Ernemann III Sound Film Cinema Projector, c. 1928 Zeiss Ikon, Dresden, Germany Film projector for 35mm silent and sound films, Maltese cross mechanism, protected front diaphragm, two fire-protection drums
for 600m spools.
image credits: Auction Team Breker, Köln, Germany
Add another one to the list of hilarious examples of why generative AI doesn’t produce correct answers, just statistically likely ones.
(Customers asked for how-to videos, which the company doesn’t have. The AI chatbot decided that a million internet users linking to this video after similar requests couldn’t be wrong.)
Well, AI just knows the rules, and how to play them….
there’s something incestuous about seasoning tofu with soy sauce
crazy that soy can be turned into both flavorless texture and textureless flavor. maybe we should try just keeping both?
As metaphysicists our task is to explain the most general feature of reality: what it means for something to
be. Through centuries of studies, we realized that
being always has two aspects. First, every existing object is limited and particularized by some particular properties: it has
color,
taste, or even subjective mental properties and propensities, like
feeling salty. We call this aspect the ‘actuality’ or 'form’ of the object. Second, properties cannot exist free-floatingly, there must be something they apply to, and this we call the ’(prime) matter’. Matter per se has no properties (for example it is colorless and tasteless), but it is massive and filling. Only by combining the two do we get a full account of what it means for me to
be (or as we say in Spanish,
soy).
and it’s a zeugma where one of the words is literal and one is metaphorical which is the BEST KIND
I didn’t know about zeugmas until just now! That is
so awesome, everybody:
zeug·ma ˈzo͞oɡmə/
noun
a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g.,
John and his license expired last week ) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g.,
with weeping eyes and hearts ).
The concept of “spoons” as an instrument for task/energy managment would be considerably more appealing to me if they were called something more cool than just “spoons”. Example:
“Today I woke up with six EPIC FLAMING SKULLS (🔥💀) at my disposal. I spent one EPIC FLAMING SKULL (🔥💀) to take a shower, one EPIC FLAMING SKULL (🔥💀) to make breakfast, and four EPIC FLAMING SKULLS (🔥💀) on attending my college lectures, so right now I’m literally dying or something because I ran out of EPIC FLAMING SKULLS. (🔥💀).
This is just an example of course - I don’t think I’m the intended audience for this method, but I did want to throw the idea out there.
Summers in Phoenix are notoriously hot. But after two punishing summers of record-breaking heat, the latest milestone, set Tuesday, may be the most ominous yet.
At 11 a.m. local time, temperatures in Phoenix hit 100 degrees for the 100th day in a row. The longest previous 100-degree streak was 76 days in 1993. In other words, this year has seen an uninterrupted stretch of 100-degrees days at least 3½ weeks longer than in any other year since records began in 1896.
The relentless heat is testing the will of Phoenix residents. While accustomed to hot summers, many have never endured anything like this. And the heat has proved dangerous for vulnerable groups such as outdoor workers and unhoused populations.
“This is the hottest one I’ve been in,” said Ron Wishon, 55, pushing a bicycle with a flat rear tire through downtown Phoenix.
The streak, which began on May 27 with a high of 102, shows no sign of ending. In fact, the forecast calls for the heat to escalate this week. An excessive-heat warning will be in effect Wednesday through Friday, when highs are expected to approach 110. Long-range forecast models suggest that highs could reach the century mark or more for two more weeks.
With recent work to improve our soil moisture sensing, it could be a nice time to design an ‘all-in-one’ board for plant and garden hacking. This board has a USB C, so you can plug it right into your computer and read the capacitance of the soil, as well as the ambient light level and temperature + humidity of the onboard AHT20. A QT sensor and 'standard Stemma QT’ mounting holes mean you can plug in a VOC, CO2, UV, or PM.2 sensor. The SAMD21E18 can run Arduino or CircuitPython, but we’ll also ship it with an example that just spits out CSV data over the serial port for instant interfacing. Coming soon.
primera bienal internacional de poesía visual y experimental en méxico : 1985-1986 : resumen general, Curated by Núcleo Post-Arte, with an essay by Clemente Padín, [Ciudad de México], 1986 [Jonathan A. Hill, Bookseller Inc., New York, NY. Art Books]
Fun fact for our international followers: If someone in Australia cuts down a tree on public land to improve the view from their house, the local government will install a sign to block that view again
Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond by Michael Nyman
Michael Nyman is a composer popularly known for his film scores for movies such as The Piano, Gattica and his collaborations with filmmaker Peter Greenway.
(Side note is you have someone who for some reason is still holding on to their Harry Potter fandom and you want to RUIN their thoughts about beloved Dumbledor. Have them watch Peter Greenway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.)\
But before he paid the bills with film scores he spent some time in the Conceptual Avant Garde music scene of the 60’s. This book is a firsthand account of his time in the conceptual and experimental art scene.
If you interest in music is a more historica, philosphical, conceptual and more academic you might like this book.
Article published 8:23 AM EDT, Wed August 14, 2024
tl;dr: The server at a restaurant on Disney property assured the couple that certain food items were free of dairy and nut contamination and the woman died of severe anaphylaxis shortly after consuming foods they were repeatedly assured were safe. The epi pen they had did not save her life because the food was absolutely contaminated with what were, for her, deadly allergens. And Disney is trying to corporate capitalist their way out of legal accountability.
It is pretty clear cut that they did, in fact, cause this woman’s death. And her husband is asking for $50k in the wrongful death suit to cover the medical and funerary expenses as well as the mental anguish they caused. A modest $50k, not 50 million. A company worth 156.43 billion dollars is trying to dismiss the suit based on a 5 year old free Disney+ trial instead of giving this man what he’s asking for, a fraction of the amount he deserves.
I hope this makes everyone think twice before visiting the park or bringing their child to the park, especially if you or your loved one has an allergy or disability. Disney will kill you remorselessly, refuse to take accountability and traumatize your loved ones further.
Remember kids, negative press does work. And fuck Disney. Fuck Disney big time.
