Posting due to an emergency- please share widely if you're local to Chicagoland.

If anyone in the Chicagoland area sees this, a friend's service dog prospect is in need of immediate boarding from tomorrow until May 6. Winnie is about 40 pounds and is not dog-reactive at all, but the person caring for her was hospitalized and so my buddy is looking for a short term emergency foster!

I'm available to help with any transportation (you wouldn't need to drive her anywhere!) and compensation+coverage for food/medical/etc. would be involved. You wouldn't need to pay for her stuff, just make sure she has a place to stay and walk her and call me if she needs to go to the vet.

If this is something you or someone you know could help with, please let me know. It's an emergency situation, so for the first time in... well over a year, I am opening my inbox in case this is something you can help with. Please DM me if you or anyone you know can help.

Doing a rare signal boost, since I know @kaijutegu IRL and can vouch that this is real and necessary. Posted originally and reblogged on 4/25, so the need for an emergency foster starts 4/26. Chicago folk, please let her know if you’d be able to help.

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

an article on the subject for the curious:

oak tree am i right

you’re certainly not wrong

This does not even begin to cover the weirdness of cathode ray televisions.

They are literally particle accelerators that you point at your face.

And for eighty years, Americans' favorite thing to do was turn them on and stare at them for hours.

If you overcharge them, they emit gamma radiation.

Servicing them is like disarming a bomb -- their capacitors are enormous and are usually charged to hundreds or thousands of volts, and most of them have no bleed system that drains that charge, meaning that they can still be dangerous months or years after the last time they were powered up. A discharge can not only electrocute you, it can cause tools to melt or explode.

A black-and-white cathode ray TV driven by an unmodulated analog signal is theoretically capable of resolution that would require a microscope to perceive.

Old school CRT monitors had the same issues.

Back when, I worked at a small whitebox pc manufacturer. One day, a service tech brought back an older, gigantic (30 inch or so) AutoCAD monitor from a service call. The customer said "Made me feel nauseous"

So, we put it on the bench and fired it up. You immediately felt the hair on your body stand up, and my co worker put his hand up close to turn the power off, and his hand and forearm started spasming - I yanked the power cord from the wall as the tingle I was feeling began to feel hot.

No idea what was wrong with the thing, but it was kicking out some serious electro magnetic radiation.

Remembering the almost imperceptible high pitched buzzing that let you know the tv was still on even when nothing was on the screen. Also putting your forearm near the screen and watching the hairs stand up

The little crackle if you touched the screen to wipe it...

Omg no one's even talking about the smell of the screen

This is both horrifying to read and nostalgic

Teeth are bullshit. What do you mean you’re decaying. Get a fucking grip. You’re a bone now act like it. You don’t see my finger bones decaying from jerking it too much now do you

If I were tumblr famous this would be a smash hit

Considering mammals will use keratin for pretty much everything I'm surprised we don't have keratin teeth yet.

Reptiles: "I improve my grip by having these bony protrusions at the ends of my digits!"

Mammals: "Hey look what I can do with keratin"

Reptiles: "I coil myself up small to minimise my surface area to volume ratio to not lose body heat when it's cold"

Mammals: "Hey look what I can do with keratin"

Reptiles: "I have these frills of skin that I can make stand up to appear threatening"

Mammals: "Hey look what I can do with keratin"

Triceratops: "Fuck this, I have a bone knife on my face"

Rhino: "Oh man you're not going to believe this"

Oh boy have I got news for you about teeth.

Motherfuckers...

this is my multiverse of madness

The haunting ancient Celtic carnyx being played for an audience. This is the sound Roman soldiers would have heard their Celtic enemies make.

Man if I heard that shit while descending upon a strange land with my brethren I'd straight up dig a hole to die in right the and there, fuck the emperor fuck the gods that's a warning straight from the bones of an older evil and whatever is coming is worse than death

Hey, happy Earth Day! Who wants to talk about climate change?

Yeah, okay, fair, I kinda figured the answer to that would be "ugh do we have to?" What if I told you I have good news though? Good news with caveats, but still good news.

