ceci, she/her, 30s, white
This blog has become a very random collection of things that grab my interest with the occasional personal post.
Most of my fandom activity is over at my Star Trek sideblog @trillscienceofficer.
It’s been long enough since I worked at the hideously mismanaged nanotech startup that I’ve started romanticizing it. Like, yes the hydrogen explosion was scary and I’m entirely too familiar with the odor of decaborane, and yes the CEO and CTO got in a fistfight in the conference room, but nothing makes you feel alive like turning chunks of graphite on an ancient manual lathe with inadequate respiratory PPE.
Asbestosis-like lung damage via inhalation of loose airborn boron nitride nanotubes, nitrate-induced chronic migraines, and a crippling caffeine addiction build character.
Fondly remembering the day where we decided to try a nickel organometallic catalyst instead of our usual iron. The difference being that while nickel should be a better catalyst, if you get an iron carbonyl leak the room smells bad for a bit, whereas if you get a nickel carbonyl leak you’re dead before you hit the floor.
So much adrenaline! We went home wired and giddy, full to the brim with nightmares and scientific euphoria. Every day I dreaded waking up, and every day I held the raw stuff of miracles in my hands. Good times.
god lived in this box, I’m pretty sure
No. Even with such egregious safety shortcuts, they barely even scratched the surface of what was possible. Sure, they had drive and vision, but never enough for my taste. They weren’t mad. They were barely even eccentric.
And I was no mere hench! I know the process. Every single object you see in these pictures was designed and assembled by me, with my own mind and hands. And moreover, I know all the radical experiments that they were too timid to attempt. All I need is some space, a bit of cash, and a used furnace or two, and I will spin up an operation to put my erstwhile peers to shame.
For as much as they were willing to risk with our health, they were unwilling to risk the money. Honestly, I get it. People do stupid things when funding is on the line. Happens all the time. I can’t even be angry. I’m really not.
No, I’m not mad, I’m just… frustrated.
OP how does it feel to be a real life mad scientist
Ok so if you haven’t already heard of it, there’s an excellent podcast on engineering disasters (and sometimes engineering disgraces) called Well There’s Your Problem, and they have a segment at the end of every episode called Safety Third, which is listeners writing in about egregiously unsafe experiences they have had especially at their workplaces.
OP, I am BEGGING you to write in with this because I want so badly to hear their voices read your email with mounting horror as they get to the pictures of the box god probably lived in.
(Also if this is the first you’re hearing of the podcast, last week’s episode had the wonderful Maia Arson Crimew @nyancrimew to talk about cybersecurity among other things, which was excellent. On the whole, great podcast, would recommend.)
124 episodes of workplace drama?????? Holy crap, this’ll keep me occupied for a few weeks, thank you!
I am enjoying the fuck out of the notes here, most of which are variations on “I thought this was a bit and then OH MY GOD THERE WAS A PICTURE.” and look I’ve mostly worked in the corners of science that are founded in naturalistic variation with very little room for hubris and I still believed every word from OP there. I’ve seen with my own eyes a video of the time my friend genetically engineered a hamster for maximum rage, okay? I’ve seen the consequences of the horrors and the thwarted sulking of those whose hands have been slapped by IRBs or Environmental Health and Safety or IT. I have two different friends on IRBs and one of these days I’m gonna make friends with someone at EHS purely for the cocktail party stories. And that is in the relatively tame field of behavioral research, okay, I’m not fucking with the stuff of material reality here.
Also I’ve read the inimitable Derek Lowe’s Things I Won’t Work With and I have a healthy fear of applied chemists.
- Igntion! is fantastic. Every time I read it I skip to the chapter on exotic rocket fuels and laugh at the boron chemists.
- I read Hench cover-to-cover in a single night last year, and now it’s lodged permanently in my brain next to the Genius: The Transgression rules doc and a web serial called Fine Structure that I read in 2009.
Arrrgh I already complained about it but man. Fucking hate how weird people are when it comes to sexuality in art. "Ohhh this only exists because the writer was horny it can't possibly have anything deep to say" fucking imagine if we applied it to other emotions. Sorry Antigones can't possibly be about anything meaningful the writer was clearly just sad. Hamlet isn't a good or interesting play actually it was just Shakespeare being angry.
