The life and times of a geeky tea lover. A compendium of nerdiness (and maybe some Earl Grey.) Once upon a time there lived a young girl, who grew up with her nose in a book and a cat at her feet. She traveled far and wide between the pages and in her mind, but always came home for teatime. Now that she's grown, she's traveled far and wide in the real world, but she's never forgotten the joy of a book. And she still always comes home for teatime.
getting lost in boston is fun because I turned around on a street corner three times and some guy yelled "hey stupid! the bus is that way!" very helpful interaction and accurate insult, 10/10 no notes
one time I walked around a building a couple times looking for a bathroom and this guy went "this bitch thinks she's on a merrygoround, where the fuck are you tryna go? bathroom? one floor down to the right behind the door that says bathroom."
My very first time in Boston. I was absolutely miserable, trying to drag my giant suitcase up a lengthy set of stairs in the pouring rain. This guy who had already reached the top looked back at me with the most pure expression of disgust I’ve ever seen in anyone’s eyes, marched back down the stairs, grabbed my suitcase, carried it to the top, left it there for me, and walked away without ever saying a word. I think about him often.
For the people in the notes going "why is Boston like this": a) the insults are a way to show you have no ulterior motives when helping someone (and don't need to be thanked or repaid), and b) Boston was settled by the Irish
also the Italians. mixing Irish and Italian sociocultural attitudes had the effect of multiplying the Sass Levels by the power of infinity, in the sense that you get all of the clever dry wit of the Irish and all of the bitchy gossipy condensation of the Italians rolled into one very stereotypically overly-friendly American package.
also worth noting that who you are to them doesn’t matter. they’ll talk to strangers like that and will also talk to their best friends like that. they’re just Like That.
Hi, these bees are babies! They’re not clumsy at all, this is what is called orientation flights. After birth and before beginning their careers as foragers (as all Honey bees cycle through all the jobs in the Hive throughout their lifespan), Honey bees take short flights back and forth, to and from the Hive, to orient themselves with their wings and their home so they can learn its location and how to get back home after foraging! Everyone has to learn, these are just smol little baby turkeys. Bees use the angle of the sun for location so adults have a better and more direct sense of location than any human
FOR INSTAGRAM (and maybe other Meta networks in the future?)
Since this is Tumblr, this is more of a PSA. I posted this on Netherworld Post's instagram, threads, and Facebook account earlier.
Good to know if you run something elsewhere. There are plenty of people talking about it, but Meta certainly has not made any giant announcement that I have seen.
Email sign up is available at netherworldpost.com and emails will (very) likely be our primary source of contact (if not exclusive) when atticus gets back in August.
Email and… sigh, laugh, Tumblr, the system that seems to survive somehow everything.
There is one very important thing I need people without major dietary restrictions to understand: the distress caused by allergies, celiac disease, and other food restrictions is largely not about the food.
Do I miss some foods I can't eat anymore without getting sick? Sure, but that's not what really bothers me. What bothers me is being excluded from a huge portion of human social life of which food is a crucial component. What bothers me is the stress and social stigma of trying to figure out what I can safely eat. What bothers me is the amount of extra work and cost that is required of me to identify, obtain, and prepare safe foods. What bothers me is people treating my needs like a nuisance, as though I chose to be like this - as though their brief inconvenience to check an ingredients list is unreasonable, when I deal with this every day of my life forever.
I don't miss the food that much. I miss not having to worry about what I eat. I miss freedom. I miss when trying new foods and new restaurants was fun instead of a minefield. I miss not having to plan my entire life around the need for safe foods.
Food is such a basic human need, and a lot of people don't really need to think about it. When your danger foods can be anywhere and everywhere, suddenly your entire life revolves around avoiding them, and it massively sucks. You get used to it and it's not a big deal most of the time, but then you go to a new restaurant, or your office has a potluck, or you've been invited to a party and suddenly it feels just as miserable and exhausting as it ever has.
Fun how the bystander effect was coined to cover up how cops are bigoted cowards who let a queer person die and stockholm syndrome was coined to cover that the cops handled a hostage situation so badly the hostages trusted their captors more than the cops.
