Be gay, do science

Heya, you can call me Quarks for short (pronouns are they/them), and I like rambling into the void about my special interests. So if you're looking for posts about astronomy, coding, writing, D&D, and whatever else I'm currently fascinated with and/or passionate about, here be said nerdiness. Warning: cheesy math puns most likely unavoidable.

[prokopetz]

More favourite tropes:

“Unfortunately, [thing that would ordinarily be described in much stronger terms than ‘unfortunate’].”  

“Fortunately, [thing that is in no way fortunate].”  

“Unfortunately, [thing that would be fortunate in nearly any circumstance except the particular circumstance at hand].“  

“Fortunately, [very minor benefit that absolutely does not offset the considerable drawbacks of whatever just happened].“  

“Unfortunately, [the exact, word-for-word thing that somebody just expressed that they hope won’t happen].“  

“Fortunately, [complete non sequitur].”

[amphibianaday]

day 432

[anarchistmemedistro]

[f1rstperson]

News stations are like “anarchists are any group I find threatening and not like an actual group that’s existed for centuries that has organized tons of community support programs or anything, right? It’s like the boogeyman. Anarchists only exist under my bed and in the vague idea of any group against me, right?”

[golden-x-mage]

is twitter suspending trump as he’s on his way out after giving him an hugely influential platform for four years an incredibly token gesture? of course. but is it also really funny? absolutely

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

People who don’t want to read The Martian in case the science is too complicated should be informed that it contains the lines “The best way to store the ingredients of water is to make them be water”, “It is of course dangerous to set off an explosive device on a spacecraft”, and “If I cut a hole in the wall of the hab, the air won’t stay inside any more”.

[neilarmstrong]

I love this fucking book

[osheamobile]

“I’ve said the words kilowatt-hours-per-sol so many times they’ve lost all meaning so I’m going to call them pirate-ninjas.

“So I need to generate nine hundred pirate-ninjas…”

[magnificentbane-deactivated2019]

there’s an entire chapter dedicated to him wondering how the cubs are doing while he’s stuck on mars, dying

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I like the part where the guys on Earth are like “He thinks we all gave up on him, and that he’s completely alone. I wonder what he’s thinking about right now.” And he’s like “How come Aquaman can control whales?”

[direwolfblackrose]

“ As with most of life’s problems, this one can be solved by a box of pure radiation. “

“Actually, I was the very lowest ranked member of the crew. I would only be “in command” if I were the only remaining person.”

Two pages later… “What do you know? I’m in command”

“Me: “This is obviously a clog. How about I take it apart and check the internal tubing?” NASA: (after five hours of deliberation) “No. You’ll fuck it up and die.” So I took it apart.

And my personal favorite :” Also, I have duct tape. Ordinary duct tape, like you buy at a hardware store. Turns out even NASA can’t improve on duct tape. Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped.”

[rowanellis]

the fact none of these posts have even MENTIONED potatoes is a crime

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

That’s a good point, about 50% of this book is about potato farming.

[ephemeralhorror]

"if you could have any videogame ability what would it be?"

[aspectofachilles]

[orangehatposts-deactivated20220]

[camjamclassic]

[cotton-andy]

[friendlyfirestarter]

[thevastnessof]

i love when ppl who constantly use self deprecating humor interact with me, theyre never sure how to react. theyre like "lol well we all hate ourselves anyways" and im like "no, im sexy as hell actually" like oil and water everytime

[mockingmolly]

Self-appreciating humor even when u 100% don’t believe what you’re saying is legitimately such an esteem-booster & i’d recommend everyone to try and replace deprecating jokes with exaggeratedly-positive & validating ones whenever u can

And tbh, it’s funnier/more comfortable for everyone involved anyway. Like, failing spectacularly at something but going “lol y’all WISH you had my talents” instead? Hilarious. Its funny, alleviates the pressure on other ppl to validate your negativity, AND even when what you’re saying “isn’t true” your brain still responds to hearing positive input & your attitude towards yourself & your situation becomes so much healthier after a while. This kind of thing has been proven to improve mental health & curb self-harming tendencies, as well as contribute to healthier social environments ;0;

[mockingmolly]

Yes I do, actually 

[citizen-zero]

we all just need to emulate the raw confidence of the kid who has the power of god AND anime on his side

[myadhdlife]

Doing this has genuinely saved me. Pls be kind to yourself even when you don't believe it

[parrotiny]

i want to know what bears think sometimes

[mediocrechick]

[parrotiny]

[morgluxia]

[doublesslightpeppa-deactivated2]

[ofools]

[bonefarm]

I said it in the notes on the last post but I’m gonna say it again.

