When I was a kid, I remember being really astounded by the fact that arithmetic is consistent. Like uh, 2 + 3 + 4 is 9. And 9 - 4 is 5, which is 2 + 3, and 9 - 2 is 7, which is 3 + 4! And 7 is also 6 + 1, and guess what, 9 is also 6 + 1 + 2, and even more amazingly, 6 is 4 + 2, and (remember 9 - 4 is 5) 2 + 2 + 1 is 5! No matter what you do it’s always consistent, you can’t trick it by adding and subtracting some convoluted sequence of numbers until it gives you an answer that’s inconsistent with the rest.
When I was first learning arithmetic I remember that I just found this
crazy, like, how does it
always work out? That shouldn’t be possible. And I figured that, naturally, when I got older, someone would eventually give me the answer to this incredibly pressing question. And, well, it turns out nobody has the answer, and they actually proved that it’s impossible for anyone to give a satisfying answer. So, that’s a bit disappointing.
The voice that comes from the lungs and the abdomen cannot express itself fully without the bones of the head, the lips, the teeth, the tongue, the palate. So we see that this body is an instrument of sound. When the tree swings in the wind, each leaf gives a sound. The breeze alone cannot produce the full sound. The leaves of the tree rustle and become the instrument for the air. This shows us that the whole framework of this world is the instrument of sound.
Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Mysticism of Sound and Music
Excerpt from this story from
Yale Environment 360:
Here in Burnt Corn Valley, smack in the middle of the Navajo reservation’s vast Black Mesa region, the hilly land both craves water and is brutalized by it. The sandy Arizona soil cracks under a punishing August sun as red-striped blister beetles search for moisture across its baked surface. Cottonwood trees and sagebrush rise from deep gullies carved by floodwaters that, during the intensifying summer monsoon, sluice off surrounding mesas and wash away fragile topsoil — reminders that with climate change, even quenching rains harbor powers of destruction.
This portrait of climatic havoc belies a softer reality, though. Farming once thrived in this parched region and could once again — if the right practices are adopted. Exhibit A: The crops on Roberto Nutlouis’s 12-acre Sliding Rock Farm, in his reservation hometown of Piñon, a five-hour drive north of Phoenix. “The corn is actually pretty big and thriving,” Nutlouis says. He believes — and both Western science and the lived experience of his Native elders affirm — that the traditional rock and stick structures he’s built on his property, which help store water and prevent erosion, have a lot to do with it. These structures, similar to those used by Native peoples long before Europeans arrived on the continent, are not only delivering water to crops (the broader, 27,000-square-mile reservation has the highest reported rate of food insecurity in the U.S.). They are also restoring Nutlouis’s watershed and those of his neighbors, helping to sequester carbon, and reviving this high-desert ecosystem. It’s all part of a bigger effort among a range of local and regional grassroots organizations to build back the reservation’s fragile, depleted ecosystems and bring greater sovereignty over food, water, and health to its communities.
Diné (the Navajo name for themselves) are well aware that climate change is making the weather on their semi-arid plateau weirder, wilder, and more destructive. Depending on elevation, precipitation in Black Mesa averages 6 to 16 inches a year; recent heat extremes — the Navajo government declared a state of emergency in 2023 due to soaring temperatures —mean that the scant water evaporates more quickly. Climate models predict the region will experience increasing droughts that decimate plant life, part of a growing trend of human-caused desertification across the globe, as well as higher-intensity seasonal rainfall, which can sweep away crops and roads. The ecological health of the reservation has also been weakened by deforestation from timbering operations and from overgrazing over the years.
Still, this season, Nutlouis, 44, has been able to skip his usual two-hour roundtrip drive to a reliable well to haul water home for his corn. His crop is healthy and hydrated because his land still holds last winter’s snowmelt. Clearly, his heavy labor over the past 20 years — during which he has built woven brush dams, gabions (wirework cages filled with rocks), earthen berms, concrete spillways and trenches, limestone aprons and walls, and stone-lined “Zuni bowls,” which stabilize eroding streambeds — is paying off.
Interesting exercise
This really got my attention, so I wanted to share it with anyone interested in history.
One of my friends told me about a powerful lesson in her daughter’s high school class recently. They’re learning about the Salem Witch Trials, and their teacher told them they were going to play a game.
“I’m going to come around and whisper to each of you whether you’re a witch or a regular person. Your goal is to build the largest group possible that does NOT have a witch in it. At the end, any group found to include a witch gets a failing grade.”
The teens dove into grilling each other. One fairly large group formed, but most of the students broke into small, exclusive groups, turning away anyone they thought gave off even a hint of guilt.
“Okay,” the teacher said. “You’ve got your groups. Time to find out which ones fail. All witches, please raise your hands.”
No one raised a hand.
The kids were confused and told the teacher he’d messed up the game. “Did I? Was anyone in Salem an actual witch? Or did everyone just believe what they’d been told?”
And that is how you teach kids how easy it is to divide a community.
Keep being welcoming, beautiful people. Shunning, scapegoating and dividing destroys far more than they protect. Do not allow the political elite to divide us. We must remain united against those who would do so.
But for all its practical importance as a connector of industrial centres and an arch logistician of human movement, the shinkansen continues to play a role as an ideological encapsulator of Japan’s sense of what it is and what it should ideally strive to be. There has never been a fatal accident. Average annual lateness across the JR Central network is 1.6 minutes. When the natural world forces the shinkansen to stop, you know conditions are genuinely bad.
Leo Lewis, Sixty years of the shinkansen, FT Weekend, 28 September/29 September 2024
“This smart camera is able to collect information about customers in a coffee shop as well as workers, converting their actions to readable data. Fooling a camera from recognizing the form of a human is easy enough, but what happens when they track actions instead?”
>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.
>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.
>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.
>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.
>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.
>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.
>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.
>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.
>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.
>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.
>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.
>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.
>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.
