I have had a really full and busy day today, but the highlight was:
So I'm sitting in the staff work area and one of my colleagues comes up to me. There's an open day this weekend, and so we need to plan an activity for the would-be students.
"Simple!" I say. "Let's get them to dissect some owl pellets. Hands on, fun, they get to play with skulls."
"Good idea!" she says. "But we'll need something even fancier for the open day in February. What can we do? Perhaps we can take some soil samples."
And as we're debating the photogenic merits of soil Vs dead mice...
Suddenly, a Dashing and Handsome Stranger (read: an autistic engineering lecturer) appears with a flourish (read: launches himself into a seat beside us while visibly and physically vibrating with excitement about his special interest being Useful) and asks "HELLO I'M SORRY DID YOU SAY SOIL BECAUSE I HAVE A RAMAN MICROSCOPE"
"Amazing!" declares my colleague. "...Who are you?"
"COME AND SEE IT!!!" he says, currently the human embodiment of the :D emoticon.
We went and saw it. It's an excellent microscope and his ten minute infodump about it was both spectacular and also extremely useful. We're going to use it to assess microplastics.
Guess who I saw again today! I say 'saw', he hunted me down to invite me to train on using his microscopes - it turned out some of the engineers asked if they could look at explosive substances with it and he was like NO YOU MAY NOT IT'S POWERED BY A LASER so now he's insisting that everyone train on it, but wanted to ask me if I'd like to do it. Obviously I have said yes. He's getting an SEN as well so he's put my name down for that, too.
And then we compared notes on working in labs, and he told me about the time he was sent to the 'chemical cupboard' in his last lab and found a Tesco bag of asbestos, three and a half kilos of TNT, and half a pint of cyanide, and when he told the health and safety woman she just said he should use a lone working protocol, and he was so angry he yelled A LONE WORKING PROTOCOL WILL NOT SAVE THE CHILDREN FROM A DIRTY BOMB, CAROLINE
Why did the chemical cupboard have three and a half kilos of trinitrotolulene (the full name for TNT, for those unaware), and was it at the very least an explosives cupboard?
It was not in an explosives cupboard, and he didn't know. Basically this was in an HE building being converted over to a young offenders institute, and for whatever reason, all the science teachers quit en masse as the switch was happening, leaving all their students in the lurch. So one morning he came into work, was told he was being promoted to Technical Demonstrator, given a Bunch of Mysterious Keys, and told he had three hours to familiarise himself with the contents of the chemical cupboard.
"Great," he said. "Where is the chemical cupboard?"
"Shrug emoji," his boss said gravely, and wandered off to have crisps.
So he spent an hour wandering the building and trying his keys in every lock before finally finding a door that opened, and upon finally opening it, was immediately greeted by a Tesco carrier bag on the floor labelled 'Asbestos, do not touch'.
"Right-o," he thought. "No touching that."
But then he had two hours left to familiarise himself with the packed shelf contents of quite a large room, and the problem is that when you tell an autistic lab tech to familiarise themselves with a room full of chemicals, what they hear is not "Have a quick look so you have an idea of what's there", it's "These chemicals must be catalogued in detail and also here have a time pressure," so he was going to be both Thorough and Grumpy about this. And this room was packed.
The oldest bottle he found was a reagent opened in 1959.
It had crystallised.
("It was quite beautiful, actually," he told me dreamily. "A work of art. I wish I'd kept it.")
The cyanide, when he finally found it, was in a stoppered glass vial. So that was the point he lost his shit and went and grabbed Caroline.
The kicker is, Caroline didn't care. She insisted they didn't have the money or resources to spare on getting rid of it. So he had to march all the way to the Dean's office.
"You look like you're having a bad day," she said warily.
"Well I thought it would peak with the Tesco carrier bag of asbestos I found," he said, "but I was very wrong."
I straight up donβt trust people who say βwell ALL religions are cultsβ because they know neither what an actual cult is nor what any religion is beyond a basic understanding if even that
Yep. Itβs pathognomonic for someone who thinks religion=xtianity (usually a specific sect). It simultaneously downplays the struggles people in/leaving cults face and also promotes the same xtian hegemony they think theyβre against. Itβs outright racist against the many ethnoreligions that exist, which are inseparable from ethnic cultural identities that are almost all oppressed minorities due to the influence of a handful of universal empire-building religions.
Also, the idea that religion = cult is really harmful in the modern day especially, because contrary to popular perception, most modern cults are not religions. There are still plenty of religious cults, but most cults today are MLMs, or self-help groups, or homeschool curriculum programs, or networking organizations, or female empowerment workshops. If you think that you are safe from getting sucked into a cult simply because you "distrust all religions", you are in fact exactly the sort of person who is extremely likely to be recruitable into a cult.
Funny this should pop up now, Iβm beginning a rabbit hole fall of how most NFT ββcommunitiesββ are functionally cults/how the crypto scheme as a whole largely is too. Gunna through a copy of this in my drafts to update if I come up with some relevant points, but in discussing is with my therapist yesterday we came to the conclusion itβd genuinely be something to look into more seriously, since she concurred what I was describing had some significant red flags
i just realized that whenever Aang says βmonkey feathersβ in the show or comics itβs really him saying βmother f*ckerβ but censored because itβs a childrenβs show. Our lil 12 year old prodigy has the mouth of a sailor <3
βIn the 1980s Exxon was the biggest, richest company in the world. Its product was carbon. And it had good scientists βΒ greatΒ scientists β on the payroll. So the scientists set to work trying to understand this problem, and in 1983 they told the executives how much the earth was going to warm and how fast. Being rational, business-minded people, the executives believed them. Exxon, for example, began building all its drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level that it knew was coming.
