Fighting with leverage and chalk @ambiguousscientist - Tumblr Blog

Oh hey, it's Skype a Scientist again, here to fund science education projects with COOL ART.

Introducing SHRIMP CITY!

Look cool as hell in while talking about shrimp science with your friends.

For example: 🦐 Mantis Shrimp (who punch so fast they create pressure voids in the water that collapse to produce shockwaves, heat, and even a flash of light!) 🦐 Pistol Shrimp (Instead of a punch, pistol shrimp create their shockwaves using the snap of their claws!) 🦐 Hermit Crabs (who aren't "true" crabs, but Shrimp City is an inclusive town) 🦐Yeti Crabs (who live in Shrimp City's sister city, Hydrothermal Ventopolis, where they grow bacteria on their hairy arms that they lick off for a snack!) 🦐 Insects (who are not shrimps per se, but did you know recent research suggests that insects group with the crustaceans?? You may have heard that shrimps is bugs, but nay… bugs is shrimp).

These shirts were designed by Philly designer The 666 Cat!

What kind of science education are you funding by buying a shirt, you ask? Well, lots of stuff, but here's a recent example:

Here's a mural all about local biodiversity that we painted in collaboration with a Philly public elementary school with local artist NDA!

We got the kids from the school to help us paint it and everything! These projects are educational and cute as hell.

So hey. Get a shirt <3

sarahmackattack

UPDATE: as of Sunday morning, we've sold 271 shirts. To fully fund our fall mural series we need to sell 1100. Each mural costs about 330 shirts (this is a goofy way to fund good projects, but hey, that's life in the 2026 hellscape babbyyy).

This means we are 60 shirts away from our first Philly Bug mural being funded. So whaddya waiting for?? Get a shrimp shirt!

larchraven

and if you are like me and white is not your color.... can I interest you in a plant native plants

or a biology is bigger than binaries?

sarahmackattack

This is true, it's all going to the same place

sarahmackattack

Update to the update: 12 more shirts to go to fund mural #1

782 to fund the whole project. But hey! That's major progress! Thank you to everyone who bought a shirt or reposted this. I'm a lucky dog to be able to do cool projects like this.

sarahmackattack

Just did inventory on all shirts!

Would love to clear out as many as we can because:

Squid shirts arrive next week (hell yeah)

The more shirts we sell, the more projects we can do to connect people with science

reasonsforhope

The slimy strings from okra and the gel from fenugreek seeds can trap microplastics better than the slightly-toxic synthetic polymer in use.

"The substances behind the slimy strings from okra and the gel from fenugreek seeds could trap microplastics better than a commonly used synthetic polymer.

Texas researchers proposed in 2022 using these sticky natural polymers to clean up water. Now, they’ve found that okra and/or fenugreek extracts attracted and removed up to 90% of microplastics from ocean water, freshwater, and groundwater.

With funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, Rajani Srinivasan and colleagues at Tarleton State University found that the plant-based polymers from okra, fenugreek, and tamarind stick to microplastics, clumping together and sinking for easy separation from water.

In this next stage of the research, they have optimized the process for okra and fenugreek extracts and tested results in a variety of types of water.

To extract the sticky plant polymers, the team soaked sliced okra pods and blended fenugreek seeds in separate containers of water overnight. Then, researchers removed the dissolved extracts from each solution and dried them into powders.

Analyses published in the American Chemical Society journal showed that the powdered extracts contained polysaccharides, which are natural polymers. Initial tests in pure water spiked with microplastics showed that:

One gram of either powder in a quart (one liter) of water trapped microplastics the most effectively.

Dried okra and fenugreek extracts removed 67% and 93%, respectively, of the plastic in an hour.

A mixture of equal parts okra and fenugreek powder reached maximum removal efficiency (70%) within 30 minutes.

The natural polymers performed significantly better than the synthetic, commercially available polyacrylamide polymer used in wastewater treatment.

Then the researchers tested the plant extracts on real microplastic-polluted water. They collected samples from waterbodies around Texas and brought them to the lab. The plant extract removal efficiency changed depending on the original water source.

Okra worked best in ocean water (80%), fenugreek in groundwater (80-90%), and the 1:1 combination of okra and fenugreek in freshwater (77%).

