âhumanity is inherently selfish and badâ bbbrrrghuhjfkg. humanity is seeing a strangerâs grocery bag break open on the sidewalk and harvesting fruits and veggies from the branch-like cracks of the asphalt for them, just because you can. humanity is helping a lost child find their mother on a crowded beach, looking for the ladybug-patterned parasol with their hummingbird-small hand in yours. itâs an elderâs fingers wrapped around your arm as you help them up the stairs because the elevator is broken, and feeling like youâre doing exactly what youâre supposed to be doing, like this is what you wouldâve been doing had you been alive centuries or even millennia ago. there will always be a heavily pregnant woman who will smile at your when you give up your seat, a nice blind man in the fruit aisle who will ask you to please pick the riper plantain for him, a tired cashier whose face will light up when you compliment their tattoo sleeve. humanity is connection
Fun fact! Helping seems to be an innate human behavior because it has been consistently shown to occur in infants way before their parents have had the chance to educate them on right and wrong, and even before the children are able to speak themselves!
to be clear this isnât some random change.org petition that doesnât matter, this is the formal proper way for EU citizens to influence what the EU commission discusses. if this gets enough signatures they HAVE to seriously consider how to implement universal basic income across the european union.
Knowing a fic author through AO3 is like attending someoneâs thesis presentation and politely clapping at the end, knowing a fic author through this hellsite is like going over to their house at 3AM to watch them eat mayonnaise out of a jar
OneID was a Yahoo scheme. I'm not sure how much I can reveal here, but given that Marissa Meyer is long gone and this water is very much under the bridge, it doesn't really matter. What happened was probably one of Yahoo's worst and most nefarious efforts to bring Tumblr into the Yahoo ecosystem:
So, you ever go to a website and it allows you to sign up for the service and create an account using your Google, or Apple, or Facebook login? That's called Third Party Authentication. What it does is it uses your valid account on a website that has a strong authentication process to prove that you're a unique human being.
You log in to these third party sites (i.e. Google) via their authentication process, they (Google) return a unique token to the website (whatever site is using the third party auth). The token can be verified again to confirm it says "yes, this person's legit", and the website uses this process to authenticate/create your account with their service.
This is kind of hard to explain without getting technical, so you can compare it to, say, using your passport to verify your identity when you try to open a bank account. The bank trusts the passport, provided by a another institution, as verification that you are who you claim to be.
Anyways, Yahoo saw that Google was providing 3rd Party Authentication, and since they're Google's biggest competitor (ha!) they assumed people want a Third Party Authentication service from Yahoo too! Sign in to your favorite websites, using Yahoo!
So they made OneID! OneID was the name of their Third Party Auth. And they wanted all of their internal properties to use it, including Tumblr. The thing is, it only works if you have a Yahoo email address. Not a lot of people on Tumblr have yahoo email addresses. So, to make it easy for Tumblr, they had it set up so that when you use OneID to create a brand new account on Tumblr, you're given a Yahoo email address too! Who wouldn't want that?!
Well, Tumblr users didn't. At least that's what Staff assumed because Tumblr was, well, a bunch of teens and young adults who were net-savvy enough to not be caught dead using Yahoo anymore. Moreover, the sign-up process for OneID was, uh, way more rigorous than Tumblr.
To sign up for Tumblr, you need an email address, a password, and you have to tell them your age. Not your birthday, just your age. That's all Tumblr has ever needed, and was all they ever wanted to ask for from a user. The age was necessary because of laws about using the internet under the age of 13, and of course verifying if you're over 18 (because Tumblr had porn at the time).
To sign up for OneID, though, you had to, well, provide your Yahoo email address, or choose the name of your new Yahoo email address that was about to be bestowed upon you. You needed a password of course. And you needed to provide your date of birth. And your phone number. And, of course, most importantly, your gender. Male or female, please.
Staff took one look at this and saw the shitstorm coming down the mountain. Yahoo wanted your gender for marketing purposes, of course, but Tumblr knew that their users wanted to be as anonymous as possible. Moreover, OneID drops a "male or female?" gender check at signup and anyone who fell outside the gender binary was going to be angry. Staff did not want to anger its generally more progressive userbase than Yahoo's (old people? scammers?).
