Euripides’ Bacchae, 405 BC (colorized)
Oo, I get to talk about an absolute CLASSIC marine ecology story!
This is not a story about AI being trained to pick plastic out of the ocean, but picking out something else that's harmful to the ocean: The Crown of Thorns Starfish. (Also yes, that name DOES go incredibly hard.)
The COTS is a species of venomous starfish found on the barrier reef, and they feed on corals. They aren't invasive, but they don't have many natural predators either, so large outbreaks in their population can descercate huge portions of the reef at a time. That's where this guy comes in:
This is Rangerbot. It's a "cots bot" equipped with trained AI to recognize inditidual COTS. It then injects the COTS with bile, which is toxic to the COTS but harmless for the environment. This was effectively used to keep the COTS population in check, so the coral of the barrier reef had time to grow.
There's an episode of Bizarre Beasts about the COTS (hosted by Hank Green himself) which I think is pretty cool and explains the whole situation in a fun way.
So, yeah! If an AI can be trained to recognize a species of starfish with %99 accuracy and effectively get rid of them, I think it is PERFECTLY reasonable to train AI to recognize trash in the oceans, at least in areas close to the shore, and have them clean it up.
can someone tell me what's up with my minecraft? is this a new update or something?
Wow, your house sure is weird...
Anonymous asked:
you ever been milked big time?
I was the only almond at Silk for 5 years
i think if we’re going to have conversations about consent we should talk about how consenting to something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be a good experience, and having a bad experience doesn’t necessarily mean someone violated your consent. this can apply to a lot of situations but the two i’m thinking of right now are sex and transition.
you’re getting it on with someone. you enthusiastically consent to having sex with them. afterward, you feel a little weird about it. maybe even distressed. maybe they did something you didn’t enjoy and in the moment you just didn’t say anything. maybe you just realized after the fact that you were not in a good headspace for sex and now your mental health is declining. that doesn’t inherently mean the person you had sex with violated your consent. sometimes it just means you need to take a break from sex or work on communicating your needs or boundaries better during sex.
and with transition, i feel like this is something that gets consistently overlooked but like. there will never be zero detransitioners. there will always be people who decide that actually transition wasn’t right for them. they could have had the best most thorough doctors in the world who did everything by the book and got full informed consent at every step. and some people are still going to decide they don’t like the changes and wish they hadn’t transitioned. that doesn’t mean that the doctors violated their consent, and that doesn’t mean that transition shouldn’t be available to anyone. it just means that we need to have more resources available for folks who detransition.
regret does not automatically mean someone did something wrong. regret is simply one possible result of having bodily autonomy, and i think we need to get more comfortable with that.
yeah!! and it kind of makes me wonder if this surge of people using “therapy speak” that ends up being inappropriate for the situation (i.e. saying a roommate is “violating their boundaries” when what’s really happening is that they’re just annoyed or upset by something their roommate did) is because we have this new breadth of words to talk about nonconsensual experiences where someone is causing harm but very very little language to talk about traumatic experiences where no one is at fault. makes me think if we broadened our language around this if there would be less people feeling like they have to find someone to blame for situations where they experienced discomfort, because in the past it feels like the only two options have been “person hurt you and they are wrong” or “no one hurt you and you’re wrong to feel bad.” a third category of “no one hurt you but you still feel bad and that’s ok, let’s find out why.”
you know the big problem with detective fiction nowadays is that all the detectives are fucking cops
like acab obviously but apart from that they're simply boring as hell. fuck off with your crime solving you're literally just doing your stupid job. the only people who should be solving fictional crimes are civilian vigilantes. little old ladies, short dithery priests, upper class twits with ptsd from world war one, well-heeled young ladies accidentally named after famous courtesans, etc.
neurodivergent private investigators can stay but you're on thin fucking ice
It’s because detective fiction is no longer detective fiction, it’s copaganda. Like the artistic merits of the crime fiction/mystery/hard boiled genre have mostly been cast aside in favor of plots and characters designed to exaggerate and romanticize the importance of the police force to the smooth functioning of society
Thanks for the upper class twits representation OP , I owe you
A lot of classic Detective Fiction involves cops refusing to properly investigate and the private detective freeing the innocent.
