enough about taylor swift already. reblog and tag the smallest, least known artist you listen to
reel big fish except they’re all only one centimeter tall
Josh Mack, random blues-rock-country singer-songwriter I found looking for a good recording of 'Have you seen the ghost of John'. (He has a different track inspired by it.)
Astronomers are a little unsure of the applicability of this index, but NASA's Planetary Protection Officer is all in favor.
Transcript
Title: Moon armor index: Caption: How thick the shells around various worlds would be if their moon(s) were converted into protective armor. (Roughly equals): Total moon volume/Planet surface area
[Vertical bars showing "moon armor" thicknesses for the Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Salacia, Haumea, Quaoar, Gonggong and Eris.
Earth and Pluto's armor are notably thick, with Eris a far runner up. Earth's is labelled "43 km thick" and the height of Mt. Everest is measured at a little under a quarter of it. Pluto's is labelled "mostly Charon".
Salacia is close but noticeably smaller than Eris, and Jupiter even closer but still noticably smaller than Salacia. Further descending in thickness is Haumea, Saturn, Neptune, Quaoar, Uranus, Gonggong, and then Mars (which has a zoom in to show its 2 inch thick armor under a rover wheel.)]
how could it be more clear that the moon is a planet
No. The Moon is a world.
Jupiter is a planet. Europa is a world. Saturn is a planet. Titan is a world.
Mars is both a planet and a world. So is Venus.
Worlds are the bits that are spherical and rock and that one could, in theory, colonize. (Ones in other solar systems are exoworlds.)
Planets are the ones that go around the Sun (or another star for exoplanets) and, depending on who you ask, have cleared their orbits. Moons are the ones that go around planets.
The Moon is a world which orbits another world, which is rare. So is Charon, but it's a very small world and so is its primary.
Ceres is also a world, and neither a planet nor a moon.
Astrogeologers care about worlds. Astrophysicists care about planets and moons, and sometimes asteroids.
gonna buy this god-forsaken web site and charge all y'all $8 a month to edit reblogs.
'oh he's so funny now.'
mf i was always funny.
I always thought 'denatured alchohol' was like denatured proteins, chemically modified to be ineffective. But no, anything added to alcohol to make it unpleasant or unsafe to consume for the purpose of drunkenness is 'denatured alcohol'.
Thus we may conclude that the essential nature of alcohol is getting you drunk, and everything else is epiphenomenal.
Deeply dispiriting post: testimony from a DOJ antitrust action reveals the entire book publishing industry is celebrity memoirs, established franchise authors like James Patterson, children's books, Bibles, and back catalogues (e.g. Lord of the Rings). Publishing new authors is not even a rounding error; you get the sense it's only done anymore out of a vague sense of obligation, and the moment one of the Big Five decides on the defect strategy, and stops doing that to save a few more bucks, it will end entirely.
I don't think that's the right takeaway from the article, and that's certainly not the takeaway the author has. Even leaving aside the self/independent publishing angle, publishers aren't investing a broad portfolio of mostly-failures out of "a vague sense of obligation", but because investing in a broad portfolio is the way to get the handful of outsize successes (the venture capital comparison is in the article itself). The numbers from the articles show that even the celebrity books, that publishers are willing to pay for, mostly fail; they're paying for the mean result, not the median.
Notably, the numbers in the article don't support the conclusion that they could make more money by just sitting on their back catalogue and not publishing anything. The backlist is a third of their revenue, which is a lot but still a minority. And only a portion of the backlist is perennial classics; it's not specified but I would guess a large portion of backlist revenue would dry up over time if they don't keeping adding new books to their back catalogue (one of the quotes says a new hit for the backlist is worth millions for them).
Yes, all the money goes to established, successful authors and celebrities, but the fact that most people trying to write for a living fail* isn't really news, I don't think (and if you succeed, you fall into the category of "established, successful authors" more or less by definition).
The article also notes that the acknowledged trend among all the big publishers is "probably we should give lower advances", though, which means they know their incentives are in the direction of publishing less. Given the huge discrepancies, probably much less.