So, two problems:
1. Tumblr had to use OneID, they didn't have a choice
2. It was going to require all this extra info from new users
3. Yahoo wanted to force existing Tumblr users who signed up to use Tumblr with the regular registration process to re-sign up for Tumblr using OneID
It quickly turned into three problems.
Staff dug their heels in, hard. This was a herculean coordination between high-level stakeholders in the engineering organization, run of the mill engineers, marketing people, support staff, trust and safety, anyone who could find a reason to slow this project down or block it stepped in.
After months of going back and forth, Staff managed to convince Yahoo not to require a phone number for the OneID process, but Yahoo insisted on the gender check. So they compromised by providing a third, "fill in the blank" option where you could type in whatever gender you wanted. By this time, engineers had slowed the progress as much as they could, but enough work was done so that it was ready for initial, internal testing.
I was working on the testing part. Myself and other engineers ensured that the OneID on Tumblr internal test was going to be extremely rigorous! And it would take a while. I mean, it's gotta be secure, it's user authentication, right? First thing we noticed: it was broken as hell. I wish I could remember the technical details, but, at this point it's been too long. Myself and other engineers coordinated massive bug hunts, encouraging as many people within the company to test it as much as possible. You know, to be extra sure it worked properly, and to find as many bugs as they could.
The process found tons and tons of bugs, of course. One of the more curious ones was this: we noticed that if you set your gender as "female", or set your gender as the "fill in the blank" option, you'd get the same type of posts recommended to you during the Tumblr onboarding process. We asked Yahoo why this was happening, and it turned out that they just treated all accounts that chose the "fill in the blank" option as "female" on the backend. Great job, Yahoo. No one would have noticed that. And no, it was never fixed. It was considered "working as expected".
After a drawn-out testing process and more bugfixing, it was finally approaching production readiness. Keep in mind that, during this whole time, Staff was begging leadership not to do this. There were regular, very critical questions about OneID at All Team meetings where David Karp had to force a smile and talk about how great OneID will be for Tumblr. This project was Marissa Meyer's pet project and, ultimately, Staff could not stop it.
The last-ditch effort to block this was to suggest we roll out OneID slowly, using an A/B test, and compare how many people completed accout registration for Tumblr via OneID, vs how many completed account registration for Tumblr via the existing registration process. Can you take a guess as to what the results were?
OneID's new account signup (aka conversion) rates were abysmal. This resulted in more setbacks, negotiations, and tweaks on Yahoo's end to try to encourage users to finish the sign up process. But the users who ended up in the test bucket where they were forced to sign up with OneID never showed better conversion rates.
Then, one day, on slack, after much anticipation and rumors, our Director of Engineering made an announcement to everyone in the org:
"Yahoo authorized us to remove OneID from Tumblr".
Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.
Carpathia received Titanicâs distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.
(Californianâs exact position at the time isâŠcontroversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanicâs distress rockets. Itâs uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)
Carpathiaâs Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanicâs aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.
All of Carpathiaâs lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.
I donât know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.
Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awakeâprepping a ship for disaster relief isnât quietâand all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.
And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.
Hereâs the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining roomsâwhich, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when sheâd done that, he asked her to go faster.
I need you to understand that you simply canât push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only recklessâitâs difficult to maneuverâbut it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They canât do it. It canât be done.
Carpathiaâs absolute do-or-die, the-engines-canât-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.
No one would have asked this of them. It wasnât expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.
They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.
This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanicâs last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.
In total, 705 people of Titanicâs original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.
At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
I think the least we can do is remember them for it.
âAnd even as he watched the rescue unfolding that morning, he would have understood that for the living, everything which could have been done had been done: not a single survivor was lost or injured being brought aboard the Carpathia. For those who had gone down with the Titanic, save for reverencing their memory at the service later that day, there was nothing more that he or anyone could do. Rostronâs duty now was as he always saw it: to the living.â
I looked up a bit about this because the post is so movingly written that when I read it aloud to my husband and mother they both wept like babies, and something else really struck me about this story.