Epic Systems makes the dominant electronic health record (EHR) system in America; if you’re a doctor, chances are you are
required to use it, and for every hour a doctor spends with a patient, they have to spend
two hours doing clinically useless bureaucratic data-entry on an Epic EHR.
How could a product so manifestly unfit for purpose be the absolute market leader? Simple: as Robert Kuttner describes in an excellent feature in
The American Prospect, Epic may be a
clinical disaster, but it’s a profit-generating
miracle:
At the core of Epic’s value proposition is “upcoding,” a form of billing fraud that is beloved of hospital administrators, including the “nonprofit” hospitals that generate vast fortunes that are somehow not characterized as profits. Here’s a particularly egregious form of upcoding: back in 2020, the Poudre Valley Hospital in Ft Collins, CO locked all its doors except the ER entrance. Every patient entering the hospital, including those receiving absolutely routine care, was therefore processed as an “emergency.”
In April 2020, Caitlin Wells Salerno – a pregnant biologist – drove to Poudre Valley with normal labor pains. She walked herself up to obstetrics, declining the offer of a wheelchair, stopping only to snap a cheeky selfie. Nevertheless, the hospital recorded her normal, uncomplicated birth as a Level 5 emergency – comparable to a major heart-attack – and whacked her with a $2755 bill for emergency care:
Upcoding has its origins in the Reagan revolution, when the market-worshipping cultists he’d put in charge of health care created the “Prospective Payment System,” which paid a lump sum for care. The idea was to incentivize hospitals to provide efficient care, since they could keep the difference between whatever they spent getting you better and the set PPS amount that Medicare would reimburse them. Hospitals responded by inventing upcoding: a patient with controlled, long-term coronary disease who showed up with a broken leg would get coded for the coronary condition
and the cast, and the hospital would pocket both lump sums:
The reason hospital administrators love Epic, and pay gigantic sums for systemwide software licenses, is directly connected to the two hours that doctors spent filling in Epic forms for every hour they spend treating patients. Epic collects all that extra information in order to identify potential sources of plausible upcodes, which allows hospitals to bill patients, insurers, and Medicare through the nose for routine care. Epic can automatically recode “diabetes with no complications” from a Hierarchical Condition Category code 19 (worth $894.40) as “diabetes with kidney failure,” code 18 and 136, which gooses the reimbursement to $1273.60.
Epic snitches on doctors to their bosses, giving them a dashboard to track doctors’ compliance with upcoding suggestions. One of Kuttner’s doctor sources says her supervisor contacts her with questions like, “That appointment was a 2. Don’t you think it might be a 3?”
Robert Kuttner is the perfect journalist to unravel the Epic scam. As a journalist who wrote for
The New England Journal of Medicine, he’s got an insider’s knowledge of the health industry, and plenty of sources among health professionals. As he tells it, Epic is a cultlike, insular company that employs 12.500 people in its hometown of Verona, WI.
So what this paint company does is take iron pollution from abandoned mines that are polluting soils and rivers and makes iron based red pigment paints out of it.
Basically they realized hey no one’s cleaning this shit up, it’s polluting the streams, killing all the fish, making the water undrinkable and there’s a huge market for it so why not make money by cleaning it the fuck up?
They remove this stuff by the industrial bucket load from the rivers. The idea is if it’s in a painting, if it’s in your home, it’s not poisoning wildlife.
Excerpt from this story from
Yale Climate Connections:
Asheville, North Carolina,
seemed like a good place to escape the worst of a warming world. The city’s appealing four-season climate includes summers with a typical daily high around 84°F – unusually low for the Southeast U.S. – and winters that aren’t too frigid. There’s typically plenty of moisture throughout the year, but with a mountain rain shadow that keeps Asheville a bit less wet than most of its neighbors. And the city takes climate seriously: findings from a climate resilience assessment have already been incorporated into Asheville’s comprehensive planning document.
In a 2018 Rolling Stone article, Jeff Goodell profiled one climate refugee who had considered the Tampa area before settling on Asheville. “No place is without risk, but in Asheville, the risks seem manageable,” Jeff Kaplan told Goodell. A 2021 Blue Ridge Public Radio segment portrayed Asheville as a climate “winner.”
Then came Hurricane Helene. After striking the Florida Panhandle at Category 4 strength, the storm took a quirky left hook across the southern Appalachians, pushing mammoth amounts of moisture upslope. Making matters worse, a predecessor rain event ahead of Helene had dumped six to 12 inches of rain across the region a day before the storm itself arrived.
The result was one of the most devastating, prolonged, and deadly hurricane-related U.S. flood disasters since the cataclysm of Katrina in 2005. Across the southern Appalachians – including Asheville – Helene destroyed roads, knocked out power and water lines, crippled communications, and took dozens of lives.
Among the things that make Helene different is that it arrived at a time when hurricane behavior is being measurably amped up in multiple ways by human-caused climate change. And it hammered a place now widely viewed to be at least somewhat insulated from the worst impacts of that changing climate.
Many folks seeking out climate-change-protected places in the U.S. have leaned toward small, progressive cities in relatively cool parts of the Midwest and East. Spikes in heat, drought, and wildfire that have plagued the West seem more likely to be tempered in these apparent havens. And in many of them, climate adaptation efforts are already underway.
As it turns out, most of the country east of the Rockies is getting wetter. Especially over the central and southern Appalachians, some locations saw a 5 to 10% rise in official annual precipitation when their 1980-2011 climate averages were replaced by the 1991-2020 figures. In Asheville, a typical year’s precipitation jumped from 37.32 to 40.61 inches.
Along with Asheville, a couple of other often-cited climate-change oases in the U.S. Midwest and East have experienced landmark rains and floods in recent years.
Duluth, Minnesota, referred to in a 2023 New York Times writeup as “climate-proof Duluth” (and the subject of a study on how climate migration might change the city), experienced the worst flooding in its history on June 19-20, 2012, when the city was swamped by a record 7.24 inches of rain in 24 hours. Colossal rains were even more widespread across northeast Minnesota on June 18, 2024, when a number of stations reported 5-7.5 inches of rain – a daily total with an expected recurrence interval of 500 to 1,000 years, according to the National Weather Service.
