Much like Springfield before it, Seattle is one of the few major cities in the world with a monorail. That, combined with a more conventional light rail system, makes Seattle the rare U.S. city with two different types of train for public transportation. On Tuesday night, the rail system briefly had a third: a Mazda CX-5.
FLY is a story about a boy who gets a second chance. Help his story take flight June 9th 11am EST on Kickstarter. Thank you for being the wind beneath my wings I hope this story lifts the world to a brighter place.
A coming of age story about Black kids who finally have power to fight back against systems designed against them.
favorite bits of the cast interviews in the LOTR special features:
Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, Elijah Wood and Viggo Mortensen all taking the piss out of Orlando Bloom for going on about a cracked rib too much, while Orlando Bloom desperately tries to wriggle out of talking about it (special mention to Elijah Woodâs âoh it hurts, babes, and I canât ride the horse, babesâ and Viggo Mortensenâs âthey can be very fragile, elves, especially theâŠMirkwood strainâŠâ)
Ian McKellen commenting that âthey never did find any suitable underwear for GandalfâŠâ
Dominic Monaghan going on and on about how Viggo Mortensen apparently had a crush on one of the Rohirrim extras (who like a lot of the Rohirrim extras was a woman in a fake beard) while Vigoo Mortensen just mutters âone could perhaps say something about Mr. MonaghanâsâŠproclivitiesâŠâ
Dominic Monaghanâs imitation of John Rhys-Davies ordering food at a restaurant for the whole cast. âYou have partridge? BRING THE PARTRIDGE!â
John Rhys-Davies talking about an incident with the Lothlorian boats and saying âif an elf and a dwarf are in a boatâŠandâŠthe boat goes underâŠlet us say that the blame was not placed on the elfâ while Orlando Bloom splutters âheâs a big guy, man!âÂ
Elijah Wood talking about how the hobbit actors shared a trailer with Ian McKellen and sometimes they would hear inarticulate bellows of protest from his side when they played loud music in the mornings
Viggo Mortensen talking about how, while filming with those same boats, Kirin Shaw (Elijah Woodâs scale double) started telling him âif the boat tips overâŠsave yourselfâŠI canât swim.âÂ
Elijah Wood describing how Sean Astin would try to direct the helicopters to land while they were on location, while the other three hobbits were screwing around and throwing pinecones at each other
Christopher Lee recounting how he had so much trouble going up some steps in Orthanc with his long robe that he stopped in the middle of the scene and said, âI cannot get up these goddamn steps, Peter.âÂ
Viggo Mortensen mentioning that he left a weekend rehearsal and went walking down the street still swinging his sword around, and promptly got the cops called on him
Hi Apple users, Apple released a fun thing where they take your photos and Siri transcripts and use them to train AI! And they may be automatically turned on without your knowledge, because oh boy they sure were for me!!!!!!!!!!!!
Open the âappsâ section in your settings (itâs usually at the very bottom), go to photos and scroll until you see âEnhanced Visual Searchâ and then turn that shit off. Then go to âPrivacy and Securityâ, scroll until you see âAnalytics & Improvementsâ, and turn off âImprove Siri & Dictationâ as well.
âI am an artist with hundreds upon hundreds of my artworks in my photo album. I also have plenty of photos with not only my own face, but the faces of my friends and my family. I do not appreciate that being used to train AI without my consent, and Iâm pretty sure itâs the same for others too.
Iâm so tired of big companies.
EDIT: I made a mistake this feature isnât used to train AI, but it does still take your photos to be analyzed by AI. This is a feature that was automatically turned on without notice, giving nobody the option to turn it off or on until they find it themselves.
@caesarsaladinn I had a whole discussion with a history major who was extremely confident that smallpox is a âcommon childhood illnessâ with a very low death rate. Therefore, she believed that historical smallpox outbreaks were either massively exaggerated or used as a cover-up for something else (since âsmallpox isnât that bad.â) I eventually asked if she was possibly confusing smallpox with chickenpox, at which point she said, âarenât they the same thing?â
One of the less deadly variants of smallpox was called cowpox, and the fact that dairy maids who contracted it tended to avoid the worst affects of smallpox is part of the development of vaccination
Cowpox is actually a separate (but very similar!) virus!
There's a lot of confusion about different "poxes" in this post (which wasn't my intention, and now I feel bad), so here's a general overview (also, obligatory apology for messiness, this was written at like 1 AM):
Smallpox:
Smallpox, caused by variola virus, was a massive problem historically. It existed in the Western hemisphere for thousands of years (genetic evidence of smallpox has been found in Egyptian mummies from â1500 BCE, but it was probably around long before then), and it was introduced to the New World during the Columbian exchange, which had devastating consequences for indigenous populations (which were already suffering from colonialist violence, which made epidemics much worse than they already would've been). Historically, smallpox had a case fatality rate between 30-50%, and survivors were often left disfigured or permanently disabled (you've probably seen pictures of smallpox scars, but smallpox can also cause blindness and other complications). Importantly, smallpox only affects humansâit has no animal hostsâwhich is why it's one of the few infectious diseases to have been completely eradicated. As of May 8, 1980, it officially no longer exists outside of certain designated American and Russian laboratories. (There are, however, concerns that it could be used as a bioweapon, which is why the government still stockpiles smallpox vaccines and antivirals. I wrote my bioethics term paper on this exact issue, and incidentally, it's one of the major reasons why I believe that STEM majors should take ethics courses!)
