Aspiring Physicist with a Book Addiction @bookishphysicsgirl - Tumblr Blog

Happy pride!

Let me know in my inbox if there are any other flags you would like to see me draw :]

Edit: I’m gonna turn off my asks temporarily while I go through my requests bc if I get any more I fear I may explode 😭😭 (I’ll turn my asks back on after I finish all of them though!)

world strongest

at the end of the day there’s such little trans rep but also simultaneously more than there’s ever been. so there’s enough to find a wide variety of representation, but still so little that there’s not a lot of each unique perspective. so it’s easier to pretend the problem is some other group of trans people that’s slightly different from you, and you dont feel represented by their art

makrustic

Urban Borders 🍃 (Sound) 'The world stands quietly at night' Prints | Ko-fi | Patreon | Bluesky ⭐

mintyfreckles

You see, I feel sorrier for you than I do for him… because you’ll never know the things that love can drive a man to

shisasan

Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924)

macgyvermedical

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day!

On May 8th, 1980, smallpox was declared eradicated. Meaning there is no natural spread of smallpox anywhere in the world.

Smallpox infections date back at least 3,000 years. There are smallpox scars on the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses V.

The last documented person to have naturally contracted smallpox was 23-year-old hospital cook Ali Maow Maalin, who survived the disease in October of 1977.

The last person to die of the disease was 40-year-old medical photographer Janet Parker, infected in a lab accident in the summer of 1978.

Smallpox was a terrifying disease. It was horrifically painful and killed 1/3 of the people it infected, leaving the rest badly scarred.

We got lucky with smallpox. It had no animal reservoir. Being that it only infected humans we were able to vaccinate our way to eradication.

Today variola major, the virus that causes smallpox, officially exists in 2 places: the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, and the Vector Institute, Koltsovo, Russia. It is likely that many other countries have samples as well.

Deliberate infection with cowpox to prevent smallpox was the first effective vaccine. We owe every other vaccine to this one breakthrough.

The smallpox vaccine causes a scar at the injection site. You probably know someone with a smallpox vaccine scar. Routine childhood vaccination for smallpox ended in 1972 in the USA.

We used the smallpox vaccine to vaccinate against mpox in 2022. Because of this, I have given the smallpox vaccine. We also vaccinate researchers and others at high risk.

Be grateful you live in a world that does not contain naturally spreading smallpox. It has a long and awful history.

bookishphysicsgirl

Wait... I was told I don't have the scar because of a new version of the vaccine that doesn't cause a scar. Does that mean I was not actually vaccinated and if one day I accidentally get sent back in time by a weird cosmic incident I could die of smallpox?

rusticfurnace

ray of sunshine

luulapants

If we wanted to engage in nuance (lol, lmao) on the "are audiobooks reading" debate, we really do need to bring literacy, and especially blind literacy, into the conversation.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.

So, yes, audiobooks should count as reading. But, no, they should not count as literacy.

naamahdarling

Finally, a good fucking take.

albatross-the-fanartist

*accordion noises*

speciesbarocus

Roman mosaic floor discovered under a vineyard in Negrar di Valpolicella, Veneto.

birdsquirrel

#something about this really gets to me #how if you get enough dirt on your floor it just becomes the ground #and eventually someone is trying to farm in your living room

lgbtqiatext

bookishphysicsgirl

I really wish we had an equivalent to "they" in my language that wasn't also gendered. As a result I accidentally generally default to my own gender when referring to people I don't know the gender of in Portuguese. People with languages with gender neutral terms appreciate it. Trying to create and implement a new one is so hard.

#like a lot of people like "elu" instead of "ele"(masc.) or "ela"(fem). #personally I like "eli" better but I get it because it sounds too much like "ele" #either way it is hard to get your brain to not automatically default to the language you are used to especially when my brain just wants to say "they"