it would be catastrophic.
Imagine the ecological harm of introducing the woolly mammoths into the fragile Arctic ecosystem (for example). Species would be invasive over time as well as space.

2025-04-01 01:39:16 UTC

The tradition I learned, growing up in Canada, is that all April Fool's jokes have to happen before noon on 1 April — if you try one in the afternoon, you're the fool (I was surprised the first time I learned that rule doesn't apply in other countries).
Also, 1 April is the start of a new government budget year, so the joke's on us anyway. 🙂 🇨🇦
#aprilFoolsDay #Canada

2025-03-17 20:31:23 UTC

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@nprofile…0g46 It looked great until
so you can spin it up on your own server using an S3-compatible storage service
(Out of the Google Docs frying pan and into the Amazon Web Services fire. 😔 )

2025-03-12 12:50:07 UTC

It's wild reading 1930s novels and seeing how reliable rail travel once was in the UK.
"The ship leaves Liverpool for Spain at 7:00 pm."
"There's a train that gets in at 6:25."
"That will allow more than enough time for the five of us to arrive at the station with all our steamer trunks, arrange taxis, and get onboard."
😳
#rail #trains #novels #1930s

2025-02-12 16:49:30 UTC

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@nprofile…fle4 As someone who started studying Noam Chomsky's Generative Grammar in the 1980s, I find the technology fascinating.
However, I find the way it's being trained, rolled out and monetized abhorrent, so I think in the end we agree.
It's like a dangerous virus that shouldn't have left the lab.

2025-02-07 17:41:14 UTC

The way to counter toxic nationalism abroad isn't by ramping up our own here in Canada. Instead, let's focus on patience, kindness, and supporting and protecting people in need, no matter where they live.
Despite the different flags and passports, we're all just humans riding a little blue dot around the sun. 🌎
#kindness #Canada

2025-01-24 11:35:32 UTC

You're not helpless. Change comes from millions of small local actions, including yours.
For example, you can influence moving your community discussions off Facebook, whether they're neighbourhood "Buy Nothing" groups, announcements for your kid's sports teams, or monthly open-mic music nights.
When people want to participate in something they care about, they shouldn't be forced to use a toxic website as a condition of entry.
#community #activism #Meta #hope

2024-11-12 22:29:08 UTC

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@npub1dts…6798 I don't know -- it would be nice to travel somewhere warm like Helsinki when it gets cold here in Ottawa.

2024-07-02 02:20:57 UTC

This year's new, accessible garden is really delivering the produce. The extra-wide aisles (3 ft/0.9 m, enough for a wheelchair or walker) help with air and light as well, and because every part is reachable from a kneeling bench, it's easy to plant, trim, and control weeds.
3,000 lb (1,360 kg) of new soil helped as well, of course.
#gardening #Ottawa #accessibility
https://cdn.mastdn.ca/media_attachments/files/112/714/487/842/716/098/original/93511841eefcef7f.jpeg

2024-03-26 11:52:59 UTC

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@npub16kg…hh7t I'd be fine with paying a lot more for #chocolate if the extra money was going to the workers and growers.

2023-08-27 22:13:15 UTC

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@npub1ddp…2tax @npub1xl5…rqkr @npub1zdp…vqv8 Science and technology are human constructs, just like religion, so of course people use them all to get what they want.

2023-08-27 20:25:51 UTC

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@npub1ddp…2tax @npub1zdp…vqv8 I am alive today because science taught doctors how to treat me. Millions of people are dying or severely malnourished today because science taught engineers how to harness fossil fuels.
The best conclusion would be that religion is less extreme in both the good and the harm it can cause: it's never eliminated a disease, but it's also never created a nuclear weapon.

2023-08-27 20:21:43 UTC

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@npub1ddp…2tax @npub1zdp…vqv8 Thank you for your reply.
What you wrote is true of a subset of religious sects, but not most (and even fundamentalist sects evolve over time; just not in a good way).
Why not take an inductive/scientific approach to religion and see what's out there, instead of deducing from pre-determined dogma? 😉
(If you are a direct victim of one of those fundamentalist sects, you have my sympathy and my apology for the light-heartedness.)

2023-08-27 19:44:59 UTC

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@npub1ddp…2tax @npub1zdp…vqv8 Religions are neutral in themselves, like politics and science — it's how people deploy them that causes all the good or evil (they all have the potential for both).

2023-08-27 12:09:52 UTC

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@npub1zdp…vqv8 "Cult" in the original/historical sense of a group of people worshipping someone (e.g. the Cult of Dionysus) but not, as you say, in the modern sense that includes collective living, psychological manipulation and physical coercion (e.g. the Branch Davidian cult at Waco).

2023-08-20 12:07:01 UTC

Did you know that there's also a men's World Cup of soccer? We need a separate event because male players get injured so easily.
Fortunately, they usually get up and recover quickly when the ref doesn't award a penalty kick.
#WorldCup #Soccer #Football

2023-08-08 14:42:41 UTC

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@npub1gl8…q5y9 That's too much Canadian in one picture. You just need to make the beer Alexander Keith's for the Internet to shut down. 🇨🇦

2023-08-06 20:06:46 UTC

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@npub1h2n…nx0j Just so. There is significantly higher income inequality in the U.S., and if you're part of the 10% (or so), you'll earn a lot — with all the caveats we've discussed earlier.

2023-08-06 15:29:09 UTC

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@npub1h2n…nx0j Also consider that you have to pay US$50-75K/year to send your kids to a top university in the States, vs maybe US$3-6K/year for UofT or McGill here in Canada (up to US$15K/year for a professional program at UofT).
And you might have to have paid >$10K/year for private school to get them into those US universities, if your school district wasn't well funded.
And after they graduate, they'll lose their health insurance coverage.
Lots of hidden costs to chip away at an IT pay diff. 🙁

2023-08-06 15:22:34 UTC

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@npub1h2n…nx0j And I think you might be giving journalists too much credit for statistical literacy; some of them are talking about specific fields, but many/most of them just look at the mean.

2023-08-06 15:21:50 UTC

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@npub1h2n…nx0j That's very true, but it doesn't apply to most of the population, only to a privileged few (to which I belong, FWIW; I could have earned much more in the U.S., but I didn't want to raise kids there).

2023-08-06 15:13:16 UTC

False: Americans earn more than Canadians.
Mean (average) income in the U.S. was $73,370 in 2021, compared to $52,960 in Canada (73% as much).
However, median income in the U.S. (PPP) was USD $19,306 in 2021, compared to $18,652 in Canada (97% as much).
Mean income in the U.S. is likely distorted by a few uber-rich people; for pretty-much everyone, incomes are essentially identical between the two countries.
https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-income-by-country
#income #stats #Canada #USA

2023-08-05 22:28:23 UTC

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@npub1trd…ussx APfest or (better) FediFest.

2023-08-03 20:04:01 UTC

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@npub1zdp…vqv8 I haven't been to NYC since before the pandemic. Did things get bad at drug stores during it?

2023-07-17 18:27:47 UTC

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@npub1vyt…mgjn I'm glad for you, because that's what you wanted or needed. Many others need to gain weight (for medical or other reasons), so I personally try to talk about weight change, in either direction (I've had to do both in the past couple of years, in different phases of my medical journey).