[feldfrog]

Imagine your bike has been at the Wright Brother’s repair shop for weeks and you see Orville suddenly whiz over your head in a contraption

[robin-hood-for-freedom]

The key to understanding history and geopolitics is to remember: just because one side is bad, doesn't mean the other side is good

[thepartyponies]

Just because an official narrative is suspect doesn’t mean the most popular counter narrative is automatically true

[tilthat]

TIL that there is journalism equivalent to the Bechdel Test. An article about a female scientist fails the “Finkbeiner Test” if it mentions one of seven topics regarding her womanhood

via reddit.com

[prowlick-deactivated20210420]

The fact that she’s a woman

Her husband’s job

Her child-care arrangements

How she nurtures her underlings

How she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field

How she’s such a role model for other women

How she’s the “first woman to…”

[hedwig-dordt]

Okay, one quote, and then you absolutely have to read the whole thing. 

Still, the virtue of some rules in Aschwanden’s test is difficult to see at first. Take the rule of “no firsts.” In the comments section below her post for Last Word on Nothing, Finkbeiner explained that no sooner had she taken the vow to ignore gender, than she caught herself writing that the astronomer she was profiling was the first to win a certain award. After a reader urged her to stick to her pledge, she removed it.

“The fact that she’s the first woman to do that says a lot more about the prize-giving committee than it does about her,” Finkbeiner explained in our interview. “So if I were going to put that into a story, it would be a story about prejudice in that prize committee.”

It blew my mind, because she’s right. The fact that there’s some many firsts left is the result of bias in the committees NOT IN THE WORK WOMEN DO

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

re ehrc guidance. which is not legally binding.

[gretchensinister]

Consider this (based on a conversation I had with some friends a while ago): Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for people who actually like Pride and Prejudice. Look–I tried to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and I got about 20 pages in before I came to the conclusion that the person who wrote it did so out of the belief that the original Pride and Prejudice was stuffy and boring. There were out of character vulgar puns. And the trailer for the movie did not convince me that I had missed anything by cutting short my reading experience. So, what I’m talking about here is this premise: the world of Pride and Prejudice, but if you die, it’s highly likely, almost certain that your corpse will get up and try to eat people. But no one dies in Pride and Prejudice, you might say. In fact, few or no people die in any Jane Austen novel. This is true. But people do get sick with some regularity. Imagine the tension added to Jane getting sick after going to visit Bingley if there was the chance that she would become a zombie after she died. Becoming a zombie in an eligible bachelor’s house probably would have seriously wrecked any chances of any of the living sisters ending up with him. Imagine Mr. Collins, as a minister, having the duty upon someone’s death of severing their head with a ceremonial plate or something that would prevent the corpse from rising. Obviously important, but this only makes him more self-important and obnoxious. And dangerous. For you see, in this version, Mr. Bennett, who stays in his office all the time, whose life is the only thing allowing Mrs. Bennett and her daughters to stay in the house–Mr. Bennett is definitely a zombie. He died at home, and Mrs. Bennett decided that, no way were they dealing with this, and so…just started faking it. Jane and Elizabeth know. The younger sisters don’t. In this universe, I think we have to go with zombies that are not any faster or stronger than the humans they were, and in fact tend to get weaker as time passes because their flesh is rotting. And…hmm, okay, how about they are pretty violent upon rising, and for about a week afterward, trying to bite people and spread the infection (even though most people are carriers anyway, but getting a nasty bite from a corpse will give you other stuff that will have you die while carrying the virus). But then they calm down and basically just start sort of attempting to act like they did in life, that is, taking habitual actions with no consciousness, in a depressing and desiccated way. So Mr. Bennett is a zombie, and Mrs. Bennett’s number one goal is to get her daughters married before anyone finds that out. And this, actually, makes Elizabeth’s refusal of Mr. Collins more frustrating for Mrs. Bennett–obviously Mr. Bennett didn’t tell Elizabeth that she could refuse Mr. Collins, because Mr. Bennett is dead, but Mrs. Bennett can’t say anything or the game would be up. Another question in this version–does Mr. Darcy find out about Mr. Bennett being a zombie somehow? Does Elizabeth find out that he knows and didn’t say anything and this is something that helps repair his earlier actions? Anyway, this is the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that I was looking for.

[exigencelost]

Okay also: in the original, when Elizabeth walks through the rain all the way to bingley’s to care for Jane while she’s sick, it’s a very dramatic expression of both Elizabeth’s love for her sister and her penchant for flamboyant rebellion, but consider, if there is a chance Jane will wake up a zombie and Elizabeth knows it, how does that change the dynamic? Elizabeth might be going to help take care of Jane, or to *take care* of Jane should things take a more morbid turn…by killing her zombie sister.

This works especially well if zombieism is communicable prior to death; if mr. Bennett is a zombie and only the elder Bennetts know, that means Jane has been pre-exposed and is almost certain to wake up as a zombie should she die in the Bingleys’ care— which the Bingleys do not know. Elizabeth has to forge through the rain to be there in case things get ugly, because she knows that the Bingleys aren’t prepared.

