alabaster @alabastermask - Tumblr Blog

you may have noticed that my blog is disorganized and thematically incoherent and my tag game is weaker by the day. this is commentary on the chaos of modern existence

lawbutch

you don't have to be scared of your suicidal friends. you don't have to be scared of your psychotic or delusional friends. you don't have to call the police every time someone says they feel like they want to die. you can say things like, "that sounds really hard" and "I'm going to bring you some food and you can tell me more about it"

lawbutch

Important addition thank you! You can absolutely have boundaries about substance use but your friends who use substances know themselves and their needs better than you, and they do not need policing or threats of incarceration. If you want to help your friends who deal with addiction, be patient and demonstrate that you're a safe person to talk to.

brainscrems

The existence of gender neutral implies the existence of gender positive or negative. Unless gender is like color charge, in which case it implies the existence of gender red, green, blue and gender anti-red, anti-green, anti-blue.

sixquarksinatrenchcoat

Gender weak isospin and gender hypercharge

rebel-reblogs

lets not forget the hypothetical spgender

donniehaspronouns

respect non-binary people not because this is “a step to realizing they’re really a trans man/trans woman” but because non-binary people are deserving of respect in their identity. because being non-binary is not “just a stepping stone” for many people and they still deserve their identity to be respected.

being non-binary is being trans, and we respect our trans siblings in this house. full stop.

queenofattolia

the other clique

daylights-rain

This post is about enjoying a nice cup of juice, or perhaps even tea. I have marked it as mature so that its more of an exclusive socializing thing like drinking alcohol but instead it tastes good and doesnt suck

scribefindegil

Brain fog in the kitchen can mean anything from forgetting an ingredient to accidentally skipping a recipe step, plus much more. Here's how to bake successfully, even when you're feeling foggy.

A useful article from King Arthur Flour (my beloved) on baking while disabled.

capt-coffeebitch

This genuinely might make me cry. I already deeply appreciate King Arthur for making the best GF 1 for 1 flour. And having good recipes. But an article posted by them from someone with disabilities about how to do the thing even with disabilities? That’s just genuinely lovely. I know that my bad there is low, but it’s low for a reason and hopefully stuff like this can continue to raise that bar for disabled people like me.

ilsa-fireswan

I love to see this! Another of my favorites is the baking with arthritis post.

With some changes to techniques, a careful selection of kitchen tools, and tips from fellow bakers, the joy of baking can live on.

ilsa-fireswan

Check out this great addition from the notes!

[image text: @system-splintered says: My grandmother started having severe memory issues a couple years before she passed, and her husband laminated her recipes and got her whiteboard markers so she could mark off things she did. It let her bake for a lot longer than she would have been able to otherwise. End.]

cricketcat9

if anyone needs it ☝🏼💖

infiniteoreos

undiagnosed autistic people will be like "I don't get upset when my routine changes though!!" and it's because they've built a set of if-then loops in their head to pick from one of 6 different strict routines and they do get incredibly upset when they're unable to keep to any of the 6 scripts. I'm john normal

thundercrackfic

This is called a fault tree. You will always know how to act if your fault tree captures all possible scenarios. In NASA Mission Control during mission critical events like landings there are huge binders with fault tree protocols, kind of like choose your own adventure books except you’re not the one making the choices, the universe is making them for you and you’re just trying to keep up.

The engineers who develop fault trees, I am told, often imagine new ways for their precious spacecraft to die (new branches on the fault trees) either while in the shower or lying awake at 3am, because human

toothpaste-footlocker

yet-another-autistic-blog

Was just thinking about this the other day. Yeah I have a favorite seat on the bus (middle of the bus, near the back doors, slightly elevated, facing forward), but I don’t get upset if someone is already sitting there, I just pick one of my other favorite spots. Then I realized that most people probably don’t have a favorite bus seat, let alone a series of backup favorites.

can-i-make-image-descriptions

[Image ID: Tumblr tags reading: #'i can solve the unpredictability of the world by making my model complex enough' #yes however #beware /End ID]

mjalti

david-goldrock

Smart woman next to an unbelievable achievement is a picture niche that will never get old

awnerd

Then you’re gonna love this photo of Annie Jump Canon.

Working at Harvard in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s as a “Computer”, Annie Jump Cannon cataloged stars using their spectra from photographic plates, in an effort to understand the mysteries and peculiarities of stellar spectra.

This was hard, detailed, nuanced work. By 1889, three years into her work, she had classified over 1,000 stars. By 1913, she could classify 200 stars an hour. She could classify three stars a minute, just by sight. Using a magnifying glass, she could classify stars down to 9th magnitude, 16 times fainter than the human eye can see. And she did this all with exceptional accuracy.

Over the course of her career, she personally classified more than 350,000 stars, accounting for a mind-boggling 98% of all contemporary stellar spectra classifications, a feat that wouldn’t be bested until the 1990’s with automated digital sky surveys.

Cannon used these classifications to develop the Harvard spectral classification system (O–B–A–F–G–K–M), organizing stars by surface temperature and physical properties.

It is hard to overstate just how foundational her work was to modern astronomy and astrophysics. Her classifications have enabled more than a century of breakthroughs in stellar structure and evolution, including the understanding of how stars change over time and how temperature, luminosity, and composition are related. The system underpins the Hertzsprung–Russell (HR) diagram, one of the most important tools in astrophysics, and remains embedded in modern research, from stellar population studies to galaxy evolution.

The immense scale of her work was itself a massive contribution to astronomy. For comparison, before Cannon, star catalogs contained between 600 and 4,000 stars. Her work single-handedly proved that large-scale stellar classification was both feasible and scientifically valuable. She helped establish systematic star catalogs as a core method of modern astronomy and laid the groundwork for astrophysical research on stellar structure, evolution, and populations that continues today.

sandersstudies

Annie Jump Cannon features as a character in the play Silent Sky, which focuses on another woman computer, Henrietta Leavitt. If you can find a showing near you, it’s a wonderful piece.

haroldjaffe

[Image 1 description:

Post by Ben Halpern 🤗 (@bendhalpern):

1969: Margaret Hamilton alongside the code that got us to the moon

2019: Katie Bouman alongside the code that got us to the black hole

Left: a black-and-white photograph of a woman smiling and steadying a stack of books as tall as she is next to her

Right: a color photograph of a woman smiling and stretching her arms wide to encompass piles and piles of hard drives

4:11 PM • 4/10/19 • Twitter Web Client]

[Image 2 description:

A black-and-white photograph of a woman sitting at a desk covered in papers, an ink stand, and a large rectangular magnifying glass]

asteroidtroglodyte

Nature Documentary: these deep sea creatures can withstand crushing pressures of thousands of pounds per square inch!

Me: they’re not withstanding a goddamn thing. The pressure is a part of them. Their interiors and exteriors are equalized. Just because your respiratory system is built around a pair of fragile poppable bubbles-

movementnudge

Movement nudge!

bark-barkley

I WANT TO LOOK AT THINGS MADE BY HUMAN BEINGS

mantis-an-animal

Look at this amazing quilt made by Grace Snyder that I saw at the Renwick gallery. It’s made of over 85,000 tiny triangles

prawnlegs

This was a hit on twitter, so: My cat. Enjoy her.

prawnlegs

cannot fucking believe how many notes this has and continues to get

cat-faces

sighinastorm

OP can we have a high-definition scan of the last panel?

onion-souls

Sorry, Millennials, but recent paleontologist findings and hyolaryngeal apparatus reconstructions no longer support the hypothesis that "rawr" means "I love you" in dinosaur.

onion-souls