Teacher is lounge

Hi! My popular blog is @inspired-lesson-plans, but this is my regular, browsing Tumblr and reblogging account. Generally everything here is #interesting.

[herpsandbirds]

Trilobote Cockroaches (Hyposphaeria sp.), family Blaberidae, Swartberg Mountains, South Africa

photograph by Aaron Jones

[mothersoatmilk]

let's hear it for arthropods constantly trying to bring back the noble trilobite

[thatswhywelovegermany]

der Sündenbock sein

literally: to be the sin buck

to be the scapegoat

Origin: On Yom Kippur, a male goat was driven into the desert after the High Priest had laid the sins of the people upon it.

[teachablr-moment]

I think I like Sündenbock better than Scapegoat. Sounds much more like the name of an unfortunate politician.

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

re my "read books that make you feel stupid" post: reading books you don't fully understand is probably the safest way to push yourself outside your comfort zone. you don't have to embarrass yourself in front of anyone. you can do it from your cozy bed. you can easily get help from book clubs or literary analysis online. you can go as slowly as you want. there's literally no risk.

[hyperlexichypatia]

This is why books should never be withheld from kids on the grounds of "They won't understand it."

[thelei-nero-dogs]

Doing this with dog ethology papers. Google open for definition checks, someone to read to if I'm stuck moving forward, and help with understanding the math.

[teachablr-moment]

This is called the Zone of Proximal Development.

[socialistexan]

Not getting a ton of reporting in US news, but the Trump administration is going after donors to Palestine, including going as far as international extradition under the guide of "counterterrorism"

[dinosaur-ears]

Okay so I typically try to find a few more mainstream/ centrist sources for stories that appeal to my biases before I'll consider sharing and the biggest shock to me is that I didn't find any NPR or Reuters coverage if this story??

Anyway Wikipedia describes Chambers as

an American communist political activist and former heir to the Cox family, which derives its wealth from Cox Enterprises.

In lieu of my preferred sources, I opted for a range. Although the specific charges haven't been released to the public, Truthout, Al Jazeera, and The Guardian describe Chambers as having funded pro-Palestine and/or humanitarian causes:

Heir to the family that owns telecom giant Cox Communications, Chambers has donated more than $1m to pro-Palestine causes and humanitarian projects in Gaza. [Al Jazeera]

Fox News, meanwhile, describes Chambers as "allegedly wanted for money laundering and providing support to Hamas". Interestingly, they also added:

He praised the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks as a "moment of hope and inspiration," told Mother Jones that "the most important thing for the prosperity of humanity is the destruction of the US" and said, "I chant death to America every day."

...and the first two quotes do check out: Mother Jones interview.

None of this is meant to say that the US government isn't using this as a test case in an ongoing march of fascism. Just adding context and a reminder to read your news critically.

[teachablr-moment]

@i-add-sources are you still doing your magic?

[thatswhywelovegermany]

Man sollte nie so viel zu tun haben, daß man zum Nachdenken keine Zeit mehr hat.

You should never be so busy that you don't have time to think.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 – 1799), German mathematician and experimental physicist

[caesarsaladinn]

“Psychologist G. Stanley Hall, one of the movement’s leaders, recommended that Christ himself be buffed up as a way of increasing Protestantism’s appeal. In a public opinion survey, Hall discovered that most viewers turned to words like “sick, unwashed, sissy, ugly, feeble” when presented with a standard painting of Christ on the cross. Hall advocated a Jesus with muscles and bulk, fighting back against his persecutors rather than succumbing meekly to crucifixion.”

[midnightfruitsqueeze]

never heard of this guy before but his Wikipedia article contains one of the most elegant insults I've ever read: 'Hall was, from his student days to his death, interested in philosophy, psychology, education and religion in every one of their aspects which did not involve detailed experimentation, intricate quantitative treatment of results, or rigor and subtlety of analysis.'

[battlefem-deactivated20170404]

you wanna see some badass shit from the early 20th century?? The Lumière brothers created the first full color photograph… in fucking 1903! So these dudes dyed potatoes (in red, blue, and green), mashed them down into just pure fuckin’ starch, and used these dyed potato starches as filters to block out/let in certain wavelengths of light. They coated one side of a glass plate with the starches and sensitized the other side with a mixture of gelatin and light sensitive materials (silver nitrate) and loaded these plates in their cameras.. This is a really simple explanation of the process and I may have missed some things A few of my favorite autochrome photos:

[itsoldjohn]

that last one is literally a LOOK

[cassiocantdrink]

yes!

but lets not forget sergei prokudin-gorskiy, who developed a similar process in 1902, published in 1903 and then toured russia to take hundreds of color photographs:

AND the guy developed color slide processing as well. as a person fairly familiar with modern b/w processing at home, but never EVER stepping into color (negatives or slides) territory, i’d say, BAMF to the highest degree. 