“We’re doing him this HUGEEEE favor because humanity is SOOOOO IMPORTANT TO US!!!!!” says company who humiliated a widower and tried to dismiss a wrongful death suit based on a 5 year old Disney+ contract
Note: this is not altruism by Disney. This is Disney recognising that their heinous and clearly illegal use of the Disney+ TOS wouldn’t hold up in court, and in fact would likely lead to a sweeping precedent that would ban a lot of predatory TOS practices like this one by big corporations. However, if they ‘waive’ this untested and unclear ‘right’ in this instance then no court gets to tell them to fuck off and ban them from doing it next time. They can keep it as a threat for the next time this sort of thing happens to a plaintiff who doesn’t end up getting international attention and doesn’t have the resources to fight back.
This is a cowardly move by a corporation that knows their bullshit is illegal. This is an admission of guilt.
This is just to say the Bell Riots don’t take place on August 30th. That’s the day Sisko, Dax, and Bashir will have been being arrived* in San Francisco. The Riots will be September 1-3, 2024.
That said, instead of rioting, today I honored Gabriel Bell’s heroics with a donation to a couple of charities that help the unhoused and the hungry. I’ve donated to the Hollywood Food Coalition and the SF Marin Food Bank:
I made the donations “In Memory of Gabriel Bell.” Please consider honoring Gabriel Bell with donations of your own to these or other organizations that helped the unhoused.
Thank you! Stay safe out there. Live long and prosper!
I don’t need a break from the internet, but I do need a break from the guidance and advice-driven podcasts, newsletters, and articles that crowd the finite expanse of my inbox and phone. From
Zoe Health & Nutrition’s evidence-based ways to reduce your cholesterol and Martha Beck’s direction on integrity on
The Weekend University, to Jonathan Haidt’s social-media -free instruction on
The Psychology Podcast and any episode about the benefits of nonduality on the
Rupert Spira Podcast, I’m inundated with content that is categorized – accurately - under “education,” “culture,” “society,” “science,” and “philosophy” – but could just as easily be categorized under “self-help.” As enlightening or informative as the shows are, they all leave my body in a tense. Each episode ends with what are akin to action items. And why would I need to take action if my life and mind were already in the state of “just as they should be?”
Excerpt from this story from
Mongabay Environmental News:
A NASA study analyzed the future action of six climate variables in all the world’s regions — air temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, short- and long wave solar radiation and wind speed — if Earth’s average temperature reaches 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, which could occur by 2040 if emissions keep rising at current rates.
The authors used advanced statistical techniques to downscale climate models at a resolution eight times greater than most previous models. This allows for identification of climate variations on a daily basis across the world, something essential since climate impacts unfold gradually, rather than as upheavals.
The study found that the Amazon will be the area with the greatest reduction in relative humidity. An analysis by the Brazilian space agency INPE showed that some parts of this rainforest biome have already reached maximum temperatures of more than 3°C (5.4°F) over 1960 levels.
Regardless of warnings from science and Indigenous peoples of the existential threat posed by climate change, the world’s largest fossil fuel producers, largely with government consent, plan to further expand fossil fuel exploration, says a U.N. report. That’s despite a COP28 climate summit deal “transitioning away from fossil fuels.”
In view of the current nonstop rise in greenhouse gas emissions responsible for intensifying climate change, NASA researchers this year posed two key questions: When will the planet’s temperature likely reach an annual average of 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels? And what will the global climate look like in great detail all over the world at that temperature?
Disturbingly, their findings indicate that a 2°C increase could be reached between 2041 and 2044 (under higher and lower emission scenarios, respectively) in comparison with the preindustrial period (1850-1900). The planet is currently at 1.15°C (2.07°F) above 19th century levels, with most of this warming occurring since 1975.
A rise above 2°C could put Earth on track for catastrophic climate change impacts, according to the 2023 report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
To investigate the potential multiple effects of a 2°C planet, scientists at the NASA Earth eXchangeanalyzed the projections of 35 of the world’s leading climate models with a very high resolution that gives results for areas of just 25 square kilometers (9.6 square miles). Many climate models currently use a far coarser resolution of 200 km2 (77 mi2). NEX fine-scaling allowed for estimated climate impact projections on both a local and regional scale, and even on a daily basis.
“If merged into a monthly average, a few days projected to be dangerously hot and humid could get lost in the numbers, concealing the risk for human lives,” explained study lead author Taejin Park, a researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “Finer-scale information can help identify variations in projected climate change that may be overlooked, so leading to significant impacts on planning and decision-making.”
In the 2040s, global mean near-surface air temperature over land is projected to increase 2.33-2.79°C (4.2-5°F), compared with the baseline period 1950–79. Greenland, Alaska, Canada, Northern Europe and Asia are projected to reach above a 3°C (5.4°F) increase in annual temperature. Image courtesy of NASA/Taejin Park.
If NASA’s projections are correct, a precipitation increase will occur over much of the northern hemisphere, especially in southeastern Greenland, but also in western and eastern Africa and South Asia, among other places. The Amazon Basin, on the other hand, will see a major decrease in precipitation. Dry regions such as Southern Africa, the North American Southwest and the Mediterranean also could see a precipitation decline. Image courtesy of NASA/Taejin Park.
After 2040, most regions of the world are expected to have more days with extreme heat stress, with heat especially pronounced in the Amazon, Central and Eastern North America, the Mediterranean and Eastern and Northern Asia. Heat stress can be devastating to wildlife, plants and of course, people. Image courtesy of NASA/Taejin Park.
Under a moderate emission scenario, Western and Central North America, the Amazon, the Mediterranean and South Africa will be at higher risk of fires in the 2040s, compared with 1950-79. Image courtesy of NASA/Taejin Park.
For some reason the article isn’t linking normally but this is amazing! I do not like that the author does not mention Hirschfeld being Jewish early enough in the article, but it’s awesome this has been restored!
For those who do not know Hirschfeld was a gay doctor who ran the first trans clinic in the world in Germany. He helped so many transition and was a great advocate for LGBT rights.
