I'm so glad I live in a world where there's Archive of Our Own
Tshirt idea I had
Was talking with one of my very lesbian friends about body dysmorphia and how you can look at a fucking gorgeous woman who has a lot of the same qualities as yourself and not realize that the complement also applies to yourself. I asked her if she'd been watching Dancing With The Stars this season and she said no.
So i showed her a picture of Ilona Maher from this week's episode.
Her response:
"Thigh. Thigh. Thigh. Thigh. Thigh."
So anyway, the takeaway here is that one person's 'too masculine' is another person's 'thigh.'
AGATHA HARKNESS and RIO VIDAL in Agatha All Along (2024) - 1.04
it’s so important to follow people on tumblr who watch tv shows that you do not watch because sometimes they will put gifsets of beautiful women on your dash and you get to look at them
So! This is a perfect case study in situations where you should be wary of misinformation.
Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?
The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!
This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.
Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:
- Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or
- Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.
The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.
The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).
Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.
So yeah, there's actually quite a lot of places that would like these. Lots of people currently breathing in terrible quality air would much rather have their boring city benches replaced with really fucking cool algae tanks that clean the air and can be used to help create + sustain future green spaces in cities. I dunno about you, but I'd take that over a dumb metal bench any day. Put these at every bus stop and I'd be delighted.
can ppl pls reblog this version
Then this is a marketing failure. That tweet up there should read "Scientists create Liquid Trees: a tankful of water and micro-algae that can produce oxygen where trees can't thrive."
Yes, critical thinking regarding media literacy is an important skill, but (like a tree!) that needs to grow and be developed before it can be expected to function.
Right now, we can and should be calling out the media for how it often at best fails to convey the actual benefits of the new thing it's talking about, and at worst deliberately portrays the new thing as useless or scary to use it as clickbait.
Part of media literacy is learning that there's text after the headline.
Also, it's not a marketing failure because "Yup That Exists" isn't supposed to be marketing, it's a random Twitter account posting weird stuff someone found.
Part of media literacy and reading comprehension in general is understanding the purpose, author, and intended audience of what you're reading! I see this specific mistake so often, where people base their criticisms on the baseless assumption that whatever they read about something was written or posted by someone who had some actual connection to it. Some people don't have a duty to make a case for something because that isn't their job in the first place! They probably have a similar amount of information to you!
They’re also shooting for 100% renewable plastic sources by 2030! All of the soft plant/leaf elements in sets right now and going forward are made out of bioplastic made from sugarcane, and they’re working on getting the regular hard plastic bricks out of that, too.
They’ve done it, actually! The full bricks are in the prototype stage now, and are expected to be 100% biodegradable without the need for a commercial compost facility. It’s very cool. Right now they’re testing the durability and playability of the bricks and seeing what needs to be revised/reworked on their final model.
So its that easy huh
Of course it is
Actually, this isn’t “easy” and is huge news. You see, Lego is absolutely meticulous about their quality control. Their standards for manufacturing are stupidly high, as are their safety requirements. You know that distinctive “click” when you pop two Lego bricks apart? They engineered that. That sound is so distinctive that it can be used to tell genuine Lego bricks from counterfeits and it’s a sound that would be based on shape and material.
Furthermore, one of the hard requirements for a Lego brick is that it must be compatible with any other Lego brick. If I buy a set today and pull a set from the 1980s? Those bricks would fit together perfectly. This requires a huge amount of precision engineering and controls on manufacturing quality. (I can’t remember the source, but I’ve at least heard that once the brick molds wear to a certain point, they’re pulled from the line and either melted down or turned into construction material for Lego HQ. Point being, no one is getting their hands on a worn Lego mold)
Recycled and non-petroleum plastics are different from other plastic. The chemistry is different. The timing and process to use them is different. This has been a reason why more companies haven’t moved to them, because there’s a drop in quality for material (so they claim).
What Lego just did is completely obliterate that argument. The corporation with some of the strictest quality control requirements for plastic just kicked the basic foundation of the “bad quality” argument out from under it, because if they feel confident enough to guarantee the same experience as using a brick from over 40 years ago, if they are confident enough that they can meet their own metrics at a huge industrial scale….
Nobody else has any excuse.
GLORIOUS NERDERY Lego edition
The world was on f i r e And no one could save me but you.
are you fucking serious