Not to hijack this post but this reminds me of a time I (public relations major working in comms) was DMing for my normal play group (marine scientists at various degrees of graduate level education).
The question came up if they could cast spells underwater with verbal components and I said, jokingly, "well give me ONE good reason that you could talk underwater while waterbreathing"
These idiots (lovingly) went into like a 15-minute debate about HYDROPHYSICS AND AQUATIC ACOUSTICS PRINCIPLES... like I just got plopped in the middle of a physical oceanography conference.
It was entertaining for the first bit before I finally interrupted and said "guys... you could have just said -*~magic~*-" like I would have accepted that the nature of the MAGICAL SPELL LETTING YOU BREATHE UNDERWATER let's you communicate...
Anyway i love playing with a bunch of academics, its always a riot
God could you imagine how mad geologists must have been to slowly watch the "hey all the continents kinda fit like puzzle pieces :)" guy get proven right
Crucially, Alfred Wegener, "the guy" OP is talking about made a lot of valuable observations, but wasn't able to explain established phenomena.
Wegener's ideas fell apart as soon as someone asked questions like "so how did these continents drift apart?" because all he had was some interesting observations (for example, Wegener noticed that fossils from identical species could be found an ocean apart, but almost as if they had a natural range across two specific areas that were at some point connected).
Without Marie Tharp, Wegener's ideas would have just been interesting food for thought, not a fully developed robust scientific understanding allowing us to predict volcanic eruptions and earthquakes and allowing us to understand continental drift.
It's wild that Wegener's ideas were dismissed as amateurish and Tharp's discoveries and huge quantities of data analysis dismissed as "girl talk". But they sure changed the face of geology and Marie Tharp specifically has saved lives through her diligent charting of the sea floor and her discovery of that rift and its movement.
I don’t think I have an Attention Deficit. I think I have an Attention Surplus. Attention is pointing Everywhere and frankly whatever you wrote in your email is not as captivating as That Radom Noise I’m Hearing
i love reading sad books bc when your own grief is stopped up inside you like a clogged drain you can grieve for a character on a page and understand that you're also grieving for yourself a little bit
‘There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.’
-Anne Carson, ‘Grief Lessons: Four Plays By Euripides’
We’ve had five babies born this shift (they play a lullaby over the intercom so we’re kept apprised) and one nurse was like “we are being overrun by new virgos” with what sounded like genuine disgust. I think she was joking but I prefer to think she isn’t because that’s funnier.
This is extremely disrespectful. The government wants to shred jewish religious texts (and other religious texts) held in the national library.
Like mentioned in the article, they could very well donate them if storage cost is a concern. Or at least consult on how to get rid of them respectfully as shredding them is not respectful.
Controversy erupts as the National Library of New Zealand plans to destroy religious texts like the Bible, Quran, and Torah.
this an institutionalized version of "pissing in a quran" or flag-burning. i think the line between freedom of expression v religious rights is crossed when these things are publically owned. shame on aotearoa.
Reading the new checks that might come in due to the Online Safety Act in the UK and this is actually bullshit
[Image Transcript:
And how will I prove my age?
There’s a number of methods a site or app might use to ask you to confirm your age. They might do this check themselves or use another company to do the check. These methods include:
Facial age estimation – you show your face via photo or video, and technology analyses it to estimate your age.
Open banking – you give permission for the age-check service to securely access information from your bank about whether you are over 18. The age-check service then confirms this with the site or app.
Digital identity services – these include digital identity wallets, which can securely store and share information which proves your age in a digital format.
Credit card age checks – you provide your credit card details and a payment processor checks if the card is valid. As you must be over 18 to obtain a credit card this shows you are over 18.
Email-based age estimation – you provide your email address, and technology analyses other online services where it has been used – such as banking or utility providers - to estimate your age.
Mobile network operator age checks – you give your permission for an age-check service to confirm whether or not your mobile phone number has age filters applied to it. If there are no restrictions, this confirms you are over 18.
Photo-ID matching – this is similar to a check when you show a document. For example, you upload an image of a document that shows your face and age, and an image of yourself at the same time – these are compared to confirm if the document is yours.
End Transcript.]
Not only is this such a fucking breach of privacy, but this is going to hurt adults in vulnerable and abusive situations. Some adults don’t have bank accounts or credit cards or even a fucking phone. I’m one of them. I could not give half of this information even if I wanted to. What the fuck is this. Fuck the UK government. This isn’t going to protect kids, this is just going to hurt adults, and I know full well when they say “sites that allow pornography” they’re going to be going after sites that have huge amounts of queer content, like tumblr and Ao3. Queer kids are gonna lose their fucking communities because of this shit. Abuse victims are going to lose online support systems because of this.
I’m genuinely fucked off about this, and worried about whether I’m going to lose every single one of my online friends. Anyone in the UK, please email your MP and sign this petition. It needs to reach 100k signatures to pass through Parliament.
I’m only hoping the backlash will be big enough for them to stop implementing these measures.
We want the Government to repeal the Online Safety act.
Anything we Yankees can do to voice our displeasure at this? This absolutely is violating and it's creepy. It absolutely will be used as a test run for implementing something similar here if it doesn't get loud pushback, and even before it does, we all share the same Internet, so it will, in some way, affect us even across the pond.
As far as I know, the best thing non-UK people can do is simply share the petition around, because it’s not possible for anyone outside of the UK to sign it (otherwise the petition can be deemed invalid). But definitely keep your eyes on American laws, because it’s likely they’ll attempt to implement them there too. The UK itself is basically copying what Australia has been trying to do with their under-16s ban.
TIL that Harvard professor Tom Lehrer was asked at the age of 84 by rapper 2 Chainz if he could sample his 60-year old song. Lehrer replied, “I grant you motherfuckers permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?”
the fact that this doesn’t mention that 1. the song is called “the old dope peddler” and that 2. lehrer’s other songs range from delights like “the masochism tango” and “poisoning pigeons in the park” to a catchy theme tune for the myth of Oedipus to celebrations of plagiarism in math academia and a series of jokes about the folk song “Clementine” as written by various classical composers, not to mention The Elements Song, is unforgivable.
lehrer is also a math genius who entered Harvard at 15 and may or may not have invented the jello shot. eventually he got bored of performing music and went back to teaching math. as of May 2021 he’s 93 and still kicking around in California.
You can’t leave the 2Chainz song out because he literally based the entire song off Tom Lehr’s Old Dope Peddler. Seriously, the original is woven into the entire thing.
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