In middle school biology, we did an experiment. We were given yams, which we would sprout in cups of water. We then had to make hypotheses about how the yams would grow, based on descriptions of yam plants in our books, and make notes of our observations as they grew.
Here’s what was supposed to happen: we were supposed to see that the actual growth of the plant did not resemble our hypotheses. We were then supposed to figure out that these were, in fact, sweet potatoes.
What actually happened was that every single student in every single class lied in their notes so that their observations perfectly matched their hypotheses. See, everyone assumed the mismatch meant they had done something wrong in the process of growing the plant or that they had misunderstood the dichotomous key or the plant identification terminology. And, thanks to the wonders of a public school education, everyone assumed the wrong results would get us a failing grade. We were trying to pass. We didn’t want to get bitched out by the teacher. Curiosity, learning, science - that had nothing to do with why we were sitting in that classroom. So we all lied.
The teacher was furious. She tried to fail every student, but the administration stepped in and told her she wasn’t allowed to because a 100% fail rate is recognized as a failure of the teacher, not the class. It wasn’t even her fault, really, though her being a notorious hard-ass didn’t help. It was a failure of the entire educational system.
So whenever I see crap like Elizabeth Holmes’s blood test scam or pharmaceutical trials which are unable to be replicated or industry-funded research that reaches wildly unscientific conclusions, I just remember those fucking sweet potatoes. I remember that curiosity dies when people are just trying to give their superiors the “right” answers, so they can get the grade, get the job, get the paycheck. It’s not about truth when it’s about paying rent. There’s no scientific integrity if you can’t control for human desperation.
I kinda want to do more paintings with the transparent/invisible subject thing, but I'm kind of dry on ideas that would be fun to work with. I had this thought of maybe painting like a brick/stone wall or some sort of a stone pile with a creepy ghost hand reaching out and clawing at the rocks, but that didn't really grab my brain from any direction.
I need to think up more scenes and subjects where the whole idea is that the thing being depicted is intangible, unseen, or so loudly absent that it's visible in outline.
Bruh tell me why islamophobes are trying to ban Zohran Mamdani from the 9/11 memorial?? Mind you, Zohran Mamdani was born in October 1991, which would make him 9 YEARS OLD in September 2001. Do these people think he was an Al-Qaeda secret operative as a 4th grader?
This has a similar energy to when I was traveling to the US on a student visa, and they pulled me out of the customs line to interrogate me, then proceeded to ask if I had any ties to the 9/11 attacks
I was born in November 2002 in São Paulo, Brazil. So like. I don’t think I do
Back during pride month, the football team I support (Corinthians) decided to make an instagram post celebrating LGBTQ+ pride day. This was the post they made. Do you notice anything missing?
That’s right, the green stripe on the pride flag has been removed. Because Corinthians’ biggest rival, Palmeiras, has green as its main color.
Corinthians said: you can be queer, but we draw the line at being a Palmeiras fan.
Fun fact: in the early 2010s, when Corinthians was building its new stadium, the president of the club wanted to dye the pitch grass black to make the stadium completely green-free. Unfortunately the Brazilian football federation wouldn’t allow it
To compensate for this, Corinthians will sometimes edit the green out of the grass in its social media posts
When the women’s team played a rivalry game against Palmeiras at the Palmeiras stadium (where absolutely EVERYTHING is green), the social media posts were in black and white (which are the Corinthians colors)
Hi my darlings, welcome to my new series where I, a biochemist, debunk science related scams and misconceptions. In today’s episode, we’re debunking collagen supplements!
What is collagen?
Collagen is the main structural protein present in your body. It is mainly present in bones, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, and skin. Collagen keeps these tissues together, along with making them strong, flexible, elastic, and also capable of repair when damaged.
But after all, what is a protein?
Everyone’s heard of the word protein, but not as many people can define exactly what it is. Proteins are a class of biomolecules, meaning there are many, many proteins out there, with their own individual functions.
Proteins are made up of building blocks called amino acids. In humans, there are 20 naturally occurring amino acids, and they can join up in all kinds of ways to form different kinds of peptides, which in turn fold up into more complex structures — proteins!