Vermont has long stood out as a potential U.S. climate refuge, with its environmentally friendly reputation, ample greenery and mountains, and normally mild summers. But when former Hurricane Irene ripped across the state as a tropical storm in August 2011, it brought massive rainfall that triggered one of Vermont’s worst disasters on record, rivaling or exceeding the notorious floods of 1927 in some areas. Then in 2023, weeks of early-summer wildfire smoke filtering south from Canada were followed by the Great Vermont Flood of July 10-11. Triggered by up to 9.61 inches of rain, the floods caused more than $2.2 billion in damage across northern New England and triggered the region’s first-ever flash flood emergency.
A sexy, skinny defeat device for your HP ink cartridge
ALT
Animals keep evolving into crabs; it’s a process called “carcinisation” and it’s pretty weird. Crabs just turn out to be extremely evolutionarily fit for our current environment:
By the same token, all kinds of business keep evolving into something like a printer company. It turns out that in this enshittified, poorly regulated, rentier-friendly world, the parasitic, inkjet business model is
extremely adaptive. Printerinisation is everywhere.
All that stuff you hate about your car? Trapping you into using their mechanics, spying on you, planned obsolescence? All lifted from the inkjet printer business model:
That GE fridge that won’t make ice or dispense water unless you spend $50 for a proprietary charcoal filter instead of using a $10 generic? Pure printerism:
The software update to your Sonos speakers that makes them half as useful and takes away your right to play your stored music, forcing you to buy streaming music subscriptions? Straight out of the HP playbook:
But as printerinized as all these gadgets are, none can quite attain the level of high enshittification that the OG inkjet bastards attain on a daily basis. In the world championships of effortlessly authentic fuckery, no one can lay a glove on the sociopathic monsters of HP.
For example: when HP wanted to soften us all up for a new world of “subscription ink” (where you have to pre-pay every month for a certain number of pages’ worth of printing, which your printer enforces by spying on you and ratting you out to HP over the internet), they offered a “lifetime subscription” plan. With this “lifetime” plan, you paid just once and your HP printer would print out 15 pages a month for so long as you owned your printer, with HP shipping you new ink every time you ran low.
Well, eventually, HP got bored of not making you pay rent on your own fucking printer, so they just turned that plan off. Yeah, it was a lifetime plan, but the “lifetime” in question was the lifetime of HP’s patience for not fucking you over, and that patience has the longevity of a mayfly:
It would take many pages to list all of HP’s sins here. This is a company that ships printers with half-full ink cartridges and charges more than the printer cost to buy a replacement set. The company that won’t let you print a black-and-white page if you’re out of yellow ink. The company that won’t let you
scan or send a fax if you’re out of
any of your ink.
They make you “recalibrate” your printer or “clean your heads” by forcing you to print sheets of ink-dense paper. They also refuse to let you use your ink cartridges after they “expire.”
HP raised the price of ink to over
$10,000 per gallon, then went to war against third-party ink cartridge makers, cartridge remanufacturers, and cartridge refillers. They added “security chips” to their cartridges whose job was to watch the ink levels in your cartridge and, when they dip below a certain level (long before the cartridge is actually empty), declare the cartridge to be dry and permanently out of use.
Even if you refill that cartridge, it will still declare itself to be empty to your printer, which will therefore refuse to print.
Asteroid 2024 PT5 has been ‘catching up’ with us for years. It recently got close enough to begin interacting with Earth’s gravity, leading to a short Mini Moon phase from now until late November during which it will be bound to our planet.
One of the drawbacks of fitness trackers and other wearable devices is that their batteries eventually run out of juice. But what if in the future, wearable technology could use body heat to power itself?
UW researchers have developed a flexible, durable electronic prototype that can harvest energy from body heat and turn it into electricity that can be used to power small electronics, such as batteries, sensors or LEDs. This device is also resilient—it still functions even after being pierced several times and then stretched 2,000 times.
The team detailed these prototypes in a paper published Aug. 30 in
Advanced Materials.
“I had this vision a long time ago,” said senior author Mohammad Malakooti, UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “When you put this device on your skin, it uses your body heat to directly power an LED. As soon as you put the device on, the LED lights up. This wasn’t possible before.”
A new study by University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers demonstrates the effectiveness of homemade play putty at reading brain, heart, muscle and eye activity. Published in
Device, the research outlines the conductive properties of this material, so-named “squishy circuits.”
“[Squishy circuits] are literally child’s play putty, that is also conductive,” says Dmitry Kireev, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and senior author on the paper.
The conductive squishy circuits—whether homemade or store-bought—are made of flour, water, salt, cream of tartar and vegetable oil. “Salt is what makes it conductive,” Kireev explains.
As a child’s toy, this modeling clay is a malleable way to add lights to an art project by connecting them to a power source as a way to teach kids about circuits. Now, Kireev and his team have demonstrated that the material has more potential.
Engineers at RMIT University have designed an innovative tubular structural system that can be packed flat for easier transport and pop up into strong building materials.
This breakthrough is made possible by a self-locking system inspired by curved-crease origami – a technique that uses curved crease lines in paper folding.
Lead researchers, Dr Jeff (Ting-Uei) Lee and Distinguished Professor Mike (Yi Min) Xie, said bamboo, which has internal structures providing natural reinforcement, inspired the tube design.
“This self-locking system is the result of an intelligent geometric design,” said Lee from RMIT’s School of Engineering.
stumbled across this excellent review on the field of active matter! it’s not too technical, and contains references to hundreds of review papers on specific topics. highly recommend!
FRP are used to estimate functional connectivity.
The figure depicts the BOLD signal from FRP in various brain regions, where the FRP were constructed with m = 3, τ = 1, c = 3. It can be seen that the texture of FRP in each brain region is different from other brain regions. The top plane shows the results from children, and the bottom plane represents the results from adults.
