Misplaced Lens Cap
pixel skylines
dirt enthusiast
Not today Justin
Game of Thrones Daily
hello vonnie
d e v o n
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
I'd rather be in outer space đž
styofa doing anything
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
occasionally subtle
shark vs the universe
Peter Solarz
â
Discoholic đȘ©
romaâ
đȘŒ
KIROKAZE
trying on a metaphor
seen from United States
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@penguin-osterone
Hunter-gatherer's approach to manufacturing textiles:
Find a suitable 3D mass
Peel off its outer layer to get a 2D sheet
Agriculturalist's approach to manufacturing textiles:
Produce a 1D filament
Shape it into a 2D space-filling curve
we need a name for the opposite of a blorbo. an anti-blorbo if you will. a character youâve been forced to encounter in dashboard wilderness so often it's now anathema to your fandom instincts. not a blorbo but a "hell no not this fucker again"
blorbno
Bro come look at the stars with me I am not feeling like myself
Sam Handwich.
If Pikiwedia says it it must be true.
another iceland fact
tourists are posting pictures from several different places in the country and tagging them with the name "gjaldskylda". they seem to be under the impression that it's the toponym of the beautiful waterfall/lava field/mountain/etc. they're visiting.
gjaldskylda means "you have to pay to park here" and it's on an unreasonable amount of signs
You guys ever see a DNI that makes you break out into laughter and almost cry
If graphic design is your passion then !!! GET OUT !!! đ«đ«đâŒïžđ„¶đ„¶đ«
Is this really who we are as a nation? What happened to kindness?
Christine explained that John is disabled, but Nicolet loudly insisted the boy didnât belong in the womenâs room, calling him a fully grown man and exclaiming to everyone in the crowded lobby that, âThis is not a transgender bathroom!â John looks nothing like a fully grown man. He looks like a kid. Did Nicolet see him as a transgender girl transitioning? Apparently, based on her comments. Then she ordered her security guards to surround the pair, and she ordered her assistant manager to call the police. Nicolet then left. The assistant manager told Christine that she disagreed with Nicolet but claimed Christine and John were âcreating a disturbanceâ and must leave the cinema. The security guards sympathized with Christine, but they also insisted that she and John leave at once. When the police arrived, Christine explained that sheâd done nothing wrong, that she âcertainly could notâ let her disabled son use the menâs room by himself. One police officer appeared to sympathize, responding, âAbsolutely.â Then â like the manager, the assistant manager, and the security guards â the police insisted that John and his mom leave the cinema at once, apparently under threat of arrest.
A harrowing story, but a vital portrait of how transphobia and ableism are intrinsically linked -- this story is reported on by my buddy James Finn, a gay Autistic man.
I have an ungoogleable question I need your help solving. Every day I look at the wikipedia top read articles list (donât know why) and it is uniformly to do with celebrity deaths, reddit top posts, big movies, anniversaries of tragedies, people looking up the crimes a new netflix documentary is about. pop culture in general. except almost every day for years now, Cleopatra is in the top 20 most read wikipedia articles and I canât figure out why. tell me your theories please.
this is crazy and absolutely the most upsettingly banal explanation I could have hoped for
Just found out that the dietary calorie is still measured by burning food in a "bomb calorimeter" and then measuring the heat produced. There's no solid evidence that this method is at all equivalent to how our bodies process food (an entirely different chemical process from combustion), the accuracy of this system has been disputed for as long as it's existed, and there are no available alternatives
There are 4800 calories in a kilogram of dry sawdust even though wood is completely indigestible to humans, because calories don't measure nutritional value, just how well something burns
Nutritional "science" is pure bullshit
A good primer on this topic is the Maintenance Phase podcast episode âThe Trouble with Caloriesâ: https://maintenancephase.buzzsprout.com/1411126/10671811
Prefer reading? The sources list for that episode is full of goodies:
History of the Calorie in Nutrition
Caloric Equivalents of Gained or Lost Weight
The Foreign Policy of the Calorie
Why the most popular rule of weight loss is completely wrong
The energy balance model of obesity: beyond calories in, calories out
âCalories in, calories outâ and macronutrient intake
Calories on food packets are wrongâitâs time to change that
Why Does the FDA Recommend 2,000 Calories Per Day?
Who Actually Needs a 2,000 Calorie a Day Diet?
The Nutrition Facts Label: Its History and Updates
It doesnât stop there though, almost everything we think we know about nutrition is kind of bullshit.
You need 2000-2500 calories a day? Thereâs no evidence to support that claim. Itâs fully a made up number.
Calories in - calories out = weight gain or lossâ? Absolute bullshit. No credible scientist believes this anymore. Your body compensates for dieting in like a billion ways to the point where reducing calorie intake often results in long term weight gain.