I’m married to someone with severe memory problems. Automation of household appliances & systems helps him a lot and helps me a lot because it reduces the number of things I have to keep in my brain at all times. I love doors that lock themselves, being able to schedule dog food being delivered, a thermostat I can manipulate from wherever. Beyond my little bubble it should be noted that voice controlled appliances can be really good for people with mobility concerns. Appliances that can measure and talk and remember little tasks can be such a blessing for people.

I will never forgive Amazon and Google for taking technologies that could be really helpful and weaponizing them, and fuck everybody who acts like its some kind of conspiracy theory that those devices are spying on you. You absolutely should be distrustful of those devices but just make sure you’re getting angry at the right people.

[creekfiend]

Making accessibility devices evil is just like so Disney villain

[prismatic-bell]

My mom is blind and without her Alexa literally could not cook, go shopping, or do a million other things. Because Alexa is voice-activated, she doesn’t have to fumble with knobs or write a list she can’t read.

I will never forgive Amazon for how much I hate a tool that allows my mother to live her life.

[olivia0823yxa]

Open source and secure alternatives for some of these:

- Voice activated smart speaker: Mycroft (can be purchased as a complete unit, or DIYed with a Raspberry Pi and microphone+speaker array) https://mycroft.ai/

- Smart Home automation: home-assistant (cannot be purchased, originally developed by MIT) https://www.home-assistant.io/

- Zigbee (the wireless protocol for smart lights and other smart devices) bridge: Conbee II (this takes the place of a Phillips Bridge, for instance. And is in many cases better because it works with all brands of smart light that use Zigbee--which is almost all of them, including the cheap IKEA ones--and also works for devices that aren’t lights. Cannot really be DIYed because Zigbee needs special hardware, not just software) https://phoscon.de/en/conbee2 

I don’t know any alternatives for locks, vacuums, thermometers, or anything else sadly. None of these are that difficult to set up with just a little bit of tech know-how, and extensive guides already exist for almost all problems you could run into because the open-source community is almost psychotically dedicated to its projects, unlike Amazon, Google, and Apple where it’s practically impossible to get help with any problem that’s even slightly unusual.

[bonefarm]

Oh thank you!! These area really neat

[ryncoon]

Oh thank you so much! My grandmother has an alexa and it’s really improved her enjoyment of life, but I hate even talking around it. It’s linked to my amazon and I’ve gotten suggestions based on things it’s heard. That wigs me out so much.

[seperis]

Can confirm, Home Assistant is amazing; I transitioned everything I could for it to control and right now that’s literally everything. It can also be integrated with other voice-activated smart speakers than Alexa as well as Alexa. It also comes WITH an Add-on called Ada for voice.  So far, there is very goddamn little on the market that isn’t either officially supported or community supported and stuff is being added at the rate of literally weekly. If you do scripting and have a taste for diy, you can be Dr. Doom and your home is your supervillain lair.

Because of the market, most smart appliances and devices are Alexa enabled, but unless they’re made by Amazon, that doesn’t mean they’re Alexa exclusive and even then, someone is hacking their way into the API and pulling the endpoints. Right now, the only thing I can’t work in here (yet) is my Nest Thermostat and HA is working on adding that back in right now.

Home Assistant is fully compatible with the zwave and zigbee standards as well as wifi and bluetooth; you can directly control zwave and zigbee items or link up your existing hubs for it to control like SmartThings.

https://www.home-assistant.io/

It can be run in several ways; I’ve done it on a Pi 4 both 4G and 8G and a VM on my Ubuntu server and while the Pi is recommended--I recommend it too for convenience--it’s one of several possibilites.  Currently I’m using a Raspberry Pi 4b 8G with a solid state hard drive instead of SD card.  You can purchase z-wave and zigbee modules to add to it for direct control of z-wave and zigbee devices or use your existing hubs (or both). Beneath the HA umbrella is also links to the blueprints of building your own zigbee and zwave devices with Arduino just to start that HA can also control. I’m not saying you’re going to be building your own smart thermostat on the weekend, but apparently, some people are doing just that.

This does not require a high tech start value; most integrations are automatic, you just say yes and login and let it happen, it even creates your Dr. Doom dashboard with TABS.

