Happy Christmas, everyone. 🎄🎅❤

you gotta be as gay as possible on the computer otherwise alan turing died for nothing

this comment fucking destroys me. I can’t think about Alan Turing for too long or I start crying. 

Y’ever read something and have understanding that has eluded you interminably suddenly stop, curl up, and snuggle neatly into a fold in your brain because a new way way opened to it?

I've seen this passed around a few times, and I have one thing to say:

It's online. The book was carefully and wonderfully recreated online by hand. You can find it here. The entire book is this easy.

calculusmadeeasy.org

Water Lily Harvesting in Mekon Delta, Vietnam. Photography by An Bui

A Butch carrying their limp Femme into Starbucks to get her a Pumpkin Spice Latte

tetanus fact: it's an old wives' tale that tetanus is caused by rusty metal. it's actually caused by puncture wounds substantially deeper than they are wide, which introduce ubiquitous anaerobic spores (i.e. the "seeds" of single-celled organisms which cannot grow if exposed to oxygen) into a warm, poorly-oxygenated space in the body. so receiving shallow cuts from a rusty knife is not likely to give you tetanus but puncture wounds from clean but non-sterile objects can. this is great news if you like receiving superficial wounds from rusty knives and blades and swords all over your dumbass body

Stop calling them superficial. All my wounds are passionate and meaningful

NOTHING FUNNY HAPPENING HERE CONSIDER LOOKING OVER THERE, TO THE LEFT- NO, YOUR LEFT, THAT'S IT

So Venus is my favorite planet in the solar system - everything about it is just so weird.

It has this extraordinarily dense atmosphere that by all accounts shouldn't exist - Venus is close enough to the sun (and therefore hot enough) that the atmosphere should have literally evaporated away, just like Mercury's. We think Earth manages to keep its atmosphere by virtue of our magnetic field, but Venus doesn't even have that going for it. While Venus is probably volcanically active, it definitely doesn't have an internal magnetic dynamo, so whatever form of volcanism it has going on is very different from ours. And, it spins backwards! For some reason!!

But, for as many mysteries as Venus has, the United States really hasn't spent much time investigating it. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, sent no less than 16 probes to Venus between 1961 and 1984 as part of the Venera program - most of them looked like this!

The Soviet Union had a very different approach to space than the United States. NASA missions are typically extremely risk averse, and the spacecraft we launch are generally very expensive one-offs that have only one chance to succeed or fail.

It's lead to some really amazing science, but to put it into perspective, the Mars Opportunity rover only had to survive on Mars for 90 days for the mission to be declared a complete success. That thing lasted 15 years. I love the Opportunity rover as much as any self-respecting NASA engineer, but how much extra time and money did we spend that we didn't technically "need" to for it to last 60x longer than required?

Anyway, all to say, the Soviet Union took a more incremental approach, where failures were far less devastating. The Venera 9 through 14 probes were designed to land on the surface of Venus, and survive long enough to take a picture with two cameras - not an easy task, but a fairly straightforward goal compared to NASA standards. They had…mixed results.

Lotta problems with lens caps.

For Venera 13 and 14, in addition to the cameras they sent a device to sample the Venusian "soil". Upon landing, the arm was supposed to swing down and analyze the surface it touched - it was a simple mechanism that couldn't be re-deployed or adjusted after the first go.

This time, both lens caps FINALLY ejected perfectly, and we were treated to these marvelous, eerie pictures of the Venus landscape:

However, when the Venera 14 soil sampler arm deployed, instead of sampling the Venus surface, it managed to swing down and land perfectly on….an ejected lens cap.

i am not joking we need to force teach cooking in schools. like. it is an essential thing for survival. do you know how easy it is to make things if you know even the bare bones shit about how cooking works. we need to teach teenagers how far you can take an onion and some other veggies it''s sad that people grow up not knowing how to prepare literally anything. and i'm not talking about oh this home ed class taught me how to make chicken nuggets at home i'm talking about learning the balancing of sweetness and acidity and saltiness and bitterness and shit like that and techniques and oil temperatures and how meats cook. it needs to be taught because it's literally not even that difficult and it matters so much

i truly believe that knowing how to cook is a basic survival concept and the fact that so many people can't even make simple dishes is depressing as hell this is the sorta thing that should be taught at a young age. being able to take the ingredients you have around your home and turn them into a meal is like, essential and will make life so much better. you don't need to be a high end chef you just need to understand some things that can be easily taught... but then again maybe the education system is playing a roll against this and ultimately they want you to grow up to rely on mcdonalds for dinner. i don't know. please learn how to cook for yourself if you're able. i'm not asking you to hunt for specific ingredients to make some expensive youtuber's "best" recipe but if you know the basics of cooking you can do a lot with cheap canned ingredients. cooking can be affordable i promise you just need to learn how to make do with what you can get

Can anyone point me towards resources that teach those basics cus I would LOVE to teach my child this stuff but i dont know how to cook

not comprehensive but heres some:

internet shaquille's basics but especially:

food safety + a recipe to demonstrate

how to learn to cook (just a list of subtopics, no actual tips)

basics with babish s1 & 2, but particularly:

basic knife skills

picking the right pan for each recipe

j. kenji lopez-alt's tips and tricks playlist

egg recipes

a little more complicated, involved, and longer than any of the rest of these but good breakdown of flavor & how and why to use the basic seasoning/flavor profiles

and then recipe channels representing various cuisines:

again definitely not a comprehensive list but it touches on most of the basics

anyone else grieving & mourning & lamenting & kicked apart by nostalgia & going silently about their lives?

one of my fave posts honestly