[shenzuul]

And I think you pretty much HAVE to make Mr. Bennett’s zombie status play a role in how and why Darcy separates Bingley from Jane—the heavy implication behind Darcy’s line about the want of propriety shown even by her father hits Elizabeth like a ton of bricks as she realizes he knows—he knows, and he thought Jane lying to Bingley about it was evidence that Jane didn’t love Bingley—but—but Darcy must not have told Bingley that part of it. Bingley couldn’t keep a secret on his life; if he knew, his sister would know, and word would already be out and they’d have been ruined by now—

And of course, not only does the fact that Darcy, who owes their family nothing, has kept and continues to keep this secret for them even after Elizabeth’s refusal deepen the gratitude she begins to feel for him after the letter of explanation, but it also liberates Elizabeth to fall in love with him. Because Elizabeth-who-wants-to-marry-for-love would never be happy marrying someone who didn’t know the family secret in advance. She had resigned herself to spinsterhood because she couldn’t be satisfied with having to hoodwink someone to have their hand, but also couldn’t put her family at risk by trusting someone who wasn’t bound to them by more than an engagement. (Maybe she was even tempted to confide in Wickham at one point, and hasn’t Darcy’s letter proven she was absolutely right not to yield to that passing thought.) But Darcy figured it out himself, and he’s kept her trust, and she could fall in love with him without guilt—if she hadn’t already turned him down.

AND THEN LYDIA HAPPENS. And Darcy realizes immediately that Mr. Bennett can’t do anything to recover her—and if Mr. Bennett doesn’t do anything about Lydia, Mr. Collins might become suspicious, or even just officously involve himself, so find out the while thing. When Darcy blames himself for not revealing Wickham’s character, it’s with a much more immediate sense of urgency. It’s not that the other sisters’ marriage prospects being ruined may impoverish them down the road—it might immediately drag them all into destitution. That’s why he rushes off to go look for Lydia himself.

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

[loki-zen]

Cystic fibrosis used to be a "disease of childhood" because people who had it rarely lived to be adults. Now it's considered a chronic illness.

[torstherapy]

[tinsnip]

Per @spoonstrek

[sreegs]

One of the common mistakes I see for people relying on "AI" (LLMs and image generators) is that they think the AI they're interacting with is capable of thought and reason. It's not. This is why using AI to write essays or answer questions is a really bad idea because it's not doing so in any meaningful or thoughtful way. All it's doing is producing the statistically most likely expected output to the input.

This is why you can ask ChatGPT "is mayonnaise a palindrome?" and it will respond "No it's not." but then you ask "Are you sure? I think it is" and it will respond "Actually it is! Mayonnaise is spelled the same backward as it is forward"

All it's doing is trying to sound like it's providing a correct answer. It doesn't actually know what a palindrome is even if it has a function capable of checking for palindromes (it doesn't). It's not "Artificial Intelligence" by any meaning of the term, it's just called AI because that's a discipline of programming. It doesn't inherently mean it has intelligence.

So if you use an AI and expect it to make something that's been made with careful thought or consideration, you're gonna get fucked over. It's not even a quality issue. It just can't consistently produce things of value because there's no understanding there. It doesn't "know" because it can't "know".

[sreegs]

its been just over a year since i posted this and i still encounter people saying things like "i asked chatgpt and..." or "i made this with chatgpt and...". and these arent like teenagers or students they're adult professionals using this shit for their job. i dont know how people live like this

[thotsandpreyers]

[kaetor]

be honest how much time do you think they spend in the pink world. as someone who's had red hair i know it's a lot

[overlyspecificmcrmemes]

danger days haters aren’t invited to my summer kick off party

[mercining]

[nothatsmi]

I dont rant enough on how much I love the killjoys

Crazy to realize it's the first time i draw them digital properly - but they're such sketchbook material I cant help it. (Would it interest yall to see the sketchbook comics n all i wonder, i'm bad at scanning or taking pictures in a way that makes it intersesting but i coud try...)

[kawatsuu]

The jetset lfe

[cartoon-aragorn]

why is sansa stark hating so common. like she's a little girl. she's terrified, she's trapped, she's being handed from one pedophile to the next, she saw her dad's head get cut off, she's alone, all her siblings are dead, her mom is dead, she's 11 years old, she's supposed to be making rubber band loom bracelets and listening to one direction, she's just a kid. all the most evil characters in the book hate her for no reason other than she's ned's kid. she's also a very smart, polite, and kind girl. she's preppy in the first book, but her greatest sin is what? being a girl? being a little girl? being a bit snooty (which she quickly gets beaten out of her anyway)? yall are horrible

[rimonoroni2]

first cryptid you ever run into as a little kid is called Best Friends Older Brother

[penny-anna]

honestly funny to me that project hail mary stars Ryan Gosling bcos like imagine being an alien and the first human you meet is Ryan Gosling. im imagining Rocky trying to figure out how physical attractiveness works for humans (u know out of scientific curiosity) and while trying to get a fix on it being like 'Grace considered attractive??' and Grace is like nooo not really I'm pretty regular.

& then later in the event of making contact w other humans Rocky being like 'so that was a fucking lie'

[penny-anna]

his innate awkwardness would cancel out his Ryan Goslingness a bit. im imagining the other astronauts working with him for months and then one day being like 'you ever notice how Doctor Grace looks a lot like Ryan Gosling?' 'nah, I don't see it'

[penny-anna]

#maybe it's just me but that just makes him more attractive#conventionally attractive movie star ryan gosling? 😴#awkward funny guy in a situation that happens to look like ryan gosling? 👀👀👀

PHM staff having an ongoing debate with regards to who is hotter: hollywood superstar Ryan Gosling OR Doctor Grace?

[penny-anna]

Once the project gets publicity in universe people being like 'has anyone noticed this one astronaut we just shot into space to save the world totally looks like Ryan Gosling?' Ryan Gosling asked for comment, is as confused as everyone else

[penny-anna]

Anyway let's have it out:

Who is hotter?

Ryan Gosling

Dr Grace Ryland

Voting ended onMay 5