The researchers hypothesize that the natural polymers had different efficiencies because each water sample had different types, sizes and shapes of microplastics.

Polyacrylamide, which is currently used to remove contaminants during wastewater treatment, has low toxicity, but its precursor acrylamide is considered toxic. Okra and fenugreek extracts could serve as biodegradable and nontoxic alternatives.

“Utilizing these plant-based extracts in water treatment will remove microplastics and other pollutants without introducing additional toxic substances to the treated water,” said Srinivasan in a media release, “thus reducing long-term health risks to the population.”

She had previously studied the use of food-grade plant extracts as non-toxic flocculants to remove textile-based pollutants from wastewater and thought, ‘Why not try microplastics?’"

-via Good News Network, May 10, 2025

derinthescarletpescatarian

Sam Handwich.

sufficientlylargen

If Pikiwedia says it it must be true.

zooperdoopers

I made Pikiwedia real. Works for any Wikipedia page. Use this wisely :)‌

sufficientlylargen

Oh, wary dell vone

zooperdoopers

Goodmorning to the Anthropic Claude AI training scraper that suddenly decided to request 660 thousand pages (exactly the number I had remaining on the starter plan) and brought Pikiwedia down.

Sudden switch from diverse user agents like chrome, safari, messenger preview to Just Claudebot. I'm not even mad though, this is maybe the funniest thing possible, because I've inadvertently poisoned their training data with thousands of fucked up articles with normal urls.

Pikiwedia perseveres, back up with a better robots.txt. I hope Anthropic has a gery vood time with Pikiwedia's data :))

thinkedem

Where can one support the Pikiwedia, to further ruin the banes of actual information (also known as genai chatbots)?

zooperdoopers

if anyone wishes to support pikiwedia i would instead donate to the wikimedia foundation !! they are doing far more to fight for a free and unslopped internet.

also, i directly use their free (!!!!) api. pikiwedia relies directly on the wisdom and hard work of millions of wikipedia authors. protect this amazing source of collaborative open source knowledge for the many, many obvious reasons, but also so that pikiwedia can continue to scrongle it.

saxifraga-x-urbium

Force Remove Copilot, Recall and More in Windows 11 - zoicware/RemoveWindowsAI

creechie

How do I... use this? I don't know what to do ;-;

the-future-is-chrome

here’s a youtube tutorial by the guy who made it

daysleftofsecondterm

it’s ok to ask for help the next 946 days

#windows 11 #computer #windows

itsfullofstars

ASTRONOMY PICTURE OF THE DAY July 14, 2026 at 05:00PM Is there an angry Sith using force lightning in the Tatacoa Desert? This is not science fiction, but a red sprite with multiple streamers! Ordinary lightning occurs when thundercloud particles collide, lose their electrons, and build up negative charge at the cloud bottom. The cloud’s negative charge repels negative charge deeper into the Earth, leaving Earth’s surface positively charged. The opposite charges attract, reaching towards each other and superheating the air into a white strike of plasma. Red sprites are millisecond events triggered by positive cloud-to-ground lightning. They extend up into the mesosphere where the air is too thin for thunder. Their red glow comes from heated molecular nitrogen. There are several potential causes for red sprites, including that the preceding positive lightning exposes the negatively charged cloud core to the positively charged upper atmosphere, allowing those charges to connect. NASA’s Juno has observed sprites on Jupiter, indicating that sprites occur on other planets! Image: https://ift.tt/zPb2w6Q via NASA https://ift.tt/qURxdfC APOD --> https://ift.tt/nq5hG7R

My most recent complete art pieces! School of Sky Lionfish and Sky Cyle are going to the printers.

#art #my art #digital art

fucking-relax

i don't know if i can have this reminder repeat in a meaningfully effective way on this blog, but

are you partway through doing something and you forgot? perhaps the laundry or some other timed event?

if not, that's fine, sorry to bother

if so, you may wanna go do that

dduane

So just to let folks know what's going on

So first of all: let me tell everybody how things went with the new glasses.