From the US but i spell grey with an e because e just feels like a much greyer letter than a
grey with an E is dusty neutral but gray with an A is bluish and darker
it really is, huh
Omg I’ve found my people
It's because GRAY is a West Saxon word for the quality of light, while GREY is an Anglian word for everyday objects. And everyday objects are typically earthy, warmer, or more neutral.
To explain: West Saxon and Anglian are both dialects of Old English. West Saxon was the politically dominant dialect, but Anglian was the more popular spoken dialect. So a lot of Old English texts are written in West Saxon, but what we know as Middle English and Modern English descended more from Anglian because it was spoken by more people.
So grey (the Anglian word) shows up when authors are describing everyday stuff. Like in this sentence describing a grey beard from Holy Boke Gratia Dei: "The hed of Petir is a brood face with mech her on his berd and that is of grey colour be twix whit and blak."
Any Middle English text you read, you'll find Anglian grey is the word the author prefers to describe everyday things. Grey wool, grey feathers, grey stones, grey horses.
By contrast, gray (the West Saxon word) shows up when authors are describing the qualities of light.
A gleaming gray sword, a deep gray lake, a misty gray morning, cold gray marble, sad gray eyes. Like in this sentence from The Siege of Jerusalem: "They glowes of graie steel that were with gold hemmyd." More often than not, gray describes an impermanent or glimmering quality of light.
There's even an instance where a Middle English author uses both, and you can see how one spelling is more about the quality of light while the other is more about the color of the animal: "The cerkyl or the roundel off the eye ys sumtyme graye lyke the ey off a catte, sumtyme blak grey lyke the eyn off doggys."
("The circle or round of the eye is sometimes gray like the eye of a cat, sometimes black-grey like the eyes of dogs.")
The reason Americans use gray and not grey is because Noah Webster hated the English. :)
Some good news! The AMA is getting on the right side of some important stuff this week:
I’m the first to bring out snide, “gender affirming care is GOOD?!?????” And “the BMI is racist, fatphobic junk science?!???? CALL THE PRESSES!!!!” comments but I’m taking a sec to acknowledge this is actually really, really good.
The AMA is the largest professional association of medical physicians and carries enormous sway and power. We need them to move the needle on this shit, even if it is frustrating they feel years behind.
I hate that planned obsolescence is starting to reach fandoms. I hate that fandoms are starting to die after two, three years, I hate that whenever you stop getting content that means the fandom will die and be gone.
I need people to stop trying to brush off old interests as being 'cringe' as soon as you lose interest, or worse: make it seem like it's imoral to like something that they themselves held so dear before.
Fandoms are meant to last for years and years, the moment content stops being created is the moment we truly thrive because we keep creating the content ourselves the way we love it and expand on the things that are already there for us.
I don't care if you lost interest on something, it's fine and normal even, but stop trying to blame and make fun of people who still do love the fandom and the content and the things we can create.
I need people to enjoy fandom again
Me and the 20+ year old princess tutu fandom continuing to hold fandom exchanges, rewatch, make merch and support each other, write fanfic and make art, and we will continue to:
Enjoy your fandom.
i've been reading a bunch of stuff online about public opinions in the USA about climate change, and. We need to talk about this.
Widespread climate change denial in the USA is a myth.
A majority in every single state believes that climate change is real and supports taking action to stop it
I encourage y'all to play around with these maps because they have some super important insights in them
Social scientists have been sounding the alarm on this because even though most surveys and studies show that at least 70% or so of Americans across all states believe in climate change, Americans estimate that only a minority of other Americans believe this
This is BAD
Because the erroneous belief that climate change is controversial stops people from talking about it and emphasizing it in political and social movements, and fuels a sense of hopelessness that stops people from acting
IT'S NOT CONTROVERSIAL! AT ALL!
