Noah Kahan
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
blake kathryn
Monterey Bay Aquarium
almost home
★
todays bird
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
#extradirty
Cosmic Funnies
Cosimo Galluzzi
macklin celebrini has autism
Stranger Things
noise dept.
taylor price
tannertan36
if i look back, i am lost
One Nice Bug Per Day
sheepfilms
Xuebing Du
seen from United States
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seen from Türkiye
seen from Türkiye
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@mandywondering
This but make it domestic Spirk:
Maaan, this Ernest Chiriacka illustration has been in my K/S inspiration folder for over a year now!! Thank you for making this post—this was the push I needed to finally make it happen xD
✨ Full size on AO3 ✨
Thank you all, i needed further explanation - And i do find it might help me!
Love how these posts were in fact 1 minute apart, the implications are great
I know it's a deliberately scripted goof by some intern so we'll share it around the internet but I like to imagine that they were flooded with responses about people owning their fave books within that one minute.
I'm gonna make my paint night paint something soooo cute tonight they're gonna be sick
We started talking about banned books so I swapped out my unicorn for gay penguins (I brought a bunch of little plastic animals for us to reference)
what companies who sell you anti aging stuff don't want you to know is that if you're chill about aging, your perception of attractiveness changes as you get older. there is no "wall" where you suddenly become ugly and unfuckable because in my experience what actually happens is you get into your thirties and suddenly realize that people in their thirties are hot as fuck and the "flaws" that the beauty industry wants you to panic about are a feature not a bug, and based on the std statistics in nursing homes I don't really expect that trajectory to change.
The thing is you can have a grassy lawn or even a golf course without it being an ecological disaster, you just have to a: be cool about having the occasional non-grass plant in the mix and b: be willing to live in a climate that supports grass without irrigation.
Golf courses in California are an abomination which is why the sport was in fact invented in Scotland.
I always thought that golf as a sport should be adapted to the local native landscape. I think this will encourage regional pride when local golfers completely trounce visitors at Swamp Golf, Desert Golf, Forest Golf, etc. Rich tourists will be pressured to travel extensively to experience all forms of golf, instead of staying in their backyard country club golf courses. Internet discourse will probably somehow get worse but I think this is a small price to pay.
so i feel the urge to add a bit of context here because i find the vague on-screen text deeply underwhelming.
this is not just "a picture", it's Pale Blue Dot, one of the most famous works of astrophotography ever made public. and it was not just "a dying spacecraft", it was Voyager 1, a probe launched in 1977 to study the atmosphere and moons of Jupiter and Saturn, among other things. both Voyager probes carried on them a golden record meant as an introduction to humanity for any alien species that might discover them (if you saw Kane Parsons' Backrooms, you've heard the contents of that record coming out of a cardboard caveman standee). they did this because NASA planned to sundown these probes by letting them drift out of the solar system to parts unknown. Voyager 1 is currently 16 billion miles away, the farthest any manmade object has ever traveled from earth.
AND it's not even dead! despite supposedly being a "dying spacecraft" all the way back in 1990, Voyager 1 is not expected to be fully out of commission until 2036. to keep the probe alive they've switched off unneeded tools, adjusted its trajectory, even essentially updated the firmware, and through all that time it's basically never stopped sending back priceless data for scientists to analyze.
this is the original Pale Blue Dot, by the way:
it's relevant because "a single point of light smaller than one pixel" makes a lot more sense in the context of the original than it does in the heavily corrected version up top, where our pale blue dot looks more like a vibrant dwarf star. the difficulty of spotting earth in these waving curtains of space IS the entire impact of the picture! the blue dot is "pale" because it's hard to see! by making earth stand out so brilliantly, Terribly Interesting have inadvertently created the impression that earth is this vibrant glowing pearl, bright for all to see for billions of miles around. and it just isn't! the point is not that we can see earth from far away, but that we almost can't, because we aren't the center of the universe! when science educators past have used this image they often referred to one where the earth is circled in bright red, which only further emphasizes how small and fragile our home really is.