So Carpathia was not a top-end luxury liner. Her reputation was for being Jolly Comfortable - she was very broad in her proportions, and not super-duper fast, and the result was that she didnât rock so much on the waves and you couldnât particularly hear/feel the engines. She was solid and dependable, and lots of people liked using her, but she therefore occupied a lesser niche than Titanic or Olympian or whatever - and crucially, as a result of that, she only had one radio operator on board. This means she only had radio ops for a certain window in the day, unlike Titanic, which had 24 hour radio ops.
So on that night, when Titanic went down, Carpathiaâs wireless operator - one Harold Cottam - clocked off his shift at midnight, and went to bed. While he was getting ready for bed, though, he left the transmitter on for the hell of it, and therefore picked up a transmission from Cape Race in Newfoundland, the closest transmitting tower sending messages to the ships. They told him that they had a backlog of private traffic for Titanic that wasnât getting through. So, even though his shift was over, and it was now 11 minutes past bloody midnight, and he just wanted to go to bed, Harold Cottam decided that nonetheless, heâd be helpful, and let the Titanic know they had messages waiting.
And thatâs how he received the Titanicâs distress signal. In spite of no longer being on shift to receive it, and therefore in order to send Carpathia galloping to Titanicâs rescue, and thus saving 705 people.
All because Harold Cottam decided one night to be kind.Â
Cottam also ended up staying awake for something like 48 hours straight trying to send survivors messages and a list of survivors home, but due to Carpathiaâs limited radio frequency range and with no other ships to act as a relay, this was rather patchy. However, he tried his damn best to make sure the survivorâs messages got home, and was also bombarded with incoming messages of bribes to spill the details of the disaster to the press.
Rostrum had ordered that no messages to the press be sent out of respect to the survivors, for they would have their privacy destroyed as soon as they reached New York. Cottam respected this order, even under extreme duress of fatigue, stress, and the knowledge that in some cases the bribes were almost three times his annual salary.
He eventually went to bed but not before working with one of the rescued Titanicâs radio operators, Harold Bride, to transmit as many messages as possible. Bride was injured (his feet had been crushed in a lifeboat) and had just passed the body of the second of Titanicâs radio operators aboard (Jack Phillips), so neither of them were really in the best shape to keep working, but they did.
In the face of extreme adversity, both men refused to do anything but their duty (and exceeding their duty) not just because Rostrum had ordered it, but because it was the right thing to do. They could have profited considerably from the disaster and they refused for the dignity of the survivors.
This is hopepunk. This is what we can be, what we are, when instinct takes over. This is what we are when we choose to care about each other. Weâre not profit machines or units of production or lone fierce wolves in a bitter wilderness. We are people, and we care about people.
I wrote a post a couple of years ago, wondering why there hadnât been a documentary or docu-drama about the âCarpathiaâ rescue run.
There are probably sound reasons why not, one of which is probably that getting yet another âTitanicâ project greenlit is far easier - name recognition, pre-sold property, multiple conspiracy theories to play with (all discredited, but when did that stop the âHistoryâ Channel?)
Here are a couple of stories about âCarpathiaâ:
As @mylordshesacactus has already said, her boilers and engines were rated for no more than 14 knots and, when she managed 17.5 for the only time in her life itâs said (I hate the phrase but I have to use it) that the Chief Engineer hung his hat over the main pressure gauge so no-one - including himself - could see how far its needle was into the red.
Captain Rostron, a religious man, was seen on several occasions standing privately on the exposed bridge wing with his own hat raised and his mouth moving in silent prayer, and when daylight revealed the extent of the ice-field his ship had passed without harm, he only said âThere must have been another Hand on the wheel than mineâŠâ
Thereâs another problem-of-sorts about a screenplay set aboard âCarpathiaâ - an astonishing lack of that easy dramatic tool, conflict. Captain Rostron decided he was going to the âTitanicâs assistance, and that was that. AFAIK not a single passenger or crewman - not one - questioned the wisdom of his decision either then or afterwards, even whenâŠ
âŠâCarpathiaâ headed at more than full speed, in the dark, through dangerous waters where an iceberg had apparently just sunk an âunsinkableâ ship.
