Gritty’s gotten real weird, and I kind of love it.
While every force available in the world is searching for the 5 people in the oceangate submersible, a boat filled with mostly Syrian and Pakistani refugees sank under still “unknown” circumstances off the coast of Peloponnisos, Greece (with the coast guard present). More than 600 people drowned but guess which of the two is making headlines
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Hello Neil, have you seen the news about an amateur submarine that sank in the Atlantic Ocean and now there are people there without much hope of salvation. Do you think they will be saved? I feel sorry for these people, I hope everything will be fine
I have indeed seen that news. Did you know that last week a ship with about 750 migrants on it sank off the coast of Greece? 82 bodies were recovered, about a hundred people were saved, another 500 people are unaccounted for and probably drowned. The vessel may have capsized due to the Greek Coast Guard trying to tow it. Most of the people on the ship were from Pakistan, trying to get to Italy.
With the Titanic tourist submarine gone missing I would once again like to say that every single person on that ship that night got their family torn apart in some way. Survivors had to sit in lifeboats and listen to their love ones die in the water. Many survivors went on to have severe mental health issues and committed suicide. After the incident the White Star Line sent out bills to living relatives of their deceased employees making them pay for the uniforms that their loved ones had died in. The people in Halifax who had to recover the deceased bodies were traumatized for life while also paying for funeral services for unclaimed bodies with money out of their own pockets.
I 100 percent believe that it’s important to study the ship as it continues to deteriorate but in no way should it be used as a fucking tourist attraction and the fact that it’s gotten to this point is straight up disgusting. If one things goes wrong down there that it’s your dead. Simple as that.
Robert Ballard who discovered the ship has even said that he has regrets about discovering the ship because of the damage that submarines have caused to it.
Skip Google for Research
As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
⁂
Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
I recently discovered laundry stripping and y’all, no matter how much of a crock of shit you think fast fashion is, you’re underestimating.
[image ID: a screenshot of the notes on this post, featuring several people indicating they want to know more. End ID.]
OKAY SO. You know how we talk about how one way fast fashion has made itself “necessary” is that the clothing looks like shit and feels horrible after just a few washes?
Let. Me. Tell. You. Something.
Laundry stripping is a process where you load your laundry into a tub or bin (I’ve been using my bathtub) with warm water, half a cup of borax, half a cup of washing soda, and half a cup of laundry soap (not detergent, SOAP, there’s a chemical difference). Leave it there for at least eight hours. I’ve been going for 12-24.
What you will come back to is a tub full of nearly-opaque black-gray-brown water that absolutely REEKS. This is normal. You are looking at (and smelling) hard water buildup, body sweat and oils that were embedded in the fabric, dead skin, and just regular grime.
Wring out your clothes. Throw them in the washer. (I like to do a spin-only cycle before going any further, because I have one of those washers that determines by weight how much water any given load needs.) Wash as usual.
You will notice I didn’t suggest any further pretreatment, and that’s because 1) you don’t want to layer too many chemicals on top of each other but also 2) you may not even need it.
When your clothes come out, check each one as it goes into the dryer, and if anything else s still stained, set it aside to run again with a regular pretreatment. One of the sweaters I did this with apparently did need a second treatment…to deal with what appears to have possibly been a hot chocolate stain that was previously invisible due to “well, it’s old” dinginess. I was planning to throw this sweater out. It looks almost new now. I need to wash it one more time for the probably-a-hot-chocolate stain, and then it needs to have the hem weighted to block it and bring it back to evenness, but dude. I wear my clothes to rags and I thought this thing was unfixable. “I need to reshape it” is nothing.
Remove clothes from dryer when done. Fucking MARVEL at the colors and how good the fabric feels. Give them a smell. Get righteously and royally angry that you can rejuvenate this stuff so easily, with a process that does take awhile but is 90% hands-off, but we’ve been trained to believe it’s all got to be binned once a year because discoloration and gross fabric is “normal wear and tear” and can’t be fixed.