but hey, if you DO want an improved version of Pale Blue Dot you don't even need photoshop:
this is Pale Blue Dot Revisited, released by NASA in 2020. this is a reinterpretation of the original data using modern image processing techniques to create a more realistic or at least more high-definition rendering of the scene. it's important to understand that this is not the original image dropped into photoshop and airbrushed. strictly speaking, there isn't an "original" Pale Blue Dot the way there are negatives of traditional photography. astrophotography is almost always the product of raw data being deliberately interpreted by scientists, so the same data can produce many different images (ie if they want to emphasize the infrared spectrum vs visible light). similar work was done by Don P. Mitchell in ~2005 to enhance images taken by Soviet Venera probes of the surface of Venus to be less noisy.
here's an original:
and here's Mitchell's version:
i'm not here to argue which is "better" (and i highly recommend you read the source for this one because it's quite fascinating), just to give another example of the process in action and hopefully clarify how it's distinct from editing a jpeg in photoshop. also i just think it's neat!
which is the real reason i went to the trouble of making this post. Terribly Interesting may indeed find all of this to be terribly interesting, but it appears to be interest for the sake of a vague transient feeling of having been interested and little else. it doesn't name the probe, the photo in question, nor does it give historical context for the mission it was part of. the only substantial thing it says about the probe, that Voyager 1 is a "dying spacecraft", is so frustratingly oversimplified it may as well just be a lie.
so what's actually learned here, if you're someone who knows none of this history? that one time there was a thing and it did a thing? earth tiny from far away?? obviously it's just one image macro but i see this kind of thing making the rounds SO often, a screenshot with like two sentences on it explaining the image with as little descriptive text as possible. it's like there's a space-themed inspiration-posting rulebook that says you can't imply the existence of information not contained within the image. mention NASA? mention Voyager 1? mention Pale Blue Dot? nope! "a dying spacecraft" took "one last photograph", and here's a photoshopped version to make earth more visible.
and it might not even get to me nearly as much if this was any other space photo. i could accept that space stuff is complicated and this kind of fast-food image can only say so much if we were talking about Cassini or JWST's role in helping us find exoplanets. but this is Pale Blue Dot, the brainchild of arguably THE science communicator Carl Sagan! he wrote a book about Pale Blue Dot, he was on TV to announce the image personally! it's arguable that no astrophotograph exists whose context has been more digestibly packaged for laymen than Pale Blue Dot, which just makes it that much more egregious when someone doesn't go to the trouble.
so much of what i love about astronomy and studying the past & future of space travel is that everything you can learn is a doorway to learning more. you can't earnestly read about Voyager or Cassini or Venera or any other mission without finding some odd searchable detail and going "wait, what is that" and immediately falling down an hourslong rabbit hole to find an answer. and you'll never reach the bottom! i love reading articles about cutting edge astrophysics written for people in, like, early grad school, because i fully comprehend maybe 10% of it, vaguely understand 20% (on a good day), can kind of wrap my head around 30%, and find the rest totally inscrutable... but that's still a solid 60% scrutability rating even at the lowest-quality end of the spectrum! i'm no expert and i never will be, but in scouring the written expertise of others i almost always find one or two ideas that end up sticking with me forever. and it starts, every time, from questions about a photograph.
the sin of the above image is that it's solipsistic. it doesn't give you anywhere to put your curiosity or interest, doesn't invite you to leave their website and learn more than they have space to share, it doesn't even tell you anything useful about its subject! it reduces the entire history of Pale Blue Dot down to a vague and nondescript wonder that's just a pale imitation of the highly specific and ideologically driven wonder that Carl Sagan wanted us to feel.