There were two strains of variola virus: variola major and variola minor. Variola major was much more dangerous, with a much higher mortality rate; variola minor typically didn't cause severe disease. Fortunately, infection with one strain conferred immunity against the other. Both strains are now eradicated. (People sometimes confuse variola minor with other viruses like cowpox and horsepox, but they're different things.)
There were four clinical forms of smallpox: ordinary (classic smallpox, associated with the rash you usually see in pictures), modified (less severe, often occurred in vaccinated people who got infected anyway), malignant (caused a flat rash instead of the usual pustules, associated with immune dysfunction, almost always fatal), and hemorrhagic (caused severe bleeding, and also near-universally fatal.) All of the non-ordinary forms could be difficult to diagnose because they looked so different from typical smallpox. The less serious "modified" form was often confused with chickenpox, and the hemorrhagic form was sometimes assumed to be a completely different disease. Occasionally, historical sources will refer to hemorrhagic smallpox as "black pox," with or without an understanding that it's caused by the same virus as ordinary smallpox.
Other relevant viruses:
Cowpox, caused by cowpox virus (an orthopoxvirus similar to smallpox) causes mild disease in cows, humans, and several other animals. Infection with cowpox virus confers immunity to variolaâEdward Jenner noticed this relationship and used material from cowpox lesions to inoculate people against smallpox.
Vaccinia virus, another orthopoxvirus, is the source of the modern smallpox vaccine. It's closely related to both cowpox and horsepox (weirdly, it's actually closer to horsepox), but it's distinct enough to be its own species. Infection usually causes mild symptoms, and, of course, confers immunity to smallpox.
Chickenpox is an entirely different thing. It's caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which is a herpesvirus, not a poxvirus at all! Infection with varicella-zoster does not confer immunity to smallpox or any other poxvirusâchickenpox is from a totally different family.
So why are the names so weird and confusing? Why is everything about all of this so weird and confusing?
There are multiple reasons for this, so bear with me.
Historically, a "pox" was any disease that caused a bumpy rash of pustles/blisters. Chickenpox, smallpox, and the other "poxes" all cause superficially similar rashesâthus the similar names. (Even though we know now that chickenpox comes from a completely different family, this wouldn't have been apparent before the dawn of modern medicine.)
Smallpox was given that name to differentiate it from syphilis, which was known as the "great pox" when it first appeared in Europe. (Fun[?] microbiology fact: There are debates about the origins of syphilis, but the most common theory holds that it originated in the New World, and Christopher Columbus brought it back to Spain. In that way, it's kind of the inverse of smallpox.) Historically, smallpox was also known by a variety of other names in different European, Asian, and African cultures. Again, this gets murky, because historical physicians sometimes struggled to distinguish between similar-looking-but-different diseases.
Other poxviruses are often named after the animals in which they were first identified. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though, and it can sometimes be misleading (for example, monkeypox virus was first discovered in laboratory monkeys, but it more often affects rodents and other small mammals. The disease formerly known as "monkeypox" was recently renamed "mpox" because the name wasn't accurate.) Also, some poxviruses aren't named after animals at all! It's a weird and inconsistent system (but a lot of virus names are kinda weird and inconsistent).
Related to the above: We don't even know where the name "chickenpox" comes from. I mean, we know it was called a "pox" because it causes a pox-y rash, but we don't know where the "chicken" part originated. There are multiple theories about this, none of which are definitive. The disease itself has nothing to do with chickens.
Basically, a lot of the weirdness is a result of historical naming practicesâpeople identified and named these diseases before modern virology existed, and those names stuck, so now we have similar names for superficially-similar-but-ultimately-different viruses, and names whose origins have been completely lost to time. Later, virologists muddied the waters further by naming newly-discovered poxviruses after the animals in which they were first seen, even when these animals aren't natural hosts or reservoirs of those viruses. It's a mess! And, again, all of this is complicated by the fact that some of these diseases were very hard to diagnose (or distinguish from one another) before modern medicine existed. Now, we can sequence viral DNA and figure out what's actually going onâwhich viruses caused which symptoms, whether those viruses were closely related, and whether being infected with one disease conferred immunity to anotherâbut historical doctors and scientists didn't have those tools, so they were doing they best they could with very limited information, and that led to a lot of weirdness in terms of how these viruses were named and classified. Our current system inherited some of that weirdness, so here we are.