it's not that left-leaning Online folk have suddenly or even gradually regressed to an era of victorian sensibilities where they fully believe that bad things in fiction = bad things irl, i've rarely seen even the most uncultured of take-havers argue for monkey see monkey do (except that one blogger who thought anyone who enjoys horror is a damaged freak—special shoutout to you forever!); it's more that people have gotten hubristically confident in their ability to "clock" bad faith or dress a portrait of the author/creator/artist beneath their work when such assumptions can be false or even dangerous. yes, sometimes a person's work will put their biases and prejudice on display. sometimes people will be chronically unable to write women, to make characters of color sound human, etc, but somehow that (still fairly surface) level of engaging with a work has become the excuse we all use to tear down the veil between author and audience and drag people through extremely damaging interrogations of intent
even worse, everyone professing critical ability online has been able to find at least a niche clutch of others who got "bad vibes" from something and end up cruising through this vibes-based economy fueled by their echo chamber of angry fault-finders, resulting in critique that has no real literary or sociological value but sounds just well-dressed enough in critical language that it becomes someone else's metric for evaluation and even creation, which is how we get swathes of grown adults rallying against benign children's media or 200 "queer fiction" podcasts that all sound like they got mashed through a therapist's office to avoid precisely this type of senseless audience violence
without meaning to single out this tag poster (i don't think you're wrong, necessarily!), i did want to highlight a common frustration that i've seen stated a lot around here but that i believe bears repeating: it's not so much that i think people are unable to think critically or lack critical thinking skills (and the term itself has deteriorated into a sort of shorthand for "capability to reach the same conclusions as me"), because a lot of the time these people ARE thinking critically when they look at a piece of media and recognize what they believe to be signs of the author's biases or shortcomings. the problem is what they then decide to do about it
personally i'm not fully of the opinion that the internet itself has meaningfully changed our behavior as a species, because the concept of angry letters to the author (and worse) has been around for as long as there have been authors and letters to send them, but it can't be denied that the wombo combo of easier access to authors' mailboxes via social media and the constant push to self-market on the part of the creators has made for an unprecedented era of interactions and a great deal of it--dare i say most of it!--has Not been Good; and even apart from all value judgment this has certainly shifted the paradigm of The Audience as a concept. so, like, i would say the problem runs more deeply than people simply not having the requisite critical thinking skills but rather concerns more what an audience member decides to do with their agency, and that is definitely something that could be addressed in classes/opportunities to teach critical thinking
You might have thought card sharks and loan sharks were named after the predatory fish, but apparently there’s a decent chance it’s the other way around from an old Dutch word meaning “person that takes unfair advantage of other people”. Before that they were known in English as a haye or dogfish, which means sometime in the ~1400s enough English sailors started saying “don’t get in the water, it’s infested with those jerks”
would be interesting to see if I use "I find that..." more often now since "Ik vind dat..." is (afaik) the usual construction for expressing an opinion in Dutch
(well ok there's also "Volgens mij..." which funnily enough has a more direct translation in Italian than in English. I still remember classmates struggling to find a similar-sounding equivalent for "secondo me..." in English and failing. Would not have had the same problem if the target language had been Dutch!)
It's interesting to me how much people struggle to intuit differences of scale. Like, years of geology training thinking about very large subjects, and I'm only barely managing it around the edges.
The classic one is, of course, the mantle- everybody has this image of the mantle as a sort of molten magma lake that the Earth's crust is floating on. Which is a pedagogically useful thing! Because the intuitions about how liquids work- forming internal currents, hot sections rising, cool sections sinking, all that- are all dynamics native to the Earth's mantle. We mostly talk about the mantle in the context of those currents, and how they drive things like continental drift, and so we tend to have this metaphor in mind of the mantle as a big magma lake.
The catch, of course, is that the mantle is a solid, not magma. It's just that at very large scales, the distinction between solids and liquids is... squirrely.
When cornered on this, a geologist will tell you that the mantle is 'ductile'. But that's a lie of omission. Because it's not that the mantle is a metal like gold or iron, what we usually think of when we talk about ductility. You couldn't hammer mantle-matter in to horseshoes or nails on an anvil. It's just a rock, really. Peridotite. Chemically it's got a lot of metal atoms in it, which helps, but if you whack a chunk of it with a hammer you can expect about the same thing to happen as if you whacked a chunk of concrete. Really, it's just that any and every rock is made of tons and tons of microcrystal structures all bound together, and the boundaries between these microcrystals can shift under enormous pressure on very slow timescales; when the scope of your question gets big enough, those bonds become weak in a relative sense, and a rock starts to become more like a pile of gravel where the pebbles can shift and flow around one another.
The blunt fact is, on very large scales of space and of time, almost everything other than perfect crystals start to act kind of like a liquid- and a lot of those do as well. When I made a study of very old Martian craters, I got used to 'eyeballing' the age based on how much the crater had subsided, almost exactly like the ways that ripples in the surface of water gradually subside over time when you throw a rock in to a lake. Just, you know. Slower.
