A few of the many beautiful Kay Nielsen illustrations for East of the Sun and West of the Moon (1914), a book of Norwegian fairytales. See more illustrations, and read the stories, here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/east-of-the-sun-and-west-of-the-moon-illustrated-by-kay-nielsen-1922-edition
Lots of people online believe in a mythical political system called “authoritarianism but Good This Time We Promise!”
There's a subset that gets even wilder and goes "authoritarianism and It's Still Bad For Everyone But Me But You Should Still Support It".
Much of human history has been trial runs (and experiments without proper control groups) for finding the least worst system of organizing/managing large groups of humans.
How are we doing so far?
obsessed with how fixable society is, on a structural level.
obsessed with how all you need to do is throw money at public education and eliminate most standardized testing and you will start getting smarter, more engaged, kinder adults. obsessed with how giving people safe housing, reliable access to good food, and decent wages dramatically reduces drug overdoses and gun violence. obsessed with how much people actually want to get together and fix infrastructure, invent new ways of helping each other, and create global ways of living sustainably once you give them livable pay to do so. obsessed with how tracking diseases, developing medicines, and improving public health becomes so much easier when you just make healthcare free at point of use.
obsessed with how easy it all becomes, if we can just figure out how to wrench the wealth out of the hands of the hoarders.
i've lived in four different cities in my adult life and talked to literally tens of thousands of people about politics and the change they want to see in the world and the overwhelming majority of them wanted life to be better, happier, easier for everyone, and dreamed of that world. the only people who didn't think that way were A) really obviously in need of mental/medical care, or B) rich.
wanting universal free healthcare, well-funded public education, and social support for all people is the most unbelievably normie opinion that exists, even among people who have lots of bad or misguided opinions about other things. when you feel alone, know that the reason you feel that way is billions of dollars are being spent to obscure the fact that you are in the majority.
In Prince's funky name, amen.
Millennial here. All the above and:
Please send me the training or tutorial in a written format with maybe some screenshots if necessary. I don't want a video tutorial. I don't want to waste time trying to scroll to the exact moment in the instructions that I need and then have to pause and replay it because I missed the .01 seconds of actually relevant information.
Please. Text. Maybe some images for clarification. I can read. I promise.
Skimmable, SEARCHABLE instructions. If they're long, there should be a hyperlinked table of contents.
Shout out to all the hard work of people who put information into coherent text for other people to read, skim, search, and absorb. Thank you!
And thank you to the people who translate that valuable information into a variety of languages!
I was recently reminded of this and it's just as funny now as it was then.
Never not amazed at the extremes people will go to in search for a new medium for art
I came across this diagram and found it really funny, I think because it's like ... alright, so gender is complicated, right? The common social conception is that there are two categories, male and female, and then you add in this "spectrum" idea where male and female are just on opposite sides, and you're either one direction or the other.
And someone saw this and said "actually, this is wrong!" but their fix for it is just ... adding on more axes? Like "ah yes, the problem is that they put male on one side and female on the other, it's actually two different things, and you can be either more or less male, a real and coherent thing, or more or less female, also a real and coherent thing, and then a third, unlabeled thing, which is assuredly also real and coherent".
It's like watching someone come this close to rejecting the categories, then they decided to just make a more complicated version of it where you can pin things into place with precise coordinates.
When you want to reject the systems, but you still believe in charts so so much.
I'm enjoying how much the second depiction looks like a clown wig.
I hope that was deliberate.
you can’t kill yourself, the music is about to switch from 4/4 to 6/8. the clarinets are just about to come in bro you can’t miss that
someone: prohibition in the united states was largely ineffective, cost millions, tried to force a religious belief on the entire country, only ever resulted in the increase in consumption of alcohol, as well as the increase in police violence, and ultimately failed
people: okay yeah that’s true
someone: the war on drugs is the exact same thing except this time because of the militarization of the police and private prison interests, is much, much more deadly and specifically exists to justify and widely reinstate slavery within the united states
people: what? but drugs are #bad, and we can’t let people use them. obviously this is the only way to deal with this situation
The effort to squash drugs and alcohol by restricting supply has been a multi-decade failure. What would it look like if we tried to lower demand?
[Link]
Under the "has cleared its orbital neighborhood" and "fuses hydrogen into helium" definitions, thanks to human activities Earth technically no longer qualifies as a planet but DOES count as a star.
people are really fucking clueless about generative ai huh? you should absolutely not be using it for any sort of fact checking no matter how convenient. it does not operate in a way that guarantees factual information. its goal is not to deliver you the truth but deliver something coherent based on a given data set which may or may not include factual information. both the idolization of ai and fearmongering of it seem lost on what it is actually capable of doing
Remember what generative "AI" does, kids: it GENERATES. That means it generates answers to questions based on whatever garbage has been fed into it. Not "goes and looks up the answer." Not "already studied and knows everything." It's just reaching into its sack of word salad and dumping a pile on your desk. Sure, maybe the words fit together to form sentences, but that doesn't make it correct.
a generative AI search result vs the exact article it is citing. the website it scrambled that information from also just happens to include info on winged roaches. gisborne cockroaches are completely wingless. even if it's pulling info straight from one reliable source, there is every chance it'll mash up that info into something false.