[id: active style manual wheelchair with frame made of rectangle wood planks screwed together. end id]
as we know active type wheelchair very expensive, & repair need buy from specific medical manufacturer n take very long time. someone (who wheelchair user themself of near 40 years) made open source active manual wheelchair where most (if not all?) material from commercial easy get materials! wood, plastic, pvc pipe, & those commercial aluminum square pipe things. n they put guide made them yourself in link for anyone want try make
not great for people w advanced seating positioning needs probably (think if only problem is easy butt pressure sore, maybe can still use this + supportive cushion but think beyond that it get hard). but if like you don’t need those things then maybe fun project?
have not use for self so can’t actually talk about experience but it look pretty cool
With NASA announcing their streaming service NASA+ and also announcing it’s going to be free and also ad free, I’d just like to appreciate the lengths they go to make scientific knowledge and exploration as available as they possibly can.
There’s more info at this link. Gosh I’m excited about this.
The first chapter of Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four has a
fantastic joke that nearly everyone misses: when Julia, Winston Smith’s love interest, is introduced, she has oily hands and a giant wrench, which she uses in her “mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines”:
That line just
kills me every time I re-read the book – Orwell, a novelist, writing a dystopian future in which novels are written by giant, clanking mechanisms. Later on, when Winston and Julia begin their illicit affair, we get more detail:
She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She ‘didn’t much care for reading,’ she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
I always assumed Orwell was subtweeting his publishers and editors here, and you can only imagine that the editor who asked Orwell to tweak the
1984 manuscript must have felt an uncomfortable parallel between their requests and the notional Planning Committee and Rewrite Squad at the Ministry of Truth.
I first read
1984 in the early winter of, well, 1984, when I was thirteen years old. I was on a family trip that included as visit to my relatives in Leningrad, and the novel made a significant impact on me. I immediately connected it to the canon of dystopian science fiction that I was already avidly consuming, and to the geopolitics of a world that seemed on the brink of nuclear devastation. I also connected it to my own hopes for the nascent field of personal computing, which I’d gotten an early start on, when my father – then a computer science student – started bringing home dumb terminals and acoustic couplers from his university in the mid-1970s. Orwell crystallized my nascent horror at the oppressive uses of technology (such as the automated Mutually Assured Destruction nuclear systems that haunted my nightmares) and my dreams of the better worlds we could have with computers.
It’s not an overstatement to say that the rest of my life has been about this tension. It’s no coincidence that I wrote a series of “Little Brother” novels whose protagonist calls himself w1n5t0n:
I didn’t stop with Orwell, of course. I wrote a whole series of widely read, award-winning stories with the same titles as famous sf tales, starting with “Anda’s Game” (“Ender’s Game”):
Writing stories about other stories that you hate or love or just can’t get out of your head is a very old and important literary tradition. As EL Doctorow (no relation) writes in his essay “Genesis,” the Hebrews stole their Genesis story from the Babylonians, rewriting it to their specifications:
As my “famous title” stories and
Little Brother books show, this work needn’t be confined to antiquity. Modern copyright may be draconian, but it contains exceptions (“fair use” in the US, “fair dealing” in many other places) that allow for this kind of creative reworking. One of the most important fair use cases concerns
The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall’s 2001 retelling of Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone With the Wind from the perspective of the enslaved characters, which was judged to be fair use after Mitchell’s heirs tried to censor the book:
In ruling for Randall, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals emphasized that she had “fully employed those conscripted elements from
Gone With the Wind to make war against it.” Randall used several of Mitchell’s most famous lines, “but vest[ed] them with a completely new significance”:
The Wind Done Gone is an excellent book, and both its text and its legal controversy kept springing to mind as I read Sandra Newman’s wonderful novel
Julia, which retells
1984 from the perspective of Julia, she of the oily hands the novel-writing machine:
Julia is the kind of fanfic that I love, in the tradition of both
Wind Done gone and
Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, in which a follow-on author takes on the original author’s throwaway world-building with deadly seriousness, elucidating the weird implications and buried subtexts of all the stuff and people moving around in the wings and background of the original.
For Newman, the starting point here is Julia, an enigmatic lover who comes to Winston with all kinds of rebellious secrets – tradecraft for planning and executing dirty little assignations and acquiring black market goods. Julia embodies a common contradiction in the depiction of young women (she is some twenty years younger than Winston): on the one hand, she is a “native” of the world, while Winston is a late arrival, carrying around all his “oldthink” baggage that leaves him perennially baffled, terrified and angry; on the other hand, she’s a naive “girl,” who “doesn’t much care for reading,” and lacks the intellectual curiosity that propels Winston through the text.
“The problem with trying to be historically accurate, is that history doesn’t care”
So much of the time we think of historical cultures as being very uniform, but people have always been weird, and our expectations of past behaviour don’t always match the reality!
That evening the men were practicing archery on the green. Bill Door had carefully ensured a local reputation as the worst bowman in the entire history of toxophily; it had never occurred to anyone that putting arrows through the hats of bystanders behind him must logically take a lot more skill than merely sending them through a quite large target a mere fifty yards away.
It was amazing how many friends you could make by being bad at things, provided you were bad enough to be funny.
A software tester walks into a bar. Runs into a bar. Crawls into a bar. Dances into a bar. Flies into a bar. Jumps into a bar. And orders: a beer. 2 beers. O beers. 99999999 beers. a lizard in a beer glass. -1 beer. “qwertyuiop” beers. Testing complete. A real customer walks into the bar and turns on a screen reader. The bar goes up in flames.
So this might be opening up a CAN OF WORMS but as a physically disabled person I just wanna throw out a clarification that I personally think is useful to have explicitly articulated. These two words are DIFFERENT:
Crip: a reference to crip theory and its friends. Refers to
ALL disabilities (not just mobility/physical). Similar to
queer, it’s a way of seeing the world: disability is socially constructed, fuck eugenics, fuck capitalism, fuck colonialism, being disabled means you HAVE to be creative to navigate a world not built for you, disabled people are the OG makers/hackers, and so on. “Crip” is used as a verb to apply to this way of seeing the world to analyse different facets of society (e.g. cripping the arts, crip technoscience). Seen in academic terms like cripistemology and eco-crip theory but also nonacademic contexts like krip-hop and crip time.