Here is a simplified diagram of protein structure:
Amino acids can join up in all sorts of ways, in different sequences and different numbers. This is how proteins as a class can be so vast, and how they can fulfill so many different functions in your body.
What happens when you ingest proteins?
When you eat anything containing proteins, your digestive system breaks them down into individual amino acids or smaller, more manageable chains (peptides).
All proteins get this treatment, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Your body breaks down proteins in food into amino acids/small chains, then uses them as building blocks to make up whatever proteins it wants. This can be collagen, enzymes, antibodies, anything your body deems necessary.
You cannot deliberately target the proteins you ingest towards anything in particular.
When you ingest collagen, it gets broken down like any other protein, and your body will do whatever it needs with those smaller building blocks.
This is why collagen supplements are a scam. You cannot ingest collagen and target it towards anything specific.
How is collagen produced? Can you do anything about it?
Your body naturally produces collagen, and while that production does slow with age, people of all ages produce collagen. It’s a natural part of healing wounds and keeping tissues together in your body!
Science is still figuring out exactly how to promote real collagen synthesis in humans. Vitamin C is a necessary cofactor in collagen production, and while you can’t make sure all of the vitamin C you ingest goes towards making collagen, if you are deficient in it, it will in fact make collagen production slower.
This is why scurvy (vitamin C deficiency) wreaks all sorts of havoc in your connective tissues. Your body needs it to build collagen.
The same logic applies here. You can’t target the proteins you eat towards collagen production specifically, but if your body doesn’t have the amino acids (which come from proteins) to build that collagen, then it obviously can’t make it!
Basically: make sure you aren’t deficient in the stuff your body needs to build collagen, even though you can’t guarantee that’s what your body will do with it.
And you don’t need fancy supplements for that. If you have adequate protein and vitamin C in your diet, you should be set!
Collagen supplements? More like certified SUPPLESCAM!
You might’ve seen dermocosmetics out there that list collagen as an ingredient. Unfortunately, that’s also kind of a scam, because collagen cannot penetrate the skin barrier.
Your skin is very selective with what it lets into your body, and collagen is simply not on the guest list. Molecules need to meet many criteria to pass through the skin, and one of those is size.
You might think of all molecules as being equally tiny, but that’s not the case. Some molecules are millions of times larger than others. As far as molecules go, collagen is HUGE, and way exceeds the size limit on what can penetrate your skin.
Think of your skin barrier as having “doors”, the size of yours at home. Small alcohols like ethanol are toddlers that can easily pass through. The hormones in transdermal patches, like estrogen, are fully grown adults. Smaller essential oils, the kinds in lotions, are couches that need a little manoeuvring, but can still get through.
Collagen is two Burj Khalifas stacked on top each other. It’s 600x the size limit of what can penetrate your skin. The most it can do is sit on top of your skin, where it can act as a humectant (meaning: help keep it moisturized), but it will NEVER get absorbed into your body.
Even if it did, your body wouldn’t incorporate it as-is either. When it comes to proteins, your body prefers to manufacture stuff in-house.
Working with different business cultures all over the globe, my biggest surprise is that while the USA is bad, it's not actually the very absolute worst I've ever worked with.
The key is business culture is like its own weird separate culture with rules and structures, but most places have a fairly comprehensible set of expectations. So most of the time, it's just remembering perceived differences in expectations. Some places it's polite to be what feels really overly friendly to me. Some places it's polite to be what feels obsequious and formal to me. It's like, whatever. A secondary form of language kinda. It's not even social cues, it's just mechanics of language really. Places with that stuff, those are all fine and wonderful to deal with because there's a framework to communicate and all that.
Part of why the USA shits the bed trying to talk with is because every business person here has like zero framework, it's all lies and bullshit, and everyone wants to be the smartest bestest boy. It's not business culture as much as daycare for toddlers who have millions of dollars and hate human rights. Not the worst though, not by far.
