Old enough to know better; too young to care @bertilakslady - Tumblr Blog

magdaliny-deactivated20191030

“In college I had a physics professor who wrote the date and time in red marker on a sheet of white paper and then lit the paper on fire and placed it on a metallic mesh basket on the lab table where it burned to ashes. He asked us whether or not the information on the paper was destroyed and not recoverable, and of course we were wrong, because physics tells us that information is never lost, not even in a black hole, and that what is seemingly destroyed is, in fact, retrievable. In that burning paper the markings of ink on the page are preserved in the way the flame flickers and the smoke curls. Wildly distorted to the point of chaos, the information is nonetheless not dead. Nothing, really, dies. Nothing dies. Nothing dies.”

— Nicholas Rombes, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (via bobschofield)

donttouchmyasymptote

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

(Aaron Freeman, “Planning Ahead Can Make A Difference In The End”)

#reblogging again because I’ve been thinking about this a lot of late

oxideblack

#blake's 7 #kerr avon #paul darrow #art

sexuallyfrustratedavocado

everyone talks about how strong and great Aragorn was for refusing the ring when Frodo offered it to him as if this man has not spent his entire life dodging leadership and responsibilities like bullets in the matrix 🙄

lesspopped

notbecauseofvictories

"impulse buy" (noun) anything I have been low-key thinking about purchasing for 3 months, an item that subsequently spent 24-48 hours in my cart as I went through each and every state of grief, and which I then bought, in a desperate, the-guilt-can't-get-me-if-I'm-fast-enough rush.

#lol

nasa

Moon Joy June: Launch Inspo

Moon Joy June artists! Looking for a little inspiration? The prompt for this week is “Launch.” Here is a small collection of photos of the launch of the Artemis II mission, which took place on April 1, 2026. What followed was ten days of our Artemis astronauts circling the Moon, returning to Earth, and experiencing pure Moon joy all throughout.

You can find more launch photos here. If you’re feeling inspired to make some art, you can share your creations on Tumblr with the #ArtemisArtShow hashtag!

#nasa #artemis #space #moon

lowkeyed1

happy 40th birthday amar chadha-patel!

#Amar Chadha-Patel #awh

fforsythiaaa

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

hypokeimena

#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)

#this is what teaching should really be about #trying to teach students to think analytically #critical thinking

girlboss-revan

"um actually jedi master boogdo from the dagdar system defeated darth krisis in 47XYZ 🙄" this is how you sound when you get too into star wars lore

homunculus-argument

If any part of your plan involves the words "nobody could be that stupid", please be prepared to be proven wrong at any minute at a moment's notice. Pay in mind that the person determined to prove you wrong may already be aware of this assumption, and is already approaching your current location at an alarming speed.

the-real-seebs

"it will be fine if people just"

people will not just

alarajrogers

In 2011 I attended an event called Bmore Fail, in which entrepreneurs in Baltimore talked about their failures and what they learned from them.

What I learned is that there is an inflexible rule about how people interact with systems. If your system would work perfectly if people Just Would, and yet they Don't, then your system is bad and you should feel bad. Systems must be built with an eye toward "will people actually do this"?

Recycling was a thing when I was a child. (The 70's.) In my home in New York State, you could carry recyclables to a recycling center. Nobody did. Now in 2024 Baltimore there is a trash truck that comes every week to pick up my recyclables, and I and my neighbors fill our cans with objects that can be recycled, because a system was developed that was easy for busy people to do, and there's a lot of social pressure to do it -- but the social pressure wouldn't exist if it wasn't easy to do. Only the most crunchy granola people bitched at you if you didn't recycle in 1979, when it required a lot of effort. Now it is considered kind of on par with spitting in the street or leaving a dirty diaper on the diaper changing table in the bathroom instead of throwing it out, if you don't recycle.

