[ohpannoinno]

(1) Hello everyone. I'm from Ukraine. Please help spread the information about African and Nigerian students in Ukraine. #AfricansinUkraine

I read from @ nzekiev on twitter that the day before yesterday it was very hard for Africans to get on any train in Kyiv, they were letting them in the last, many managed to get in only coz they started pushing African women into the train so they had to allow everyone in. Before that if they managed to get on the train they were sent back outside with the phrase "Ukrainians first", but nobody was checking anyone's passports.

Today, February 27, he says the Ukrainian soldiers at the Polish border were holding them at gunpoint if they crossed the border before Ukrainians. These are students, they can't be fighting this war!!! Other people of color share on twitter that it's harder for them to cross the border, a Nigerian medical student told @ stephheharty they were told Ukrainians go first and were sent to the back of the queue by Ukrainian soldiers on Polish border.

@ Damilare_arah shared a video where Ukrainian soldiers block Africans from getting on trains. (https://twitter.com/Damilare_arah/status/1497654141350522880?t=rkNx-B9TffKopCRtfgZodA&s=19)

I can't figure out how to download videos from Twitter so I'm attaching screenshots. (https://twitter.com/Damilare_arah/status/1497855205098106880?t=gi_dUgx8nFI36KqlH-CeEA&s=19) (https://twitter.com/nzekiev/status/1497805019311218689?t=hz-3gS0hFxwAZQddLZI85w&s=19)

We must help. They can't be denied shelter while every other white Ukrainian gets to cross the border right before their eyes. @ chylady and @ Damilare_arah share all the important information for Africans and Nigerians on where to find help and also donations.

@ korrinesky is actively sharing all the information. This thread increases to this day and time:

They also have a Telegram chat for African and Caribbean students who are in Lviv but I can't seem to be able to copy the link directly so I'm sending the link to the tweet:

Use the hashtag #AfricansinUkraine and mentions @UN @RedCross @UNESCO @wateraid @amnesty @gatesfoundation @FordFoundation @ActionAid @Oxfam on twitter.

[engineering]

Open Sourcing Kanvas: Tumblr’s Media Editor and Camera

Today, Tumblr is releasing Kanvas, the Media Editor and Camera used in the Tumblr iOS app, as open-source!

https://github.com/tumblr/kanvas-ios

Kanvas is an open-source iOS library for adding effects, drawings, text, stickers, and making GIFs from existing media or the camera. It’s used by Tumblr for its camera, media editor, GIF maker, and media posting tool, and WordPress will be using it in the future too!

The project is licensed under the Mozilla Public License v2. Check out the Projects tab on GitHub for an idea of what we’re working on, and how you can contribute. The README is a good place to see Kanvas in action and add it to your own app. And if you’re interested, follow the project, as we’ll be posting more documentation about how Kanvas work and the history of the project.

Thanks to everyone who’s contributed to Kanvas over the years, and we’re excited to see what this new open-source & WordPress chapter brings.

[prokopetz]

At times I suspect that a lot of discussion about why machine learning sucks is ignoring the elephant in the room, insofar as when I dig into the particulars of how machine learning tends to fail, some of those failure modes start to look awfully familiar.

What does an indifferent student do when faced with a series of quizzes that don’t seem to relate to anything, set by an evaluator who provides no feedback beyond marking answers right or wrong?

They’ll memorise, learning to identify particular types of questions and regurgitate the expected answers on demand, without developing any real understanding of what they’re talking about.

They’ll bullshit and guess, because the penalty for being wrong is no worse than the penalty for not answering at all, and a bullshit answer may score partial credit by accident.

They’ll come up with wild generalisations about the subject matter whose foundational reasoning is utter nonsense, but which happens to yield mostly correct answers, most of the time, within the narrow domain of what’s being tested for.

They’ll game the system, identifying patterns and flaws in the way the material is presented that allow correct – or at least correct-ish – answers to be derived independently what’s actually being asked for. (e.g., noticing that the same letter is never the answer twice in a row on a multiple-choice exam, or that an “all of the above” option is only included when it is all of the above, etc.)

Like, these aren’t failure modes of machine learning. They’re just failure modes of learning.

Maybe the real problem we need to overcome before we can really tackle machine learning in any constructive way is the fact that our pedagogy objectively sucks, is what I mean to say.