What's key to understand is this is all separate from things like the real people in different places. Business brain people don't have any relevance to real human behavior, it's this whole other structure of make believe which controls everyone's well being. It's important to know because I know how to email a business guy in South Korea using language that will feel appropriate enough after translation, but that's completely irrelevant to the real people living there. It's easy to talk to business guys in China or India or whatever. Germany, Nigeria, Mexico.
UK business guys are pretty bad too. Still not the worst but you have to put a lot of extra work in because business culture in the UK still thinks the Brittish empire exists. The majority of business dudes in the UK see no difference between selling something that has their company name on it, and making it themselves. It's like how all the stuff that says "made in the USA" is 99% made somewhere else, and then one staple is put into it and it's made in the USA, but if you talk to business guys here, they never confuse where things are made, just like... more basic realities like linear time and physics. UK guys go the opposite way, and always say they own everything. But that's all relatively navigable. It's like, okay, you all live in an imaginary world, but I can still get everyone to understand time and logistics and stuff enough to get everyone understanding the same information. I can translate imagination land to reality and back, they get it.
Australia business guys are the worst. Uncontested. I keep minutely detailed notes on every interaction I have with any business brained Australian. I don't want to do this. I have to. Working with business guys in Australia is like being stuck in a marriage with an emotionally abusice pickup artist. Their favorite way to communicate is using work appropriate language to imply you're stupid and your work is worthless. Luckily, there's also no way to explain what you do, because I think when you get a corporate executive level position in an Australian business, they surgically remove the part of your brain that takes in new information.
My average verbal or email exchange with an Australian business guy goes something like this:
"Okay, this is going to take around a month. We need so and so dollars to start. Also, the Earth orbits the Sun."
"Great, just to confirm, we're ready to deliver tomorrow, and the giant hamster rolls the sunball across the sky. Sounds good, have you started?"
It's infuriating in some ways, fascinating in others. Information simply vanishes into an Australian business person as if you hurled it into space, but something in space might theoretically end up somewhere and everything I say to Australian business guys doesn't. I've tried every way around it, and nothing works. And they become enraged when the things they imagined, which no one ever actually said, don't happen. Like you know those clips from Alex Jones in court being read his own words? Imagine that instead of blustering denial he demanded to know how the lawyer was so incompetent at lawyering because words don't exist and he was told this was a carnival cruise not lawsuit. And they have both of the worst traits of USA and UK business guys on top of all that. And I've never heard anyone even close to the same level of casual racism as business guys in Australia. I mean, business guys as a rules aren't great people, but nowhere I've ever worked with has been so consistently terrible to deal with. It would be one thing if it was an outlier, I've had one or two USA companies that were rough, sometimes companies in South Korea can be a real pain, navigating business culture in France if you're from the USA is a labyrinth. But Australia. Those business guys are on another level. Every other company with dodgy practices knows what they’re doing that's questionable. I don't know if business guys in Australia have the ability to understand... like... language. Do they understand laws, money, logistics, anything? Impossible to say! They walk and talk like people but they have discovered some means by which they never intake any information ever. It's like plausible deniability evolved into a new part of the brain specifically to make it easier to be as unethical as the manifest physical reality permits. The regular people in Australia all seem fine, just more people, but the business operators are like night and day. I can find ways to communicate with non-English speakers fairly well, knowing how to work language to adapt to translation is fun. I can't make fucking heads or tails of English speaking Australian corporate execs. If you speak any second language, any at all, know that you are doing better at it than these guys are in their first one. It's literally impossible to overstate how uniformly unpleasant it is to work with business guys from Australia. They are, without question, the worst.
@elodieunderglass Those look really interesting, do you have a link to a sharper version? (Or is there a joke about communication difficulties and you're not supposed to see what it says?)
Ha, yeah, I hadn’t expected Tumblr to compress it like that - “do you love the colour of business communication around the world?”
The body of work is called “Communication Patterns Around the World,” by Richard Lewis. The main book they’re from is at the bottom of the image, but they’re widely spread. Googling will lead to many articles and many images.