Your job as the system creator is to make it as easy as possible for people to do the right thing, and as hard as possible to do the wrong thing. This is why web forms have data validation (but too much data validation actually makes the forms harder, so hit the spot in the middle.) And if you want people to adopt social change, whether it's environmentalism, accepting gay people, or whatever, make it as easy as possible. And don't guilt people about not doing it until it's as easy as possible; instead phrase things more like "wouldn't it be cool if". It's not the fault of the individual that they can't get things done in a bad system. Fix the system.

the-real-seebs

if users regularly fuck up using a tool you made, and your answer is "you're holding it wrong", the next question you should ask is "why did i make this tool so it's easy to hold it wrong?"

reasonablywittyatbest

And then you're tech support begging the development team to change something very small that would make the user experience so much better cause they made the tool too easy to hold wrong and development will whine at you because they're very busy with the back end stuff and hey you're the customer facing side why can't you just make them, and no you can't just make them, please development please I'm begging you make the tool less easy to hold wrong.

gamergunk64

sorry what was that about how "accepting gay people" is on the list of things we should "make easier"?

@alarajrogers what did you mean by this?

that the onus is on gay people to be more palatable?

alarajrogers

No, the onus is on whoever is building the system. Most of the time that's not the gay people themselves, because people who are marginalized are rarely in a position to build systems that affect their own marginalization; that's what allies with privilege are for.

A small thing. If you want to support trans and nonbinary people, then on government forms, if they require gender and you can't get around it, allow "other"; better still, don't require gender. If you're building a medical system, and the patient's gender is M, do not gray out all the "female" problems he might be presenting with on the grounds that a man can't possibly have menstrual problems, be pregnant, or have issues with his uterus; likewise if the patient presents as F, don't make it impossible to enter a diagnosis of prostate cancer for her.

Don't set up validation rules that prevent someone with gender M from having a husband. Better yet, let "husband" and "wife" both be covered by the term "spouse", because that is inclusive of non-binary spouses as well.

Because I'm in IT, I think in terms of IT systems. But there are government systems and insurance systems and financial systems and all sorts of systems out there, that should be set up so that a gay person will be able to navigate it as easily as a straight person, and a straight person will see that the available options don't privilege them at the expense of everyone else... a subtle reminder that no, you're not the center of the universe and gay people exist. Why do you think the right wing fights so hard against there being Spanish on forms that are also in English? You'd think, it doesn't harm anyone using the form for there to be both Spanish and English. But they know, the presence of Spanish reminds English speakers that the world doesn't center around what works for them; other options exist. That's what they want to get rid of, the subtle reminder that someone besides them is important too.

This is a discussion about how to make systems work in some way other than If People Would Just, making them easier to promote the result you want, so I'm not sure how you even got "the onus is on gay people to be more palatable", and I get the feeling you don't understand the context of the discussion. I am not even sure how you could devise a system that incorporates "gay people should make themselves more palatable" because that sounds exactly like a thing that People Should Just... meaning, you're relying on humans to behave in the exact specific way you need them to for your system to work, and the whole point of this conversation is that doing that dooms your system to fail. Gay people will never Just Make Themselves More Palatable To Straights, as a cohort, so if your system for getting gay people to be better accepted relies on If Gay People Would Just, your system will fail.

Unfortunately, reading comprehension is also one of those things that If People Would Just, so posting about things on Tumblr is also a system that's doomed to fail. :-)

#people will not just #nor will they simply

starsfromuncle

Blake's 7 (re)watch #5

Seek-Locate-Destroy

That security robot is honestly the shittiest one ever, and the Aged P wonders why on Earth Vila is wearing bright red when they're trying not to draw too much attention...then a few minutes later remarks that 'it's like having a court jester with you the whole time' and like...they're not wrong 😂😂😂😂😂 but he proves his skills as a thief once again and we get this hilarious speech to the guards:

Vila: Hello there! How are you? Excuse me wandering about your premises, but I wonder if you can help me? I'm an escaped prisoner. I was a thief but recently I've become interested in sabotage, in a small way you understand, nothing too ambitious, I hate vulgarity, don't you? Anyway, I've come to blow something up. What do you think will be most suitable?