Again, you DO NOT NEED TO KNOW ANYTHING BUT COMPUTERS EXIST AND HOW TO CLICK YES AND NO TO USE THIS. For me, it was actually easier than a lot of setups with shit I had to pay money for that said they were easy.  This is open source, but that is not synonymous with user unfriendly; a lot of work was done to make this accessible to the casual automation user. The UI is card based; when you first start, HA does it all for you and creates discrete cards that control different things on your dashboard; no effort on your part, you can turn on and off any light in here or turn them red while someone is in the bathroom because that’s fucking funny.  But as you get more comfortable, you can start to create your own configurtions, take direct control of the UI, and mix it up; it’s up to you.

But.

If you are a DIYer or just want to be or never knew you wanted to be but feel the vibes and need a place to start, this is the perfect sandbox for learning and escalating.  There are a metric ton of tutorials, community add-ins, and message boards to consult. If you can imagine it, it can be done and its likely someone is working on version eight right now. The primary languages are python and javascript with yaml for configuration files for DIY.  You can create your own layouts, your own sensors, and your own cards if you don’t like what they have. If you’re like me, you may also go in to community addins and add new stuff to their code so it runs like you want it to; it’s all up to you.

I am not a dev pro, I’m a QC analyst with a scripting hobby; I do this quite literally for fun on weekends or when I’m bored or anxious and need to soothe myself with coding.

Here is the home page of my MULTI-TAB dashboard. Yes, that is a floorplan of my apartment and those glowy orange and dark grey bits are things that I can turn on and off from the comfort of my bed.  It’s fun.

I seriously would kill to get more people into this and have someone to play with and enjoy the feeling of controlling all within my (apartment) kingdom with but a single command.  Dear God tell me if you’re into it; we’ll be best friends and hopefully you’ll be okay with that.

Here’s an intro to Home Assistant I wrote back in September in DW when I first started, with screenshots.  You’ll also be able to see my Dash when I first started compared to the dash above. Feel free to ask me anything from the perspective of someone not a dev professional, an engineer, or even has a degree in anything, much less anything like this, and yet is a QC lead who codes their own testing tools and for whom this is just something cool and fun.

Home Assistant: An Introduction

[valtsv]

not to sound like a golden retriever on main but the feeling when someone praises me for something i did? indescribable

[whitepeopletwitter]

[breelandwalker]

This used to be called “Auto Shop” and “Home Economics,” subjects which were included in nearly every high school curriculum up until the 1980s. Auto maintenance, budget management, sewing skills, cooking, and other basic Adulting skills were actually taught in classroom settings. But suddenly all that money got funneled away to sports and graduation requirements shifted toward standardized tests because those were somehow more? important? than life skills? and the home ec and shop classes were no longer taught, even as electives. We’ve been steadily losing arts classes for similar reasons.

And so students leave school with a thorough grounding in football and calculus, but having no idea how to sew on a button or change a tire. 

Petition to bring back these classes in every single middle and high school in the country.

[dissonant-aria]

Like most things that went wrong in the 80s, this is due to Reagan. He signed the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act into law which allowed “Job Creators” to control our educational system.

If it can’t help the Boug make a buck from you, it no longer gets taught.

[safetytank]

[aphony-cree]

If you don’t know how to cook, you buy more prepared food

If you don’t know car maintenance, you spend more on auto repair

I’ve known many people who throw out clothing that has a minor tear or missing button simply because they don’t know how to fix it, so they buy a new item instead

There’s a reason “job creators” decided these were skills you didn’t need to learn

[sciencebelongstoallofus]

Maki Naro @ The Nib

[mistertotality]

There’s a lot of misinformation going around about the Covid-19 vaccines, so now is a good time to bring this back.

[siege1]

Vaccinate. All I’ma say.

[smolfrogi]

Vaccinate your crotch spawns

[get-thee-to-a-shrubbery]

i feel like ppl need to understand that words like bisexual, pansexual, lesbian etc aren't these strict objective categories. they're words. used to describe things. it's like how all taxonomy is inherently subjective, for example the difference between bisexual and pansexual is legitimately Vibes. like we gotta understand them as words. words can have the same definition but still have different meanings and implications and associations

[stark-tony]

au where jet doesn’t find out that zuko and iroh are fire nation and when he runs into the gaang he goes ‘oh by the way this is my new friend lee. we met on the ferry ride over here!’ and the gaang and zuko just like awkwardly stare at each other for a really long time

[urbanfantasyinspiration]

I love it

[linanlu]

[thescarlettempress]

*in everyone’s minds*

Zuko: Maybe if I just keep up my persona, they’ll believe I’m someone else… Okay, that’s stupid, but what choice do I have?