Meanwhile Jim Hansen worked forΒ NASAΒ from an office in New York City, at 112th and Broadway on the Upper West Side. Hansen had built the worldβs most powerful model of the climate, and he had the best data coming in from around the globe. He reached the same conclusion that the Exxon scientists had reached, and he told Congress in June of 1988 that the βgreenhouse effect,β as we called it then, was here, that the planet was indeed warming, and that it was going to be a very serious crisis.
Exxon could have said the next day, βOur scientists can confirm what Mr. Hansen is telling you.β Had that happened, it would have been a turning point in history. No one would have said, βOh, Exxon executives are just a bunch of alarmists. Pay them no attention.β We could have begun to take relatively modest steps that would have put us on a different trajectory. By this point we could be on the way to solving climate change.
Instead Exxon, and the fossil-fuel industry as a whole, took the opposite course. It began spending lots of money to build an architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that for the next thirty years kept us locked in a pointless debate about whether global warming was real β a question that, remember, both sides knew the answer to from the get-go. Itβs just that one of them was willing to lie. That turned out to be the most consequential lie in human history. It has cost us three crucial decades.
Itβs a tragic story of an opportunity lost to corporate greed, and also to a kind of ideological conviction that ran strong, and still runs strong in those circles: that markets can do no wrong and all problems will be solved by laissez-faire capitalism. This has clearly turned out not to be true. Now half the summer sea ice in the Arctic has melted, and the oceans are 30 percent more acidic than they were before. Weβve run market capitalism through a test, and it has failed.β
-Tipping Point, Bill McKibben On A Planet In Peril
βWhy do people like a character whoβs committed war crimes but hate this other character just because theyβre annoyingβ because itβs fiction Susan, and being annoying in fiction is a greater sin than being a supervillain, because it wonβt make me want to read about them. It isnβt difficult to understand
I think my favorite translation-related detail in the Witcher saga that separates the original Polish version from English lies in Geraltβs horse(s), Roach
He names all of his horses βRoach,β which in English, is a very grim-sounding name. It immediately stirs the thought of a cockroach, and it sort of fits the grimy dark fantasy aesthetic that the series has going for it, as well as Geraltβs personality as someone who likes to keep things simple and uncomplicated. He gives the name to every horse he owns, further adding to that.
Meanwhile, in the original Polish version, his horseβs name is PΕotka, which to my understanding is a diminutive form of pΕoΔ, which is a type of fish, known as a common roach in English, which is actually a pretty small and common fish. It being a diminutive form, itβs also basically sayingΒ βRoachieβ instead ofΒ βRoach,β so all things considered, itβs meant to be a tiny, adorable, cutesy name, but that gets completelyΒ lost in the translation. Itβs like naming your horseΒ βGuppyβ or something.
Fun fact: by court order, no Burger King franchise is allowed to operate within this black circle, a 20 mile radius around an independent local restaurant named Burger King that had used the name first
In Ireland the prefix Mc or Mac on a second name is part of our history and language. A lot of people have names like McGraw or McGuire. Also in Ireland, as a left over of how Irish language works, its not unusual to give someone a sort of nickname by adding βyoung(small)β or βbigβ in front of their name. (it flows better in Irish but we still do it). This combined with an abbreviation of second names being used as their nickname youd end up with people being called βYoung Daveβ or, and Iβm sure you can see where this is going, βBig Macβ
In 1978 one such person opened a fast food restaurant called Supermacs and they just happened to sell a burger called a Big Mac. They became wildly popular and can be found in most towns in Ireland. Their food is actually pretty good.
Now, a certain large restaurant chain didnβt take kindly to this cuz they thought they owned the idea first (they didnβt) and they brought the relitively small fast food chain to court to force them to stop using the name βbig macβ and anything with the prefix Mc. Yaknow, the way Irish people have named ourselves since before Irish was a written language.
In a wild twist they lost and in doing so lost all exclusivity of the prefixes in all of Ireland so now any restaurant can sell a βbig macβ and they do. Most chipshops do a Big Mac of some variety.
Unfortunately McDonalds werenβt happy with this for some reason and brought the case to the European Courts in 2019 or soβ¦ and THEY FUCKIN LOST AGAIN.
So, if youβre ever in Ireland you should treat yourself to a Supermacs. Not cuz theyβre food is amazing, itβs not, itβs just ok but by god the idea that some rich fuckin assholes spend years in courts and spent a fortune trying to sue a small buisness out of their family name and then lost, twice, sure does make it taste amazing.
We got asked if this is cute and okay. I can very happily say yes, this is stupid cute and those are happy porcupine noises.Β
One of my favorite things about doing zoo work was all the noises you never realize the animals make when theyβre excited or interested in a new thing. Coatimundis squeak and snuffle, and giant porcupines make that sound.Β
So hereβs a fun thing, admittedly very AU centric as this is an AU vid:
If they pull the βcompany policyβ line, ask to see it.Β Ask to see it in writing.Β Ask to see that they have put in writing that you will be performing 15 minutes unpaid work every day.Β Check your contract.Β
Spoiler: They havenβt.Β Β βcos itβs illegal.
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