[petermorwood]

Here are a few more Prokudin-Gorskiy / Gorskii shots, and a reminder once again that these aren’t recently colourised BW images but original colour photos taken about 120 years ago. Many colourised pics don’t look this good. Some modern colour pics don’t look this good (as I know all too well. “Delete image Y/N? Y!”)

This is Leo Tolstoy, author of “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”.

Alim Khan, Emir of Bukhara…

…and his Minister of the Interior.

A Type B-15 steam locomotive…

Another of those peasant girls with guest-gifts of berries…

The Church of St John the Baptist at Staraya Ladoga…

…and a Sergei Prokudin-Gorskiy self-portrait.

Unlike some current selfies ;-> he’s not dominating the image, so here’s a closer shot.

Nice hat…

[teachablr-moment]

@artstardoodles

[olecap]

one day in the life of the reunited odysseus and penelope on ithaca

[nachosforfree]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

The radius and ulna are among my favourite bones specifically because they do this

[jessica-problems]

I hate this. I hate that they do this. I think about this every time I rotate my wrist. It seems like the sort of thing that would go wrong in all sorts of horrible ways and leave a bone sticking out of my skin. and yet it keeps happening. every day of my life.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I rotate my arms regularly just because I like it when they do this.

[aberrantemotion]

iiiiiii dont. think thats how bones work

[frankencanon]

Here are two videos on Reddit demonstrating how the radius bone rotates around the ulna bone: link / link

[aberrantemotion]

Yeah i doubt someone would make these gifs for the purpose of an online joke so I have no choice but to believe it

[invisible-goats]

i have a degree is bones (bioarchaeology) this is how bones work and i hate it

[convenient-plot-device]

For fellow autistic people who aren't sure whether this is a joke: I asked my mother, who has an MD, and she said this is in fact how those bones rotate

[nachosforfree]

You also can either use Google or Literally Just Feel Your Arm Where The Bones Are

[nachosforfree]

This post continues to piss me off because of the number of people who are disturbed or in denial about this extremely simply checkable fact. If you can't handle your arm bones rotating, how the fuck can you be prepared to find out that when doctors do abdominal surgery they just shove your intestines back in there, and the intestines wiggle their way back into place? What about the fact that your eyeballs are on a separate immune system from the rest of your body and need to be hidden from your main immune system so it doesn't start attacking them. Do you even know that digestion should be an extremely painful process but your brain just blocks it out? You people disgust me

[eightyonekilograms]

Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled

It’s been an interesting few weeks for counterexamples. This post is basically my perspective of what has been going on in the world of form

Even though Terry Tao has been saying for months that "AI in mathematics is the real deal", it was a little slow to percolate. But now that Fable and Sol are out, several big AI results were delivered on back-to-back days and it seems like math is about to have its own Claude Code moment where the whole field collectively realizes over a period of days that the game has changed. My condolences to them, it's kind of traumatizing but hopefully you come out the other side intact. Some people do, I'm still not sure if I'm one of them.

[eightyonekilograms]

The Dark Night of Mathematics

What are we really doing?

This is what I mean by "traumatizing". Either you get through this phase or you don't but we should probably have a plan for what to do if this happens to the entire economy all at once instead of one profession at a time.

[specialagentartemis]

tell me more about classic filk i know a few songs but never got deep into it

Heck YEAH

"Filk" is music (often but not always folk music-style, often but not always song parodies to the tune of famous pre-existing songs) about sci-fi, fantasy, and other fannish topics. Filk circles are popular events at science fiction conventions, and that's really where the genre started. The word "filk" actually arose from a typo in a convention program once, and people just rolled with it ever since!

Some of the most iconic albums in the filk world are the anthology albums "Minus Ten And Counting" (songs about space exploration and the real-life space program), "Carmen Miranda's Ghost" (songs about sci-fi space shenanigans and space ghosts), and "Finity's End: Songs of the Station Trade" (songs set in the world of CJ Cherryh's Alliance-Union novels, and my personal favorite. I've never read any of CJ Cherryh's books, but these songs paint such a vivid world.) "Space Heroes and Other Fools" is another big one, it's more hit-or-miss for me but it's iconic. Other really good and foundational ones are "Divine Intervention" by Julia Ecklar, "Avalon is Risen" by Leslie Fish, and "We Are Who We Are" by Vixy & Tony.

I lean more towards sci-fi and space than fantasy, but fantasy and paganism are huuuugely popular filk topics too.