2 liters of water per day? Again: a made up number. ZERO evidence.
The BMI? Not remotely based on science. Absolute bullshit.
Being âoverweightâ or âobeseâ is bad for you? Heavily disputed for all but the highest weight categories.
And of course: there is no evidence based way to lose weight and keep it off. The idea that people can decide to be thinner if not supported by evidence. Almost every study shows that almost all humans just keep returning to their set weight again and again.
Vitamin supplements? We still donât really know why they sometimes work and sometimes donât. Your body seems to decide whether to absorb them pretty much on a whim.
It all falls apart the moment you go looking for evidence. Itâs such a sham.
Oh, I forgot the 10.000 steps one. Also a completely made up number!
On a more serious note: it might be worth adding that âNutritional science is pure bullshitâ is of course a bit of an overstatement.
Nutritional science is a very young field full of unknowns, in which a lot of actual science is being done but the main conclusions those nutrition scientists keep on drawing is âshit, this was more complicated than we thought it wasâ and âwow, the human body is surprisingly capable of self regulation, neat!â. Plus some obvious ones like âjup, veggies are still good for youâ.
Itâs just that almost all of the bullshit that gets presented to the public as âdietary guidelinesâ isnât nutritional science at all, itâs fatphobia dressed up as science. The science consistently shows that (1) weight is not causally related to health and (2) most people can not lose weight, nothing will work in the long term and most attempts make you less healthy. But this is consistently ignored by public officials in order to keep pushing âobesity epidemicâ bullshit and diet culture.
So they come up with weird unscientific catchphrases like â2000 calories per dayâ and âcalories in, calories outâ because there is no scientific way to defend their unscientific hatred or fat people.
The internet may threaten to make perpetual shoppers of us, but it offers heaps of information about repair and mending too. Here's our pick
iFixit
iFixit is a wiki-based site that teaches people how to fix almost anything. It was started in 2003 by Luke and Kyle, in a dorm room at California Polytechnic University when they tried to fix an old iBook together. With no instructions, they tinkered, fiddled, broke some tabs and lost some screws. But they fixed it. When they decided to start selling spare parts themselves, iFixit was born. It now hinges around its step-by-step repair guides, which are free to download and use under Creative Commons licenses.
Now, anyone can create a repair manual for a device on iFixit and anyone can edit the existing set of manuals to improve them. The siteâs founders say that thousands of people make use of the guides every day.
âWeâve heard repair success stories from forensic detectives, field translators, and even kids,â say the pair. âFrom New York to Alaska, Tibet to the Faroe Islands, people have used our guides to fix their stuff.
âOur philosophy is that if you canât open it, you donât own it. Once you disassemble, repair, and put back together your laptop or iPod, you have a much better understanding of what goes into it. Itâs astounding how just 20 minutes of work can make an iPod good as new â but most people have no idea that there are instructions available to make the work easy. And why should they? Apple tells everyone that the battery isnât user-serviceable.
âThatâs where we come in, filling the ecosystem hole that Apple created by manufacturing a device without an end-of-life maintenance and disposal strategy.â
Fixing the world, one gizmo at a time.
Restart Wiki
This is a place where members of the Restart community share tips for mending appliances and gadgets with people who are starting out, or whose knowledge lies elsewhere.
This wiki wonât show you how to fix a particular make and model of device: they leave this to the various fix-it websites and disassembly videos. (You can also get help with a device on social media using #SOSRestart). Rather, contributors to this page concentrate on basic and widely applicable principles, for example soldering and how to stay safe while fixing things.
The site is aimed at anyone with a curiosity about how things work and how to fix them. No prior knowledge is assumed. In the spirit of spreading knowledge as widely as possible, everyone is welcome to read it â and to share it. Anyone is welcome to reuse anything on the wiki, under the terms of the Creative Commons ShareAlike Licence 3.0.
Makers of electronic devices will have to make their products easier to repair under the EUâs right to repair legislation
âMy thesis is that at many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve.â (from Conflict Is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman. highly recommend it if youâre interested in having better dialogues and feeling less defensive in your life)
In the New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, John Seymour - who pretty much defined the principles of âself-sufficiencyâ as a modern political movement - goes into detail about conflict and community-building. So far from todayâs interpretation of self-sufficiency as an American prepper-homesteader isolated from their neighbors - self-sufficient in the sense of âaloneâ - he envisioned self-sufficient in the sense of ânot needing to buy things,â whether that was buying things for pure survival or buying things just to feel good. Seymour felt strongly that a community of close friends, preferably meeting frequently in pubs with wood-burning fires and live music, was a hallmark of being especially practical and self-sufficient; and if you think about it, youâll see that it makes sense.