[empressofdiamonds]

If you're at your low/lowest...

Have some compassion for yourself you're at a low point but it doesn't means you're not worthy of love, and hope. You know you can do better, you swayed off the track, which happens actually pretty frequently. The good thing is that you got lots of resources, YouTube videos for improvement, Tumblr posts, Pinterest pins, etc. You got a wealth of knowledge about how to get outta this trap, it's just a matter of trying different things until you find the right thing that clicks perfectly for you.

Self-improvement is complex, not only one factor gonna better your life it's a bunch of smaller habits that compound, you gotta find a better lifestyle and mindset that fits better you and makes you feel better about yourself and happy.

Every choice you do is buliding the future self you'll be, it's every small choice that is a expression of self-love or self-hate, and the more you express to yourself self-love everything just plainly goes better. You drink water to feel good because you love you, you eat good foods because you want every cell of your being to be well nourished so you feel good. You eat delicious food because delicious food makes your brain go all happy because you love yourself. You sleep because it just freaking feels good. That's DOPE.

Start practicing that act of self-love via good actions now, it just doesn't needs to be grand, hell it should never be.

Self-improvement is a lifelong journey, it has its downs and ups, what matters is how you act facing this journey, are you gonna get stuck on the lows forever and suffer? Or are you going to try new things there and there, to see what happens and have fun along this experimentation?

[takerfoxx]

WTF is an NTF? No matter how many times I’ve had it explained to me, it still makes no sense. The best I can figure that it’s a form of cryptocurrency with personalized artwork made on a really environmentally unfriendly material being sold for ridiculous prices just so suckers can get unique furry artz

[erinptah-admin]

Wwwwwelp, let me take a shot at it. *cracks knuckles*

Okay, so: you know how there are people who collect currency (the traditional, paper-and-coins type)?

And for some people, the specific thing they collect is “bills with unusual serial numbers”:

https://rarest.org/stuff/dollar-bills

So if you find a $1 bill with a serial number like “010101010″, a collector might be willing to pay $50 for that bill.

In general, currency is “fungible”, which just means interchangeable. If I loan you a $1 bill today, and you pay me back tomorrow with a different $1 bill, same difference, that’s an equal exchange.

But if you find a person who specifically thinks Bills With Weird Serial Numbers are a neat thing they like having – they’ll pay extra for the weird $1 bill. And they wouldn’t be willing to swap it for some other $1 bill with just any non-remarkable serial number. It is a Non-Fungible Bill.

…to the collector, anyway. Not to anybody else! You can’t take it to the grocery store and say “please give me $50 worth of groceries for this $1 bill because the serial number is interesting.”

(Although, hey…if you had a way to convince lots of people that (a) all of them should turn into collectors and (b) every single random serial number is a special one they should pay extra for…that sure would be a way to make a lot of money, huh?)

Non-Fungible Tokens are the same idea, but with cryptocurrency.

Bitcoins have ID numbers. (Same with any other crypto token – I’ll just use Bitcoin as our example here.) If you can find a collector who likes Bitcoins with weird ID numbers, maybe they’ll pay you 50 Bitcoin for it?

…okay, it turned out nobody cares about Bitcoin ID numbers for their own sake.

But! The ID can be used in a URL.

This is where the art comes in.

You upload an image to that URL. Then you tell people “look, if you buy this token from me, it’s like you’re buying the image! Art collections are fun and interesting, right? Someone give me 50 Bitcoins now.”

Note that the file doesn’t need to be personalized, or unique, or anything like that:

You can upload literally any file at that URL

You can upload someone else’s art

You could upload the same file to 20 different URLs, and sell 20 different NFTs of the same art

You could load the page for a token someone else owns, download the file, and directly re-upload it to the page for a token you own

The whole server could go down, and the URL from your token could be a 404 error for the rest of forever

So if you’re thinking “this sounds like a stupid deal that makes no sense” – you’re right! You are understanding the situation perfectly. This is total stupid nonsense. For the buyer.

For the person who owns some Bitcoins, and would like an easy way to turn them into even more Bitcoins? This is a fantastic racket.

Pay me a ton of tokens – or, preferably, the US$ equivalent of tons of tokens – for this single token I have! It’s totally actually worth that much, I promise.

Also, go ahead and Venmo me $50 for every random $1 bill in my wallet. This is a great deal for you.