Briefly: they're brilliant. The new varifocals work way better than earlier versions of them have routinely done. (This is apparently secondary to the way my eyes continue to change shape as I get older. It continues to make me snicker that I'm getting Iess nearsighted as I age. "So," I said to my Eye Lady, "if I can manage to live to, like, a hundred and twenty-five, I'll be twenty-twenty?" She gave me sort of a cockeyed look. "Well... you'll still be astigmatic. As for the rest of it, let's see how things go...") The reading glasses are no good for the computer: they’re genuinely just for reading. ...But this is okay, because the varifocals work fine for computer work. So THAT whole business has turned out more than satisfactorily... and thanks once more, from the bottom of my heart, to all those who helped out. ❤️

And get this. I went out to lunch after picking the new glasses up, and in the middle of lunch found myself paper-outlining a paranormal police procedural trilogy. (headclutch) So that went well. ...And no, I can't tell anybody anything about the plotting on these: it's too soon. But this looks like something of a change of writing voice (and thematic material) for me: darker than usual, maybe a touch grittier. We'll see how this group of works sets itself up as work gets going. (Other works further along in progress are in front of these right now, but that's fine. Giving things time to mature is never a problem.)

Anyway: typically enough, some other unexpected health junk that had been behaving itself during the spring then started kicking up cranky in June and over the last couple of weeks. (eyeroll) I don't want to get into more detail than necessary about this, but it's an outgrowth of the internal problems that have made me give up long-distance travel. It's required a goodish outlay of cash, and has resulted in me falling behind on my rent.

My landlord is being really easygoing about this, but nonetheless I'd very much like to get caught up on this before it gets any worse. (As being behind this way, I'm finding, is increasingly interfering with my work... especially as that's now become so much easier to get to grips with due to the new glasses.)

So it seems to me that this is a good time to repeat the Summer Reading Sale over at Ebooks Direct!

I imagine lots of people here know the drill. Everything's cheap, and the ebook bundles are all being held at their lowest price points for the duration (meaning specifically the "All The Wizardry" bundle, the Middle Kingdoms series bundle, the LGBTQ Pride collection, and the Feline Wizardry bundle—Even our "Give Me Everything You've Got" collection, which is the whole ebook store in one package, has had a bit knocked off.

So could I get folks to reblog this post so that people who might not have caught one of these sales before can do so now if they want to? Please & thank you!

And additionally: for those who're already up to the gunwales in ebooks and don't need any more, but still want to help out with the rent situation—if you'd like instead to drop something into my Ko-Fi, it'd be very welcome. And if you feel like doing this, I thank you very much in advance! 🙂

Support Diane Duane

...So that's the news from Lake Wobegon for the moment. ...Now to slip outside and give the potted plants a potful or so of water as an evening drink. They've been suffering from the (unusual-for-us) local heat wave, there's a wildfire watch on (leading to a ban on selling portable BBQs), and we're also having a ban on watering things with a hose at the moment. (sigh) One thing after another...

Anyway, thanks again, folks.

ariaste

Today is the reveal of the cover for new edition of YIELD UNDER GREAT PERSUASION, coming out July 16th from Tor UK and October 6th from Tor Bramble!

YIELD is a cozy M/M romantasy about doing the hard, unlovely, backbreaking work of learning to love and forgive yourself so that you can accept the love of other people which has been waiting for you all along. Tags include: One-sided enemies-to-lovers, one-sided yearning and pining, grumpy/sunshine, your honor they're idiots, busybody gods, and plant magic.

SUMMARY:

Tam Becket has hated Lord Lyford since they were boys. The fact that he’s also been sleeping with the man for the last ten years is irrelevant. When they were both nine years old, Lyford smashed Tam’s entry into the village’s vegetable competition. Nearly twenty years later, Tam hasn’t forgiven him. Now Tam has reconciled himself to the fact that love and affection are for other people, that the gods won’t answer any of his prayers (not even the one about afflicting Lyford with a case of flesh-eating spiders to chew off his privates), and that life is inherently mundane, joyless, and drab. And then, the very last straw: Tam discovers that Lyford (of all people!) bears the divine favor of Angarat, the goddess Tam feels most betrayed and abandoned by. In his hurt and anger, Tam packs up and prepares to leave the village for good. Tam soon finds himself set on a quest for the most difficult of all possible prizes: Self care, forgiveness, a second chance... and somehow the unbelievably precious knowledge that there is at least one person who loves Tam for exactly who he is—and always has.