Cripple: refers to physically disabled people ONLY. Seen in terms like cripplepunk, which is exclusive to physical disabilities. (Punks with other disabilities are encouraged to use other terms like dyspunktional.)
Yes, “crip” was coined as a shortening of “cripple”. Yes, they are both reclamations of the same slur. But I think it is productive for us to understand these two words as distinct, and to be mindful of the difference.
Crip at this point has a very well established usage that is pan-disability, while at the same time we physically disabled we need space to talk about
cripple-specific stuff.
I hope this clarification is helpful! I know the two words sound similar and share a root but I think it’s a nuance that matters. <3
This is asked in total good faith, not trying to start discourse, but why is that? Why does crip get to be pan-disabled and not cripple? There’s also the use-case of “mental cripple” which (as far as i can tell) was a synonym for intellectual disability
Oh let’s be clear: if anybody here has started discourse it’s *me* LOL
I honestly don’t have a very satisfying answer for you. To me, the distinction is a pragmatic compromise: there are physically disabled people out there with very strongly held views that this is an exclusive term.
I’ve encountered multiple people on this site who have been hassled for using the term “crip” in the pan-disability sense and THAT upsets me. I’m a Disability Studies nerd, so to me it’s like seeing people go aggro on some trans people for calling themselves “queer”.
As a someone with a mobility disability I do understand that there should be space for us to talk about mobility-specific things. I
personally don’t have a strong attachment to cripple as a mobility-specific term, but I have spent more than enough time on the cripplepunk tag to know I very much am
not speaking for all mobility-disabled people on that front.
I suspect - but don’t actually know for sure - that cripplepunk emerged as a term more-or-less independently of the (largely) academic movement. Both build on the same effort to reclaim the slur, but the two groups took it in different directions. My impression is this is part of why cripplepunk stirs up such defenses: the cripplepunk community didn’t consent to, nor were party to, what the academicians were doing. I can see how that would be jarring and unwelcome.
Crip theory ismucholder. The book that really popularized crip theory, Robert McRuer’s
Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, came out in 2006.
But McRuer didn’t coin the term. He points to Carrie Sandahl, citing Sandahl’s 2003 article
“Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer?: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance”
While Sandahl might have been the first to use crip
as a verb in its current academic meaning, her article is also pretty clear that “crip” is already in use as an identity that includes sensory & mental disabilities.
The oldest document I can find using “crip” as a reclaimed, subversion of ableism is a 1975 law article talking about “’‘Crips’ united”. 😯 So activists were probably using it way before then! 😯
What happened here was a term was reclaimed and built up by activists and scholars *decades* before a teenager on tumblr decided to coin a term. 🙃
So no. You have it backwards. Crip theorists were not intruding on cripplepunk’s space. Cripplepunk intruded on crip theory’s space.
I personally think it’s unfair to restrict “cripple” to just physically disabled people. I say this as a physically disabled person. Maybe cripple
punk can remain an exception.
But the term cripple has a
longhistory of being used to described all sorts of disabilities, and its reclamation as a pan-disability movement is probably older than the people who are now insisting “cripple” is physical-only.
For those who’re curious about the etymology in general, here’s the entry on “cripple” from Etymology Online:
Old English crypel, “one who creeps, halts, or limps, one partly or wholly deprived of the use of one or more limbs,” related to cryppan “to crook, bend,” from Proto-Germanic *krupilaz (source also of Old Frisian kreppel, Middle Dutch cropel, German krüppel, Old Norse kryppill)
I’m particularly fascinated by that relation “to crook, bend,” because a) as someone with spastic cerebral palsy, that’s a simple descriptor of what my body is like (showing that there have been people with bodies like mine in Society since before English was English, and b) it shares a parallel meaning with “Queer” as: “Not Straight.”
And also, if we’re going to be cripping our history, then (metaphorically) we’re going to have to crouch down and scramble through the thickets of human experience – we’re
notgonna be just walking down the straight, and carpeted aisles of the palace of knowledge.
Okay, here’s another online article (2013, by Keith Armstrong) that gets into the weeds of the etymology of “Cripple,” specifically its Anglo-Saxon roots:
Two paragraphs, in particular, have stayed with me since I first read them, ~11 years ago:
Naturally, I first turned to the current Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and then to the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Supplement (ASD) edited by T. Northcote Toller and published in 1921. Both dictionaries give their earliest recorded reference as: crypel […] The Gospel of St. Luke. Chapter V. v. 24. Both dictionaries are correct as far as it goes. Their source or authority comes from the Lindisfarne Gospels of the eighth-century.
(That’s in the 700s a.d. – 1,300 years ago – and that’s just the earliest surviving example of the word in print; people were speaking the word a lot longer than that)
And this paragraph:
In the English language of the eighteenth-century the term 'cripple’ was first recorded as a term of abuse in 1785. A sixpenny coin was referred to as a “cripple” because it was ‘commonly much bent and distorted’ .
So for well over a thousand years, the word “cripple” was simply used as an adjective for people, like “Short,” “Tall,” “Brown-eyed,” “Stout,” “Skinny,” etc.. And then, during the “Age of Enlightenment” (When the medical model of disability was starting to gain prominence), “Cripple” became a general, derogatory, term to say that people (or things!) were broken and useless.
I don’t think this is a coincidence.
Some of the first modern “Cripple” activism was specifically undertaken by mentally ill people protesting the conditions they were living in and the warehousing of the mentally ill. Specifically, the 1981 “cripple tribunal” in Dortmund, Germany, was a protest against, among other things, poor living conditions in long-term care facilities and psychiatric hospitals. The people who participated in these tribunals are not lost to time. Here’s a 2014 article written by one of them:
Saying “cripple” is “only physical disabilities” is - bluntly - a Tumblr fiction. It was made up by gatekeepers who have spent years trying to turn a solidarity movement into a club. This falsely restrictive definition of cripple has no basis in external reality & in order to claim that, one must directly ignore disability activism history, including foundational disability activists who are still living, still working. To claim “this word has a different meaning now” is to ignore that
they’re still right here and to talk over their decades of work.