And if you believe all that…I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Sidenote: the “environmentally unfriendly” part isn’t about material, it’s about energy. Producing and exchanging cryptocurrency takes an obscene amount of computing power, which uses an obscene amount of electricity. And it’s not a special thing about NFTs – it’s how all cryptocurrency works.

(A comparison I saw recently is, at the current rate, “people mining Bitcoin” for 1 day uses about the same amount of energy as “powering every commercial building in the United States” for 2 months.)

Sidenote 2: pretty sure the reason so much NFT art is ugly is, most of the Actual Artists have thought about it for 5 seconds and realized it’s a big racket. (Or been warned off it by other Actual Artists.) And the people who want to buy Actual Art are commissioning the artists directly, same as always.

So the people left in the NFT-buying scene are mostly people who…don’t care about the art quality at all. They just want in on the hype.

[trixxtersrat]

This is an absolutely amazing explanation! But it leaves me with another question, how does “mining” for cryptocurrency use more energy than normal internet use?

[erinptah-admin]

Whoo boy, let’s dive into this one…

Short answer: because it was designed that way. On purpose.

Long answer: for a currency to have any useful value, the amount and production has to be limited somehow.

(Which makes sense, right? If we tried to pay people in leaves, nobody would go to work for 15 leaves an hour, not when they could go for a hike and pick 15 leaves off the trees in 15 seconds.)

Precious metals – gold, silver, copper – have been popular for all of recorded history, because the limiting factor is “this material is physically difficult to dig out of the ground.”

With US dollars, the limit is part “bills are printed with complicated techniques that you need special equipment to pull off” and part “it’s illegal to for anyone except the government to print new dollars, and we will take you to jail if we catch you at it.”

With cryptocurrency, it’s all digital, so there’s no naturally-rare mineral involved. And it’s decentralized, so nobody has the authority to claim “we are the Bitcoin Police and we can take you to jail if you do this wrong.”

If you want it to work, you have to come up with some artificial limit, and then build that directly into the base code.

I’m not any kind of expert in the technical details here, so please nobody get too picky about it…but the general idea is, the blockchain will only spit out a new coin in response to a computer running calculations.

And for every new coin, it demands more calculations than the last one.

If you could still get a new Bitcoin by, say, “not using the internet for a day, have your computer use that power for mining instead,” then nobody would spend thousands of dollars to exchange for one Bitcoin, right? Anybody who wanted one would just take a day off Tumblr to mine it themselves.

Basically, there’s no reason to buy a Bitcoin for a dramatically higher price than it would cost you to mine a Bitcoin.

And the mining process keeps requiring more power, so:

First you can’t do it with just spare processing power from your main device, you need to buy a new one that’s fully dedicated to mining if you want to keep up

The extra power usage is enough to put a notable spike in your electric bill

One computer won’t do it anymore, you need two

Then four

Then eight

You have a warehouse full of computers

You have the electric bill that it takes to power a warehouse full of computers

Plus the storage rental costs of the warehouse space

The internet bill to keep all your computers in touch with the blockchain

The air-conditioning bill that it takes to keep the warehouse from just flat-out melting

Ongoing maintenance costs

Replacement parts

Not just any parts, you are buying up high-quality graphics cards and computer chips that can do the fastest processing

So much that it’s contributing to a global computer-chip shortage (this is not an exaggeration; Wall Street Journal source, Tech Republic source)

And the power demands are so high that defunct power plants are being re-activated to fill them (also not an exaggeration; Ars Technica source)

And the processing requirements just keep going up and up and up….

When the exchange rate for Bitcoin is at $10,000, that implies “the cost of the equipment, maintenance, and power bills to mint 1 Bitcoin is now so high that people would rather pay $10,000 cash than deal with it.”

…okay, this is a little oversimplified – there’s also gambling and speculating involved. Say, you think oil prices are about to go up, maybe you pay a little more than the current rate, figuring the power costs of mining are about to get more expensive and you’ll come out ahead. Or say Elon Musk said something mean about a coin you have, maybe you sell all your tokens for a lower price, figuring it’s better to get out now than wait for it to crash even farther.

But you can see how they’re generally connected. Nobody would pay around $10,000 if the production cost was around $10.