This film is great and Hirschfeld is worth talking about. He was also someone who had a complicated relationship regarding race - his lover was Asian, but he was racist towards Black folks. He was part of the German eugenics movement which led to the incarceration and sterilisaion of thousands - recommending “feebleminded” people for sterilisation - and ultimately the same logic was used to justify Aktion-T4, the Nazi murder of disabled people which was the Nazi testing ground for The Final Solution. Like many historical figures, he was a complex character - I’m not trying to cancel him here - but folks should know, his constant lionisation makes disabled people uncomfortable.
The following screenshots are taken from Chapter 9 of
Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love, by Laurie Marhoefer. entitled
MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD’S QUEER EUGENICS.
(Please note, I’m sorry these images are undescribed, my disability makes it a shittonne of work to transcribe and I couldn’t just copy and paste.)
[image ID from original post : Article headline screenshot. “Lost during Nazi rule in Germany, one of the world’s first pro- gay films has finally been restored for modern viewers / Filmmaker and scientist Magnus Hirschfeld’s "Laws of Love” promoted his controversial views about sex / By Isaac Würmann September 24, 2021 9:27 am EDT.“ A picture of a man holding another man’s face is included with the caption, "A still from Magnus Hirschfeld’s "Laws of Love.”“ /End ID.]
[image transcript from reblog: Magnus Hirschfeld’s enthusiasm for eugenics was not a minor, fleeting thing. It was at the heart of his vision of a better world. It was not for nothing that one of the associations he helped to found was called the Medical Society for Sexology and Eugenics (Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Sexualwissenschaft und Eugenik), or that the international congresses of the World League for Sexual Reform regularly hosted discussions of eugenics, or that the WLSR officially supported it. On his tour of the world, he talked about eugenics in his lectures. Over the course of a long career, Hirschfeld found little time for his own research. He did, however, find time to research the eugenics of transvestitism, homosexuality, and other "intersexual” conditions, 12 Eugenics, the science of human heredity, belonged to the field of sexology. As eugenics advanced as a science of its own, it would probably “form the epicenter of sexology,” in his words, 13 For almost forty years, scholars who have grappled with Hirschfeld’s thought and legacy have had to puzzle out what to make of his eugenics. Historians have fought long and hard over whether it is important or not. 14 Around the turn of the twenty-first century, a consensus opinion emerged: it held that it was not all that important. 15 A key to this consensus was the fact that, as Andreas Seeck put it in a 2004 essay, “Hirschfeld did not connect eugenics with racism."16 Another oft-repeated point was that among the many, many supporters of eugenics, Hirschfeld stood out as a left-of-center advocate of voluntarism. He promoted education; he was not, for the most part, an advocate of compulsory sterilization. This second idea is now so entrenched that two leading Hirschfeld scholars have gone so far recently as to assert that Hirschfeld was only in favor of voluntary eugenics, 18 The purpose of this chapter is to argue that we ought to revisit that consensus. 12 Not only is it based in errors, but it misses just how central eugenics was to Hirschfeld’s thinking, how important it was to his antiracism and to his struggle for homosexual liberation.
Hirschfeld thought eugenics worked in favor of gay rights. He sought a queer eugenics, that is, a eugenics that would justify some queer erotics, even as it sought to suppress other queer erotics. "Eugenics… is a science of invaluable worth,” Hirschfeld wrote, and it was at the heart of the fight for freedom, 20 Rather than unscientific racial prejudices, eugenics ought to be used to distinguish fit from unfit humans, for the good of humanity. When it came time to write a dedication for his memoir of his world journey, Hirschfeld dedicated it not to his traveling companion Li but to eugenics, 21 We remember Hirschfeld as a force for justice, but his vision of justice was stamped by the biological determinism of the late nineteenth century. Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau and the French revolutionaries all championed equality. As worthy as that goal was, it was based in bad science. “The premise that individuals are equal in nature and in capacities was proven wrong in the nineteenth century by natural science.” Hirschfeld was for equality and freedom, insofar as it was possible to achieve them given natural human inequality. He still wanted equal rights and democracy, with a small qualification: all adult women and men ought to have the vote, with the exception of “the mentally stultified.” 45 It is true that the eugenic programs Hirschfeld really liked were voluntary programs. He also believed in public education. If people learned about eugenics, he thought, they would apply it to themselves, for example by choosing not to have children if a counselor explained that they carried bad hereditary material. He did lots of public outreach about eugenics himself, in his lectures and publications. He supported a Weimar Republic effort led by left-of-center, sex-reform-minded people to set up hundreds of marriage counseling clinics all over Germany; some of the clinics did eugenic counseling. One was housed in the Institute for Sexual Science. Hirschfeld thought the clinics were a very good start. In a paper for the 1929 WLSR meeting in London, he described an idea for a matchmaking service that would operate by mail, matching men and women based on sexual, physical, and mental factors, as well as eugenic criteria. The decision about whether or not to marry would of course be up to the people in question. 46
Hirschfeld was very skeptical about forcing people to go along with eugenics. In Sexology III, he goes through a long list of proposed eugenic programs and gives his thoughts on them. He spends a lot of ink there mulling marriage bans or sex bans. Though he did not like the idea of banning certain eugenically unfit people from marrying or having sex, he made a few exceptions. The children of very young parents tended to have hereditary defects, thus he favored banning sex for young people-under eighteen for men and under sixteen for women. 47 He wanted bans on the unions of close relatives, for eugenic reasons. He also wanted restrictions on people who had infectious illnesses that damaged hereditary material (he does not specify which, but he was possibly thinking of syphilis). But any other marriage or sex ban was scientifically unfounded. He seemed open to laws requiring certificates of health prior to marriage, so long as the choice to marry or not remained voluntary. 49 He did not, however, have a principled objection to compulsory eugenics or, specifically, to forced sterilization. His concern was that the science was just not there yet, in most cases, though not in all cases. There were a few cases in which it was obvious that sterilization would stop the transmission of hereditarydefects: cases like that of the “feebleminded” women discussed above and cases involving alcoholism, which Hirschfeld and many others believed caused heritable damage. Sterilization was nothing more than the application of a principle that every gardener followed - one had to pull out the weeds. Yet it was not time to jump on board with an ambitious plan for mass sterilization. Human reproduction was a lot more complicated than animal reproduction; scientists did not understand human hereditary all that well yet. Large compulsory sterilization programs like those in the United States, or even more ambitious plans to sterilize hundreds of thousands of people, were impractical, he thought.20 When the Nazis passed a eugenic sterilization law in 1933, Hirschfeld, then in exile, raised essentially the same objections to it-it was too ambitious, too vaguely crafted, too tainted by racism, and too reliant on junk science. Norway’s law was much better, he wrote. As was true for other left-of-center reformers, the problem with the German sterilization law was in the execution, not in the very fact of forced eugenic sterilization per se 52
