I really don't understand how people are throwing their spamton plushes and killing it like a fly with hammers. every time I get into bed I have to be like "wait fuck where's spamton I have to get him tucked in with me or else he'll be cold." I can't be mean to this thing it needs nutrients and enrichment and also to go to preschool tomorrow. How could I do that.
Please for the love of god, if you value whatever media or whatever you're creating a wiki for:
DO NOT USE FANDOM WIKIA
Not just because Fandom wiki is just straight up adware. But because they will happily take all your rights as a wiki owner away and give it to a corporation in the name of profits, like they did to the McDonald's wiki or y'know, completely destroy LGBTQ+ wikis on many identities (including removing nearly every aroacespec labels including demisexual, greyromantic, and many other labels, including many more I used!) all without the permission or consent of the admins of the wiki to "make LGBTQ+ identities easier to understand" and replaced the admins with their own chosen ones, of which iirc were very questionable in their behavior.
"What are alternatives then?"
Fandom Wikia runs off a FREE open-source software known as MediaWiki, it's the same thing Wikipedia, Bulbapedia, and many others use.
This means that you can host your own wiki, or use any other wiki farm such as Miraheze, which is what the wiki I help run uses.
The best part about WikiMedia is that something made on one wiki can be cross-compatible with another. We often use and base our templates off of other wikis, and it makes it somewhat easier to transfer from FANDOM if necessary.
Stop FANDOM's monopoly over wikis, they'll stab you in the back as soon as it's a choice between the user or profits.
THE WRITER AND ACTOR’S STRIKES HAVE SUCCESSFULLY PAUSED THE PRODUCTION OF 4 MARVEL MOVIES!!!! thank you striking creatives.
Why they're smearing Lina Khan
My god, they sure hate Lina Khan. This once-in-a-generation, groundbreaking, brilliant legal scholar and fighter for the public interest, the slayer of Reaganomics, has attracted more vitriol, mockery, and dismissal than any of her predecessors in living memory.
She sure must be doing something right, huh?
A quick refresher. In 2017, Khan — then a law student — published Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox in the Yale Law Journal. It was a brilliant, blistering analysis showing how the Reagan-era theory of antitrust (which celebrates monopolies as “efficient”) had failed on its own terms, using Amazon as Exhibit A of the ways in which post-Reagan antitrust had left Americans vulnerable to corporate abuse:
The paper sent seismic shocks through both legal and economic circles, and goosed the neo-Brandeisian movement (sneeringly dismissed as “hipster antitrust”). This movement is a rebuke to Reaganomics, with its celebration of monopolies, trickle-down, offshoring, corporate dark money, revolving-door regulatory capture, and companies that are simultaneously too big to fail and too big to jail.
EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (2022) Dir. Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert
I'm technically a prophet but the prophecies are presented to me in a language I can neither speak nor fundamentally fathom. so I just circle back to basically being normal
Most business leaders harbor a deeply-rooted belief: Offices as sanctuaries of corporate integrity, bustling with industrious individuals who diligently toe the line of right conduct under the leader’s watchful eye. Indeed, that’s a major reason why many business leaders want their employees in the office: they feel they can keep control, ensuring compliance with laws, rules, and policies. However, a recent peer-reviewed study in the European Financial Management journal comes to puncture this inflated balloon of conventional wisdom: Bankers working from home, while brewing their morning coffees in pajamas, have been setting a higher ethical standard than their well-heeled office counterparts.
That certainly puts a different twist on the demands by JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs that their bankers work from the office five days a week! These major banks could be unwittingly opening the door for greater financial misconduct by forcing in-office work.
I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"
basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.
she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.
if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.
because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.
a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.
instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.
she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.
when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍
So, we actually do understand a lot more about how this works than OP explains here, not that I blame them for not being aware of some of the details.
The process is called Nitrogen Narcosis, although that name is a lil bit of a lie. The actual truth is that any gas that can be breathed except helium and maybe neon can have this effect, which is anesthetic effect that occurs at high pressures. It's usually compared to being drunk, and different people response to this effect differently. Also, different mixes of gases will produce different effects, which is why it's really important to have the correct sort of gas for a particular dive. Just to be clear, Oxygen also causes this narcosis effect, and according to NOAA should be considered as narcotic as nitrogen. Obviously, you can't remove oxygen from tanks entirely, but there are other mixes of gas that can limit narcosis and increase the safe diving depths.