What if I told you that since the Paris Agreement in 2015, we've avoided a whole degree celsius of global warming by 2100, or maybe more?

Current projections are 2.7C, which is way better than the 3-5C (with a median of 3.7C) we were expecting in 2015. It's not where we want to be - 1.5C - but it is big, noticeable progress!

And it's not like we either hit 1.5C and avoid all the big scary consequences or fail to hit 1.5C and get all of them - every tenth of a degree of warming we avoid is going to prevent more severe problems like extreme weather, sea level rise, etc.

This means that climate change mitigation efforts are having a noticeable impact! This means a dramatically better, safer future - and if we keep pushing, we could lower the amount of global warming we end up with even further. This is huge progress, and we need to celebrate it, even though the fight isn't over.

It's working. Keep going.

Holy shit, they got Voyager 1 working again!

15 billion miles away and NASA was able to tweak code packages on one of the onboard computers and it worked and Voyager 1 is sending signals back to earth for the first time since November.

Incredible!

At the local lake, this is around the time of year when they do the fish stocking. It's artificial, but it happens to the real lakes, too. Right now, the water is finally thawed out just enough that the park supervisor can roll up a big ol' truck full of fish and dump them into the water. They'll live happy, contented lives in the lake, unless they bite a hook, are abducted by clever seagulls, or someone finds the drain plug at the bottom again like they did back in August of '88 and lets all the water out.

Because the park is really cheap, the community association was looking for someone to pick up the truck, fill it with fish, and drive it to the lake. Since I had no real job at the moment, and needed something to check off the "community service" section of my parole documents, I decided to volunteer. Long-time readers may recall that I also have a small amount of affection for the operation of internal-combustion automobiles, which is a bonus.

Everything went great at the pickup. It turns out that my buddy Halvin was working in the town motor pool and made sure to give me the oldest, shittiest GMC Kodiak in the lot because it would make me more comfortable. What a guy. I was so overjoyed that I didn't even tell him it was me who backed over his mailbox last Christmas. Why ruin the moment?

After some hot twin-stick action to get across town, I was at the fish hatchery. You might not be familiar with one of these things, if you live a boring life. Me, I'm here at least once a year, mostly because their dumpster always has a lot of only-slightly-expired silicone sealants thrown away in it. It was here that I encountered my primary obstacle in completing Mission: Fish Flow.

As for what happened next, the exact details are still being worked out by my attorney. In my defence, however, I have been authorized to state that having over one thousand fish in the back of your 1970s cargo truck should qualify you for the car-pool lane, even if you do ram a state trooper, who – by the way – was riding in the car all by himself, the fucking hypocrite.

"Long-time readers may recall that I also have a small amount of affection for the operation of internal-combustion automobiles, which is a bonus."

Why yes, tumblr user seat-safety-switch, I DO recall. I believe you are understating the amount of your affection though.

Eva Funderburgh

I thought I recognized this piece! I'm friends with Eva, she is just as delightful in person as her works.

This one is called "Drink Deep." You can see more of her work here: https://evafunderburgh.com/#

Unpopular opinion: All games should have the option to enable pausing.

And to save almost everywhere.

Yes even in soulslike games.

I am an adult who has a full time job and responsibilities. I get to play maybe an hour a week. I do not want to lose that hour of progress because devs decided 'pause' was not allowed in their game and I had sudden unexpected things come up that meant I had to quit the game without saving/leave it playing and hope enemies wouldn't respawn.

Also it would massively increase accessability. I have fully working non-injured hands and they still need a break after a tough boss fight. I can't imagine how frustrating it must be for people with joint pain, arthritis, etc, etc.

love the word “rapscallion”. like not only are you a rascal but you’re also kind of spring onion about it too

oh shit, it's 3/21/23, 32123, palindrome day

don't worry, your'e still in time for 3/22/23, 32223, palindrome day the second

I missed BOTH of them.

don't worry, you're still in time for 3/28/23, 32823, palindrome day eight

im very exited for next years weed palendrome day of 4/20/24

so it's weed day and palindrome day, on leap year. perfection is achievable

oh shit, it's 4/20/24, 42024, weed palindrome day