Deep down, she believes the world is perfectible. @desastresetoiles - Tumblr Blog

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thetursithan

And after endless engineering calculations the result is achieved.

esoanem

(via @naamahdarling )

elodieunderglass

You don’t want to commit to the sit until you can commit to the sit

unashamedly-enthusiastic

cyle

never thought i'd be sitting here realizing just how much i take sitting for granted

swimmingblue

reminder of the day that babies and kids have to figure so much out? Stuff that we absolutely take for granted. Like sitting.

driveintheaterofthemind

Peter Falk / Columbo

Art by Peter Falk

vexwerewolf

America got freedom-fried

itsapmseymour

Which is Your Black Cat?

creatures-in-posts

Confirmed creature post

moniquill

These are the same animal five minutes apart.

willgrahamscock

the level of censorship around this man is ridiculous, what happened to free speech? It’s just his name.

willgrahamscock

calling her a “copy cat” when she didn’t do anything other than repeat 3 words is insane. her bail is set at 100,000.

willgrahamscock

as of now she’s facing 15 years in jail for ‘threatening’ the ceo of the insurance company that denied her claim. and isn’t that ironic? since women always get told that ‘threats don’t mean anything unless there’s action’ when it comes to reporting stalkers, ex and present partners who threaten abuse. but now a threat warrants this disproportionate action?

raptorific

If I were president of Doctor Who, I'd make a Simpsons episode and I'm not joking

raptorific

Doctor Who and his bestie of the week arrive in a perfectly normal, if particularly eventful, small town in modern day earth, full of quirky characters who have all been stuck in time for close to 40 years. They aren't trapped in the 80s, though, time keeps moving forward, but the people don't. They're aware of the passage of time, but not of their static nature. Their young son has celebrated 35 Christmases and 35 tenth birthdays and he remembers all of them, he just hasn't put together that this is too many for someone who would, if pressed, claim to have been born in 2014. Their daughter remembers being 8 in 2004, in 1998, in 1989, but she's sure she was born in 2016. The 44-year-old school principal has PTSD flashbacks from a war that should've been over five years before he was born. The parents are in their late 30s but their worn, elderly voices tell a very different story. What's causing this? Is it ethical for the doctor to make the residents aware of their condition, or to fix it, knowing Grandpa might crumble to dust if he does the math on his age? Should a state of affairs be allowed to persist like this for so long?

nelc

Twist: Grandpa is the only one who is fully aware of what's happening, but every time he tries to talk about it, it's taken as the ramblings of a confused old man mentally unstuck in time.

sevdrag

tell me something cool

not-available-for-comment

Wastewater treatment is not achieved through a series of chemical treatments. Instead, it’s a managed natural process in which the effluent from the sewer system is filtered, aerated and then broken down by wild microbes.

Technically it doesn’t need to be aerated, but anaerobic bacteria, which don’t need oxygen, produce much stinkier byproducts during this breakdown process, so most decent-sized urban wastewater treatment plants do aerate in order to spare the neighbors. Very simple rural wastewater plants may just pump the wastewater into a lagoon—an outdoor pond, usually with a liner of some kind—and just let whatever grows in there do so.

As the wastewater is breaking down, it separates into a layer of muck (sludge) and a layer of cleaner water. Large wastewater treatment plants have a series of stages with clearer and cleaner water emerging from each one. Small plants may have a series of lagoons or just one. The more stuff you have in your wastewater that’s not poop (say maybe you accept discharge from a local factory, or there’s a restaurant district with a lot of food waste in their greywater), the longer and harder it is to treat.

Discharge from wastewater treatment plants to natural water bodies is heavily regulated and monitored for quality. In the US, it’s regulated by the EPA, and they take it seriously. The finishing step involves testing your discharge to make sure it’s within your approved discharge limits. This is the only step where a chemical treatment is commonly added: a little chlorine, to kill off the last of your microbes. But some plants use constructed wetlands or sand filters instead. If they do apply chlorine, they also have to take it back out before releasing the water, so that they don’t upset the ecosystem the water will be released to.

(If you have wastewater that’s mostly human waste and a correctly sized plant, you shouldn’t technically need this step. The microbes should be slowly precipitating out of the water along with the sludge. But things like high volume, cold temperatures, and complex effluent can make those benchmarks hard to hit without a finishing step.)

