Cosmic Gorilla Effect Could Hinder Alien Detection
@rosethyme
I like games, tea, food, books, science fiction, cartoons, comics, the goblin who steals my socks, steam powered giraffe, physics and computer science. Also bats. Lots of bats.
Here's your periodic reminder that the reason Kirk (tos-flavor) got a commendation for his solution to the Kobayashi Maru is because his "cheating" was his answer. Kirk's answer to the question of, "What do you do in a no-win scenario?" is "I break the rules until it isn't a no-win scenario. I don't give up on my crew, and I do whatever I can to save as many lives as possible."
And here's your periodic reminder—or first-time FYI, depending—that according to certain apocrypha, Nog similarly "beat" the Kobayashi Maru by relentlessly demanding to barter with the enemy until the simulation crashed. Like a true Ferengi, his answer to "What would you do in a no-win scenario?" is "Renegotiate the terms of the scenario. Rule of Acquisition #98: Everyone has their price."
It's wild how many people seem to think that winning a revolution would somehow be easier than winning an election.
This is what I'm saying!! People keep being like "we can't possibly solve things through voting! That would involve massive organizing, getting everyone on the same page, making compromises and settling for less than perfection, and it would be subject to the influence of mega-wealthy donors and an opposition-controlled media environment! We just have to have a revolution so we don't have to deal with any of those things!"
And it's like. I'd be less annoyed about what are obviously people who are hurt and frustrated lashing out if they didn't act like I was a fucking fascist for saying "I don't think massive amounts of death and violence will help this situation, actually"
very disappointing when someone says "the bird app" and for one lovely moment I think they are talking about Merlin Bird ID by Cornell Lab, the free app that allows you to identify birds by appearance or sound, make a list of birds you have seen, and explore all the birds native to your region.... and then I realize they are talking about twitter.
Another design is using 2 20x25x1 filters, taping them to the sides of the box fan and then to each other so they sort of make a triangle, then cutting cardboard to make a top and bottom to the triangle.
This was discovered as a more effective design during the 2020 US west coast fires.
The videos referenced are the video essay about Blade Runner 2049 by @ladyknightthebrave and an interview between Adam Savage and Matt Parker about his book "Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World"
The 13th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th August 2026.
It’s short and easy, for most participants it takes 5 minutes or less.
After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.
If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful!
Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com
The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.
Thank you so much!
[ Link to survey ]
PS: You can see some regularly-updated statistics about incoming data here, with lots of demography and graphs to peruse!
It's not "hostile" to binary trans people. Binary trans people are just not the target group. They are intentionally not represented at all. It's not a study about binary people.
This is the very first thing on the first page of the survey:
Who can participate?
This survey intends to collect information from everyone who ISN'T adequately described by the "gender binary".
According to the binary model of gender, everyone fits tidily into just one of these categories:
● Woman/girl - all the time, solely, and completely
↳ (may be cisgender, transgender, intersex, etc. for the purposes of this survey)
● Man/boy - all the time, solely, and completely
↳ (may be cisgender, transgender, intersex, etc. for the purposes of this survey)
Anyone who doesn't feel like they fit into one of these two boxes is invited to participate.
Obviously you are allowed to vent on your own blog, and I didn't realise you didn't want responses that might clarify/clear up confusion and mistakes - sorry about that!
Seems like you should call it something else then like the non binary survey
I've got a thing in the FAQ that kind of relates to this a bit:
I have to avoid words like “binary” and “nonbinary” in the criteria for who is invited to take part, in order to be fully inclusive and avoid bias.
Basically, there are a lot of people who are failed by the binary model of gender, who don't identify as nonbinary. And if you're studying how often people use a particular word, you can't really include that word in the marketing, because it biases the results.
Like, yes, we know that "nonbinary" is a word that a lot of people use to describe themselves, and the reason that data is in any way reliable is because it doesn't call itself "the nonbinary survey". Right?
Imagine:
Make a survey called the nonbinary survey
Have no criteria
Ask participants if they're nonbinary
100% of participants say they're nonbinary because they took part because it was called "the nonbinary survey" and they identify with that
Researcher declares all humans nonbinary
That wouldn't be very science 🧐
Anyway, I do try very hard to lean heavy on the not-binary part in promotional stuff, just because I don't want to waste anyone's time. But I have to do that very carefully because I don't want to bias the results.
Like the image with the boxes with the Mars and Venus symbols on, right? It doesn't say "male" and "female", it implies it. And It refers to the gender binary in simplified ways so that people who aren't familiar with queer theory will understand and jump in. But at the same time, a binary trans woman, for example, would be like, "well I do fit into that Venus box really. So, this is probably not for me." And if she doesn't say that, she is probably invited into the sample anyway!