I just love him so much. Then Avon delivers this zinger in response to the remark that they're taking too long:

Avon: That's the trouble with heroics. They seldom run to schedule.

And it's a well put together mission aside from the fact that a) no one thinks to consider that there being no wreckage from the cypher device is going to raise suspicious and b) the most shocking thing of all which is that they fucking forget Cally!!!!! They leave her down there and no one notices she's not there and it's just so bad, Aged P and I are appalled (as I always am because like what) and as they later point out a leader worth their salt should do a head count!!!!!!!! That is like Rebel Leader 101 what are you doing????

(Part of me did wonder why no one carries a spare teleport bracelet but the Aged P made the point that the risk of it falling into enemy hands is too great. I agreed. But the above point still stands they should've noticed!!!!! Instead they're so full of self-congratulation that they completely miss the the fact they're one person down!!!!)

And then we finally meet Supreme Commander Servalan. And she's as glorious as always, she is truly the villain of all time - she's cold, she's ruthless, she's efficient, she'll kill you without one single iota of regret or a second's hesitation and she'll look fabulous throughout it all and no one is doing it like her. 'You have some criticism of my handling of this matter, Secretary Rontane?' she asks calmly as if anyone would dare (and they don't, they clearly know how dangerous she is).

We also get the revelation that the Federation apparently didn't work out that having a complete blackout is only going to make the rumours and conspiracies worse -' Each time the story is told it is elaborated upon. Any damage to the Federation is attributed to Blake. The smallest incident is exaggerated out of all proportion until it becomes a major event. Blake is becoming a legend.' What did you think was going to happen, really, and yet they keep the blackout because...who even knows??? Sunk cost fallacy or something. But at this point it's definitely ridiculous like hasn't he only struck two targets by this point???

(Naturally their only concern about Space Commander Travis is the optics but honestly I think he was always going to be made a scapegoat even if he'd succeeded in capturing Blake, even the most loyal Federation citizen would not stand for a war criminal being paraded about as a hero.

On the Liberator we get this exchange between Blake and Jenna beause Blake knows full well Cally was suffering from survivor's guilt (and he should know because so does he!!!)

Blake: She was ashamed to go back to her own people because she had survived when the rest of the freedom fighters were massacred. Jenna: Well, that wasn't her fault. Blake: Shame like hers is an emotion, Jenna. It isn't rational. Jenna: Exactly, and so is guilt like yours. That's not rational, either. Blake: It's ironic, isn't it? She was the only one of us who wasn't a convicted criminal. Jenna: She convicted herself. You can't live like that. You've got to make peace with yourself, Blake, if you want to survive.

(Jenna's right, of course)

And then we meet one of my favourite one-off characters of all time - Rai!!!!! I love Rai so much you have no idea, he's going to appear in my fic with a bigger role because he's an interesting character like the fact he's willing to confront Servalan, for one thing - dangerous, perhaps, foolhardy, even, but he's determined to speak his mind and we get this revealing conversation:

Servalan: Rai, Space Commander Travis is the subject of a military inquiry. He was ordered to suppress an attack on Auros. Rai: The man is a butcher. He continued with his attack after the total surrender. The death toll was horrifying. Servalan: Travis is an advocate of total war. He carries out his orders with meticulous thoroughness. An enemy does not cease to be an enemy simply because it has surrendered. Rai: (shocked) That's the philosophy of an assassin, not a Federation officer. (Stands up straight, looks at her determinedly) There are those among your officers who will not serve with Travis or take orders from him.

Because it's the first time we've really seen any kind of humanity from anyone working for the Federation since episode one and it's from serving officers and it just says so much - that at least some Federation officers really believe in what the Federation's meant to stand for, law and order, bringing peace to the galaxy, etc, not committing war crimes left, right and centre...and it's gutting because this is exactly what the Federation is doing!!!! Travis is pilloried for it and yet we already know they've done this exact same thing, executing people who'd surrendered, and clearly most people have no idea, not even their own soldiers have any idea of this. Rai's clearly appalled at the prospect so clearly they're trained to not do this!!!!! And I just love that it makes this organization more three dimensional because of course it would be and has to be, 'Faceless Evil Empire' is boring, you've got to show these parts.