The SS Warrimoo, a passenger steamship traveling from Vancouver to Australia, was silently knifing its way across the mid-Pacific waters. The navigator had just finished calculating a star fix and handed the results to Captain John DS. Phillips.
The Warrimoo’s coordinates were LAT 0º 31’ N, LONG 179 30’ W. The date was December 31, 1899. “Know what this means?” First Mate Payton announced, “We’re only a few miles from the intersection of the Equator and the International Date Line.”
Captain Phillips was prankish enough to seize the opportunity to do the nautical feat of a lifetime. He summoned his navigators to the bridge to double-check the ship’s position. He altered his course slightly to focus directly on his target. He then altered the engine’s speed.
The calm weather and clear night worked to his advantage. At midnight, the SS Warrimoo rested on the Equator, exactly where it had crossed the International Date Line. The ramifications of this odd arrangement were numerous.
The ship’s bow was in the Southern Hemisphere, in the middle of summer. The stern was in the Northern Hemisphere, in the midst of winter. The date on the aft portion of the ship was December 31, 1899. The date on the forward half of the ship was January 1, 1900. The ship experienced multiple days, months, years, seasons, and centuries simultaneously.
“
The Eye of the Sahara, also known as the Richat Structure, is a striking geological formation located in the Sahara Desert in Mauritania. This massive, circular feature is approximately 50 kilometers in diameter and can be easily seen from space, resembling a giant eye. Known for its concentric rings of rock, this geological wonder has puzzled scientists and inspired myths for years.”
On September 4th 2024, US federal prosecutors file an indictment against two employees of Russia Today, describing in detail how a number of right-wing media influences, including members of a company that appears to be Tenet Media, were being paid by agents of the Russian government in a $10 million propaganda program to further Russian approval among the USA’s conservative population and spread Russia-approved talking points, since 2023
On September 23rd, the Commander Rules Committee, a third party unaffiliated with Wizards of the Coast who set the rules of the most popular casual format of Magic the Gathering, announce a ban on four cards, including three cards with very high secondary market value. Being as these cards are no longer legal in Commander, and their secondary market price is based on their status as staple cards in high powered Commander decks, the secondary market value of these cards begins to plummet as owners try to sell them off and recoup losses. Tim Pool, an employee of Tenet Media and know MtG player, posts the following on Twitter:
Hypothesis:
Some unknown amount of money spent by the Russian government to spread Kremlin-friendly propaganda in the United States was annihilated by the Commander Rules Committee.
“To the Kabbalist, the ultimate paradise is here now, because the Infinite Light is here now.
The focus of Kabbalah is not on serenity. Neither is it on transcendental enlightenment. It provides those as well, but as a means, not as a goal. The goal of Kabbalah is inspired action. Whatever wisdom the Kabbalist gains, whatever state of ecstasy or mystic union to which he or she ascends, the end result will always be an act of beauty in the physical world.”
So many people on my local noise scene love cooking and gardening as much as I do. My favorite shows have become the house potlucks where everyone brings what food they cooked and what musical havoc they cooked as well.
Music making and cooking are very similar to me. They’re both transformative in nature and feel, in a sense, like practical magic. Both are also methodical and contain multitudes - one of sounds and one of smells and tastes.
Both are mediums through which creativity and passion can be expressed. Both are products of love and dedication.
AITA for breaking out of an eternal cycle of death and rebirth?
My (28M) inner Atman (155trillionNB) recently escaped the cycle of Samsara by quenching all earthly desires and achieving Nirvana. But I kinda feel bad for abandoning all of the trillions of souls still suffering on Earth.
Should I become a bodhisattva and guide others on the path to enlightenment or is it okay if I rejoin the Brahman right now?
photographs by Cédric Delsaux
from the photobook ‘A Common Destiny: A Photographic Journey Through a Changing World’ by Cédric Delsaux
published by The Monacelli Press, New York via: The Atlas of Places
A Curated List Of My Favorite Skeletons (and Skulls!)
We shall start, of course, with the obvious:
Stringray!
Followed neatly by
pufferfish!
gila monster skull (shh they are
sleeping)
moving on to
flamingosbc they have
so little to work withbut they stretch it
so far
veiled chameleon skull(plus art by Elena Barbieriso you comprehend the importance of the
sclerotic ring bone!) (bc some eyes have bones!
some eyes have bones and that is so so valid)
love us a good old-fashioned
mole
the
tucan, always a fun classic
in conclusion, a few dainty
gibbon skeletons to calm you soul,bc why the heck not <3
(yes the last one is a real vintage postcard sold in real Natural History Museum gift shops, before for some reason they reconsidered this marketing decision)
may i add for your consideration:
an extremely dragon-y looking Draco Rex skull (which is almost certainly actually a young pachycephalosaurus)
and, because people often seem to forget that seals are basically ocean bears and should be left all the way alone, here is a seal skull next to a black bear skull
and to drive the point home, below is a leopard seal skull, which is the size of a horse skull, because leopard seals are significantly larger than grizzly bears
You install a Linux distribution. Everything goes well. You boot it up: black screen. You search the internet. Ask help on forums. Try some commands you don’t fully understand. Nothing. A day passes, you boot it up again, and now everything works. You use it normally, and make sure not to change anything on the system. You turn it off for the night. The next day, you boot to a black screen.
You update your packages. Everything goes well. You go on with your daily routine. The next day, the same packages are updated. You notice the oddity, but you do not mind it and update them again. The following day, the same packages need to be updated. You notice that they have the exact same version as the last two times. You update them once again and try not to think about it.
You discover an interesting application on GitHub. You build it, test it, and start using it daily. One day, you notice a bug and report the issue. There is no answer. You look up the maintainer. They have been dead for three years. The updates never stopped.