Some of the most popular names to look into include Leslie Fish (intensely prolific, barely a fraction of her work is on any streaming or music service), Julia Ecklar (famous for her "ose," the filk-world word for sad songs - because they're "ose, more-ose, and even more-ose), Juanita Coulson, Kristoph Klover, Vic Tyler (who just recently died :( rest in peace), Duane Elms, Kathy Mar, Bob Kanefsky, Alexander James (trans, with lots of filk under his previous name as well), Vixy & Tony, and Seanan McGuire. (I like Seanan McGuire's filk music better than her books, hah.) Some other great ones include Cat Faber (most acapella), Astrisoni, The PDX Broadsides, Kari Maaren, and Sassafrass (also mostly acapella. Includes Ada Palmer). Heather Dale, Tom Lehrer, and Jonathan Coulton are kind of honorary filkers too haha.

The best place to get the ones from 80s and 90s cassettes are on the Internet Archive or Youtube; a few filkers who are more currently active have their stuff on Bandcamp.

And I'll leave you with a few of my Favorite Ever filk songs:

"Sam Jones" by CJ Cherryh and Leslie Fish

"Pushin' the Speed of Light" by Julia Ecklar and Anne Prather

"Chickasaw Mountain" by Leslie Fish

"Fire in the Sky" by Jordan Kare

"The Phoenix" by Julia Ecklar

"Freedom of the Snow" by Leslie Fish

"Burn it Down" by Vixy & Tony

"Hope Eyrie" by Leslie Fish, or this Minus Ten And Counting version

"Rocket Rider's Prayer" by Kristoph Klover, Ernie Mansfield, and Cecilia Eng

"Dawson's Christian" by Duane Elms, performed by Vic Tyler or Vixy & Tony

"Somebody Will" by Sassafrass

"Chances & Choices & Fortunes & Fates" by Astrisoni

... my tastes lean sentimental and ose but I swear there's a lot of very funny filk out there too

"Never Set the Cat on Fire" by Frank Hayes (a famous one)

"Banned From Argo" by Leslie Fish (an INFAMOUS one)

"Don't Push That Button" by Duane Elms and Larry Warner

"No More SF Cons" by Juanita Coulson

"One More Ose Song" by B. J. Willinger

everything Bob Kanefsky writes

[gecko-with-a-greatsword]

*guy who doesn't know anything about sports and has never cared about sports in his life* hey did you know womens professional baseball is returning after 70 years and the games are going to be streamed for free on youtube and the season starts august 1st

[gecko-with-a-greatsword]

youtube link

Women's Pro Baseball League

Our time is now. The inaugural season of the WPBL begins August 1st, 2026.

website

[teachablr-moment]

@artstardoodles

[savings-club]

Square Bloom

quilt by Jo Wollschlaeger

2nd place in American Patchwork & Quilting Transparency Quilting Challenge, QuiltCon 2025

this challenge focused on the illusion of transparency in quilting.

[batbetbitbotbut]

So I noticed this was second place in a contest.

So I looked up first place:

This is "Light Me Up" by Lindsey Berres. Closeups here.

Here is the (partial?) gallery of entrants on the QuiltCon website, but the image files are so large that I literally can't load them so have a selection of much lower quality screengrabs from this video tour instead...

"Neural Overlap" by Jane Eileen García (3rd place)

"Surfacing" by Tara Glastonbury

"Dot Your Eyes" by Nora Bauser

"Risograph Rings" by Colleen Kesterson

"Benched" by Linda Hungerford

"Windmill Meadows" by Lynett Muhaso

"Starman" by Lorena Uriarte

"Triple Silk Transluscence" by Cassandra Beaver

"Who Invited Cyan?" by Samantha Saturday

"Star Crossed" by Karin Rabe

"Contintuity of Radiance" by Svetlana Silver

"Mod Layers" by Anthea Naylor

"Dialectic No. 4" by Heather Akerberg

"Perfect Pansies" by Holly Clarke

"Still Life #1" by Barbara Strick

"Circle of Friends" by Erin Case

"Orange Peel Overlay" by Stephanie Bracelyn""Orange Peel Overlay" by Stephanie Bracelyn

"Spotlight" by Amy Friend

"Blobs" by Lucie Belanger

"Sunshine Amidst Rain" by Sarah Wigton

"Cellophane Squares" by Sharon Thomson

"Evolution of Man" by Carrie Stout

[inbabylontheywept]

Something that I find really interesting about probability in continuous systems is that you can have events that are technically possible despite having a probability of zero.

For example, if I'm trying to pick a number between 0 and 1, and the space is continuous, there are an infinite number of numbers available. The odds of it being any particular number in the set one out of infinity, which is to say, zero, yet at the end of the day its still one of those numbers.