I love how Zohran Mamdani is wearing a suit everywhere. And if he has anything else he puts it ON TOP of the suit. A basketball jersey. A high-vis vest. All worn over the suit. He’s like the mayor character in a cartoon who’s always dressed as The Mayor. If I didn’t know who he was and he biked past me in NYC I’d be like holy shit was that the mayor
Not to bring the serious to a very fun post, but this reaction is exactly what Mamdani is working for with his image, because in a very real way the most effective way for him to be The Mayor is if he looks like The Mayor.
This is a man who is VIOLENTLY aware that when it comes to conservatives, he is a Muslim first, a Brown Man second, an Immigrant third, a Socialist fourth, and a human a very distant fifth, if considered at all. He was also a young adult during the Obama Years and will have seen Republicans rip Obama to shreds for wearing a tan suit instead of a dark one and use literally ANY excuse they could to try and degrade his image.
Despite the fact that a mayor who wears a T-shirt and jeans might "seem more approachable" in the eyes of the average American, Zohran Mamdani knows that someone with his profile fundamentally cannot get away with that the way his White colleagues can. He has instead put in the effort to look professional and BE approachable, because not only does it make it easier for him to reach and represent his constituents, it forces everyone, including both his opponents and establishment Democrats, to engage with the work he is doing instead of judging his image. The fact that he is always seen in a suit and is recognisably The Mayor is, while also something he has fun with, a deliberate choice to ensure he is as inarguably A Professional Politician To Be Taken Seriously. The added humour of e.g. the hi-vis is a bonus, only achievable because he works so hard to Look Like The Mayor.
just learned americans have different standard paper sizes than everyone else. what do you MEAN you don’t have A4 as the standard. what do you mean your standard paper size isn’t even the same size as an A4. apparently it’s like. ’letter’ and ’legal’ and whatever else. help!!!
So I work in engineering; and always wondered who used these weird “A” sizes I’d see in large printer settings that I’ve never seen any company even have paper in stock for. Now I know.
And now I have to be one of those obnoxious US Americans because WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU USE THESE WEIRD UNEVEN DIMENSIONS!? Even in metric most of the “A” settings are an annoying ratio! 210x297mm? 594x841mm!? What’s the point of using such small units of measurement if you’re not going to make sensible sizes!?
because the largest standard paper size is A0 which is exactly one square metre of paper with an aspect ratio of the square root of two. this gives us a nice simple measurement of area for the paper as well as allows us to do the halving/doubling magic. A1 is 0.5m², A2 is 0.25m² etc.
The halving/doubling magic that psychaun refers to is the fact that you can get each paper in the series by cutting the previous one in half. I fold some A4 paper in half, I have an A5 booklet. I tape two A4 pieces together along their long side, I have an A3 piece. Each piece of paper is half the area of the previous and half the width of the previous' length with a length the same as the previous' width. The aspect ratio is exactly the same for every size. This makes it very easy to resize things, fold things inside each other, and calculate the size of paper you've never used before based on its name. "I can resize this to fit any other paper size because the aspect ratio is identical," "I can fold a standard size in half to get the next standard size down" and "the area I'm working with can be multiplied up to fit into a metre squared without any messy fractions of leftover paper" are all far more practical considerations for a paper size than "the millimetre length of this paper size isn't a round number".
The US doesn't "have to do things different" for the sake of doing things differently, as your words imply, nor is the sentence above about who uses what paper fully correct, either*.
The reason that the US (and Canada, most of Central America, Chile, and the Philippines) use different standard sizes* from Europe is probably pretty easy to figure out when you think about things like "there's a big fucking ocean between two of those places, but not between all of the countries in Europe."
The standard size of paper, according to the American Forest and Paper Association, comes from the days of manual paper-making, and their assertion that 44" is about the length of the average experienced vatsman's comfortable grasp. So a sheet is 1/4" that length. The US standardized its own paper according to what legacy equipment it had, and keeps those standards because even today, paper tends to not be shipped back and forth between Europe and the US unless it has to be, because paper and books are really fucking heavy, so why should either one of us change our standards? Doing so would require massive amounts of capital investment, and frankly, we like our paper sizes just fine. It's really not to our detriment at all. We don't really import a lot of paper, and in fact, we export a lot of it.