And I wish it'd been explored more. Clearly some officers fell into line but did others? Was there growing discontent among the military, was there defections? Did some even join the rebels? Did Rai, because he clearly hated the idea of working for Travis? Like I'd have loved to have seen more of the turmoil within the Federation outside of Servalan and her politics (interesting as that is too) but we never really do, never see anyone questioning themselves or working from the inside to try and bring it down or change things, and it's a missed opportunity - even with Tarrant they never go into it even though that was really the perfect opportunity to do so. He deserted - why?

There's another couple interesting moments on Centaro where one of the workers seems genuinely relieved Cally's not dead, calls her lucky, the doctor called to treat her tries to make the point that she's not fit for interrogation and again, it's just interesting to see that no, not everyone is Evil with a Capital E, most people are just trying to do their jobs and aren't heartless bastards, which is realistic, really.

(Aged P compared it to the Nazis in that not everyone in Nazi Germany was a Nazi and not everyone agreed with their actions - I will have to do more research on this but probably this is the case in most regimes?? Research)

Space Commander Travis is also quite the iconic villain (apparently the inspiration behind the 2006 BBC version of Guy of Gisburne which is hysterical, explains all that black leather), equally as cold and ruthless as we've already heard, he will hunt down Blake and nothing will stop him, he will ensure no-one stands in the way of that:

Servalan: Why mutoids particularly? Travis: Why mutoids? I've always thought that individuals with a high bionic rebuild were more reliable, less likely to let emotion interfere with judgement or duty. I give a mutoid priority over a man every time.

(Well, that and he clearly knows he's deeply unpopular, if someone doesn't try to knife him out of principle they're likely gonna knife him for their own ends, he's well aware of that.)

Aged P and I both forgot he was the one behind the first massacre Blake witnessed (which feels like a retcon even though it's obviously not, it's more 'still figuring things out cos it's the first season') but yes, Blake remembers him very well and this is key, cos when they first decode the message Aged P wondered why no one seemed to consider it might be a trap, except they do!!!! That's why Blake gets there first using Travis's own strategy against him and does a very fast teleport - which is a hell of a feat, by the way, teleporting at high speed like whoever was in charge of beaming him down must've been having kittens the entire time like christ, that is definitely not a responsibility you'd want.

It's brilliant, though, especially when Travis and the other Feds put so much work into being prepared for them - complete with snark from Travis, 'A rough analogy would be the static build up during an electrical storm.' 'Yes, well, I'm always grateful for a rough analogy.' - but it literally doesn't occur to him that Blake would do this and that just makes it all the better. It's also one of the few times I agree with a protagonist's decision to not kill someone, at least at this point in time because yeah, might as well be Travis as anyone else (it's only later it gets ridiculous like why don't you just shoot him?) and anyway, it's humiliating for him.

Chuckled at this moment on the ship afterwards.

Vila: Anyway, we're glad you are safe, aren't we? *looks at Avon when he doesn't say anything* Aren't we?

Avon: Yes, I'm glad you're all right.

Like is he quiet because he doesn't usually express this kind of thing or quiet because he's shaken up about it all and trying to hide this? Or both?

Blake's determined not to lose any more friends but, alas, we know this is doomed to fail, because he's going to get more reckless as time goes on. And this is also the first time they fail in terms of their mission, because it was all for nothing and the codes are just going to be changed.

But definitely remains one of my favourite episodes of all.

#blake's 7 #meta #excellent analysis here

depsidase

#wow #AI

cuunos

being a kid and hearing adults say stuff like "woah 2011 was 4 years ago haha" didn't really convey the fucking horror of a youtube video crossing my recommended labelled "9 years ago" and it's from 2017. that's not true. 9 years ago is 2010 or something. don't lie.

#WTAF