"Alongside the sexiness and absurdity (and the sexy absurdity) in Yield Under Great Persuasion is a tender, resonant story of second and third chances and being loved when we need it most and feel we deserve it least. Evocative, emotional, and endlessly entertaining." -Jules Arbeaux, author of Lord of the Empty Isles

"A hot cup of chocolate for the soul." --Book Riot Preorders should be available now wherever you buy your books, including Bookshop.org, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.

(If your first question is "Where is the best place to get it?" check the FAQ page on my website!)

As an author, it is really hard to get the word out about books, so signal boosting would be immensely appreciated!

ariaste

Now that the kickstarter for THE WISDOM OF EMPERORS is over, I am back on promo for YIELD UNDER GREAT PERSUASION! Comes out in July in the UK/EU and October in the US!

ariaste

This bad boy comes out TOMORROW (July 16th) in hardcover in the UK/EU, and worldwide in audiobook format! It's also available RIGHT NOW in ebook format worldwide! (Hardcover release for the US is in October!)

If you read the first edition and loved it, this one has about 13,000 words of new chapters at the end :)

catgirltoes

What the hell happened to the energy around gender neutral bathrooms. Remember when we were fighting for all bathrooms to be gender neutral. But now we can barely argue that people can use the gendered bathroom of their choice. Maybe there's some single stall bathroom tucked away in a basement somewhere.

phleb0tomist

so many people ive known have pushed themselves to burnout trying to deny their disabled reality, skipping accommodations, skipping rests etc. and the world convinces them that the solution to their burnout is to push even harder. it’s a huge tragedy. i know social pressures make it tough but i want more disabled people to make things easier for themselves where possible, to opt out of things that harm them when possible, to quit while they’re ahead. be that person today! protect yourself where you can! take micro breaks while doing your hobby. get that shower chair. sit to brush your teeth. lie down in the middle of the day, even if only for 5 mins. these things add up and it’s so worth it.

phleb0tomist

happy disability pride month! ACCOMMODATE YOURSELF TODAY!

horreurscopes

never forget the universal rule of the order of things: People Will Not Read It

horreurscopes

signs at stores? émail? menu ?? instruction ? post online ? caption with andswer to question ? group hand outs ??? street sign ??? no. The Written Word Is The Enemy

lasrina

#The number of compliments i have gotten for reading a thing

The ability to occasionally Read A Thing will make you a hero in your workplace, especially if it is for example an error message that tells you what you need to do differently, or instructions on unjamming a printer.

stephaniematurin

how dare you say we put jam in the printer

berkelbites

Ok reblogging this again because story time.

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

She does not respond.

samueldays

I have similar story from tech support.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

But then people with a perverted intellect would still be thinking about ways to avoid reading the message, like dragging it off edge of screen or hiding it behind another window. So maybe the dialog box could have an always-in-front feature to override other windows, and the alert could use the computer's hardware "beep" functionality that can't be switched off by muting the regular sound system, and keep beeping... shit, I realize I'm reinventing pain, and get philosophical about it.

treepyful

I'm thinking about the harm of nuisance alarms now.

A nuisance alarm is a repeated false alarm. Like a fly buzzing in your ear, nuisance alarms start becoming an annoyance you just swat at to make them go away. "Oh, the temperature alarm in the cold room is going off again? Just hit reset, it always does that, management won't buy us a new one but the temperature is never too high so it's fine," et cetera. This means that when the alarm is going off for real -- the temperature in the cold room is actually too high -- recognition of the situation is delayed due to the habit of distrusting the alarm. This is something that is acknowledged and tempered in industries where it is very important for alarms to not be ignored (aviation, for eg.), but elsewhere, it can cause a lot of issues.

I'm not saying the error messages in the above story are nuisance alarms. In fact, they're the true alarms: they're the information getting lost in the noise.

In this scenario, the nuisance alarms are ads.