The first time I watched Knives Out, I was in nursing school & wondered what I’d think about it when I was a nurse. Now I’m five years into my nursing career, plus with plenty of time in the home health speciality like Marta, and watched the movie again a few nights ago. My overall feelings about the nursing are actually about the same: I could quibble about details but overall the vibe feels right. She feels emotionally authentic. She feels like a nurse. She should have maybe done a respiratory assessment. But also that old man was absolutely so hyped to concoct a mystery. Absolutely jazzed to slit his own throat. Not a good partner in his own care. Patient who definitely wouldn’t use the call light appropriately.
You know that hospitalist note starts with something painfully diplomatic that just screams you will be walking into a war zone. “Harlan is an energetic and pleasant 85 year old gentleman with very engaged family support network actively involved in care”
Btw. If you're a teacher and you catch one of your students (kids, tweens, teens) using AI for the first time, please be gentle with them.
Last week i was looking into one of my teen's homework when I noticed she was writing words she "wasn't supposed to know" in english (like "furthermore", for example. They only know very intermediary english) I got a bit mad for a second. I wear an "anti-AI" button all the time, i even told them before why i was anti-AI, yet she didn't listen to me and thought she could get away with it... But i decided to keep it cool because i didn't know why she would do this, since she never did.
Okay, one week after, this Wednesday, it was time for their class again and, when she arrived, i told her to come to my desk and asked her: "what is furthermore?" She went pale when she noticed the paper in my hands. I asked again: "darling, what is furthermore?" Then, she shuttered: "I don't know, teacher. I'm sorry, I had to ask Gemini because I had no time..." then I sat her down, she was clearly upset (she is just 13) and I asked her what happened. "I didn't have any time left because of my exams and there were too many units to go through. So I asked my mom to help me and she told me to use ChatGPT but I asked google instead." Okay. So I looked into her eyes and told her it was okay, that she didn't need to be upset, but she would have to re-do that paper and bring it back to me by the next week. I told her she didn't need google or gpt to do her work, because she got a very high score at her english exam (both at school and at the course). She got right back on her feet and we started class as normal.
The only reason why I'm telling you this is because I hate AI. I hate it SO much. But, as a teacher now, I hate ANYTHING that takes the learning process away from kids. I hate the GLOSSARY in my kids' books as well for the same reason bc they don't want to figure the words out with me, they want to check the answer as fast as they can to get rid of that boring thing and I don't blame them for wanting to get rid of the boring task! But I blame ADULTS for allowing the kids to go the fast way, when they need the slow process to learn something! Her MOM told her to use ChatGPT to ace her homework. You know, the person PAYING the course bills so her daughter can learn english at an early age doesn't care about her learning process. But I do. I care. And you should care too. It's not my student's fault, it's about the learned helplessness, it's about wanting to be the fastest, it's about the knowledge scrapping, the way nobody cares anymore. And the kids are being affected by parents who don't care anymore. They're byproducts of this. So please, when teaching them why AI is bad, be gentle. It's not their fault the world around them is teaching them how to be dumb in a smart, sneaky way.
"do you know how waterwheels grind up grain in a water mill using the force of running water? We found a way to create a huge source of force that runs all the time and can transfer its force over long distance. I can tell you in more detail, but that's the basics. Now that is a chime that has a mechanism that one can press instead of having to open the door to let you know that you are waiting to be let in. It requires the transferred force to make the mechanism work and that wire is how we transfer the force to the chime."
i love these sort of posts because they feel like a vision of a kinder and more thoughtful world that I wish more than anything was the mainstream instead of the exception
It's not just that they're doing corruption, but they're doing the kind of corruption that is basically "guy hands over a cartoon money sack with dollar signs on it" corruption.
When I got my current job they made me sign a form acknowledging that I'll be immediately fired if I accept free mcdonalds or an amazon gift card from someone at a rival firm
to be clear you SHOULD buy that cast iron pan and you SHOULD buy that knife set and you SHOULD buy that fancy rice cooker and you SHOULD buy that novelty mug. high quality kitchenware is always worth it you’re literally gonna be using that almost every day
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