One more link (which explains some of the same things in different words, in case mine aren’t working for everyone):

Here Is The Article You Can Send To People When They Say “But The Environmental Issues With Cryptoart Will Be Solved Soon, Right?”

And, finally, let’s tie this back to NFTs:

Another thing you need for your currency to work: it has to be useful for something other than “gambling on the price.”

It can’t just be something you endlessly swap for other currencies and hope the exchange rate works in your favor! There have to be places that say “we will take this in exchange for Tangible Goods And Services.”

Bitcoin has this, at least a little bit. Most places aren’t lining up to accept it, but it’s been around long enough to build up some credibility, so there are a few.

If I started a new cryptocurrency tomorrow where the cost of mining the first token was $10K, nobody would bother. Because it has no credibility, no staying power, no way to ever convert that currency into actual stuff.

To be clear, people are launching new cryptocurrencies all the time.

Most of them aren’t even trying to be useful, they’re just pump-and-dump schemes. Meaning the founders pump up people’s interest with “ScamToken will be the next Bitcoin, don’t miss this amazing opportunity, convert your $$$ into ScamToken now while it’s cheap!” Then they dump all their tokens, selling them to all the people they’ve convinced to buy. It isn’t long before the hype fades, the cold reality of “we can’t do anything with this” sets in, and the buyers are left with wallets full of tokens nobody new will buy, while the founders walk away with the $$$.

But some people are playing a longer game. They don’t want their currency to get “an afternoon’s worth of excitement from hyped-up crypto speculators” and then immediately flop. They want it to be useful for actually buying something, so it has a legitimate basis for getting some actual, stable value in the long run.

Or, failing that…they want it to appear to be useful for buying something. So it looks more credible. So the excitement lasts longer. So you reach outside the circle of “people who follow crypto for its own sake” and get the attention of “people who don’t care about crypto at all, but who do care about whatever Something you’ve convinced them your token will buy.”

So, hey: how big, do you think, is the market of people who care about digital art?

Now start paying attention to how many press releases for “an amazing opportunity to buy some cool new Non-Fungible Tokens” include “by the way, the specific Tokens we’re selling are from a cryptocurrency you’ve never heard of, let alone bought.”

[lastvalyrian]

This explanation is fairly concise and still gets to the point. I don’t think you could cover all of these facets that are relevant to the topic with meaningfully less text. And the post is still that long.

That’s another aspect of the crypto/NFT scam: you need to understand how cryptography and economics works and all the connecting parts between them. If someone levels a critique against them, crypto bros can always come out of the woodwork with another level of this whole construct and likely catch the complainer off guard with something they don’t know about or aren’t confident in.

The thing is though, most crypto bros are marks and also don’t understand how this works, instead they are psychologically committed to think that crypto is great because otherwise they lost a house worth of money for nothing but an ugly lion picture. The rest of them are true scammers, know exactly how this works, and rely on the complexity of it all to keep their marks in the dark.

That’s really dangerous! Almost nobody knows how this works! Legislators don’t know how crypto works, these people still don’t understand how facebook could possibly make money! And we expect them to regulate it?

It’s even worse though. Crypto exchanges are currently going mainstream, and wallstreet people are thinking about expanding their portfolios into crypto as well. I mean, why not? Bullshit investment instruments that serve no real purpose, that no normal person can understand and that are woefully underregulated is their whole deal! As soon as that happens the current crypto bro scammers will probably be edged out by the entrenched scam industry, i.e. the international financial sector.

Once that happens, it will practically be impossible to regulate crypto in any way. If finance has a tool to make money off, it will use its considerable influence over the political system that is stays that way.

That’s why I think it’s so important to make fun of crypto and NFTs now. It’s not just because it’s fun to laugh at those idiots (even though it really is fun). The narrative on crypto still hasn’t solidified. The average person has basically only heard of it and probably thinks it’s some kind of new techy invention that will revolutionise the economy (just like previous techy inventions that revolutionised the economy - at least that’s what the story is) and that some people got really rich off it. That might be good, right?

If instead the prevalent association with the term NFT is some losers with purple lion icons losing their shit because they paid 200k for an ugly image and then someone downloaded it from twitter, the whole “industry” suddenly loses a lot of its cool factor.

[witwitch-deactivated20160508]

we probably lost a lot of medical knowledge during the witch hunts because of how many mid wives were persecuted, and how men took over the field of medicine. I bet a few hundred years ago a mid wife might actually have some kind of knowledge about conditions that affect women exclusively which we still haven’t bothered to research in our modern society.