Given that one of the major apologies for Hirschfeld is that he was not a racist sterilization zealot like Popenoe, let’s take a look at how they differed. Not only did Popenoe favor a very ambitious program of eugenic sterilization; he was also a fanatical white supremacist. “The Negro race differs greatly from the white race, mentally as well as physically, and… in many respects it may be said to be inferior, when tested by the requirements of modern civilization and progress,” he and his coauthor, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, wrote in their influential 1918 textbook on eugenics, 62 In California, eugenicists like Popenoe and Gosney went after Mexican Americans in particular. The textbook repeats, in detail, the major tropes of scientific racism, such as that Black people were gregarious but hapless, with powerful, poorly inhibited “sexual impulses” but a lack of “that aggressive competitiveness which has been responsible for so much of the achievement of the Nordic race.” 64 The book inveighs against interracial marriage - many American states banned such marriages prior to 1967-as well as interracial sex and the immigration of South and East Asians. Popenoe’s book also disparaged Jews. 65 If Hirschfeld, who hated exactly this sort of racism, objected when they met, Popenoe had an answer. Germans might speak out for racial equality, but this was only because they lacked “race experience.” 66 They changed their tunes when they went to their own colonies (stripped from them after the First World War) or to the southern United States and saw societies where Black people were a large slice of the population. 7 Despite their differences, Popenoe and Hirschfeld shared common ground. Both doubted the intellectual abilities of women: Popenoe’s textbook frankly informed students that women were by nature the intellectual inferiors of men. Both wanted to sterilize the “feebleminded.” Hirschfeld, however, thought there were a lot less “feebleminded” people in need of sterilization. They were so few, in fact, that the government need not get involved. He seems to have wanted to leave the decision about whether to sterilize a “feebleminded” woman without her consent up to her doctor. He wrote, “This is in no way to deny that there are cases of feeblemindedness in which there is indeed a pressing indication in favor of sterilization. But on the whole, these are extremely exceptional cases, and moreover they can be appropriately treated without a sterilization law.” 62 Simply give physicians like himself free rein; that was what was needed. A large part of the sterilization abuse in the United States and elsewhere has, historically, been carried out quietly and informally by doctors acting on their own
In what ways was Hirschfeld’s eugenics queer? First, in the sense that it victimized queer people. In what to us seems an odd, disturbing twist of logic (though it was no twist of logic to Hirschfeld and many of his contemporaries), some of the people Hirschfeld saw a reason to sterilize were queer people, by my definition of “queer.” That is, they were people who got into trouble because they had non-normative, consensual, adult sex. He wanted to sterilize those people not only for strictly eugenic reasons, with an eye on future generations. He wanted to sterilize them in part to stop their queer behavior in the here and now. This depended on a fuzzy understanding of what sterilization (or castration) did to a person’s sex drive, an imperfect understanding that was widespread at the time. For example, the Swiss literature on eugenics around 1910 held that sterilization put a stop to masturbation; one sees such confusion in the Dutch literature as well. 80 The American state of Oregon had men castrated to stop their same-sex erotic behavior. 81 Another key idea here was that disability and queerness were inextricably linked: one’s sexual misbehaviors could be signs of one’s eugenic unfitness. “Feebleminded” people could not control their urges, for example. Sterilization could stop masturbation. In 1925, school and medical officials in Germany had a nine-year-old boy sterilized to stop him from masturbating at school and encouraging his fellow pupils to masturbate. 82 The official who oversaw the boy’s sterilization was Heinrich Boeters, a doctor who made a name for himself in Germany in the 1920s as the single loudest proponent of passing a national eugenic sterilization law modeled on laws in the United States. Boeters, on his own initiative, sterilized 150 people - most or all without consent - and announced the sterilizations after the fact. This caused a public outcry and Boeters lost his job. Prior to the Nazi takeover, eugenic sterilization was deeply controversial in Germany, though by the late Weimar period a modest sterilization law was probably in the offing. Hirschfeld thought Boeters was far too ambitious. He however defended him. He thought Boeters had done Germany a service by raising the issue, […] /End ID.]
The numbers interspersed are the footnote numbers. I can’t check this with a screenreader right now, so please let me know if I should remove them for clarity.
reblogging for @livingmeatloaf’s sterling transcription, because this shit is important. Thank you so much!
In Canada, false environmental claims are now illegal. Under legislation passed in June, companies may be penalized for making representations to the public about their products’ ability to mitigate climate change without being based on an “adequate and proper test.” It was a success for environmental groups who spent a year and half working on the antigreenwashing law.
The legislation is just one moment in a much wider “disinformation turn” in the climate movement: the US Congress has been holding high-profile hearings with titles like “Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak: Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change.” Academics are convening conferences on “climate obstruction” with multiple days of deep dives from the network of scholars that meticulously track corporate climate misinformation. Environmental NGOs are making disinformation databases with lists of individuals and scientists and leading programs on climate disinformation. And think tanks that work on disinformation are now moving into climate, with reports like the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s The New Climate Denial.
Disinformation is a curious focus for the climate movement at this moment, however, at least from a US standpoint. This is because we actually have some funds for climate action on the ground. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill and 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) unleashed a trillion dollars to use to address the climate crisis. But much of the public is unaware of this massive investment — and local governments, tribes, and organizations often struggle to navigate accessing the new funding.