Itâs easier to write - and sell - a story about pride, arrogance, stupidity, rich against poor and lives lost through hubris, than it is to write one about people who rallied round and did the right thing at the right time, not for reward but because it was the right thing to do.
Hereâs Rostron and his officersâŠ
âŠthe âCarpathiaâ stewards and cabin crewâŠ.
This post is so important to me, I wonât lie, and I couldnât help but record it aloud to the best of my ability. I didnât state every reblog, apologies, just the ones discussing the story of RMS Carpathia.
if youâre ever about to comment on a writerâs work and think, oh, they probably know how good they are, youâre definitely wrong. every time a writer posts or publishes anything, no matter how many years theyâve been doing it and no matter how many readers they have, they are struck with the idea that perhaps they arenât very good at all.
if you think youâre annoying for commenting, or that we wonât see your comments anyway, youâre wrong. we see your comments. we actively look for them. we are starved for them no matter how many we get. we remember them and they fuel us. leave comments, even if itâs just saying âoh i like thisâ. i see an âoh i like thisâ and my heart grows three times its size and i am seized with an urge to provide you more writing just to hear you say âoh i like thisâ again.
there's no way Viktor league of leggings can have no emotions when he literally has a robot cat and gives sad children choccy milk and has a stable homoerotic rivalry with a himbo
I keep hate-reading plague literature from the medieval era, but as depressed as it makes me there is always one historical tidbit that makes me feel a little bittersweet and I like to revisit it. Thatâs the story of the village of Eyam.
Eyam today is a teeny tiny town of less than a thousand people. It has barely grown since 1665 when its population was around 800.
Where the story starts with Eyam is that in August 1665 the village tailor and his assistant discovered that a bolt of cloth that they had bought from London was infested with rat fleas. A few days later on September 7th the tailorâs assistant George Viccars died from plague.
Back then people didnât fully understand how disease spread, but they knew in a basic sense that it did spread and that the spread had something to do with the movement of people.
So two religios leaders in the town, Thomas Stanley and William Mompesson, got together and came up with a plan. They would put the entire village of Eyam under quarantine. And they did. For over a year nobody went in and nobody went out.
They put up signs on the edge of town as warning and left money in vinegar filled basins that people from out of town would leave food and supplies by.
Over the 14 months that Eyam was in quarantine 260 out of the 800 residents died of plague. The death toll was high, the cost was great.
However, they did successfully prevent the disease from spreading to the nearby town of Sheffield, even then a much bigger town, and likely saved the lives of thousands of people in the north of England through their sacrifice.
So I really like this story, because itâs a sad story, because itâs also a beautiful story. Instead of fleeing everyone in this one place agreed that they would stay, and they saved thousands of people. They stayed just to save others and I guess itâs one of those good stories about how people have always been people, for better or worse.
Hereâs the thing. One third of the residents of Eyam died during their quarantine, but the Black Plague was known to have a NINETY PERCENT death rate. As high as the toll was, it wasnât as high as it should have been. And a few hundred years later, some historians and doctors got to wondering why.
Fortunately, Eyam is one of those wonderful places that really hasnât changed much in hundreds of years. Researchers, going to visit, found that many of the current residents were direct descendants of the plague survivors from the 1600s. By doing genetic testing, they learned that a high number of Eyam residents carried a gene that made them immune to the plague. And still do.
And it gets even better than that, because the gene that blocks the Black Plague? Also turns out to block AIDS, and was instrumental in helping to find effective medication for people who have HIV and AIDS in the 21st century.
Here is a lovely, well-produced documentary about Eyam and its disease resistance. Itâs a little under an hour. Trigger warning for general disease and epidemic-type stuff, but also, maybe it will help you have some hope in these alarmly uncertain times.
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