After all, if you want to buy absolutely nothing - if you want to create a way to live separate from society - you cannot do it like Thoreau; even Thoreau wasnât doing it like Thoreau; you have to create an separate society, a self-sufficient community, and live in that.
And interestingly Seymour put his finger on âwhy communes fail.â
In his experience, which was deep and broad, experiments in self-sufficient communities/communes virtually always failed. And not because the idealistic fools werenât capable of growing crops, or chopping wood, or whatever. It isnât even the founders were stupid or ignorant or inexperienced, or because self-sufficiency only attracts dramatic personalities. No, the communities he observed consistently failed because they had no ability to resolve conflict. Every group of people will have to come to a tricky decision, resolve a sticky situation, have an awkward conversation or even just get along with unideal situations. They didnât fall apart because a sheep fell in a ditch; anyone can get a sheep out of a ditch; they fell apart over the arguments about ideology, ditches, sheep and blame. It was always some issue of conflict or communication that broke these well-meaning, well-intentioned, well-educated people apart.
Step back from that and think: people frequently try to live outside capitalism even in this modern world, people frequently try to live in the most environmentally-friendly way, people frequently try to envision an alternative to a hostile state, even in this world where it is difficult or impossible to do so. For every utopia you might picture, people (being people) will have already made a decent attempt at building and living it, in the hope of showing it or even giving it to you. And those utopias arenât here at the moment for you to have, because itâs terrifically difficult to make communities out of nothing. And thatâs largely because itâs very hard to have communication skills about anything at all, let alone something that gets you mad.
So itâs worth having communication skills. As a matter of self-sufficiency.
If you have ever worked with the public, remember: the public will be part of your politically utopic community.
All the mommy bloggers, all the brosephs, all the every single customer or client or other person you have dealt with who you wanted to fucking strangle, or at least wanted to be allowed one of those amazing moments of Put Down that viral reddit posts are made of, every single frustrating as fuck human: they will be part of your post-capitalist utopia.
They will not wake up, the morning of the revolution, and suddenly become different people. Your choices will be to line them all up against a wall and shoot them . . . .or figure out how to live with them in your community. (And multiple revolutions in the past hundred years have tried that whole "line them up and shoot them" thing, tried it REAL HARD, and it didn't work out great for them either.)
The more de-industrial, de-urbanized, de-impersonal, whatever, your ideal society is? The more it will involve having to work, and work well, and work effectively and without interpersonal violence (physical or social) against people who irritate the fuck out of you.
And no, we never really had any Neat Trick to make that easier in the past. What we most often had was survival pressure so intense that the threat of being ostracized (or having the group turn on you) was enough to force resolutions that nobody was really happy with, or that left an unspoken wound to fester for generations, or to offer up a scapegoat to vent the community's violence on and then pretend to move on, or . . . .
Etc.
If you want a cooperative, non-violent, non-coercive community, and especially if you want that to be the norm, you end up having to learn to work collaboratively and productively with the person who irritates and frustrates and upsets you most in the ENTIRE world. And if you can't picture doing that, then maybe it's time for some self-reflection about how you really want the world to work, and what you're capable of contributing to that.
Reposting this quote from The New Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency just because I find it extremely funny:
âDo not be put off if you find some of the people irritating or bizarre in some way. You have to remember that several of these people are likely to become very good friends as time goes by.â
by far the most interesting part of the latest Youâre Wrong About on homosexuality in the animal kingdom is the account of how science missed it for so long. the guest, lulu miller (of radiolab fame) basically divides the reasons into three categories: ignorance, self-suppression, and what you might call âofficialâ suppression.
essentially, since the days of thomas aquinas when it had been simply declared that homosexuality was inherently against nature, you had a lot of observers of the natural world, even once the enlightenment got underway, who simply didnât know what they were looking at. many animal species are very sexually dimorphic and thus easy to sex; but many more are not, and if your background assumption (because the background assumption of society in general) is that homosexuality does not occur in nature, if you see two animals of unidentified sex mating, you will assume one is male and one is female. or you might simply assume what you are seeing is an aberration, with no real systemic significance, and not pointing to any kind of underlying phenomenon, and simply fail to note it downâor talk to any other naturalists about it.
and this blends into self-suppression, which includes all researchers who might have noticed homosexuality among animals in the wild, but didnât write about it. this includes researchers who might not have thought it was significant, or who might have thought nobody was interested in itâmiller offers the example of a guy who died relatively recently who spent his life studying mountain rams, who omitted mentioning from his quite detailed survey of their behavior that about one in twelve males mate exclusively with other males, because it seemed to him (at the time of writing) an aberrant and unpleasant fact about an otherwise majestic creature.