The anecdote about the Ones Who Got Away report, which concluded that they were mostly getting trapped in bidding wars that look a lot like dollar auctions to me, seems particularly significant.
People often react to the phrase "carbon footprint" with something about how it's coined by the fossil fuel industry to direct blame from producers to consumers, but I think there's still something extremely valuable about looking at emissions per capita -
graph one: total CO2 emissions, NOT per capita, by region. By 2020, China, the US, the EU, India, and Russia are the largest players, with the entire rest of the world barely surpassing China's emissions.
Graph two: The same regions but weighted per capita.
The US is unique in being extremely emissions-intense per capita while also being large and wealthy. This graph doesn't count emissions generated in China to produce goods shipped to America - it counts those under China's emissions.
No? Looking at those two graphs demonstrates that the per capita numbers are useless bullshit.
Got to thinking about what it would be like in classic Old World Warhammer if the other seven winds got the Necromancy treatment. So here will be seven in-universe descriptions from historical AUs where those were the big Dark non-Chaos casters.
when they said in Dune that they needed spice for space travel i thought it was used as some sort of fuel but no apparently it's just because your pilot needs to be hight out of his mind to be able to safely navigate big ships into space
Common misconception. They can't see the past because they weren't trained by the Conspiracy Nuns, so they can't see the future properly either.
Tumblr on desktop has been extremely slow to load for me, for the past 1-2 weeks maybe.
It's like, a partial version of the page loads, which has most of the content in place but lacks (1) images and videos inside posts and (2) anything related to notes or activity. The notes button is missing from the bottom-left of each post, and the Activity button on the sidebar does nothing.
It sits there like this 10 or 20 seconds, images/videos slowly trickle in, and then suddenly the page "refreshes" in some way (e.g. if I'm on the dash, I am suddenly scrolled all the way to the top) and now contains all the expected stuff.
I've filed a support ticket, just posting out of curiosity if anyone else is experiencing this.
Happens to me but only for a couple seconds. Noticeable mostly because 'J' to scroll down doesn't work.
its so crazy that for the last 5 years a small but annoyingly vocal online group has been acting like mob movies of all things are pretentious and inaccessible cinema. yeah the godfather is kinda slow but these are movies about criminals who shoot people
speaking of the godfather its funny as hell that scorsese got lashings for saying marvel movies not cinema while coppola was out here saying shit like this
See also: samurai movies. Sure, some of them are in black and white, but they’re still full of swordfights.
I've seen the first third of Seven Samurai (had to leave early, for some reason they started showing it at 9 PM) and very little happened.
I assume it would partly make up for this in the latter two-thirds of the movie but people who are averse to inaccessible cinema probably wouldn't get that far either.
I understand why alchemists invented, and modern fiction writers use, systems with a few understandable Elements like Earth / Fire / Air / Water / Light / Dark.
I understand why even most nerds don't bother to study the Elements in real life. There's too many of them, and they don't neatly correspond to meaningful aspects of macro-level existence.
But just once I'd like to read a worked magical system where the author has looked up the properties of the real Elements, has put in all the work to build up a system of plausible-sounding correspondences, and the protagonist is a rare dual-element Tellurium-Iodine wizard.
I forgot that you're on tumblr
Does the imbalance in "meaningful aspects of macro-level existence" imply that oxygen or carbon or something rules the world?
Yeah, my first thought was that carbon-benders are extremely powerful, whereas all the [synthetic element that doesn't exist in nature and lasts a fraction of a second]-benders are essentially muggles.
(Which actually would be a cool explanation for the existence of muggles, they're the people born with the potential to control element 300 or something.)
But I think the idea in the OP was more of a metaphorical system based around the properties of the elements, rather than element-kinesis. Even Avatar does this a bit; air-benders are really good at dodging like a leaf in the breeze, water-benders can heal because water is soothing, earth-benders can echolocate because earth is good at conducting vibrations, etc.