American paper sizes are also half of each previous size, it's just that our base is a rectangle, not a square, uses imperial measurements, and reaches back to measurements based on manual paper-making. Sure, we could spend billions of dollars changing our standards to meet that of countries that don't supply us with this good, creating a massive amount of industrial and consumer waste as everything from paper manufacturing mills and industrial printing presses to plastic binders and hole punches at schools all become garbage, but... why? We also use different standard sizes of snack food bags, based on how our industries developed, but there's no actual reason for those things to be standardized, so why, exactly, should they be? Because it bothers someone who doesn't use our machines and didn't know until today that it was different? That's not a real reason. That's just "haha the US sucks and is dumb and irrational."
No, it's actually super fucking rational when you remember that most European countries are smaller than US states, and we're standardized across the places where paper actually moves back and forth in massive bulk on a regular basis. You know: our own states, and Canada, and not Europe, on account of this being a huge fucking continent and paper being incredibly heavy and expensive to transport across oceans. That's why it's governed by the American National Standards Institute, which also governs or governed stuff like thread standards for nuts and bolts & exposure standards for film. The latter had the ANSI standard become the ISO standard, which is a great example of technology which was developed more recently and more specialized and thus not so deeply rooted and hard to change being much more possible to standardize.
tl;dr: all industrial standards like paper sizes have valid and long-argued reasons why they're like that, and unless you're coughing up the solution for changing something with hundreds of years of built-up infrastructure without breaking all of the industries that depend on that standard, the cash to do it, and the reason why all the old equipment that can't be converted should become garbage... fuck off, man, and leave us alone. There are real problems in the world, go solve those.
*While many Mesoamerican countries have officially adopted ISO standards, ANSI standard paper is most commonly in use day to day.
#you could use the same reasons to justify the us still using standard instead of metric #which is stupid and counterproductive as hell #I don't think anyone seriously believes the us just does things their own special way for it's own sake
#however they do double down on doing it their way even when there are other (arguably better) ways
#out of weird american exceptionalism #so I think that people getting frustrated and saying that America just insists on doing things in dumb ways #is a shorthand for all of that
THOSE ARE THE SAME! FUCKING!! REASONS!!! WE DON'T (FULLY, MANDATORILY) USE METRIC
Holy fucking shit. People could literally spend 30 seconds looking this up instead of repeating "bluh bluh bluh America dumb"
The U.S. does not use the metric system due to high conversion costs, inertia, resistance, and historical reluctance.
The US has actually used a hybrid of metric and Imperial for decades, with changeover occurring where it's both necessary and economically viable, and has not fully switched over because of the prohibitive cost and ingrained habits. Literally trillions of dollars worth of equipment, road signs, documentation, like... I genuinely think y'all don't have any concept of how fucking big this country is, or how much this shit costs to change.
Let's take one single easy thing. Ready? Speed limit signs. How much would it cost just to change the speed limit signs, very very approximately?
Okay. So. To keep ourselves from going fully insane, let's limit this question only to interstates. This is the network of federally-managed roads which, you know, goes from state to state. There are 48,890 miles (sorry! 78,680 km, but I'm still mostly calculating in miles, because it's easier to find numbers this way) of interstate roadway in the US.
There are between 1 and 4 speed limit signs per mile, depending on traffic density. For simplicity, let's say 2 per mile.
It costs about $400 per sign to replace a speed limit sign. This is just speed limit signs. We'll get to other signs in a minute.
So that's $39.11 million dollars just for the speed limit signs. But hold on! You can't even get to replacing exit signs until you replace mile marker signs! Those are approximately every 1/10th to 2/10 of a mile, again on average, bc you don't want someone to have to walk very far to look for a mile marker if they've been in an accident. Let's go with every 2/10 of a mile. It costs $200 to remove a sign and $550 to place a new one, bc you have to get surveyors out to measure them and place them properly.
So let's see, that's 244,450 signs removed... $48.89 million... and then let's say we're placing kilometer markers every half kilometer just to make it nice and even, okay? 157,360 new half-kilometer markers at $550 each. $86.5 million.
So we're already spending about $174.5 million dollars, about $15 million more — on just replacing those two kinds of road signs just on interstates, which are a tiny fraction of the actual number of miles of state or federally-managed roads — than it costs the Federal Housing Authority to oversee the processing of every mortgage in the US for a year, just to pull a random line item out of the 2026 budget. We haven't touched any of the other signs on those or any other roads, let alone literally anything else.