[victoriassecretpolice-deactivat]

ok now I’m fucking mad

[vaervaf-deactivated20160101]

how many got killed cuz of witch hunts seems like youd have to kill a lot

[00000000000000000000000000000-d]

“It is estimated that at least 1, 000 were executed in England, and the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish were even fiercer in their purges. It is hard to arrive at a figure for the whole of the Continent and the British Isles, but the most responsible estimate would seem to be 9 million. It may well, some authorities contend, have been more. Nine million seems almost moderate when one realizes that The Blessed Reichhelm of Schongan at the end of the 13th century computed the number of the Devil-driven to be 1,758,064,176. A conservative, Jean Weir, physician to the Duke of Cleves, estimated the number to be only 7,409,127. The ratio of women to men executed has been variously estimated at 20 to 1 and 100 to 1. Witchcraft was a woman’s crime.

    Men were, not surprisingly, most often the bewitched. Subject to women’s evil designs, they were terrified victims. Those men who were convicted of witchcraft were often family of convicted women witches, or were in positions of civil power, or had political ambitions which conflicted with those of the Church, a monarch, or a local dignitary. Men were protected from becoming witches not only by virtue of superior intellect and faith, but because Jesus Christ, phallic divinity, died “to preserve the male sex from so great a crime: since He was willing to be born and to die for us, therefore He has granted to men this privilege. ” Christ died literally for men and left women to fend with the Devil themselves.” (pg 129-130) Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin 

“The witches used drugs like belladonna and aconite, organic amphetamines, and hallucinogenics. They also pioneered the development of analgesics. They performed abortions, provided all medical help for births, were consulted in cases of impotence which they treated with herbs and hypnotism, and were the first practitioners of euthanasia. Since the Church enforced the curse of Eve by refusing to permit any alleviation of the pain of childbirth, it was left to the witches to lessen pain and mortality as best they could. It was especially as midwives that these learned women offended the Church, for, as Sprenger and Kramer wrote, “No one does more harm to the Catholic Faith than mid wives. ” The Catholic objection to abortion centered specifically on the biblical curse which made childbearing a painful punishment —it did not have to do with the “right to life” of the unborn fetus. It was also said that midwives were able to remove labor pains from the woman and transfer those pains to her husband—clearly in violation of divine injunction and intention both.” (pg 139-140) Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin 

“The magic of the witches was an imposing catalogue of medical skills concerning reproductive and psychological processes, a sophisticated knowledge of telepathy, auto- and hetero-suggestion, hypnotism, and mood-controlling drugs. Women knew the medicinal nature of herbs and developed formulae for using them. The women who were faithful to the pagan cults developed the science of organic medicine, using vegetation, before there was any notion of the profession of medicine. Paracelsus, the most famous physician of the Middle Ages, claimed that everything he knew he had learned from “the good women.” (pg 140)  Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin

****************get the PDF here *********************

Bolded sections are by me. Honestly I don’t think I need to explain much. We lost some of the most important women in the world, who were the pioneers of medicine for a “curse of eve”.  Basically saying if you relieve another woman’s pain we’re going to call you a witch and kill you “in the name of god” because having a child is punishment upon women and relieving their pain is illegal because this book written by men told me so.

Also check out the part where men can’t be witches because jesus and his “phallic divinity” “preserve the male sex”. 

[sparklyjacquelee]

Ever heard of the Voynich manuscript? Big, huge, herbal / medical / astronomical lexicon from the 1400s, depicting lots of naked women clearly performing rituals that serve medical functions, lots of them pretty clearly related to childbirth.

You know, this book that is written in a language that nobody has been able to read for 600 years, but nobody, and I mean NO MAN has ever even thought about the simple reality of WOMEN having written it. 

I found one blog post by a woman about how this text is very clearly written by women, and the knowledge within it has been completely annihilated or co-opted by men who now don’t even consider the possibility that a woman, or multiple women, could have written something like this.

Seriously, look it up. Naked women. Fat, short, in baths, all of it. And the entire academic world is absolutely convinced this must have been written by a man. In the wikipedia article, only male linguists and historians are mentioned, because only they matter. And every single one of their theories is laughingly phallocentric and simply wrong.  

