planets are suboptimal

things i never expected to learn through a tedtalk but now am glad to know:

the founder of Sirius XM radio is a sapphic trans woman and is currently trying to preserve her wife’s consciousness in a digital file so her wife can be immortal in the body of a robot.

heres the tedtalk if you dont believe because everyone deserves to know this reality of the amazing world in which we live 

Holy shit you neglected to mention that when her daughter got a terminal disease with no cure or treatment possible she literally went to the library got some medical textbooks and taught herself enough biochemistry to actually begin developing a drug that halted the disease good god why have we never heard of this absolute genius

YOU KNOW WHY  YOU K N O W   W  H Y

Real life tony stark is a gay trans woman

Her name is Martine Rothblatt. She also founded United Therapeutics, which is a company that works to find cures for “””small””” diseases that don’t necessarily affect a lot of people. 

oh, yes–and she’s Jewish.

Here is a picture of Martine and her wife, Bina Aspen:

Looking forward to this person becoming the next Elizabeth Holmes in about 5 years.

That seems kind of unfair? United Therapeutics existed before Theranos, outlasted it, and has already developed actual FDA approved drugs that have been on the market for over two decades.

And she was already a billionaire when this all started after she was a founder of the successful Sirius satellite radio:

Mold: earth

Odor: air

Trauma: quintessence (heart)

Checks out to me

Saw a post by an Indian describing her nation's other recent space advances besides the Chandrayaan moon landing. Mostly good shit, but she did include the ASAT test. Noticed in the notes some commenters pushing back, saying that actually ASAT testing is bad. OP's reaction is that all the catalogued debris is already down because the test was done in low orbit, "our scientists know what they're doing," therefore the test is good. This is missing the point.

Imagine a post saying "my country exploded its first nuclear weapon recently!! 💥 💥" that goes on to say that this is fine because the test was conducted underground, so no fallout escaped into the atmosphere. This is missing the point in the same way! Direct effects from the weapons test may be bad, but weapons proliferation is much worse!

Space assets are important for fighting modern wars: Ukraine/Russia has taught us that much. The lowest-tech way to neutralize an opponent's space superiority is with direct-ascent weapons. Russia's not trying to degrade Ukrainian space assets with their ASATs because all Ukraine's space assets are owned and operated by the US. Russia is kind of pissed off by this, and there's no guarantee this restraint will still apply in the next space war.

When you use these weapons in real life, you can't contain the debris like you can in a test. The first time these things get used in anger, we're going to have a serious space debris problem on our hands, and there will be a lot of splash damage to uninvolved nations. Even worse: the weapons are new, so their proper place in escalation isn't established, and they don't kill anyone directly, so you don't need to be a mass-murdering psychopath to order a first strike. A world where every country that can field a satellite has military observation capabilities and antisatellite weapons is a world where we get Kesslered by every stupid little brushfire war like Armenia/Azerbaijan. Maybe in fifty years we'll have a robust nonproliferation treaty and a well-fleshed-out concept of MAD in space, but we ain't there yet.

I assume there would have been such posts if India had had Twitter in 1974. Or Pakistan in 1998. Or North Korea in 2006.

My wife adds the context that India has had the technical capacity for antisatellite weapons for at least a decade, but they'd been holding off on testing due to fear of diplomatic reprisal. But then they looked at the abysmal state of international norms around antisatellite weapons testing and norm enforcement and decided, hey, what the hell, why not?

Anyway, we need that global antisatellite test ban yesterday.

Fortunately, unlike with nukes, there are higher-tech antisatellite technologies that accomplish the military aim of degrading adversary space assets without nearly as much risk of Kessler syndrome, as the Steve Carell documentary Space Force (2020) aptly portrayed in its first episode (this "snib snab" weapon is deployed by China against US assets as the first strike in a space cold war).

I'd consider it a significant win if the world were divided such that a small handful of nations had non-kinetic antisatellite weapons, and every other nation were prevented from developing ASAT missiles by a combination of treaties and norms.

Saw a post by an Indian describing her nation's other recent space advances besides the Chandrayaan moon landing. Mostly good shit, but she did include the ASAT test. Noticed in the notes some commenters pushing back, saying that actually ASAT testing is bad. OP's reaction is that all the catalogued debris is already down because the test was done in low orbit, "our scientists know what they're doing," therefore the test is good. This is missing the point.

Imagine a post saying "my country exploded its first nuclear weapon recently!! 💥 💥" that goes on to say that this is fine because the test was conducted underground, so no fallout escaped into the atmosphere. This is missing the point in the same way! Direct effects from the weapons test may be bad, but weapons proliferation is much worse!

Space assets are important for fighting modern wars: Ukraine/Russia has taught us that much. The lowest-tech way to neutralize an opponent's space superiority is with direct-ascent weapons. Russia's not trying to degrade Ukrainian space assets with their ASATs because all Ukraine's space assets are owned and operated by the US. Russia is kind of pissed off by this, and there's no guarantee this restraint will still apply in the next space war.