And for what, exactly? Why? Because it fucking bugs people who don't live here? What is the purpose of spending a bunch of fucking money to change our shit up and just confuse people who think in miles?
We use metric when it both makes sense and is financially feasible to switch. My medication is measured in metric. A lot of precise machinery is measured in metric, especially new things that were created or invented in the last few decades or are used in scientific fields. Grandma's recipes and the roads and our paper are done the way that works for us in our big weird country that is actually 50 smaller and extremely proud little countries wrestling for elbow room in a giant lumpy trenchcoat, and it's not hurting you, so you don't have to be a dick about it.
A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previou
A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for false claims in its AI-generated search overviews.
In this case, Google's AI had wrongly linked two publishers to scams and shady business practices.
The court treated the AI overviews as Google's own content and rejected Google's argument that users were responsible for fact-checking the results themselves.
Long COVID patients can experience severe energy crashes after physical exertion. New research provides clear evidence that there's a biolog
Full Transcript at the link; 3-minute listen.
Quote:
By taking biopsies from long COVID patients before and after exercising, scientists in the Netherlands constructed a startling picture of widespread abnormalities in muscle tissue that may explain this severe reaction to physical activity.
Among the most striking findings were clear signs that the cellular power plants, the mitochondria, are compromised and the tissue starved for energy.
"We saw this immediately and it's very profound," says Braeden Charlton, one of the study's authors at Vrije University in Amsterdam.
The tissue samples from long COVID patients also revealed severe muscle damage, a disturbed immune response, and a buildup of microclots.
"This is a very real disease," says Charlton. "We see this at basically every parameter that we measure."
I feel insane seeing stuff like this because this research already exists for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, a post viral condition caused by multiple types of viral infections that a LOT of people with "Long Covid" meet the diagnostic criteria for.
This article mentions that ME/CFS is a "similar complex condition" but that's DEEPLY underreporting the similarities. The phrase "post exertional malaise" (now researchers are trying to replace it but this article uses that phrase) was INVENTED for ME/CFS. It's the only known condition, before "long covid", that causes these kinds of symptoms after exertion!
It's good to know for sure that it's the same mechanisms at play when the inciting viral infection is Covid and not, for instance, Epstein-Barr or RSV, but half the time it doesn't seem like researchers are making comparisons at all, just reinventing the wheel and acting like "long covid" is a totally new phenomenon with no previous point of comparison.
There are literally drugs in human trials to try to treat the mitochondrial dysfunction in ME, this dysfunction is well-established and fairly well understood and I feel insane when ppl report on long covid without mentioning that there is already a named and studied condition that accounts for this subset of symptoms!!
SOME researchers are drawing comparisons but they're largely ME researchers who everyone else is largely cignoring because of the widespread perception that ME is a fake disease for lazy women.
That same perception btw is why "graded exercise therapy" (GET), or exercise gradually increasing in intensity, cwas for years the go-to treatment despite MOUNTAINS of evidence that it makes ME patients sicker. Some end up permanently bedbound and unable to even eat or drink without a feeding tube/IV because the damage is so bad!
The GET recommendation was finally changed only in the past few years in the US and the UK, and many doctors hate that they're not allowed to recommend it anymore, because they insist despite the evidence that ME/CFS is psychological and ME patients are just "deconditioned" and too lazy to do anything about it.
Now the same kind of "treatment" is being recommended for long covid patients despite evidence showing exercise is having the same kinds of cellular effects as it does in ME patients. "Taking PEM into account" sounds gentler but I'm deeply concerned about the reinvention of GET for patients who meet all the criteria for an illness that's been shown definitively to become permanently worse with GET.
This mitochondrial damage is progressive in ME, and there's no reason to believe patients who meet all the criteria of ME after Covid won't experience the same progression if they force themselves past their energy envelope in such a systematic way.
The additional finding that T cells — part of the immune system's arsenal — had infiltrated the muscles of long COVID patients also caught Iwasaki's attention, possibly indicating "an autoimmune response within the muscle cells."
This autoimmune response is well-researched for ME. Every time you overexert, you're injuring your cells more and more. It's deeply worrying that rebranded GET is being recommended for long covid patients who meet the criteria for ME when research like this study keeps showing it's the same phenomenon.