TL;DR: Poxvirus names are messy. Smallpox is caused by variola virus, which has two strains: variola major (the more severe one) and variola minor (less severe). Cowpox and vaccinia are different viruses in the same family, and being infected with one of them confers immunity to smallpox. Chickenpox isn't a poxvirus at all, but a herpesvirusâit just happens to cause a pockmark-y rash that looks superficially similar to smallpox pustules (and mild forms of smallpox were historically confused with chickenpox).
(P.S. none of this is super relevant to the average person, so don't feel bad if you didn't know any of it. Unless you are a history major inventing new conspiracies about smallpox, in which case you definitely should feel bad.)
Sources & further reading under the cut!
Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination
The History of Smallpox (CDC)
The Triumph of Science: The Incredible Story of Smallpox Eradication
Scientific Background on Smallpox and Smallpox Vaccination (from Scientific and Policy Considerations in Developing Smallpox Vaccination Options: A Workshop Report) <- this article is like 20 years old, but it has some interesting information about the clinical forms of smallpox and how difficult they would be to diagnose accurately
Phasing out monkeypox: mpox is the new name for an old disease <- discusses the renaming of monkeypox to mpox, also mentions issues with other poxvirus names and virus names in general
Poxes great and small: The stories behind their names
I have been to Edward Jenner's house (for my birthday, because I am a nerd) and it's a truly emotional experience. Jenner used his garden's little summer house, which he nicknamed the Temple of Vaccinia, to give people the first ever vaccines himself, for free.
Here it is:
Imagine, if you will, a queue of people who have lost children, parents, siblings and friends to smallpox. People who don't really understand how the vaccine will save them but don't care, because it'll mean they never have to grieve another smallpox death again.
Upstairs in Jenner's house there is a framed certificate from the World Health Assembly that declares the total eradication of smallpox. When was this momentous event, you ask? 1980.
History and STEM are vitally important to one another. If you're interested in one I urge you to look into the other.
Google Chrome is reaching into usersâ machines and writing a 4GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking, Alexander Hanff writes.
Google Chrome is silently installing a 4GB AI model on each of our devices without consent, says Alexander Hanff, a prominent computer scientist and lawyer. According to him, thatâs both illegal and extremely costly for the climate.
Hanff said on his blog heâs discovered that Chrome is âreaching into usersâ machines and writing a 4GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking.â
The file is named weights.bin, and it lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. Essentially, itâs the weights for Gemini Nano, Googleâs on-device large language model.
Moreover, the file appeared with no consent prompt, Hanff says. There is no checkbox in Chrome Settings labeled âdownload a 4GB AI model.â
The download triggers when Chromeâs AI features are active, and, of course, those features are active by default in recent Chrome versions.
i just saw the saddest tiktok in the world that purported âim not like other girls, i dont masturbate because i know it would make disinterested in men foreverâ baby girl you have to jack off and never talk to a man again im literally begging you.
It's literally just "If I masturbate I'll get addicted to it and I'll let myself and my future spouse down" in fewer words đ
So, as a woman who has been where this girl is rn, is married to a man, and was sexually active with this man prior to the marriage, let's clear a few things up:
1) There is no guaranteed future spouse or "the one" for everyone. Churches may tell you this and even secular materials may tell you this, but it is not true.
2) Marriage and sexual activity often go together, but they do not have to, and a healthy marriage depends on way more than just sex.
3) Even if you do end up getting married in the future, you are not cheating on your future spouse by masturbating or having sex before you meet said future spouse.
4) Whatever you do and think about to pleasure yourself are entirely private and have zero bearing on the health of your future relationships--except, of course, perhaps in a positive way: if you learn what you like ahead of time, you'll be able to teach that to your partner, and you'll enjoy sex more, and by extension so will they!
5) You will not get "addicted" to masturbation just because you enjoy it, and you're not addicted just because you do it multiple times a day. There really is no such thing as masturbation addiction.
6) There also really is no such thing as porn addiction.
7) People who fear such a thing happening to them or who believe they are in that position are often found to have been conditioned to feel that way due to sex-negative religious upbringings. Usually what's found is that their masturbation frequency/level of porn consumption/etc is entirely normal.
8) There is such a thing as compulsive masturbation or compulsive porn consumption--when you do either or both to the point that it's getting in the way of you being able to be present in your daily activities and relationships--but usually there is some root cause, like avoidance of deep feelings or problems. The same thing can happen with any activity, like food, video games, or work.
9) Masturbating does not leave you incapable of receiving sexual satisfaction from or desiring sex with another person.
10) Same thing with consuming porn, by the way.
11) And on that note, using porn within a relationship doesn't necessarily mean you are cheating or that you are dissatisfied with your partner. But knowing their partner is doing that hits differently for different people. What really seems to have the most negative effect is discovering secret usage despite setting boundaries about it ahead of time. Checking in with each other to make sure you're on the same page is important.
12) Using toys/vibrators to masturbate and even during partnered sex is entirely normal, healthy, and sometimes necessary for some people, especially those who have a clitoris. If your partner feels jealous or inadequate because of that, it's because of their own insecurities and hangups, not because you are doing anything wrong.
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