But at the same time, these things are more fragile than you'd believe, and can shatter like glass. The surface of the Earth is like this, too. Absent the kind of overpressures that make the mantle flow like it does, Earth's crust is still tremendously weak relative to many of the planet-scale forces to which it is subject- I was surprised, once, when a professor offhandedly described the crust as having a tensile strength of 'basically zero;' they really thought of the surface as a delicate filigreed bubble of glass that formed like a thin shell, almost too thin to mention, on the outside of a water droplet. On human scales, liquid is the thing that flows, and solid is the thing that breaks. But once stuff gets big or slow or both, the distinction between a solid and a liquid is more that a liquid is the thing that doesn't shatter when it flows. And it all gets really, really vague, which I suppose you'd expect when you get this far outside the contexts in which our languages were crafted.
oh no fuming again because I read a post that I thought was specious and condescending
The three of us have studied forest fungi for our whole careers, and even we were surprised by some of the more extraordinary claims surfacing in the media about the wood-wide web. Thinking we had missed something, we thoroughly reviewed 26 field studies, including several of our own, that looked at the role fungal networks play in resource transfer in forests. What we found shows how easily confirmation bias, unchecked claims, and credulous news reporting can, over time, distort research findings beyond recognition. It should serve as a cautionary tale for scientists and journalists alike.
First, let’s be clear: Fungi do grow inside and on tree roots, forming a symbiosis called a mycorrhiza, or fungus-root. Mycorrhizae are essential for the normal growth of trees. Among other things, the fungi can take up from the soil, and transfer to the tree, nutrients that roots could not otherwise access. In return, fungi receive from the roots sugars they need to grow.
As fungal filaments spread out through forest soil, they will often, at least temporarily, physically connect the roots of two neighboring trees. The resulting system of interconnected tree roots is called a common mycorrhizal network, or CMN.
When people speak of the wood-wide web, they are generally referring to CMNs. But there’s very little that scientists can say with certainty about how, and to what extent, trees interact via CMNs. Unfortunately, that hasn’t prevented the emergence of wildly speculative claims, often with little or no experimental evidence to back them up.
One common assertion is that seedlings benefit from being connected to mature trees via CMNs. However, across the 28 experiments that directly tackled that question, the answer varied depending on the trees’ species, and on when, where, and in what type of soil the seedling is planted. In other words, there is no consensus. Allowed to form CMNs with larger trees, some seedlings seem to perform better, others worse, and still others seem to behave no differently at all. Field experiments designed to allow roots of trees and seedlings to intermingle — as they would in natural forest conditions — cast still more doubt on the seedling hypothesis: In only 18 percent of those studies were the positive effects of CMNs strong enough to overcome the negative effects of root interactions. To say that seedlings generally grow or survive better when connected to CMNs is to make a generalization that simply isn’t supported by the published research.
Other widely reported claims — that trees use CMNs to signal danger, to recognize offspring, or to share nutrients with other trees — are based on similarly thin or misinterpreted evidence. How did such a weakly sourced narrative take such a strong grip on the public imagination?
Source: undark.org
The ancient world was full of textile masterpieces we can only imagine… but most of them have rotted away. So few of them have come down to us in these days that we think of metal and stone as the primary mediums for the oldest artworks. But there were tapestries and fabric work that would have rivaled the finest wrought gold and iron and the first cave paintings.
This is a incredibly rare find. A ball of yarn made from stinging nettle fibers in the Late Neolithic (5900 years old) in what’s now Marin-Epagnier in Switzerland. The thread has been preserved by being carbonized. Look at how much thread that is! And how fine and even it is spun! The skill going into this is absolutely incredible. Imagine the incredible textile work that must’ve been made with that. For a reference here’s a ball of nettle yarn I managed to make with a drop spindle. That took me 300 hours of work.
June 22 2019 - A fascist trying to pick a fight at Bologna Pride gets more reaction than he bargained for. [video]
Exit, pursued by bear.
The description of the original video:
Translation:
“A neo-fascist, in all his Italian virility, begins to insult some women participating in Bologna Pride. This until, frightened by other protesters covered with glitter and by a bear far more virile than he, to devote himself to what the Fascists do best: escape.”
EXIT, PURSUED BY A BEAR. I’M SOBBING
La fuga, pursued by bear in glitter 🤣🤣🤣
“to devote himself to what the Fascists do best: escape.” ROAST HIS ASS
the Strength, the Solidarity, and the Shade here is examplary
how do i explain to the internet that mixing baking soda with vinegar does jack shit for cleaning (except some bubbles). mixing baking soda with acidic agents is best for baking, for which those bubbles are very useful