Aerb, the world of Worth the Candle, stands out as a prototype I think - a setting with a ton of different magics, like Gold Magic or Bone Magic or Gem Magic, each based on different metaphors and properties of the thing in question. (Gold is valuable so Gold Mages get more powerful the more gold they hoard but risk being undermined by their greed, Gem Mages shoot lasers based on the refraction of light through their gems, bones form the underlying skeleton of the body so Bone Mages can pull a creature's innate abilities from them, etc.)
So like, a xenonmancer wouldn't necessarily control elemental xenon, they might channel it's unreactivity to become immune to poison and acid (a shared power of all Noble Gas mages?) and it's fluorescence to shoot beams of blue light.
The more I think about this, the less unwieldy it seems, since the properties of elements are fairly well-structured. (A xenonmancer is a noble gas mage and a fluorescent, plus probably some stuff based around density and being a gas at human-livable temperatures, etc.) If you really wanted each elemental school to be totally unique magical schools in ways that are somehow still convincingly tied to their properties, even allowing for cultural properties like "gold is valuable", that would be harder.
Quickly sketching out a setting:
Yesterday had an infuriating situation where someone who should have known better messaged a patient about their new surprise serious diagnosis when I specifically told them to call. Today found a new breast cancer diagnosis dumped in my inbox as if it were nothing with note “patient unaware.” NOT FOR LONG THEY AREN’T, the results automatically release, what the fuck is wrong with you? If you’re the provider who ordered the test and it’s positive, call the patient and set up the urgent referral, don’t wait THROUGH THE WEEKEND. Jesus Christ.
yeah... my patients who have mychart and are with it find out what they have before i see it in Epic. i've had multiple pts in for other things see "concern for malignancy" or "probable metastatic" in their radiology report and ask of they have cancer. and then i have to explain as a nurse i'm not allowed to interpret scans, and its not in our computer yet so the doc doesn't know yet.
for the love of god, if you order something you think will have bad news in it, check manual release and not immediate release. please.
We literally can’t anymore.
Oh yeah at our place we explicitly asked to set the EHR settings so the doctor can actually review a test result themselves before a test result gets dumped unreviewed into the patient’s inbox….we were told no, because test results MUST be released within 72 hours, even on a weekend or when the doctor is out. We have no control over release time at this institution outside of genetics results. Why? Some fucking MBA-assigned metric, I’m sure
(And before asking “just make sure to look at and respond to every test result in 3 days no matter what” we have over 800 patients each, the spirit is trying but the flesh cannot work 24/7)
In our state I don’t even have 72 hours. It releases to patients immediately. No options. We were told it’s because of a new-ish legal mandate.
In the last month I’ve had three patients find out they had cancer before I did. It’s horrible, and we can’t stop it, and it’s happened because somebody never released a cancer result, I’m sure of it.
I was in the ED this week, and this is the message I received every time a result was released, often before the provider had seen it.
Apparently any sort of delay or hold is considered “blocking” the patient’s access to the health records, and they’ve recently increased fines for hospitals not complying:
That explains a lot! Thank you.
Okay I fully recognize that I'm a minority here but I do think this is an important thing to recognize is true of more than zero people you might be working with:
If I found it that my doctor intentionally withheld information about my medical testing results from me until they could first call me on the telephone, when it was mechanically possible to provide that information to me instantly and digitally, I would immediately and completely lose trust in that doctor. I would want to leave and get a different doctor. I would have to try really hard to be a mature grownup member of civilization and not scream at that doctor until my voice gave out.
That information is MINE. You are not my mother. You do not get to decide for me whether I am emotionally prepared to handle it or by what communication method I should receive it. Unless I have specifically requested this service from you (and I'm sure it's very valuable to the people who want it! I have great respect for the no doubt horribly stressful process of it being your job to have to call people on the phone and gently tell them they have cancer!), you do not have the ethical right to decide I need it anyway.
What I need to emotionally handle alarming medical news is to read it in text, so I can be sure I didn't hear it wrong, and then be alone for a bit to process it, and then figure out what I want to do given this information, AND THEN, AFTER THAT, to talk to my doctor about what they recommend. If my doctor insisted on hiding the info until she could call me she would be badly hurting me. Please do not try to do this to people without checking whether they want you to.