It’s utterly unreal! I just pulled a seven-year-old work undershirt out of the dryer and this thing looks NEW!! It FEELS almost new!!! One of the shirts I hung up from the last load is older than some of the people on this site and it went from “I keep this to wear on laundry day, for sentimental reasons” to “I could actually wear this out of the house, it looks old but respectable”! The pajama bottoms I’m wearing were from Goodwill and they have BRIGHT YELLOW in them! I thought it was goldenrod!!
I do not know how often you’re supposed to do this (doing it every time can strip the dye out of your clothes, not to mention it’s way too much work to do every time), but once or twice per season seems respectable. I don’t wear white, so I can’t test the “it will make whites look almost-new as well” claim, but I’ve seen a lot of people on the cleaning subreddit attest that it works.
Just remember: WASHING soda. Not baking soda. I tried baking soda and a little bit happened, but not a lot.
Go forth. Rejuvenate your clothing. Strip your laundry.
I’ve decided that all bats fall somewhere on this horrid little graph I’ve devised. Here are some prime examples of the various Creature Varieties found in nature.
Hi OP no notes I just wanted to add some more guys because I have disorders
You’re so correct about all of these and it is our human right to be incredibly disordered about bats online. Thank you. Let’s go take ibuprofen together.
ever have the nagging feeling that everyone has been getting dumber recently
After casting an open invite for people between the ages of 18 and 60 who previously had a mild case of COVID-19, Romano-Silva and colleagues in the preliminary study tested a group of 130 volunteers comprised mostly of women with a mean age of 38 years about four to six months post-infection with mild COVID-19. “We found mild COVID was associated with the development of important persistent cognitive deficits even in younger adults,” Romano-Silva says.
Researchers found 1 in 4 showed significant cognitive impairment in visuoconstruction skills — the visual ability to spatially reproduce designs or patterns — matching the increased levels of inflammation they were seeing on blood panels as well as in neuroimaging.
[...]
The researchers ruled out vision problems with neurological and ophthalmological exams. In addition, they conducted a battery of tests: psychiatric and cognitive assessments, and MRI and PET/CT neuroimaging. When they compared results of these tests with the drawings, they say the alterations were consistent. Those who were drawing the bad copy showed increased volume of white matter on their brain MRIs, likely due to swelling from inflammation, while their PET images showed decreased brain glucose uptake, which researchers surmised was possibly due to cells being less active and thus consuming less glucose.
Romano-Silva adds it’s “really worrying” because the group’s mean age was 38 and mostly highly educated professionals such as physicians and nurses, as recruitment took place during the initial stage of the pandemic. Interestingly, he notes participants did better on the memory and recall portion of the test, drawing the complex figure from memory better after five minutes and again after 30 minutes. “This shows it’s specialized to visuospatial organization,” Romano-Silva says. “A person looks at it and cannot organize visuospatially what they are seeing. But by memory, they are able to recruit other areas of the brain so they can make the drawing much better.”
I want to add the images from this study because they are chillingly illustrative of what is going on here:
The pen drawings were done while the participants were looking at the image! They did a better job five minutes later, and had even closer results after 30 minutes which suggests that it's pretty pure visuospatial impairment and calling on other parts of the brain to help reconstruct the image works over time.
Unfortunately, a lot of people who have been impaired in this way are still driving, which very much relies on quick reaction times and good visuospatial skills. I'd be really interested to see collision statistics for the past couple years compared to pre-covid levels.
requested by anonymous:
RATING: RELIABLE
For clarity, I would note (although I'm sure it wasn't intended literally) that 'getting dumber' isn't an accurate way to describe this phenomenon. The participants have a very specific impairment, which doesn't necessarily impact their general intelligence. Of the 13 neuropsychological tests given, only the ROCFT copy test showed a significant difference between the test subject and control group.