A second thing that is interesting about probability in continuous spaces, that is faaaaaar weirder than even the above, is that there can be two events that both have a probability of zero, while one is infinitely more likely than the other.

For example.

Imagine a right triangle.

Imagine you are throwing a dart at this right triangle.

The odds of it landing in any particular region is just the area of the region divided by the area of the triangle. One dimensional points don't have an area, so the odds of it hitting any point is, obviously, zero, but lines also don't have an area, so the odds of hitting one of those is, again, zero. But! The odds of hitting anywhere on the line x=0.5 is infinitely more likely than hitting the exact point (0.5,0.5). And then being weirder still, the odds of hitting somewhere on the line x=0.5 is exactly half of what they'd be hitting somewhere on the line x=1, what with the vertical line at x=0.5 being half the length of the vertical line at x=1. So you can have a zero probability even that is infinitely more probably than another zero probability event, and also, exactly twice as likely as another zero probability event. But they're all still zero probability. Which doesn't mean that they can't happen, just that they won't.

(Not a mathematician, this was just sort of casually explained in my Baby Quantum for Dummy Electrical Engineers and we all left the room like this:)

[inbabylontheywept]

OH ℵ0

[probabilitydirigible]

This reminds me of the Bus Stop Paradox, which is that the average wait time for the bus is slightly longer than the average time between busses. This is because if you arrive at a random minute, you're more likely to arrive during a longer delay, because those contain more minutes. Another version of this is that if you agreed your roommate was in charge of lightbulbs and they bought a terrible brand that burns out in 1 second 75% of the time, the average lifespan would be very low, but you might never notice because in order to know about the duds you'd have to see one, and they all get installed and removed instantly.

[inbabylontheywept]

I'd heard a similar statistic about how your friends, on average, have more friends than you. The gist was something like if there was one guy in a town of 40,000 people that was friends with everyone, he would blow everyone's average way the fuck up, because now everyone would have one friend with 39,999 other friends. Whereas all the people with 1 or 2 friends aren't in enough friend groups to meaningfully pull the average down. Making your friend count larger doesn't just change how big the number is, it changes how many times that big number gets counted.

I have a sneaky feeling that something like this can be used to explain things like wealth inequality, but I can only kind of gesture blindly in that direction. That's just my math gut whispering to me and it is frequently wrong.

[kickair8p]

So I saw a photo of this hexagon tile floor . . .

The blurb said the shot was taken in Granada, Spain, by Agneta Fondén.  No other info, so I have no idea how old, etc.  There's a game (from 1988) that uses a similar pattern on one of its pieces, but this could predate it by at least a thousand years  — or not.  But the pattern intrigued me, so I made a texture map and used Blender's geometry nodes (no generative AI) to set up a hexagon grid with random rotations for the tiles:

That's all done with a single design:

You'd think this would have a name, right?  (For its historical use as an architectural / decor tile — although I've found out more about its use in games, that's not what I'm looking for.)  Like the Penroses do (and no, it's not one of those).  But I've had no luck finding it, or any other info.  Any (human only, please) help?

Crossposted to Pillowfort and Dreamwidth.

[canthaveshitingotham-crucified]

i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point

[canthaveshitingotham-crucified]

you get it. you get the themes. i dont have time to do it justice. just look at it its on the ceiling

[brenna]

[teaboot]

[wheresmyphonemp3]

[fadingponycookiedream]

[andsorrowsend]

[werefeathers]

[allonsybadwolf]

"crochet can't be made by machines" went from being a cool fun fact to being a call to action of "so if you see mass manufactured crochet in Target, that was made by a person and they were underpaid and you should boycott it" which is true, it was made by a person, but EVERY item of clothing you own (that you did not purchase from a company using ethical labor) was made by a person being underpaid (at *best*.)

Sewing machines are operated by *people*. Knitting machines are operated by *people*. Yes lots of the process is automated but you cannot tell a machine "make me a t-shirt" or "make me a knit cardigan".

Higher awareness of fast fashion, and the true human labor and abuse behind it, is GREAT, but let's not pretend that the crochet hat in target is THE problem. Every article of clothing in target is the problem. "All clothes are made by people" is the jumping off point here into understanding this issue it's not just crochet it's the whole thing ahhhhHHHHHHHHHH

[enerdsout]

[marzipanandminutiae]

If you've ever seen images of sweatshops in the early 20th century, in New York or the UK or other developed countries

Guess what

Your clothing is still made in a place that looks like that. The only thing that's different is the tech level of the sewing machines and the race of the workers 

[barksbog]

This also applies to all plushies. Every single plushie is made by people, there is no way to make them without human labour.

Unless you buy them from small scale makers who make them themselves, this means they were made in a factory, the same way clothing is.