We have been conditioned to react with hostility to pop-ups because they are so frequently something that require hostility! All you want to do is read this delicious-sounding chocolate cake recipe on your favourite blogger's website, so why is your screen now filled with pop-ups asking you to sign up for a mailing list, and to buy this spatula on Temu, and to accept all cookies (I thought this was cake?). The solution? That little X in the upper corner, again and again and again. Ah, a clear screen, now you can read the cake recipe in relative peace.

It's understandable how that same behaviour could translate to other pop-ups, particularly if the error message sort are encountered far less frequently than the advertising sort. You're at work and you're just trying to run the program you always run, but it spits a pop-up at you. And we know how to fix a pop-up -- the little X. But the program still isn't running. You restart it in the hopes that will work, X the annoying pop-up again, and bah, no dice! Then the IT person asks what the pop-up says, and you're baffled because, well, it doesn't matter. It's just a pop-up. It's unimportant and exists to be closed. The IT person tells you that this pop-up is important and explains what you need to know, and you feel silly because how were you supposed to know that this time, this one pop-up was important?

Anyway. I don't know if there's a good and feasible solution to this kind of problem. Fixing the problems caused by nuisance alarms in aviation systems happens through fixing the alarms themselves so they don't go off falsely, but the equivalent here would be to... universally stop pop-up ads. Like, don't get me wrong, I would love for that to happen, but it's a lofty goal. Ad blockers work (props to Ublock Origin, I haven't seen an in-browser ad in years), but there are always going to be people who don't know about them/don't use them and are thus exposed to the pop-up nuisance alarms and all the problems they foster. And like we can say "just slow down and READ the WORDS before you react" but, as this entire thread can attest, that isn't exactly a solution either.

justalurkr

Truncated text of tweet from MrPitBull, Mar 11, 2026:

She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.

Yale University, 1969.

Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program.

Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"

The faculty answered firmly: No.

Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit.

Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them.

So she started looking.

She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.

There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.

The professors had been wrong.

But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing.

Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams.

But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.

It wasn't random. It was systematic.

Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.

Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries.

Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.

She needed a name for what she was documenting.

In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870.

In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect.

The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.

Her dissertation became a lifelong mission.

For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.

Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating.

Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.

Eventually, the evidence became undeniable.

Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:

Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.

Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize.

Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.

And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.

Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.

The Matilda Effect became standard terminology. Scholars used it to examine how credit is assigned, how authors are listed, who receives awards, who gets left out.

zeelatunes

hrt and transgender surgeries being positioned as dangerous and experimental despite being around for much longer than ozempic, which many people are pushing as a miracle weight loss drug while ignoring its real medical indications and any possible negative side effects

it seems like hypocrisy but it's really the same idea: your body is not yours to control. you are not allowed to be fat, you are not allowed to be trans, we will say whatever it takes to keep you in line

carfuckerlynch

hey does anyone have that poem. about the author seeing two boys cuddling on a hotel lobby couch, where he refers to it as something like an island of safe anonymity or smth. its been 5000 years my college boyfriend had it written out and pinned to his wall

carfuckerlynch

THANK YOU @witchoflight it is indeed "on traveling together" by Kayleb Rae Candrilli

fuckyeahfluiddynamics

Inside the LA Aquaduct

In the early twentieth century, Los Angeles had capital and political willpower, but not water. So it built an engineering marvel, the LA Aquaduct, to guide water from the Sierra Nevadas down to the growing city. Grady gets into the literal (and figurative) ups and downs of the project in this Practical Engineering video. (Video and image credit: Practical Engineering)

body-knows-best

I’m having a meltdown. When I was 9 years old I read an article in a magazine called Backyard Adventures about how this antelope, the saiga, was on the verge of extinction. I enlisted the help of my best friend and launched a fundraising campaign called Save the Saigas. We sold lemonade, had bake sales, sold belongings, yelled at strangers as they passed in their cars. Our parents were able to match the money we made. Our school helped. It wasn’t much, it didn’t save them, but it helped the organization at least a little bit.

Y’all. The saigas have been saved. A little piece of my passionate child heart that has seemed hopelessly lost and endlessly disappointed for a long time feels so soothed. Maybe it’s not all hopeless. Maybe our efforts aren’t a complete waste. Maybe we keep trying and actually hope for the best.

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Fighting with leverage and chalk