These material victories would make it the perfect time for a climate movement to focus on things like explaining to people what heat pumps are, campaigning to expedite transmission lines, and helping communities understand the labyrinth of federal funding. Indeed, many regional government organizations, municipal planners, and volunteer committees who work on climate action have their hands full with these activities. They are engaged with the ground game of mitigation and adaptation.
Yet the nationwide connective tissue and broader narrative about climate action feels absent. If there is a role for “climate intellectuals” — for the online climate commentariat, the journalists and national NGO leaders who tell us the story of climate action — it would be to focus on the new opportunities for action on the ground, and knit together those people in Peoria or Altoona who are trying to talk to people about resilience, connecting them in a broader story that fuels their motivation. Instead, the intellectual wing of the climate movement has decided to wage an information war focused on uncovering what Big Oil knew and policing speech.
Given that funding and public attention is limited, this climate-disinformation obsession is a missed opportunity and a strategic dead-end — part of a larger liberal tendency to make disinformation a bogeyman we can blame for our major political problems.
I’ve tried to draw the graphs of a function x ↦ x² in ℤ/pℤ for some of prime p’s. And the result gives me the feeling like I’m a medieval sage and I’m studying some sort of alchemy :)
Apparently we can see quadratic residues (the numbers which have at least one incoming arrow) and quadratic non-residues (have no incoming arrow). It is a visual representation of a fact that for each prime p there are equal amounts of both, which is (p-1)/2. Also, I could see two structures: cycles and trees, which are always combined and which I am curious to investigate further. Also it’s interesting how the number of connected components is related to the number p
It really feels like I gradually unveil the secrets of the universe. The look of my printed paper also gives an impression of an ancient scroll
Over a fifth of Europe’s energy was generated by solar panels and wind turbines in the first half of 2020. Solar and wind energy generation was higher in some European countries. Denmark came out on top, generating 64 per cent of its energy from these renewable sources, closely followed by Ireland (49 per cent) and Germany (42 per cent), according to the report from independent climate think-tank Ember. In a half-year review released in July by the think tank, all renewables - including wind, solar, hydroelectricity and bioenergy - were found to have exceeded fossil fuel generation for the first time ever. They produced 40 per cent of the EU’s power from January to June with fossil fuels contributing 34 per cent.
Amsterdam heeft grafisch ontwerper Karel Martens (85) gevraagd een patroon te ontwerpen om 30 km/u wegen visueel smaller te maken om zo de snelheid te verlagen.
As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
⁂
Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
Ever since I got a job as a security guard I can’t take heist movies seriously anymore.
Why is that?
Accurate heist movie: The Team is sneaking into a high security facility. An alarm is triggered, they freeze, prepared to knock out whoever responds to the alarm. It takes 40 minutes for someone to respond. When they finally do show up, they shuffle along, annoyed, arms full of 16 bags of pretzels for some reason, and reset the alarm without bothering to check their surroundings. They report that the alarm went off in error. Security control starts a fight about the correct designation of the door. The guard announces that they’re leaving the alarm key in the alarm because it’s always going off for no reason. No one challenges them on this. They shuffle away, leaving an alarm key and several bags of pretzels behind.
The Team knocks out a security guard and steals their radio. The team mimic can perfectly replicate the knocked out guard’s voice. They get caught because they pronounced the name of the company correctly.
The Team disables an alarm. The only way to do this is to rip it out of the wall and disassemble it until it physically can’t make noise anymore. This very loud process is clearly heard by the posted security guard nearby, who rolls their eyes and text their supervisor that the logistics contractors are fooling with the alarms again.
The Team breaks into the facility at night. There they meet a single security guard who is chanting potential names for NPCs in their DnD campaign out loud while they do their patrols. They encounter a fire extinguisher. They pause in their chanting to check that it is properly charged and to apply a sticker that reads, “Anal use only”. This guy is disgustingly good at their job. There’s no way around it, they’re going to catch you. And you’re going to have to deal with the fact that you’ve been had by someone who has a supply of stickers that say “Anal use only” and who unironically wanted to name their NPC shopkeep Mammogrammus.
The Team attempts to bribe a security guard. This is its own post but know there’s no way in hell that would work.
The Team breaks into the high security room and disables all the alarms. Security control sends several guards to investigate why there are no alarms going off.
The Team attempts to break into the high security room but can’t because it’s randomly decided not to let anyone at all in today.
The Team steals a keycard with “””””unlimited””””” access to the facility and gets caught because the computer system that manages keycards randomly revokes access for no reason.
The Team walks past a security guard in broad daylight wearing T-shirts that say, “We are here to rob you”. The security guard does nothing, having seen several people in logistics wearing that exact shirt two days prior.
This sounds like a great movie, honestly
I will always remember that when I worked for a pharmaceutical company in IT, there were massive security procedures, systems with air gaps, locations with biometric scanners and metal detectors and locking revolving doors, but the highest level of security was a human being in a bulletproof proof room with line of sight to the door and a button. To /get/ to the door, you had to go through tons of other layers and badge access and identity verification, but the final lock was a dual physical key (which required two people to open) and a human being with a book of photographs and a button to push.
At the onset of the 2008-onward recession it became more or less impossible to get the sort of summer gig that college students traditionally get. I couldn’t get a callback from any of the area fast food restaurants, the babysitting gigs were gone, I drew blanks on waitressing, dishwashing, landscaping, car washes, summer camps, you name it. The big local summer attraction near me is a horse racetrack, and I put in apps for every position from betting clerk to horse manure removal tech. I got one (1) job offer that summer, and it was to be a security guard. I was a 19 year old girl with a perky ponytail, big ol’ doe eyes, and no experience or interest whatsoever in policing, so I genuinely thought I’d gotten the offer because they’d confused my application with someone else’s… until the first day of training.