Talk to your family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers about Native Trees, Ecosystem Restoration, Community Gardens, Farmer's Markets, and Building Local Community Resilience
Talk to the people you encounter every day about the reality that we are part of an ecosystem and the responsibility of learning about and caring for each other and the life forms around us
'horseplay' and 'monkey business' being treated as synonyms means something. don't know what though
Monkeys are so silly that what they consider business, horses consider play.
anyway i can think of an instance where bruce distanced himself from a kid who probably needed an explicit parental figure in their lives, and was weirdly ghoulish to them and imposed unfair pressure and avoided building a relationship outside of their vigilante roles even though at other times he clearly had protective dad feelings, because he’s a little bitch or something. what i’m saying is, read batgirl (2000)
okay i’m gonna pitch this one actually
what cass really needed, in her solo series, was a parental/mentor figure who was a counterpoint to babs, who is awesome but who fundamentally had a “normal” childhood, and who is not always good at putting herself in the shoes of someone with wildly different experiences. someone who gets, on an instinctual level, not feeling like normal people your age, and not wanting the same things they do, and wanting things they don’t, things that they think are weird and obsessive and unhealthy. who understands cass’ need for a deep driving purpose, and discomfort with things like social situations and reading, and can encourage her to find things in civilian life she might enjoy without making her feel judged for not being able to do it ‘right.’
that’s a role bruce is well positioned to fill. it’s a role he has filled, for dick; arguably for jason; on occasion for tim. empathy with these deeply independent kids, who feel riven by trauma and alienated from the rest of the world, and the necessary outlet of robin.
bruce is probably meant to be filling that role for cass, too, but … imo there’s a near-total lack of warmth in his interactions with her that overshadows any benefit he might be providing. when he talks to her he is sharp and clipped and often judgmental. he’s uncomfortable expressing emotion or vulnerability. he doesn’t seem to see any problem with cass living in a mini-batcave 24/7 and only doing batgirl things and replaying simulation fights with shiva in preparation for her own death–until he’s convinced to by babs, whereupon he expresses his concern (and guilt) by … telling cass she’s unreliable and reckless and taking batgirl away and abandoning her to an apartment in bludhaven. (the nicest possible reading is that he doesn’t see anything wrong with this because it’s what he wants to be doing all the time, but like–compare the often-expressed notion that bruce took dick in, and made him robin, so that he wouldn’t have to become like bruce.) he doesn’t communicate with her. he puts his emotional hangups before her needs … pretty much all the time.
like if i had to pick a kid who missed out on the fun and good batdad parts of bruce because he locked those down in response to past trauma, who he hurt by keeping at a distance even though she obviously needed someone … it’s cass, 100%. give me the fic that tackles that. the one where bruce comes back to gotham and is making an attempt to be a dad to damian, and cass sees how they are together and starts to realize what she missed out on. the idle comments from dick or tim about post-patrol rituals that she never experienced. let cass be upset that the other kids got to experience warmth and affection and humor and she didn’t!!! and let bruce acknowledge that cass is important and he was wrong to treat her the way he did, and she deserves to have all those things even if it means they have to make up for lost time.
Ummm!!! Is anyone else getting comments like these? I wouldn't have noticed anything off about the comments themselves, but check out those usernames. And then in that context, those comments are very generic.
What's happening? What's even the point of spam like this? Is it worth reporting or would it just create unnecessary work for volunteers?
( @naryrising tagging for likelihood of you being more in the loop)
Yes, it's just spam. What's the point: spammers presumably trying to build up some 'realistic' comment history so they don't immediately get detected as spam, before they start spamming for real. You can simply mark them as spam, that doesn't cause any work for us at all because it's an automated system, and marking them helps better train that system to recognize this type of spam.
I really hated this girl in my class and we kept exchanging notes with various threats of violence on them but then on a Zoom call I saw that she kept a bunch of them pinned on her wall with little hearts around them and I got the biggest crush on her after that.
star trek deep throat nine
badpatient
Not what it’s called
oh yeah? then explain this
Was going to respond to this with a different gif, but then I scrolled past this one and…
It sucks that people are treating the Reddit blackout as a joke or assuming it's impotent rage over a minor decision bc it's Reddit when like. No, a tech company shutting down access to their API by forcing third-party devs to pay completely unreasonable fees ($12,000 per 50 million API requests, which to the largest third party clients would be tens of millions of dollars) and in the process destroying both accessibility apps and moderation tools is Bad Actually
Also, this is the death of forums part 2. Forums died in web 1 because it was more convenient to gather on larger social media platforms, like reddit. Reddit is used by a lot of people to find answers to obscure questions that are written by humans and not advertizers or bot. Now reddit is imploding, and a lot of the useful communities (like the 3d printing one) are moving to discord, which makes it impossible for non members to find the answers they need.
We need to bring forums back in a better way, where they are convenient to use and affordable to host, or we will lose the ability to find humans on the internet with answers