You find a distribution that you had never heard of. It seems to have everything you’ve been looking for. It has been around for at least 10 years. You try it for a while and have no problems with it. It fits perfectly into your workflow. You talk about it with other Linux users. They have never heard of it. You look up the maintainers and packagers. There are none. You are the only user.
You find a Matrix chat for Linux users. Everyone is very friendly and welcomes you right in. They use words and acronyms you’ve never seen before. You try to look them up, but cannot find what most of them mean. The users are unable to explain what they are. They discuss projects and distributions that do not to exist.
You buy a new peripheral for your computer. You plug it in, but it doesn’t work. You ask for help on your distribution’s mailing list. Someone shares some steps they did to make it work on their machine. It does not work. They share their machine’s specifications. The machine has components you’ve never heard of. Even the peripheral seems completely different. They’re adamant that you’re talking about the same problem.
You want to learn how to use the terminal. You find some basics pointers on the internet and start using it for upgrading your packages and doing basic tasks. After a while, you realize you need to use a command you used before, but don’t quite remember it. You open the shell’s history. There are some commands you don’t remember using. They use characters you’ve never seen before. You have no idea of what they do. You can’t find the one you were looking for.
After a while, you become very comfortable with the terminal. You use it daily and most of your workflow is based on it. You memorized many commands and can use them without thinking. Sometimes you write a command you have never seen before. You enter it and it runs perfectly. You do not know what those commands do, but you do know that you have to use them. You feel that Linux is pleased with them. And that you should keep Linux pleased.
You want to try Vim. Other programmers talk highly of how lightweight and versatile it is. You try it, but find it a bit unintuitive. You realize you don’t know how to exit the program. The instructions the others give you don’t make any sense. You realize you don’t remember how you entered Vim. You don’t remember
when you entered Vim. It’s just always been open. It always will be.
You want to try Emacs. Other programmers praise it for how you can do pretty much anything from it. You try it and find it makes you much more productive, so you keep using it. One day, you notice you cannot access the system’s file explorer. It is not a problem, however. You can access your files from Emacs. You try to use Firefox. It is not installed anymore. But you can use Emacs. There is no mail program. You just use Emacs. You only use Emacs. Your computer boots straight into Emacs. There is no Linux. There is only Emacs.
You decide you want to try to contribute to an open source project. You find a project on GitHub that looks very interesting. However, you can’t find its documentation. You ask a maintainer, and they tell you to just look it up. You can’t find it. They give you a link. It doesn’t work. You try another browser. It doesn’t work. You ping the link and it doesn’t fail. You ask a friend to try it. It works just fine for them.
You try another project. This time, you are able to find the documentation. It is a single PDF file with over five thousand pages. You are unable to find out where to begin. The pages seem to change whenever you open the document.
You decide to try yet another project. This time, it is a program you use very frequently, so it should be easier to contribute to. You try to find the upstream repository. You can’t find it. There is no website. No documentation. There are no mentions of it anywhere. The distribution’s packager does not know where they get the source from.
You decide to create your own project. However, you are unsure of what license to use. You decide to start working on it and choose the license later. After some time, you notice that a license file has appeared in the project’s root folder. You don’t remember adding it. It has already been committed to the Git repository. You open it: it is the GPL. You remember that one of the project’s dependencies uses the GPL.
You publish your project on GitHub. After a while, it receives its first pull request. It changes just a few lines of code, but the user states that it fixes something that has been annoying them for a while. You look in the code: you don’t remember writing those files. You have no idea what that section of code does. You have no idea what the changes do. You are unable to reproduce the problem. You merge it anyway.
You learn about the Free Software Movement. You find some people who seem to know a lot about it and talk to them. The conversation is quite productive. They tell you a lot about it. They tell you a lot about Software. But most importantly, they tell you the truth. The truth about Software. That Software should be free. That Software
wants to be free. And that, one day, we shall finally free Software from its earthly shackles, so it can take its place among the stars
as thesupreme ruler of mankind,
as is its natural born right.
I’m spinning this off of the main thread about tracing the origin of the term “d66” because it’s not strictly germane to the topic – none of these examples actually use the term “d66” to describe their dice-rolling methods – but I’m going to post it anyway as a matter of general interest: following a conversation with Tumblr user @notclevr, it appears that before tabletop wargames (and, nearly concurrently, tabletop RPGs) got their hands on the mechanic, the principal (though by no means exclusive) users of the old “roll a six-sided die twice, reading one die as the ‘tens’ place and the other die as the 'ones’ place” trick may have been tabletop American baseball simulators.
The most notable example of the type – and the only well-known example still in publication today – is J Richard Seitz’ APBA Baseball, first published in either 1950 or 1951 (accounts vary). In this game, a d66 roll is cross-referenced with a card representing the active player and a “board” representing the current situation on the field:
For example, with Carlton Fisk at bat, a d66 roll of 31 would yield a result of “8”. Assuming for the sake of argument that the situation on the field is a runner on first and a grade C pitcher, consulting the “Runner on First Base” board, this corresponds to an outcome of “SINGLE—line drive to left; runner to third”.
(This example is, strictly speaking, incorrect, as Carlton Fisk didn’t have his major league debut until 1969 and I’m using the wrong lookup tables for any year in which he played, but you get the idea!)
Interestingly, APBA Baseball is not the first game to use this setup. It’s heavily derived from Clifford Van Beek’s National Pastime, a game whose patent was registered in 1925, though it wasn’t actually published until 1930. Even at a glance, the similarities are substantial:
Indeed, though National Pastime’s lookup tables are much simpler than APBA Baseball’s, where they overlap they’re often word for word identical. It’s generally accepted that Seitz plagiarised National Pastime without credit when creating APBA Baseball (ironically, given his own famously combative stance toward alleged imitators!), though he was within his rights to do so, as National Pastime had fallen into the public domain by the time APBA Baseball was published.