Training consisted of a number of retired high ranking New York State Troopers very earnestly trying to convince a room of “dudes who desperately wanted to be a cop but couldn’t jump even that low hurdle” and also “one increasingly incredulous 19 year old girl who could only hear a loud high pitched note in one ear because she stood too close to her amps at the punk show last night” not to bring swords, shurukens, or butterfly knives into work.
We went over the “do not bring in your own weapons” lecture for the majority of day 1 of training. Day 2 was also “do not bring in your own weapons” for a lot of the day, then we moved onto “identifying the different types of fire extinguisher,” and wrapped up the day with “wasp stings.” Well, actually during “wasp stings” we had a sidebar when this one guard who looked like Ben Franklin raised his hand and shared that he, personally, took care of wasps by blowing their nests up with improvised gasoline-based explosives, so technically we wrapped up the day with “do not bring in your own weapons even if those weapons are to harm a wasp.”
Day 3 was a half day, where we reviewed everything we’d learned about no weapons, fire extinguishers, and wasps, and then we took a written test, which I finished with a perfect score in three minutes so Sargeant Minetti made me grade everyone else’s. After that, I was a full ass security guard; I picked up my fake cop uniform, badge(!!!), tiny notebook, strapped a walkie to my belt, and was given my assignment. My beat was very very literally the most public facing one that existed; while most of my colleagues were posted at gates that might never get opened for the entire summer, I had “the wholeass quarter mile of pavement abutting the chain link fence that separated the public from the ponies.” My responsibilities were simple:
1. tell people to move their rolling coolers out of the fire lane
2. take people with wasp stings to the nurse
and oh yeah
3.
every time a clerk at a betting window in my section accumulated more than $10,000 dollars in cash, I had to escort them for ½ of a mile through the incredibly dense crowd of drunk people, any of whom might be interested in stealing more than $10,000 dollars, and get the money safely into the giant vault.
I remember the very first run i made. The betting clerk looked at me, the 19 year old responsible for protecting both them and $10,000. I looked back at him through the mirrored aviators that I’d bought at a gas station for 5 bucks because I thought it was very very funny and good fake cop cosplay. My walkie hissed ominously.
“…Uh, so if someone tries to take the money, what are you going to do?” He asked.
“Well, I get paid 12 bucks an hour, so… nothing.” I responded. “How about you?”
We quickly arrived at an understanding.
Two of the guards from my training group got fired that summer for bringing in their own weapons, and at least one of them had both a butterfly knife and at least one shuruken. Many more dropped out as they discovered that they would not actually be doing Die Hard shit. As for me, I did literally nothing to prevent crime all summer, but I also halfheartedly cleared a path through the crowd at the front of a very sad “St. Patrick’s Day In July” parade, which made me enough of a success story that they actually called me unprompted to ask if I’d come back the next year… with one caveat.
See, the next year I returned as a weathered veteran with a spotless disciplinary record, so they gave me three hours of additional training to get a certification to become a peace officer. As a result, from ages 20-23 (when my license expired) I had the same legal powers of arrest as a police officer.
Me. They just gave me that.
In conclusion, if you’re a highly qualified team of heistmen looking to rob an entity that accumulates wealth by convincing drunk desperate people to give them their money and you pick a fucking casino when the racetrack is right there, you’re either thinking way too inside the box… or you have a healthy fear of shurukens I guess.
Only valid response to this post, everyone else can go home.
Uncountable hours of hobbyist studies of Astrophysics
Documentaries. Classes.
This. Is what finally gets me to see how
IMMENSE
Jupiter really is
It really
is like 10% of the way to being a Star
huh
It
looks like there’s enough material for a
whole additional planet after Mars, that’s just… being perpetually perturbed out of a proper accretion disk by Jupiter’s big fat fucking gravity well.
Huh.
So why are the red objects in a triangle? And how come the green clusters are at only two of the points?
Because of the interaction between Jupiter’s gravity and the Sun’s gravity, only certain orbits are stable. Specifically, orbital periods close to - but just a little longer or a little shorter than - Jupiter’s are unstable. This actually holds true to some extent for all the IAU-recognized planets, though it’s most obvious with Jupiter. The green clusters are known as the Trojans (called that because they were named after figures from the Trojan War - with two exceptions, those at the leading point are named after figures on the Greek side and those at the trailing point are named after figures on the Trojan side), which surround two of the five Lagrange Points, known as the L4 and L5 points, which are 60 degrees ahead and behind it. A diagram using the Earth-Moon system (not to scale):
The principle is the same for any system where the first object is much larger than the second object, with the same angular separations
Anything at one of those points will have a stable orbit equal in length to the Earth’s orbit. However, only the L4 and L5 are stable in the long term. Objects that are close to the L4 and L5 point will, over the long run, kind of circle around them, with an orbit that varies over time, being sometimes slightly shorter than and sometimes slightly longer than the second object, but averaging over the long run exactly the same, causing their angular distance from Jupiter to fluctuate over time, but always around 60 degrees. Because of Jupiter’s large mass, it has the most dramatic effect. A large number of asteroids have gotten caught in orbits around its L4 and L5 points. These are the ones that are marked in green on the above gif. Jupiter has over 10,000 total known asteroids between its L4 and L5 points, while most of the other planets have a few in theirs. Earth, for example, has two known asteroids in its L4 point, but none in its L5 point. Neptune has a total of 28 known asteroids between its L4 and L5 points. Mercury and Saturn are not known to have any. Theoretically, it might be possible in some other solar system for an actual planetary-mass object to be located in the L4 or L5 point of a larger Jovian, though no such system has been discovered to date
