Officially Left

socialism n shitposts - UK, nerd, adult - say if you want something tagged - header is @geekstudio's custom pride candle

[charlesoberonn]

Necessary and sufficient

[charlesoberonn]

[charlesoberonn]

Adding a second lock was not necessary.

[charlesoberonn]

Understanding the difference between necessary and sufficient is necessary, but not sufficient to earn a math degree.

[charlesoberonn]

Part 2

[charlesoberonn]

Gladly!

[charlesoberonn]

A bit more complicated, but sure!

[datasoong47]

[tilthat]

TIL Ray Bradbury first titled Fahrenheit 451 “The Fireman”, then called a local fire station to ask what temperature it would take to actually ignite books. The responding firemen placed him on hold and burnt a book, then reported that the heat required was “Fahrenheit 451″.

via reddit.com

[fourlughero]

That’s such a fire fighter thing to do.

“You know what? That’s a good question. I’m gonna put you on hold while I find out”

[verdigrisvagabond]

My dad used to design kitchens at Lowe’s and one day he got a dude from one of the national labs looking to buy a countertop. Dad sent him home with a sample of a quartz-composite countertop to make sure the color will look good with his existing cabinets. The dude asks my dad what the composition of the countertop is and whether it’ll melt if he puts a pot on it (since it’s a composite and not pure stone) and Dad gives him some rough numbers and reassures him that it won’t melt if he puts a hot pan on the counter. The dude comes back with week later without the sample. The dude gives dad a detailed list of the countertops composition, to the nearest hundredth of a percentile, and the exact temperature it melts at, because he took it to his lab and melted it down. tldr, it’s not just firefighters.

[kaijuunibyou]

Imagine giving someone a sample of the granite you use to make countertops and they come back a few days later just to tell you they fucking dematerialized it

[ferrous-princess]

Ok, but this is just, like, what people do if they have access to equipment. We just… put shit in it. Just to see. At this point, I’ll try and hit just about anything with an arc, just to see. I’ll sand and polish anything you’ll let me, if I’m bored enough. If I had a machine that could melt something down and tell me exactly what was in it? I’d be just waiting for parts of my world to become “trash” so I could de-materialize it and turn it into knowledge of what it was.

[weevil-mastermind]

Imagine if we did the “public libraries are punk” thing for other subcultures. Imagine if people made shirts that said “Soup kitchens are grunge” or “Mixed Use Urbanism is Juggalo”.

[vintar]

[academicabyss]

[tpwrtrmnky]

The parachute study is actually a wonderful piece of art because it demonstrates so succinctly the kind of situation where randomized controlled trials are not the gold standard of evidence, and in fact reach misleading conclusions.

Because you can't recruit people to willingly jump out of mid-flight passenger planes for science, you redesign the study to engineer a scenario where the risk to the control group is minimsed. The plane is landed.

And then, because you've removed the main reason to use a parachute, you find that parachutes have "no effect" on mortality or injury.

The constraints of performing an ethical RCT guarantee this result. A result that we obviously know is dangerously wrong to extrapolate to the real-life uses of parachutes.

Now here's the thing: The people insisting that "evidence-based medicine" says we need RCTs of trans healthcare know this is what they're doing. It's extremely well established that you can abuse these "standards" to engineer incorrect results.

SEGM and their ilk are doing this on purpose because they know it's an effective way to dress up science denial in a veneer of scientific rigor.

[mortalityplays]

talking about impenetrable accents/dialect just reminded me. when I was in Milan a couple of years back I was staying in this little rathole hotel and I had the biggest fucking migraine, so I was like non c'è problema I'll just go buy painkillers. of course every pharmacy on the map in a three block radius was closed, so my stupid ass just starts wandering around trying to figure out on the fly if you can get OTC from supermarkets in italy.

I walk into this little everything store (to my foreign eyes the kind of place that back home could sell you a bunch of carrots, a 6-pack of beer, pantyhose, bleach and a screwdriver set) and I see some household basics in the back but not what I need. with the confidence of a person who is only in the city for 3 days because he got bored and packed a bag and booked the cheapest flight available the week before (<= MENTAL ILLNESS), I was like no worries I know some italian, I can just ask.