Aang: …Maybe if we just pretend we’ve never met before he’ll stay nice and we can all keep the peace.

Katara: If he lifts one hand against us, I will freeze them both.

Sokka: Please be a coincidence. Please be a coincidence. Please be a coincidence. Please be a coinci-

Toph: Why is he so scared? Is he shy? Why is Katara so upset? Why is Aang freaking out? Why is Sokka so irritated? And now Jet’s freaking out.

Jet: Do- do they not like him? Do they not like him because he’s my friend? Do they still hate me? Do they hate him because of me? Lee looks like he’s about to pass out? Is he okay?

[theoneandonlyturtleduck]

This needs to be a fic

[duckie-baby]

ACTUALLY SCREAMING

[amphibianaday]

Could you draw a mushroom themed toad? Please🍄

day 409

i misremembered it as “toad in a mushroom hat” while drawing but i hope this is close enough!

[teaboot]

My old man once said to me, "your thoughts are so random and unconnected. We were just talking about the carnival- how did you get started on wasps?"

So, I told him, "they're not unconnected- we were talking about going to the carnival, and the carnival is on the same fairgrounds they used to use for the rodeo, and one time at the rodeo my brother spilled sprite on himself and a bee went up his shirt and stung him, and bees die when they sting, but wasps don't, and I was wondering why, so I asked you."

And he said, "that makes no sense," and for the life of me I can't understand how anyone thinks of anything if not by this exact process

[randomslasher]

The best part of ADHD thinking (which this is) is when you weren’t paying 100% attention to where your brain went and then you realize you’re thinking about something, like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and you have to try to trace your own thoughts backwards because the last thing you remember thinking about was potato soup.

[wokeuphighbyvanessacarlton]

As I've said before, we should be allowed to hunt men for sport.

[mariacallous]

Holy fuck this is one of the smarmiest and condescending things I’ve seen written this year.

Does the writer of this have a doctorate of their own, by any chance?

[kendallroy-deactivated20210425]

[chronicallyedelgard]

Also love that research into retaining community college students by meeting their needs is “unpromising”

[year-of-the-terf-deactivated202]

Here’s the full piece

[greenwire]

the author, unsurprisingly, barely has a bachelor’s degree. he skated by because of adjunct work and a massive inferiority complex against tenure eligible faculty

and I hate to be THIS kind of phd but a doctorate is not just a terminal degree but THE terminal degree. The convention is that you list your degrees from least to most advanced, which is why if you have a medical degree and a doctorate of philosophy, your professional title is Jane Doe, M.D., Ph.D. Because phd is more advanced than md. It’s the same with juris doctor too. A doctorate degree requires that you contribute to the field in which you received your dr, unlike a medical degree or juris doctor, which require that you learn existing knowledge about human systems and pathology, or existing laws.

If anything, medical doctors should be calling themselves physicians and stop trying to steal the title of doctor since they can’t seem to share. And pretentious undereducated men should stop projecting their insecurities onto women who have accomplished more than they.

[appropriately-inappropriate]

“Nobody should call himself a doctor unless he’s delivered a child”

Well, someone ought to tell that to the neurologists, anaesthesiologists, optometrists, cardiothoracic surgeons, oncologists, and gastroenterologists who have MD after their names!

As for “delivering a child”, last I checked she’s delivered at least one more child than you, kiddo, so sit down, and suck on your binkie.

[eve-made-the-right-choice]

No man would ever write a letter like this to another man.

[fingerlickinbutch-deactivated20]

This tweet sums it up pretty well

[appropriately-inappropriate]

FUCK EM UP CHASTEN

[assassinationtipsforladies]

[strangestofquarks]

I feel like someone's going to reblog this post with some comment about how the Ph.D. holders are being mean to physicians and how this is sooooo unfair, so I want to put in my own two cents amd remind everyone that no one's devaluing physicians here or saying they can't rightfully call themselves doctors - the point is that when the person holding a doctorate is a woman, all of a sudden, some men decide to blatantly ignore that Ph.D.s are more challenging to get than M.D.s, and require not just understanding of a field, but contributions to it, for the sake of attempting to justify sexism.