And this text:
The survey is open to [...] feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.
Again, very carefully written to imply "not binary trans people" without saying it outright, because there will always be people in the grey area who do belong in the sample.
I wish I was better about paying attention to channel names because I did watch a video a while back and this was basically the whole video summed up. Like, everyone knows Light was an arrogant fool who sewed the seeds of his own destruction but his solution to the societal problems he lamented about in the first chapter was literally something only the juvenile son of a cop could have come up with.
To Light, Crime was the source of society's "Rot." And his philosophy on what constituted "crime" was basically about normal-ass people who were willing to break the law. you know, the laws Cops enforce.
It also explains why he's indiscriminate rather than surgical. Because of his own biases, he never stops to consider the flaws in the methods of who gets arrested, or how that never actually seems to have an impact on Crime Rates tm. Cops (like Light) simply see this as evidence that they're not arresting enough people! That they're not going far enough! And these are the values our protagonist was raised with. A surgical strike would let Real Criminals off the hook, while targeting people who, yes, may be more evil by orders of magnitude, but they do it in a LEGAL way!
I don't think the story ever consciously addresses this. The Watsonian explanation for that would be that we don't really get to see exactly WHAT values Light's dad instills in his children - he's a major character, but Light spends far more time putting him on a pedestal than actually engaging with him. A couple Doylist explanations might be either that Ohba didn't condone Light's actions, and considered an outside exploration of his motivations to be either uninteresting to explore, or perhaps too much of a challenge to pull off in a story that so heavily revolves around the protagonist's inner monologue. I think it's far more likely, though, that this wasn't intentional - Light's dad was a cop so that he could be on the Kira taskforce and we could get the drama of Light being hunted by his own father, and the blind spots that created for both characters. Knowing the story, and how these characters are used, I find it hard to believe there were intentional ramifications beyond that. But that doesn't change the fact that they're there, and more than anything it serves as an explanation for why Light was the way he was.
was talking to a coworker and realised i could not for the life of me remember his name but i was too embarrassed to ask because we've spoken multiple times so mid-conversation i started concocting a plan to nudge the conversation towards the ID photos on our building passes so that i could be like oh my ID photo is awful haha the camera they use to take these has a real talent for making me look as unphotogenic as possible and then he would say oh yes me too haha everyone says that (because they do) and then i would be able to say well let me see yours it can't be as bad as mine! and he would show me his ID because we are coworkers and why wouldn't he and this would allow me to see his building pass which of course would have his name on it and then i would be able to say well yours is perfectly nice it must be me that's the problem! and then we would have a polite chuckle about it and i would have his name without needing to ask for it and he would be none the wiser and all would be well but then before i could execute this fine plan a little voice in my head went "so this is some light yagami bull shit you are about to pull" which was such a violent reality check it shocked me completely out of my embarrassment and i went "hey im so sorry your name has slipped my mind could you remind me" and he did and it was fine.
"This is some Light Yagami bull shit you are about to pull" <- Littany against avoiding small embarrassing/awkward moments that don't matter with over the top ass mind games.
It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.
But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.
To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.
San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.
Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.
Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.
Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.
Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.
When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.
He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.
It was a mistake that would change American history.
Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.
She saw "her kids."
She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.
Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.
She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.
So, she made a choice.
She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.
Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.
The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.
She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.
She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.
"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."
And it did.
Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.
Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."
For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.
She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.
She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."
By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.
In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.
This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.
One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."
They underestimated who they were dealing with.
They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.
When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.
It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.
Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.
She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.
Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.
"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."
The quote ran in newspapers across the country.
The court didn't stand a chance.
Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.
The charges were dropped.
Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.
She needed to change the law.
August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.
She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.
But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.
She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.
She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.
In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.
It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.
She never got rich.
She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.
She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.
Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.
Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.
Most of them have never heard of Mary.
They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.
They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.
They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.
Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."
She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.
She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.
She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.
Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.
It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.
It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.
Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.
Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.
Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana." Weird Everything, FB december 12, 2025
I'd be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named "Mary Jane," but also, that's a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.
What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren't AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.
Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.
The first thing I did was search for "Brownie Mary" and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.
Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don't want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.
The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.
Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn't have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)
Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.
...or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.
I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.
My search string of "Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun" hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!
She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.
The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I've now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.
The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let's hook onto that and see what we get.
Searching for "Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980" gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!
We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:
...wow. I should see if my library has that!
The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I'd already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.
There's a lot of information out there, and it's worth digging into. Otherwise it's altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.