âofficialâ suppression we might apply to any time a researcher noticed and wanted to write about the phenomenon, but who simply couldnât get their data published, including researchers who might have pressed the scientific community at large to recognize this phenomenon, only to be greeted with hostility and suspicionâi.e., what kind of pervert is so obsessed with this topic?
and out of a combination of all these factors you get centuries of a bias being confirmed, because anybody who might care to ask, âwell, homosexuality clearly occurs in humans, have we observed it in other animals?â would have been confronted with a vast lacuna in the scientific literature, not because it did not occur, but because multiple intersecting cultural biases prevented anybody from actually talking about it. and it makes it hard to have a conversation about natural phenomena from an empirical and rational perspective when a bias that irrational runs that deep! and i cannot help but wonder what other biases we have in our culture, that might be producing similarly irrational lacunae in our apprehension of the world.
ppl in the age of cell phones: fucking up their necks
ppl in the age of books: fucking up their necks
ppl in the age of textile art: fucking up their necks
ppl in the age of picking lice: fucking up their necks
ppl in the age of cooking: fucking up their necks
man, i know anti-intellectualism is fucked up, but so is the response of "you should only ever trust this very specific group of ppl/ authority figures"
as if psychology and anthropology and healthcare etc hasn't been permeated with racism and ableism and fatphobia etc etc at some point in history (and/ or literally built off of them). as if humans aren't fallible, as if we dont have personal biases, or cant be swayed by money
it shouldn't be "believe the experts" it should be "read the fucking studies yourself. were the methods shoddy? does the conclusion make sense wrt to the evidence?" and "acknowledge and examine all perspectives and their presented evidence. are there holes in the evidence you personally believe?"
bc, as you'll find, anti-intellectuals dont exist in a vacuum. they are real people who feel frustrated with some part of the academic world (like my anti-vax mom, who turned out that way bc some doctors fucked up her body & refused to acknowledge or fix it for years, so now she doesnt trust the medical system), and it actually makes things worse when you call them idiots or tell them to wholeheartedly trust any authority figure(s) on the subject. they'll just latch onto anyone that makes them feel smart.
when the subject of "why do people believe things that are seriously wrong and harmful" comes up it feels like you kinda hear one of two perspectives:
"oh, that's easy! it's because they're fundamentally Bad people who want to hurt others and choose their beliefs to justify that! :) hope this helps"
or
"they just don't have access to the same information we do. look at this person who was raised in a cult! don't you feel sorry for her?"
and like, yes, fine, some people were in fact raised in cults, but what i wish people would understand is that the bulk of it is just normal human flaws, like:
they want to believe stuff that makes them feel smart and cool and like they've figured everything out (you also do this)
they want to believe stuff that makes them feel like their emotions are justified and grounded in reality, and that the people they want to hurt deserve to be hurt (you also do this)
they form conclusions before they've processed all the relevant information, and cling to that first impression even when new info comes to light (you also do this)
they pick up beliefs from the people around them because they want to be liked and fit in, not because the beliefs are good or true (you also do this)
they come up with reasons that the stuff that benefits them (and the people they like and identify with) is actually overwhelmingly best for everyone and obviously the right thing to do (you also do this)
they pay more attention to stuff that supports what they already believe and avoid looking in places that might show them otherwise (you also do this)
they listen to people who talk like 'one of them' and ignore others (you also do this)
they come up with reasons to dismiss people with conflicting viewpoints as obviously in bad faith or ignorant or a shill or evil (you also do this)
they fail to take their own beliefs seriously sometimes, and take their beliefs way too seriously other times, in a selective way that lets them do the things they already wanted to do (you also do this)
the very ways they construct the ideas of 'knowledge' and 'wisdom' and 'belief' and 'understanding' are biased so that what they don't want to believe comes under lots of scrutiny and what they do want to believe receives less (you also do this)
you, dear reader, are presumably right about everything and were correct to die on every hill you've ever died on, but the difference between you and someone who's wrong about important stuff doesn't look like "well they're inherently evil and i'm not", it probably looks like a combination of:
natural environment (they would have been exposed to different information than you regardless of their choices)
being in the right place at the right time (your particular profile of flaws and virtues happened to be what was needed to lead you to the right conclusions, they had the opposite experience)
random luck (you doubled down on what felt right to believe but wasn't, but it turned out to be inconsequential, or even right for different reasons, while they doubled down on what turned out to be a horrible mistake distorting their entire worldview)
you do less of the things in the previous list, and over time the difference between you and them adds up
and, look, i also do these things. the nicest and most thoughtful people i've ever met do these things. if you meet someone who never does any of these things, i dunno, give them a fucking medal or something.
i know you're doing your best. we're all doing our best.