here, feel it for yourself:
----
[P.S.: before you lament that this is an "AI" problem, while yes "AI" has radically increased the volume of low-value (often negative-value) inspiration bait like this, know that this has been a problem in online science education for a LOT longer than chatgpt's been around. this example isn't extraordinary, just close to my heart. nothing new under the sun and all that]
lmao someone else got their knocks in on this post before i could finish writing mine. clearly we are hand in hand re: Talk About How Cool Voyager 1 Is You Fucks
💬 0 🔁 109 ❤️ 245 · Okay, I need to add some clarification and correction to this. This photo is known as The Pale Blue Dot. It was take
If you haven’t seen the meme, it’s three photos of me showing my flapjacks to the judges and then a quote, I don’t remember saying this but apparently it’s how I talk, says “Started making it, had a breakdown, bon appétit”
James Acaster on his Bake Off experience - Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999
The Man The Myth The Legend
by Laerte Coutinho
btw this is laerte. She is 73 now! Making art and being happy! It's never too late to transition
For those unsure of a sport to pick:
Have you considered hitting your friends with a sword? Have you considered getting hit with swords by your friends? Have you considered making out after a duel?
to anyone in the areas impacted by the wildfire smoke, my #1 biggest piece of advice as someone whos been dealing with wildfire smoke in the NW united states for years, is build yourself a Corsi-Rosenthal Cube
they perform as well as expensive HEPA air cleaners, and are comparatively VERY inexpensive. all you need is a box fan, 4 air filters, a piece of cardboard, and some duct tape!!!!
i think it took us maybe a half hour to put ours together, if that, and we replace the filters every 3 months. it's really made a HUGE difference, both when the air quality is bad, but also with our allergies
Saw these easy to read instructions on Twitter. Stay safe 💚
Also just a handy, DIY air filter in general, if a bit bulky. For a less bulky and cheaper (but also less effective) solution, you can simply tape one filter to the fan, cut a shroud if you'd like.
just FYI, this is quite literally what the climate scientists at my work who specialized in wildfire smoke impacts recommend. it works great, it's cheap to make, and it will make a noticeable impact on your air quality.
i have asthma & keep one of these running in my room perpetually. after I set it up the difference in my sleep quality was pretty much night and day. Dont waste your time on proprietary air filters; SIMPLY bust out the duct tape
Just remember! HEPA is a rating of the filter itself, not the expensive box with a fan on it they can mount to. The expensive thing is making it quiet and pretty and trendy. If the filters themselves are HEPA rated, then this design is a HEPA filter.
knowing how it tends to go with male authors and their wives it was probably marge who wrote the odyssey
Nine Worlds spin-the wheel, because I think this has the potential to be utter chaos.
First spin is who's trying to kill you. Second spin is who's trying to protect you. Good luck!
How fucked are you?
I will survive and make friends in the process!
I will most likely live, maybe even with all my limbs attached!
It's conceivably possible I would survive.
Fifty-fifty
I might die
I will probably die
I will die
The Fall of Astandalas will have *nothing* on this.
Apologies in advance for any spelling errors, I'm on mobile on my lunch break so I didn't double check anything.
Strictly speaking, "ultimate" means "last", not "best". It's often figuratively employed in the latter sense to suggest that the thing so described is the final word on the subject, after which nothing more need be said, but if we're being real technical, describing a game or movie that was so bad it killed its entire franchise as the "ultimate" is in fact correct.
@ffoxer replied:
Now I'm thinking about the prefix "pen," which as far as I can think I may have only ever seen in "penultimate"
It's Latin for "nearly" or "almost", and it does pop up in a few other English words. "Penultimate", "penumbra" and "peninsula" are the only ones I can think of that you'd even remotely expect to encounter in everyday speech, though; the rest are all medical or mathematical jargon.
Penis, Latin for something that almost is.
the legally blonde mentality isnt just for law students. u can bring that attitude with you into every field of work. be the whimsical force of positive change. wear that neon outfit. snaps for us all.
this post was inspired by my boss telling me she couldnt "take me seriously" in a pair of dinosaur print overalls. sorry i have two degrees and a dope wardrobe. you dont need to take me seriously but You Will Take Me.
OP's an inspiration. bring on the whimsy movement!
Official joy and whimsy post
Thought this might help others who struggle when writing. I know I get in my head too much.