I grab a bottle of water, walk up to the counter, and I'm like Ciao, hai il paracetamolo? And the guy is like che, and I'm like paracetamolo. Per la mia testa. And he's like che?

This is where I would have said 'aspirina' except I can't take aspirin for medical reasons, or 'antidolorifico' except I don't know that word and I've got no phone data for google translate and also I'm stupid. So in my fucked up leith-glasgow-italian accent I'm like paaa-ra-cetta-mollll-ooo. He's like ohhh bene, bene, and he calls another guy out of the back and asks him to go get something. Other guy then walks out of the store into the street, and before I can be like hey, che la fuck, he comes back and hands me a huge bundle of herbs.

At this point I'm like okay this entire interaction has been a bust, but these guys have been very nice and patient and they're both smiling happily at me because they've been of service, so I'm like ahh perfetto, grazie, pay them a couple of euros and leave.

EVENTUALLY I find a pharmacy that's open, and my head is fucking killing me, and my phone still isn't connecting, and now I have this small shrubbery poking out of my coat pocket, so I don't even bother looking around the shelves. I just walk straight to the counter and I'm like uhh ciao, scusi. And hearing my nightmare of an accent the guy answers in english and I'm like thank christ, do you please have paracetamol. Not aspirin, I can't take aspirin. And he's like yeah yeah hold on, goes into the back, comes out with what I need.

Only when he comes out he gives me this look, and then he starts laughing. And then he pretends he's not laughing and rings me up and I pay, and as I'm leaving I can see him losing it. But I don't care, my head is going to explode, I'm going back to the rathole to close the blinds and fall comatose for four hours.

When I get back to my hotel room I take off my coat and remember the huge bouquet of herbs in my pocket. They smell amazing, and I'm like I'm pretty sure this is parsley in which case I can just get some tomatoes and mozzarella later and make it work. but since I have no idea what that interaction was, I want to make sure. I bring out my phone to get a visual reference of what parsley leaves look like, and because I was using it for google translate earlier I put 'parsley' in the wrong box like a dope and translate it to italian.

prezzemolo

I wish I could have been the pharmacist in the moment he looked at my tired pissed off anglophone ass, heard me say 'paracetamol' in my fucked up accent, and turned around saw what was in my pocket. I'd have lost my shit too.

[sabrebash]

Is That Allowed

[sabrebash]

Boy am i glad that the con has a facebook page so i can post this photo:

[parkchanwoohoo]

[crazy-brazilian]

[finnegeanscake]

Knightposting this princessposting that WHO IS TILLING THE FIELDS

[dionysiaproductions]

You don't hear from the field workers because they aren't "posting"

They're serfing the internet

[trans-girl-nausicaa]

there are no serfposts because they were almost exclusively illiterate

[sonbr]

that doesn’t stop most tumblr users

[aethersea]

how dare you say we surf on the poor

[blackwatersinkingship]

When I finish this whale shark lamp all 4 of you are gonna be So I'm pressed

[blackwatersinkingship]

She glows now, just so you know, and she's full of string deliciöusee string

[god-sent-gender-bent]

Are you gonna show us the lamp? 👀

[blackwatersinkingship]

Good news! Whäle shark lämp 🥰

[hollyevolving]

A lot more than 4 of us are impressed

[prenbyw]

Spoon in the shape of a fish. Carved from some Sycamore I found just outside Wivenhoe, Essex.

[hinako-supremacy]

op i love your fish so much i made it a png

they are now a school of fish

[teaboot]

Posts that prove that despite about 300 thousand years of technological development, humanity at its core hasn't really changed all that much

[spaghettiwoman46]

Ugh they are always doing this

[keepcalmandcarriefischer]

Little freaks

[trashcangimmick]

[sunshinetomorrow]

this clip from the new will anderson video is actually maybe the funniest thing ive seen in years

[slowspinningredemption]

pretty sure i just lost my editing gig to ai. hate and fucking war on planet earth.