When you use these weapons in real life, you can't contain the debris like you can in a test. The first time these things get used in anger, we're going to have a serious space debris problem on our hands, and there will be a lot of splash damage to uninvolved nations. Even worse: the weapons are new, so their proper place in escalation isn't established, and they don't kill anyone directly, so you don't need to be a mass-murdering psychopath to order a first strike. A world where every country that can field a satellite has military observation capabilities and antisatellite weapons is a world where we get Kesslered by every stupid little brushfire war like Armenia/Azerbaijan. Maybe in fifty years we'll have a robust nonproliferation treaty and a well-fleshed-out concept of MAD in space, but we ain't there yet.

I assume there would have been such posts if India had had Twitter in 1974. Or Pakistan in 1998. Or North Korea in 2006.

My wife adds the context that India has had the technical capacity for antisatellite weapons for at least a decade, but they'd been holding off on testing due to fear of diplomatic reprisal. But then they looked at the abysmal state of international norms around antisatellite weapons testing and norm enforcement and decided, hey, what the hell, why not?

Anyway, we need that global antisatellite test ban yesterday.

I remember once I referred to Nick Cave as a weeaboo for the US South, to which someone said made him a "yeehawboo."

It's annoying that these are the most commonly used images of Venus because neither one is remotely what the planet actually looks like to the human eye. The one on the left is a radar image of the terrain below the cloud cover and the one on the right is an infrared view with greatly exaggerated colours. In actual reality the planet looks like an almost featureless white disk. The photo below was made by the MESSENGER probe on its way to Mercury and it's the most accurate to visible light close-up view of Venus we have.

It's crazy that applejack the horse is named after a type of alcohol (apple brandy)

It's also the kind that can make you go blind. Let me explain:

"Jacking" is a traditional form of distillation common in cold places. You take your beer or cider or whatever and put it outside overnight. The water freezes, and you can skim a more-alcoholic liquid off the top. The benefit of real distillation, though, is that you can sort of separate out the methanol (high poison/fun ratio) from the ethanol (low poison/fun ratio), since they have slightly different boiling points, whereas jacking just extracts the water and leaves everything else. It's the same absolute amount of methanol as was in the cider before you jacked it, but let's be honest. you weren't distilling cider to improve the taste, you were distilling it so you could drink more and quicker to get absolutely blasted, weren't you?

All this to say: be careful with home-jacked apples. No idea what the pony implications of this are.

how do i find lo-fi hip hop beats that are cursed. atonal lo-fi hip hop beats. lo-fi hip hop beats for when you are dissociating madly to avoid the Horrors. lo-fi hip hop beats concealing untold monstrosities

You may be looking for Bull of Heaven:

best ice cream in north american cities (according to me and @salt-and-bramble)

Montreal: Kem Coba

Boston: Toscanini's (but they don't always have halva which is their best flavor)

DC: Jubilee (Pitango when Jubilee is fucking around and finding out)

Bay Area: Salt and Straw or Almare (Salt and Straw also makes the worst ice cream in the bay area. or anywhere)

The best ice cream place overall is Jordan Pond ice cream in Bar Harbor, ME. It's not really even close.

Can't visit Toscanini's with a straight face because of their silly Backwards Hebrew sign that takes up the whole wall as you walk in

so close

we hunt the mighty pasta BEAST

and breadsticks are its BONES

ALFREDO FLOWS inside its veins

its organs are CALZONES

LASAGNA plates its armored hide

and should the hero dare

you'll find the noisome Jaws are strung

with garlic angel hair

The poem is written in common hymn meter (alternating lines of 8 and 6 syllables, usually iambs), so there are many possible tunes you can use to sing it:

Feel free to add any favorites!

Jabberwocky is 8.8.8.6, just like "We Three Kings!" Unfortunately We Three Kings is trochee-forward vs iambic Jabberwocky, so it sounds kinda weird. The search continues :/

sometimes you will see a number describing a temperature in fahrenheit or celsius, and then another number in the same scale describing a different temperature, and the second number might be, for instance, approximately twice the first number

and you might be tempted to say something to the effect of 'wow, it's twice as hot in [situation described by the second number] than it is in [situation described by the first number]!'

it is very important that you do not do this. because it will make me sad.

I will say “the delta from zero is twice as big,” annoying everybody.

I still think about this stupid fucking headline from five years ago

Please watch for EXCELLENT ONCE IN A LIFETIME Siberian hedgehog content

I love the alpha еж!!!!!

If you cross my palm with wild hedgehog videos I can provide photos of my wife's pet hedgehog

Somebody remind me to submit a panel talking about the prevalence of Sub Wukong in anime and games for Animethon next year

I can only assume you're referring to the Breedable Monkey King, which sounds like a fascinating take on the traditional character