MORE COOL STUFF ABOUT WASTEWATER:

DID YOU KNOW? Potassium, an important component in fertilizer, is actually mined out of the earth? Did you know potassium deposits are running low? DID YOU KNOW POTASSIUM IS A WASTEWATER BYPRODUCT!?

DID YOU KNOW? Some large plants can trap and clean methane from their wastewater and use it for power?

DID YOU KNOW? The precipitated sludge can be further treated and used for fertilizer? I particularly liked the plant that was using it to fertilize fast-growing trees for the paper trade.

DID YOU KNOW? Many wastewater plant operators have a protective—if sometimes frustrated—relationship with their microbes, which they call “the bugs”, and include not just bacteria but also other microorganisms like algae and daphnia. The bugs are the workhorses of the wastewater plant: if their ecosystem becomes imbalanced, everyone’s job gets harder. I doubt they’d appreciate this, but in my mind, wastewater treatment operators are microbe herders. Though I suppose thinking of them as bog technicians is also accurate.

This has been the short version of my “wastewater treatment is fricking awesome” rant. I generalized a lot but the gist is still true. You asked for something cool, behold: Wastewater treatment, first wonder of man’s interface with nature.

curseworm

by far the best part of grocery shopping is the little babies. i was carefully selecting mushrooms when i felt upon me a piercing gaze and looked up to see a very chubby and very red-cheeked baby staring intently at me from a grocery cart with a slightly furrowed brow, hand clutching an apple for dear life. i wiggled a mushroom at her and she gasped and kept staring. i turned back to the mushrooms and heard a shriek. i turned around and the baby stared in anticipation. i wiggled another mushroom and she shrieked again in delight. she looked down at the apple in her hand, considering it for a moment. fair-minded as she was, she decided it would only be right to wiggle produce at me in return, and she held up the apple and shook it with all her might. i think i could live forever now

pyrrhiccomedy

I feel like we need a refresher on Watsonian vs Doylist perspectives in media analysis. When you have a question about a piece of media - about a potential plot hole or error, about a dubious costuming decision, about a character suddenly acting out of character -

A Watsonian answer is one that positions itself within the fictional world.

A Doylist answer is one that positions itself within the real world.

Meaning: if Watson says something that isn't true, one explanation is that Watson made a mistake. Another explanation is that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made a mistake.

Watsonian explanations are implicitly charitable. You are implicitly buying into the notion that there is a good in-world reason for what you're seeing on screen or on the page. ("The bunny girls in Final Fantasy wear lingerie all the time because they're from a desert culture!")

Doylist explanations are pragmatic. You are acknowledging that the fiction is shaped by real-world forces, like the creators' personal taste, their biases, the pressures they might be under from managers or editors, or the limits of their expertise. ("The bunny girls in Final Fantasy wear lingerie because somebody thought they'd sell more units that way.")

Watsonian explanations tend to be imaginative but naive. Seeking a Watsonian explanation for a problem within a narrative is inherently pleasure-seeking: you don't want your suspension of disbelief to be broken, and you're willing to put in the leg work to prevent it. Looking for a Watsonian answer can make for a fun game! But it can quickly stray into making excuses for lazy or biased storytelling, or cynical and greedy executives.

Doylist explanations are very often accurate, but they're not much fun. They should supersede efforts to provide a Watsonian explanation where actual harm is being done: "This character is being depicted in a racist way because the creators have a racist bias.'" Or: "The lore changed because management fired all of the writers from last season because they didn't want to pay then residuals."

Doylism also runs the risk of becoming trite, when applied to lower stakes discrepancies. Yes, it's possible that this character acted strangely in this episode because this episode had a different writer, but that isn't interesting, and it terminates conversation.

I think a lot of conversations about media would go a lot more smoothly, and everyone would have a lot more fun, if people were just clearer about whether they are looking to engage in Watsonian or Doylist analysis. How many arguments could be prevented by just saying, "No, Doylist you're probably right, but it's more fun to imagine there's a Watsonian reason for this, so that's what I'm doing." Or, "From a Watsonian POV that explanation makes sense, but I'm going with the Doylist view here because the creator's intentions leave a bad taste in my mouth that I can't ignore."

Idk, just keep those terms in your pocket? And if you start to get mad at somebody for their analysis, take a second to see if what they're saying makes more sense from the other side of the Watsonian/Doylist divide.