[slowspinningredemption]

like they've already made it very clear by a) ghosting me for months and b) getting my colleagues to train their stupid new ai. like i only know about this because one of my colleagues tipped me off. i imagine they're waiting to get it working before they formally let me go and fuck that. i am literally drafting my resignation lmao

[slowspinningredemption]

[slowspinningredemption]

guys. there has been an update. my spy colleague has informed me that my ex-boss is backtracking. the ai was supposed to speed things up because apparently i was unavailable too often but it turns out that another colleague has been lying about me telling him i was unavailable. i have email receipts proving this never happened.

this colleague also has beef with me because his documents were always garbage and i came back with a million corrections and called him out for mass copy-pasting. so he was just skipping the editing and saying i said i couldn't do it. and i lost my job because of it.

[slowspinningredemption]

ex-boss backtracked and ended up asking me if i'd come back not as a freelance contractor but on an actual employment basis.

[slowspinningredemption]

i declined.

[slowspinningredemption]

shoutout to all the people reblogging the version of this before my rejection letter. and especially shoutout to those people saying they're happy for me and that there's justice on this earth. i regret to inform you that my version of justice means choosing violence.

[dovewithscales]

This is a thing of beauty

[meta-sequoia]

so does anyone have any recommendations for hotd/game of thrones/grrm whatever fanfiction that cares how plants work. would like some speculative botany/ecology worldbuilding to go with that bonkers seasons worldbuilding. tired of frothing at the mouth about the winterfell glass gardens all by myself

[meta-sequoia]

in the fic in question, which i otherwise am quite enjoying:

the isekai protagonist OC is a very minor noble on marginal land trying to keep her peasants from starving in the six year winter immediately following the end of House of the Dragon/Fire and Blood

which: so true bestie! agricultural yield WAS a matter of life and death for premodern peasants, we should have more fantasy fiction about agricultural problems

OC invents clear pane glass. dubious but ok sure its cool

OC builds glass gardens

now to be fair, a lesser writer would say "and then we planted wheat and everyone lived happily ever after". but wheat is a bad crop for greenhouse cultivation bc its not very useful in small planted areas. your best greenhouse crop will be greens or similar, for micronutrients.

again, writer has done their research. crop rotation schemes, discussion of preservation techniques prior to canning, rotting manure as a heat source for greenhouse beds, etc. i see we have both read about the paris market gardens

"however!" author says proudly. "do you know what has high caloric yield per unit land, excellent micronutrient characteristics, and tolerates low soil temperatures? the humble potato!" or, "winter apple", "from bear island". you know what sure, isekai protag can have little a seed potato, as a treat

except even day neutral potatoes are not totally indifferent to day length! there's a basic energetic issue at play, which is that high latitude winter sunlight is weak and there's not much of it - winter days are as short as 7-8 hours in much of the northern US and Europe. many plants shut down vegetative growth below 10hr days, regardless of temperature, presumably because vegetative growth requires abundant energy. (i am not a botanist, but, like. thermodynamics.)

EXCEPT. planetos winters are canonically magic, not related to axial tilt. which brings up the possibility that even in winterfell, winter days are canonically twelve hours long. (it would be so easy for GRRM to accidentally fuck this up and talk about the long northern winter nights or whatever; I do not know if he did)

however! if this is true then the northern biomes should be adapted to these conditions. we should see an entire food chain built around evergreens or even lichen. wild mammals gotta eat something. and probably something in there is domesticatable if humans have been living in the temperate regions of Planetos for millennia. there's probably a lot of complexity there about low temperature chemistry making this plant matter not very rich or abundant calorically, but nature abhors waste of solar energy and would probably find a way. I don't know nearly enough about tundra/boreal ecosystems to write this. There's also something there about carrying capacity and human population densities; not sure what without trying to do math about it.

Notably, this doesn't bring us to the equilibrium we see in canon, where peasants are trying to survive on warm season grains for... no reason? I would say this would make the First Men recent settlers without useful foodways, but canon claims they've been there for eight to twelve thousand years! What are they doing?

What about the children of the forest? The wiki says they cultivated fucking oats and barley, which means unless they domesticated something winterhardy and called it oats/barley, they have the same supply problems as the First Men. (Not touching the treatment of indigeneity here. GRRM racist, more at 11)

In conclusion: ????