The red asteroids are known as the Hilda asteroids (named after their largest member, the asteroid 153 Hilda). Unlike the Trojans, their orbits are not in a 1:1 ratio, but rather, in a 3:2 ratio, that is, they orbit three times for every two of Jupiter’s orbits (on average). Their aphelion (furthest point from the Sun) approaches Jupiter’s orbit, but their orbits are such that those aphelions are reached when Jupiter is either 60 degrees ahead, 180 degrees, or 60 degrees behind - as their orbital period is 2/3 of Jupiter’s orbit, each time it reaches the aphelion, the angular separation between it and Jupiter is 120 degrees less - i.e., if the first time it is on the opposite side of the Sun from Jupiter, the second time it will be 60 degrees ahead, the third time it will be 60 degrees behind, and then repeating the fourth time. Hence, when you map out all of them, those at their furthest approach from the Sun - coming approximately to Jupiter’s orbit - are either 60 degrees behind Jupiter, 60 degrees ahead, or 180 away, and those that are at their closet point are between the Sun and Jupiter, 120 degrees ahead, or 120 degrees behind, with those at intermediate distances being at intermediate angles. So, each individual asteroid follows an elliptical orbit, but the sum total of all their positions creates a rough triangle which appears to orbit with Jupiter
Other orbits that are close to Jupiter’s, but not in those 1:1 or 2:3 ratios, don’t last long. They’ll either end up getting caught up in the 1:1 or 2:3 ratio, or end up getting flung out of those orbits ending up in significantly smaller or significantly larger orbits. Jupiter’s orbit also causes certain gaps in the asteroid belt around orbital periods that would be unstable with Jupiter’s influence
@injuries-in-dust That’s not actually the asteroid belt! The main asteroid belt is in a circular shape. A more complete, but non-animated, image:
The big white band is the main asteroid belt. The animated image above only shows the Jupiter Trojans and the Hildas, two specific groups of asteroids which are outside the asteroid belt itself
don’t forget we use descriptions like circle and triangle do describe these orbits as a matter of convenience for easy conceptualization – in actuality the sun itself is orbiting the center of our galaxy at roughly 450,000 miles per hour, so our solar system has orbits that are actually more like this:
No one did better than random chance, even though they only included people in the study who are experienced with astrology and stated that they expect themselves to do better than random chance
They gave every astrologer a set of 50 things about a person and 5 birth charts to choose from. They weren’t even coming up with the chart themselves!
After taking the test, most thought they nailed it. Zero out of 152 did better than 5 out of 12. None nailed it
Astrologers who rated themselves highly experienced (“world class experts”) did the same or worse as those who said they have limited experience. Both performed the same as random chance
Indigenous groups across the Americas had all encountered Europeans differently. But where other coastal groups such as the Haida or the Mi’kmaq had met white men who were well-fed and well-dressed, the Inuit frequently encountered their future colonizers as small parties on the edge of death.
“I’m sure it terrified people,” said Eber, 91, speaking to the National Post by phone from her Toronto home.
And it’s why, as many as six generations after the events of the Franklin Expedition, Eber was meeting Inuit still raised on stories of the two giant ships that came to the Arctic and discharged columns of death onto the ice.
Inuit nomads had come across streams of men that “didn’t seem to be right.” Maddened by scurvy, botulism or desperation, they were raving in a language the Inuit couldn’t understand. In one case, hunters came across two Franklin Expedition survivors who had been sleeping for days in the hollowed-out corpses of seals.
“They were unrecognizable they were so dirty,” Lena Kingmiatook, a resident of Taloyoak, told Eber.
Mark Tootiak, a stepson of Nicholas Qayutinuaq, related a story to Eber of a group of Inuit who had an early encounter with a small and “hairy” group of Franklin Expedition men evacuating south.
“Later … these Inuit heard that people had seen more white people, a lot more white people, dying,” he said. “They were seen carrying human meat.”
Even Eber’s translator, the late Tommy Anguttitauruq, recounted a goose hunting trip in which he had stumbled upon a Franklin Expedition skeleton still carrying a clay pipe.
By 1850, coves and beaches around King William Island were littered with the disturbing remnants of their advance: Scraps of clothing and camps still littered with their dead occupants. Decades later, researchers would confirm the Inuit accounts of cannibalism when they found bleached human bones with their flesh hacked clean.
“I’ve never in all my life seen any kind of spirit — I’ve heard the sounds they make, but I’ve never seen them with my own eyes,” said the old man who had gone out to investigate the Franklin survivors who had straggled into his camp that day on King William Island.
The figures’ skin was cold but it was not “cold as a fish,” concluded the man. Therefore, he reasoned, they were probably alive.
“They were beings but not Inuit,” he said, according to the account by shaman Nicholas Qayutinuaq.
The figures were too weak to be dangerous, so Inuit women tried to comfort the strangers by inviting them into their igloo.
But close contact only increased their alienness: The men were timid, untalkative and — despite their obvious starvation — they refused to eat.
The men spit out pieces of cooked seal offered to them. They rejected offers of soup. They grabbed jealous hold of their belongings when the Inuit offered to trade.
When the Inuit men returned to the camp from their hunt, they constructed an igloo for the strangers, built them a fire and even outfitted the shelter with three whole seals.
Then, after the white men had gone to sleep, the Inuit quickly packed up their belongings and fled by moonlight.
Whether the pale-skinned visitors were qallunaat or “Indians” — the group determined that staying too long around these “strange people” with iron knives could get them all killed.
“That night they got all their belongings together and took off towards the southwest,” Qayutinuaq told Dorothy Eber.
But the true horror of the encounter wouldn’t be revealed until several months later.
The Inuit had left in such a hurry that they had abandoned several belongings. When a small party went back to the camp to retrieve them, they found an igloo filled with corpses.
The seals were untouched. Instead, the men had eaten each other.
A postcode is good enough to locate an end user for generating location suggestions
A postcode will be in a single timezone
A postcode only has a single state
A postcode has no exclaves/enclaves
I would like you to meet 0872. Australia’s largest postcode (I think), covers 3 states, has three cut outs (Warbuton, Alpurrurulam, and Alice Springs), and even still some mail outside of this area is routed via 0872
Additional fallacies about postcodes:
A postcode can be treated as a number (0872 would become 872)
A postcode can be mapped to other geographic coding schemes like LGAs
A postcode can’t move or change
A postcode can be mapped to a geographical location (see e.g. defence force personnel codes, or 9999 postcode for “North Pole, VIC”)
Seven-character Buddhist scroll, by Kogetsu Sogan (1574-1643). After a poem by Tang-dynasty poet Liu Shang (12th century).