They go so far as say that aliens wrote it before they consider that women actually had herbal and medicinal knowledge and passed that knowledge on, in secret, written in languages only they knew, so that no priest or holy man or inquisitor could read it and kill them. 

Open your eyes. This has been going on for hundreds of years. Women had to hide in the shadows, had to invent languages, just to avoid being killed by men for trying to help themselves and other women. This is reality.

[benyw]

It wouldn’t be the first time women have had to invent their own language because of the rights men withheld from us. 

[parthenogenon]

A blog post is good but how about a whole blog written by a woman who’s actually making progress on the translation.

[clit-club]

The Voynich manuscript is a book devoted to women’s health and medicine.

[parthenogenon]

I don’t know if the blog writer is the first person to make her discoveries, but wrt to Mr. Gibbs, I’m not letting him steal this limelight.

[radicalcoffeeclub]

I’ve never actually looked through the blog linked above, but now I did and it’s totally worth a look! It feels obscure and complex at first but you quickly get into it. And it’s entertaining, too:

It’s true.

If male scholars are so blinded by their bias they don’t see midwifery here, they shouldn’t be scholars. But as the blogger wrote, “better a man’s nonsense than a woman’s sense, or?”

[thefemmerefinery]

You don’t get to where you want to be by just wishing and making vision boards. Goal setting is the first step. Next you have to break your goals down into steps that form an actionable plan. This is where I struggle the most as I love to wing things. I’m learning that life requires a plan. Yes you should still be flexible with your plan as life is full of surprises and isn’t linear but you do need to have a plan. This weekend I’m going to be spending some time reviewing and rewriting my goals to i can then break them down into a plan, you can refer to it as the procèss like @lamide.elizabeth does with hers. She has an amazing video on goal setting that I will link in my linktree. Have a great day girlies!

#thefemmerefinery

#mindsetshift

#girlgang

#girlboss

#bossbabequotes

#LuxeGirlSummer

#feminineenergy

[neurosciencestuff]

Research strongly suggests COVID-19 virus enters the brain

More and more evidence is coming out that people with COVID-19 are suffering from cognitive effects, such as brain fog and fatigue.

And researchers are discovering why. The SARS-CoV-2 virus, like many viruses before it, is bad news for the brain. In a study published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers found that the spike protein, often depicted as the red arms of the virus, can cross the blood-brain barrier in mice.

This strongly suggests that SARS-CoV-2, the cause of COVID-19, can enter the brain.

The spike protein, often called the S1 protein, dictates which cells the virus can enter. Usually, the virus does the same thing as its binding protein, said lead author William A. Banks, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine and a Puget Sound Veterans Affairs Healthcare System physician and researcher. Banks said binding proteins like S1 usually by themselves cause damage as they detach from the virus and cause inflammation.

“The S1 protein likely causes the brain to release cytokines and inflammatory products,” he said.

In science circles, the intense inflammation caused by the COVID-19 infection is called a cytokine storm. The immune system, upon seeing the virus and its proteins, overreacts in its attempt to kill the invading virus. The infected person is left with brain fog, fatigue and other cognitive issues.

Banks and his team saw this reaction with the HIV virus and wanted to see if the same was happening with SARS CoV-2.

Banks said the S1 protein in SARS-CoV2 and the gp 120 protein in HIV-1 function similarly. They are glycoproteins – proteins that have a lot of sugars on them, hallmarks of proteins that bind to other receptors. Both these proteins function as the arms and hand for their viruses by grabbing onto other receptors. Both cross the blood-brain barrier and S1, like gp120, is likely toxic to brain tissues.

“It was like déjà vu,” said Banks, who has done extensive work on HIV-1, gp120, and the blood-brain barrier.

The Banks’ lab studies the blood-brain barrier in Alzheimer’s, obesity, diabetes, and HIV. But they put their work on hold and all 15 people in the lab started their experiments on the S1 protein in April. They enlisted long-time collaborator Jacob Raber, a professor in the departments of Behavioral Neuroscience, Neurology, and Radiation Medicine, and his teams at Oregon Health & Science University.

The study could explain many of the complications from COVID-19.

“We know that when you have the COVID infection you have trouble breathing and that’s because there’s infection in your lung, but an additional explanation is that the virus enters the respiratory centers of the brain and causes problems there as well,” said Banks.