Source: 'We did not find significant differences in most of the neuropsychological tests, with frequencies of impairment around 8% (the expected for the criterion −1.5 standard-deviations below normative data). However, we found an atypically high rate of impairment in the copy ROCFT (26%). Matched controls showed about 6% of impairment in the same task.'
The text in the reblog from OP is all taken directly from the news article, which accurately explains the study.
Driving does use visuospatial skills.
Source: 'Visuospatial ability is key to several daily living activities, such as driving, planning, drawing, to locate oneself in a place, and several occupations rely on good visuospatial perception, such as artists, surgeons, designers, pilots, among others.'
Housekeepers and Janitors Need Praise As Unsung but Very Much Important
Remember when the NRA told doctors to “stay in their lane” RE gun violence and #thisismylane trended as a result?
One of the tweets I saw was a surgeon who’d taken a picture of her OR, having just finished surgery on a young man who’d been shot. Blood. Everywhere.
This bloke retweeted her, mentioning that he worked as a cleaner in a hospital and had had to clean up stuff like this and worse.
Surgeon replied to him (and went up *greatly* in my estimation) and, despite living in different countries, thanked him for his hard work.
I can’t find the tweets sadly, but hers went something like;
“Without a clean and sterile operating room to work in, my team, our skills and the best medicines in the world are next to useless. You are doing invaluable work, without which my work would be impossible.”
WITHOUT PEOPLE DOING THE CLEANING, SOCIETY WOULD GRIND TO A HALT WITHIN DAYS
Every garbage workers’ strike shows it.
Give them the respect they damn well deserve.
Changeover🔊
First, you think the bird is a fool.
They you realize the bird is smarter than you and actually checked first.
notajerusalemcricket
Source: Mehdi Alibeygi
huh, the full video is almost two minutes long, and what got cut was entirely title and credits:
Reblog for the full length one… because you know heaven forbid people credit artists for their hard work that made us laugh or smile.
And corporate media has been a willing accomplice to this false equivalence, by misusing and completely bastardizing the meaning of the word “moderate”
Joe Manchin and Mitch McConnell, for example, could write a bill saying that everyone making less than $20k annually should be forced to work in coal mines and have their right to vote removed, but as long as Manchin and McConnell didn’t use curse words or raise their voices, our lapdog media would still insist on calling them “moderates”
Every time a Republican smiles into the camera and pleasantly suggests a truly heinous policy that will kill poor people, and then some media pundit calls them a “moderate” politician, I want to throw my television directly into the sun
Please pay attention to who the media calls “moderate” and who they label extreme
The framing matters. Words matter. Words mean things. Our media has been dutifully shifting the meaning of the word “moderate” further and further to the right, providing cover for obvious political extremists. It’s not by mistake
Whether you call it climate change or pollution, it’s still a series of policy decisions (deregulation). Deregulation that is disproportionately upheld by greedy corporations, red state Democrats, and is enforced overwhelmingly by Republican and Libertarian controlled legislatures.
(sources and other relevant links beneath the cut)
US Folks: Call your rep today!
Right now, Thursday June 8th, Washington DC is under an air quality emergency due to wildfire hundreds of miles away. I just got hit with the same disaster, so I can tell you: Unbearable stink, burning eyes and throat, apocalyptic orange skies, pollution numbers three times the immediate danger level.
This is horrible, but it creates an interesting political opportunity. Take a page out of our enemies’ playbook and never let a crisis go to waste!
The House and Senate are in session, so they and their staff are in town. They are enduring the pain of climate change firsthand, perhaps for the first time in their lives.
Call them today, and say something like, “Look out the window! Look at what climate change is doing! What are we going to do about reducing carbon emissions and mitigating the effects of climate change?”
Leave your name and town, if you are comfortable doing so, to prove that you are a constituent.
Senators’ numbers: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm
House of Representatives’ numbers: https://www.house.gov/representatives