The original poem translates as ‘Since you left Mount Shunzan, I have no friend to play games with.’ In the original language this reflected a sense of loss, poignancy, but also acceptance.
Given a choice between a folly and a sacrament, one should always choose the folly—because we know a sacrament will not bring us closer to God and there’s always a chance that a folly will.
The Great Train Graveyard in Uyuni, Bolivia is a unique tourist attraction in addition to the famous salt flats and red lakes. The area is home to a collection of abandoned, vintage trains that were originally intended to expand the transportation network in the early 19th century. However, due to technical challenges and conflicts with local indigenous communities, the project was never completed. The trains were later used to transport minerals to port cities, but when the mineral resources depleted in the 1940s, the miners left and the trains were left to deteriorate in the desert. Over time, exposure to salty winds has caused the trains to corrode, creating the fascinating landscape of the Great Train Graveyard that exists today.
At its height in the 1990s, Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong housed about 50,000 people. Its population is unremarkable for small cities, but what set Kowloon apart from others of its size was its density. Spanning only 2.6 hectares, the tiny enclave contained 1,255,000 people per square kilometer, making it the densest city in the world.
Kowloon was built as a small military fort around the turn of the 20th century. When the Chinese and English governments abandoned it after World War II, the area attracted refugees and people in search of affordable housing. With no single architect, the urban center continued to grow as people stacked buildings on top of one another and tucked new structures in between existing ones to accommodate the growing population without expanding beyond the original fort’s border.
With only a small pocket of community space at the center, Kowloon quickly morphed into a labyrinth of shops, services, and apartments connected by narrow stairs and passageways through the buildings. Rather than navigate the city through alleys and streets, residents traversed the structures using slim corridors that always seemed to morph, an experience that caused many to refer to Kowloon as “a living organism.”
The city devolved into a slum with crime and poor living conditions and was razed in 1994. Before demolition, though, a team of Japanese researchers meticulously documented the architectural marvel, which had become a sort of cyberpunk icon that even inspired a gritty arcade as tribute.
Good evening, friends, let me tell you some Secrets on how to argue like (and with) assholes. I’m writing this because I keep running into a particular asshole, and I need to
stop engaging with them, and so this is an instruction sheet for myself as well as you guys.
First, try to avoid assholes; they don’t deserve your time and energy. But, if an Argument is unavoidable, here are a few tips on how to emerge unscathed.
Let go of the idea that you’re going to win.
You’re not gonna win. Nobody wins in an argument with an asshole. But, on the other hand, you can
make them lose. You can deprive them of their entertainment and their triumph.
How???
Do not present your side of this debate.
This is so counter-intuitive for most of us who believe in things like, oh, science, or
real facts, or the idea that real facts can be determined by science. Here’s a cool terrible thing about humans:
certainty has nothing to do with facts. And when people are
certain, that is when they become assholes.
When someone’s only goal is to win an argument, any real evidence or facts you give them is just ammunition for them to turn against you.
You will not convince them. So what should you be doing?
Destroy their arguments.
This is a thing of joy, because it’s what assholes are used to doing. They are, at heart, morons who don’t know how to construct, only how to destroy.
I used to be super emotional about arguments like this. I couldn’t think of anything to say while the other person ranted on about their horrifying bigotry. Now I’m a lawyer, and I’ve learned to weaponize my essentially nitpicky nature. For money.
So here are some easy tactics you can remember and deploy:
-
Make them define the words they use.Nitpick the definitions.
-
Turn questions back on them.If they ask you “why do you believe x”, ask them why they believe y. If they pull some “I asked first” shit, ask them why they’re afraid to defend their beliefs.
-
Call them emotional. If possible, pick out specific emotions. This is especially devastating when you’re debating a man, as he will get more emotional as a result.
-
“Why is that funny? I don’t get it.”Making people explain mean jokes can be a delight; they just wilt the more you question them about the underlying assumptions.
-
Laugh at any especially dumb shit.Like they use some slogan or catchphrase that’s obviously untrue, due to science, or essentially ridiculous, like “we’ve made America great again,” and you just blurt out laughing. If they get mad, tell them – oh, so sorry, I’ll shut up, I’m giving you the floor to talk about your beliefs. I’m respecting you.
This is a goddamn power move. It gives you the high ground, and also the implied control over the situation. The floor belongs to
you, but you are
yielding it to someone because you
can.
-
If they make an awkward exit, let them.Especially if they call the discussion “political.” It means they’re feeling attacked. Graciously allow them to retreat with their tail between their legs. If they storm off, allow them to do that too. Congratulations; you’ve ended the argument and you don’t have to deal with it anymore.
Basically:
hand the asshole a shovel, and let ‘em dig.Relieve yourself of the burden to convince them they are wrong, and just sour their fun instead.
–
Additionally, these are the tactics that assholes use, consciously or subconsciously, all the time. Recognize them. Once you know what they are, you can become immune to the intimidation and belittling tactics.
Good luck.
Good to know.
added benefit, doing this a few times makes it way easier to recognize when people are just doing this to you (which is a lot because because this is how assholes argue and there are a lot of assholes)
and then you get to be like, oh, this isn’t an argument, doing these things instead of having a good faith conversation is just this asshole’s hobby and it stops having the same kind of effect on you.
Once you get used to it, you just do this back at assholes who are doing this, and because you know the behavior pattern and they usually aren’t self aware enough to understand that this is what they are doing, they don’t catch you at it.
Then they pour a lot of energy into it but you don’t even really have to pay attention. Right? Like you can just do your own thing barely paying attention while they pitch their whole wind up, notice they said the word “regulate” and make them define it, reverse a couple questions, wait for them to get wound up about it and tell them they’re being too emotional..and the whole thing becomes this
This was my first time working with leather because I got a burning desire for a bag shaped like a horseshoe crab. It has two zippered compartments, and an adjustable strap so it can be worn at my side as a cross-body bag or on my back more like a backpack.
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