Specifically, because helium doesn't have this narcotic effect, there are specific breathing mixes that can be used for saturation or technical dives, specifically Trimix (nitrogen, helium, oxygen) or Heliox (helium, oxygen). These mixes allow divers to dive deeper and remain at depth for longer safely, reducing the narcosis that they experience.
Interestingly, everyone undergoes narcosis at depth. Regardless of training or how well they cope with the narcotic effect, everyone experiences it. The key difference is in how different people handle the narcotic effects. Each person tends to have specific reactions to narcotic effects, known as personal onset signs, that can impact how well they can perform at different depths. While some people experience hallucinations and paranoia, others may instead experience a sense of calm or euphoria. Some people may experience a general sense of well-being, which can actually be more dangerous than panic because it leads to them ignoring or not noticing danger signs. Some people can maintain themselves and their cognitive function better under narcosis due to a number of factors, but everyone is experiencing it.
Because everyone is impacted by nitrogen narcosis, that's why it's vital to not take any sedatives or central nervous system depressants prior to diving (acholol, weed, etc), as they can have additive affects.
So!! How do you predict how people will be affected by this narcosis?
Well, there are actually methods that you can use. All of these are still under research, but the best predictor is a person's prior reactions to narcotic effects, particularly nitrous oxide. How well someone tolerated nitrous oxide tends to predict how they will tolerate nitrogen narcosis. People who've been exposed to nitrous oxide and had a low tolerance for it or experience serious emotional impairment may want to avoid or be extremely careful about diving. An easier predictor that is still being explored is that people who are more heavily impacted by alcohol tend to also be more impacted by nitrogen narcosis.
There are also indications that people with anxiety, people diving in cold waters (or with poor circulation), and people who are tired may be at increased risk for experiencing greater negative effects of nitrogen narcosis. If you're someone with any of these traits, you should be extremely careful while diving and make sure to alert your instructor to the possibility of these conditions so they can keep a close eye on you.
Finally, what do you do when someone is experiencing nitrogen narcosis?
Well, this is actually pretty easy. You bring them up.
Shockingly, for all that it can be a scary and dangerous experience, nitrogen narcosis can be alleviated by ascending, the impact is quick and significant. The pressure very directly causes nitrogen narcosis, and relieving the pressure relieves that effect. Once a person is up, they should recover their senses and no longer be exposed to the narcotic effect.
So while there's plenty left to understand about nitrogen narcosis (and understanding it may lead to a better understanding of how people interact with anesthetics in general), we do actually have some measure of predicting how someone will experience it, as well as ways to limit how much it occurs (using helium at greater depths).
Anyways td:lr:
People don't actually lose their mind because of the depth, people lose their mind because nitrogen is a narcotic under pressure. The reason people react differently is due to a lot of different physical factors, much like how people have a variety of reactions to other narcotics. Be careful when diving, and know if you have risk factors. If you do, clearly communicate those to people you're diving with and consider limiting depth to keep yourself safe.
Y'all ever get so excited about a scientific paper you're reading that you get chills???
So I thought to myself
Huh, a lot of our invasive species come from China and Japan
And then I thought, huh, I should look up what Kudzu is like in its natural habitat
And I found this article by a team of scientists investigating the history of Kudzu in China
And ohhhhh my goddddd. I'm vibrating with excitement over how cool this is.
The first bombshell that turned my brain inside out:
KUDZU IS NOT WILD. IT IS SEMI-DOMESTICATED.
In China, Kudzu has been a fundamentally important plant for food and textiles throughout history. We have Kudzu cloth that is 6,000 years old!
THIS PLANT CLOTHED AND FED ONE OF THE MOST POPULOUS AND MOST ENDURING HUMAN CULTURES ON EARTH
and in turn
HUMANS SHAPED AND SELECTED FOR ITS TRAITS
*AND*
in its natural range, humans are the main "predator" of kudzu
"Harvest by humans appears to be the major control mechanism in its native areas."
Kudzu is like that because it co-evolved with humans.
WHAT
YALL
This means
That Kudzu is so highly invasive because—just like most plants evolved to be grazed by herbivores and/or eaten by caterpillars, keeping them in balance with everything else—Kudzu basically evolved to be harvested by humans
The other half of the ecological partnership that keeps Kudzu in balance with everything else isn't a caterpillar or a hoofed beast. It's us.
I had no idea Kudzu was cultivated for making cloth - I might try to weave something with it if its in my area. It would be really cool if we could help mitigate its spread by harvesting it to make things, even if it only helps a little bit.