If you need a visual, here’s how poorly AI performed when asked to create citations for news articles. And that’s just for citations, imagine what it’s doing when you ask it more complex questions and tasks.
Gen AI operates on exactly the same principle as autocorrect: which word (or letter) is statistically likely to come next?
Gen AI does not understand the difference between fact and fiction. It does not understand the difference between a reliable source and ten-year-old Yahoo Answers. It can only measure probability of word order.
it really is insane how little you hear about "america has the world's highest prison population by such a significant margin that it would be seen as excessively over-the-top if it was used in fiction"
before you say "4% isn't that big of a difference between the US and China"
for anyone bad at math 1.4 billion divided by 340 million is about 4. we have a fourth the population of china but a higher prison population and a higher incarceration rate by far. this is just widely publicly available information that you're supposed to just accept. it's not supposed to make you go insane.
The US has the largest prison population AND the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world. The US is home to 4.2% of the world's population but 20% of its incarcerated population. More than 0.6% of the US population is incarcerated.
Men make up 93% of the US prison population, but despite this, the US accounts for 30% of the GLOBAL population of incarcerated women.
Housing insecurity is the most significant predictor of incarceration with 22% of state prisoners experiencing it shortly before incarceration.
12% of state prisoners in the US were unhoused before their 16th birthday.
68% of US state prisoners were first incarcerated before their 16th birthday.
More than half of people in prisons and jails in the US have a mental illness.
Cognitive learning disabilities occur in state prisons at nearly 500% the national rate.
[all data sourced or derived from the Prison Policy Initiative]
Today an elderly patient's daughter asked if I could guarantee that the blood I might need to give to the patient (in case the patient is actively bleeding out during the surgery, which had a pretty high chance of happening) is from a donor who hadn't been vaccinated against COVID.
Not gonna lie, I needed a moment to recover from that
There's been hesitation prior to patients getting bone marrow transplants that didn't exist before.
Typically you get all your childhood vaccines given to you again with new bone marrow.
When patients decline (still a tiny minority), some services then have to say well, we can't offer this too you, because the risk of dying is high and the resource is so finite. But it's the reality now.
I just can't.
We are practicing medicine in a country of cromagnons.
I'm in a local moms group on Facebook, and I've seen requests for donor breast milk from tobacco-free, alcohol-free, and vaccine-free donors. The first two are extremely common, basically standard. The third shows a profound lack of understanding of how vaccines work. The baby gets all the benefits! None of the risks!
the number of spacecraft failures recently has been absolutely insane and it all comes down to tech bros barging into the industry going "it's not that hard wtf is nasa so bad" and then completely skipping out on any testing
Recently, a privately funded asteroid mission failed immediately after launch. Here are some choice excerpts from the company's blog post about it:
they cost that much because they do integration testing
.....by skipping integration testing
"skipping integration testing was the right move actually"
come fucking on.
AND YOU FUCKING LAUNCHED ANYWAYS
it failed immediately you dipshits
or you could. i don't know. do integration testing?
Hey, Fuckchop: If you did it for 10% but you have to do it 10 times? You fucking failed AND didn’t save any goddamn money.
Even if you had the money to throw away, why would you launch with known problems? What are you possibly learning from this? Were they just hoping those wouldn't matter? "Yeah, whoops, blew up an expensive payload because we figured it was worth rolling the dice on problems we already knew about instead of waiting for a new launch window!"
Launching-as-part-of-iterative-design only makes sense for a kid's model rocket you don't have other testing methods for. Or for things that don't explode.
Launching substandard low-cost products to low earth orbit is a decent way to make a lot of improvements fast. I say this as someone who has directly designed/built/flown over 700 smallsats at a couple different startups. New teams don't realize how difficult troubleshooting in space is until they've done it at least once (or in Planets case.... A half dozen times). But the trick is to do it in low earth orbit which is relatively benign (fuck you solar maximum) and decently accessible for communication.
The problem is this gives these idiots the idea that they can apply the same rapid design to things that are multiple orders of magnitude more difficult. Anything that requires being outside earths atmosphere???? Fuck me man. It's awful.
I'm landing a sensor on the moon next year and every fucking week I have to argue with the CTO that no, we cannot skip this environmental test. Why? Well the last three tests revealed fundamental flaws in our understanding of the expected thermal repercussions of the estimated lunar environment. This next test, which will be off actual telemetry data from a comparable location currently on the moon is also non-negotiable. And it has to happen on the flight model so if we find a big fuck up we have a chance to fix it before delivery.
No it cannot be fixed after shipping by "pushing software".
As someone who has built crewed vehicles under the NASA safety system and built uncrewed NASA instruments there are things I'm willing to be a little looseygoosey with in build-fast-break-things mentality of low earth orbit. I'm not willing to take that risk anything higher than MEO because it's a waste of their money and my time.