Raber said in their experiments transport of S1 was faster in the olfactory bulb and kidney of males than females. This observation might relate to the increased susceptibility of men to more severe COVID-19 outcomes.

As for people taking the virus lightly, Banks has a message:

“You do not want to mess with this virus,” he said. “Many of the effects that the COVID virus has could be accentuated or perpetuated or even caused by virus getting in the brain and those effects could last for a very long time.”

This study was partially supported by a National Institute on Aging-funded COVID-19 supplement to a shared RF1 grant of Banks and Raber.​

(Illustration by Alice Gray)

[futurecentricity]

[themounts]

Types of Matter

[memenotmimi]

Look at this high af and your mind will be blown 🤣

[prettyandmean]

As a biochem major the plasma one still blows my mind

[two-thirtyy]

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Look buddy, i’m just trying to make it to Friday.

[taykoutmccleod]

reblog if its friday and you made it

[nuggsmum]

[13370w1]

The ‘Gender-equality Paradox’ in STEM

A few decades ago, it was a rare sight to see a woman working in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) position. Today, whi

A few decades ago, it was a rare sight to see a woman working in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) position. Today, while more common, women are still outnumbered by their male counterparts and significantly underrepresented. Based upon scientific research, this poses new challenges at the dawn of the era of digital transformation.

[13370w1]

How China’s New Central Digital Currency May Lead to Global Enslavement

Digital currencies are any form of money or payment that exist in electronic form. This may be one of the most noteworthy technologies of ou

[13370w1]

Beginner-friendly Software Development in Python

This course is a pragmatic introduction to software development in Python for students without prior programming experience. Students will d

Anyone looking to learn Python programming this summer? Well, I just completed this excellent bootcamp and now I can actually develop software now!! The course is very detailed, highly recommend it

[politicsoflanguage]

Native English speakers are the world’s worst communicators

In a room full of non-native speakers, ‘there isn’t any chance of understanding’. It might be their language, but the message is often lost

“A lot of native speakers are happy that English has become the world’s global language. They feel they don’t have to spend time learning another language,” says Chong.

“But… often you have a boardroom full of people from different countries communicating in English and all understanding each other and then suddenly the American or Brit walks into the room and nobody can understand them.”

The non-native speakers, it turns out, speak more purposefully and carefully, typical of someone speaking a second or third language. Anglophones, on the other hand, often talk too fast for others to follow, and use jokes, slang and references specific to their own culture, says Chong. In emails, they use baffling abbreviations such as ‘OOO’, instead of simply saying that they will be out of the office.

“The native English speaker… is the only one who might not feel the need to accommodate or adapt to the others,” she adds.

[lierdumoa]

I’ve been thinking about this post all day, and the article glosses over one important detail. All of the “native English speakers” the article mentions belong to the same niche demographic: white collar/corporate professionals

English corporate speak is it’s own fucked up dialect. 

It’s so incomprehensible and exclusionary that even a native English speaker with a master’s degree in English will have difficulty parsing it. Trust me when I say that nobody who isn’t a business major knows what the fuck “synergy” means.

And the jargon’s just half the problem. The other half is the gross overuse of hobby-specific expressions and analogies.

Go to most corporate offices and you’ll be bombarded with sports analogies that only make sense to someone who spends all their free time watching ESPN.

I tracked down this quote I read in a tumblr post years ago:

“I remember working with a law school in which white men heavily dominated the faculty. They used lots of sports metaphors (doing an end run, Monday morning quarterbacking, and so on), with legal jargon thrown in for good measure. I suggested that this was not a particularly welcoming trait in their school, that in fact it was sexist, but they paid little attention. I made my point by speaking for about five minutes in dressmaking terms: putting a dart in here, a gusset there, cutting the budget on the bias so it would be more flexible, using a peplum to hide a course that might be controversial. The women in the room laughed; the men did not find it humorous….Language is power, make no mistake about it. It is used to include and exclude and to keep people and systems in their places.”

- Frances E. Kendall, Understanding White Privilege

My point is,

This kind of poor communication probably shouldn’t be blamed on monolingualism alone. It’s most certainly made worse by an exclusionary and elitist work culture.

You’ll probably encounter far fewer communication issues talking to a cashier at a tourist trap than you will talking to a lawyer or a stockbroker.

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Addicted to geosmin it is

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