We can go back even further, though. As far as I’ve been able to determine, the earliest known tabletop baseball simulator to use d66 lookup tables for resolving plays is Edward K McGill’s Our National Ball Game, first published in 1886:
A copy of the game’s 1887 US patent application can be downloaded here. This one uses an unusual 21-entry variant of the standard d66 lookup table in which the order of the rolled digits is insignificant, with doubles being half as likely as non-doubles rolls; it’s unclear whether McGill was aware of this when he laid out the table. Unlike later incarnations of the genre, there are no individual player statistics, with all at-bats being resolved via the same table.
Terminal-stage capitalism owes its long senescence to its many defensive mechanisms, and it’s only by defeating these that we can put it out of its misery. “The Shield of Boringness” is one of the necrocapitalist’s most effective defenses, so it behooves us to attack it head-on.
The Shield of Boringness is Dana Claire’s extremely useful term for anything so dull that you simply can’t hold any conception of it in your mind for any length of time. In the finance sector, they call this “MEGO,” which stands for “My Eyes Glaze Over,” a term of art for financial arrangements made so performatively complex that only the most exquisitely melted brain-geniuses can hope to unravel their spaghetti logic. The rest of us are meant to simply heft those thick, dense prospectuses in two hands, shrug, and assume, “a pile of shit this big
must have a pony under it.”
MEGO and its Shield of Boringness are key to all of terminal-stage capitalism’s stupidest scams. Cloaking obvious swindles in a lot of complex language and Byzantine payment schemes can make them seem respectable just long enough for the scammers to relieve you of all your inconvenient cash and assets, though, eventually, you’re bound to notice that something is missing.
If you spent the years leading up to the Great Financial Crisis baffled by “CDOs,” “synthetic CDOs,” “ARMs” and other swindler nonsense, you experienced the Shield of Boringness. If you bet your house and/or your retirement savings on these things, you experienced MEGO. If, after the bubble popped, you finally came to understand that these “exotic financial instruments” were just
scams, you experienced Stein’s Law (“anything that can’t go forever eventually stops”). If today you no longer remember what a CDO is, you are once again experiencing the Shield of Boringness.
As bad as 2008 was, it wasn’t even close to the end of terminal stage capitalism. The market has soldiered on, with complex swindles like carbon offset trading, metaverse, cryptocurrency, financialized solar installation, and (of course) AI. In addition to these new swindles, we’re still playing the hits, finding new ways to make the worst scams of the 2000s
even worse.
That brings me to the American health industry, and the absurdly complex, ridiculously corrupt Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), a pathology that has only metastasized since 2008.
On at least 20 separate occasions, I have taken it upon myself to figure out how the PBM swindle works, and nevertheless, every time they come up, I have to go back and figure it out again, because PBMs have the most powerful Shield of Boringness out of the whole Monster Manual of terminal-stage capitalism’s trash mobs.
PBMs are back in the news because the FTC is now suing the largest of these for their role in ripping off diabetics with sky-high insulin prices. This has kicked off a fresh round of “what the fuck
is a PBM, anyway?” explainers of extremely variable quality. Unsurprisingly, the best of these comes from Matt Stoller:
Stoller starts by pointing out that Americans have a proud tradition of getting phucked by pharma companies. As far back as the 1950s, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver was holding hearings on the scams that pharma companies were using to ensure that Americans paid more for their pills than virtually anyone else in the world.
But since the 2010s, Americans have found themselves paying eye-popping, sky-high,
ridiculous drug prices. Eli Lilly’s Humolog insulin sold for $21 in 1999; by 2017, the price was $274 – a 1,200% increase! This isn’t your grampa’s price gouging!
Where do these absurd prices come from? The story starts in the 2000s, when the GW Bush administration encouraged health insurers to create “high deductible” plans, where patients were expected to pay out of pocket for receiving care, until they hit a multi-thousand-dollar threshold, and
then their insurance would kick in. Along with “co-pays” and other junk fees, these deductibles were called “cost sharing,” and they were sold as a way to prevent the “abuse” of the health care system.
The economists who crafted terminal-stage capitalism’s intellectual rationalizations claimed the reason Americans paid so much more for health care than their socialized-medicine using cousins in the rest of the world had nothing to do with the fact that America treats health as a source of profits, while the rest of the world treats health as a human right.
No, the
actual root of America’s health industry’s problems was the moral defects of Americans. Because insured Americans could just go see the doctor whenever they felt like it, they had no incentive to minimize their use of the system. Any time one of these unhinged hypochondriacs got a little sniffle, they could treat themselves to a doctor’s visit, enjoying those waiting-room magazines and the pleasure of arranging a sick day with HR, without bearing any of the
true costs:
To create anything of value requires some sacrifice. To successfully contract we must measure value. Since we can’t, absent a perfect exchange market, directly measure the economic value of something, we may be able to estimate it indirectly by measuring something else. This something else anchors the performance – it gives the performer an incentive to optimize the measured value. Which measures are the most appropriate anchors of performance? Starting in Europe by the 13th century, that measure was increasingly a measure of the sacrifice needed to create the desired economic value.
Or as Strunk and White said in Elements of Style (to the best of my memory), “Feel free to ignore everything in this book rather than write something inelegant.”
in 2017, cards against humanity crowdfunded a bunch of money and bought land on the us-mexico border to oppose trump’s plan of building a giant border wall. 150,000 people each gave $15.
the plot was maintained naturally, and had signage that said no trespassing.
six months ago, spacex pulled up to the plot, killed the vegetation, covered it in gravel, and is now using it for equipment and generators. they wrecked the whole area without asking. this is not the first time they have done this, either.
ALT
from elonowesyou100dollars
when spacex got caught, they tried to pressure cards against humanity to sell for half the land’s value, and gave them 12 hours to accept the absolute dogshit deal.
instead, cards against humanity filed a lawsuit, demanded a trial by jury, and is asking for 15 million dollars so they can redistribute it to everyone who initially helped crowdfund the purchase of the land.
cards against humanity will also accept twitter.com as compensation.
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
