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Six of Swords
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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.
It's actually even wilder than the above description suggests: They didn't just avoid the bad chip, they can't. It's too important and it's not like they can go resolder the computer now.
They instead mapped out which parts of the memory chip are bad (about 3% of it), and rewrote all the code using that chip to avoid those sections. The probe is still using the bad chip! it's just only using the parts that haven't failed yet.
It's like having a car that was in an accident and can't turn right anymore, so instead of repairing it you just map out a new route to work that involves only left turns.
It's frankly amazing that they were able to do this, especially since all their diagnostics they ran to figure out which parts of the chip were bad HAD TO RUN ON THAT EXACT SAME CHIP.
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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.
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Brooch
Marcus & Co. (New York City, New York)
c.1900
This exquisite brooch is one of the few extant examples of plique-à-jour jewelry made by the New York firm of Marcus & Co., whose reputation at its prime rivaled that of Tiffany & Co. Herman Marcus (1828–99), a German–born and Dresden–trained jeweler, arrived in New York in 1850 and worked for a number of prestigious firms before establishing Marcus & Co. in 1892. Following his death, the company continued under the direction of his two sons, George Elder Marcus and William Marcus.
The brooch is a superb example of Marcus & Co.’s work in plique-à-jour enameling, in which the "cells" of color have no backing, allowing light to shine through the transparent enamel, thereby creating the effect of stained glass. One of the only jewelry firms of its day to succeed at this challenging technique, Marcus & Co. followed the lead of such innovative French designers as René Lalique. The sensitive 3-dimensional sculpting of the sweet pea blossoms and leaves, as well as the naturalistic coloring of the enamels, reflects the Art Nouveau aesthetic that prevailed at the turn of the century. Indeed, close parallels can be drawn with the brilliant naturalistic work of Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose oeuvre is so well represented in the Met’s collection.
The MET (Accession Number: Accession Number: 2016.107)
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Fact: The earliest reliably dated use of the phrase “fucked up” appears in the court records of a US Navy court-martial case from 1863; the way the phrase is used suggests that its meaning was already well known at the time, but this is the first known printed record of it that we can confidently put a date to.
Additional fact: Bram Stoker’s Dracula is set in 1897.
Conclusion: It would not anachronistic for your Dracula fanfic to have a character describe the Count as a fucked up old man.
official linguistics post
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Yo I feel like the idea that the only historical women who counted are the ones who defied society and took on the traditionally male roles is… not actually that feminist. It IS important that women throughout history were warriors and strategists and politicians and businesswomen, but so many of us were “lowly” weavers and bakers and wives and mothers and I feel like dismissing THOSE roles dismisses so many of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers and the shit they did to support our civilization with so little thanks or recognition.
YES. This is such an important point. Those ‘girly’ girls doing their embroidery and quilting bees and grass braiding were vital parts of every domestic economy that has ever existed.
This is precisely what chaps my hide so badly about the misuse of the quote “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” because this is precisely what the author was actually trying to say.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a domestic historian who developed new methodologies to study well-behaved women because they were
1) so vital, and
2) their lives were rarely recorded in the usual old sources.
“Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all. Most historians, considering the domestic by definition irrelevant, have simply assumed the pervasiveness of similar attitudes in the seventeenth century.”
Original article: “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735” (pdf download from Harvard)
If you didn’t know: Abagail Adams (John Adams’ wife) led a very successful effort to fund the American Revolution. How did she and her tiny army of women do it?
They made lace, and sold it to the aristocrats. Real lace (the stuff you see on old outfits in museums, not the machine-made stuff you might be familiar with from today) is stupidly difficult to make, takes a lot of time and skill, and, well:
If you watch this through, you’ll hear her say this is DOMESTIC lace. This is not fancy, this is for household objects. You can imagine what it would take to make some of the elaborate pieces you see on old aristocratic clothing, and see why it was so expensive and valuable. (Incidentally, if you’ve ever heard the music from the musical 1776, in the song where Abagail and John are trading letters and he’s like “ma’am we need saltpeter” and she’s like “dude we need pins,” THIS IS WHAT THEY NEEDED THE PINS FOR. That song was based on real letters between the two.)
And this is all those revolutionary Revolutionary women did, every free moment of every day. They pulled out their pins and their bobbins and they made lace until they couldn’t see straight, and they sold it to revolutionaries and royalists alike, anyone who would pay. Yard upon yard upon yard of lace to earn cash to translate into rations and bullets.
The war was won by a women’s craft. Not even a “vital” women’s craft like cooking or cleaning. It was won by making a luxury item whose entire purpose was to say “look how wealthy I am, I can afford all this lace.”
Lace was not the only source of income for the Revolution. But it was a major one, and it is extremely fair to say it turned the tide.
And until this post, I bet you didn’t know.
If you know Discworld, you know the observations about “ladies who organize”?
That’s not something Pterry made up. That is reality. Ladies Who Organize have been a major driving force of history - usually unremembered b/c everyone remembers the guy who was officially involved and not, eg, his wife who organized a massive letter writing campaign and seven soirées that funded Mr Historical’s entire enterprise.
Ladies Who Organize both started and ended Prohibition, as noted above funded American Independence, and were the ONLY people who got their shit together with regards to eg the 1918 Flu in a lot of cities (Philadelphia is a really great example).
Ladies Who Organize is just ONE area of history where that’s the case. It’s just they did things in mostly socially accepted ways and when they pushed the envelope they did it strategically and tactically, leveraging whatever else they had to offset that.
Now, we get to know about them because they were not only nearly universally literate but MASSIVELY WORKED VIA LETTERS so as we started actually paying attention we had sources. Imagine how many of these we’ve lost because the record ONLY contained the other stuff.
For the record, this is what the phrase “Well-behaved women seldom make history” actually means.
That’s not me just saying that, that’s what the author of the book by that name meant by it:
At the time (1970s) that Ulrich was writing her article, she writes in the book, the discipline of history was not very interested in the everyday ordinary lives of people—especially not interested in the ordinary lives of women. Her statement, “well-behaved women seldom make history,” was a commentary on how her academic discipline was not interested in the activities of “well-behaved women” because they were not considered worth studying. In that context, the words had a mostly literal meaning. … Since women throughout much of history have been encouraged (if not forced) to adopt behaviors sanctioned by men instead of having the freedom to do as they wished, being a “well-behaved woman”—and whether that was good or bad—was based on a person’s perspective. Several posters/graphics currently available featuring Ulrich’s statement have pictures of well-known women who were pioneers/leaders in various fields (including Amelia Earhart, Rosa Parks, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg). These women, for the most part, were not considered “well-behaved” by society as a whole, at least at the times they were making the contributions to history for which they became known.
While telling the stories of these history-making women, Ulrich illuminates the intended meaning behind the slogan that is the title of her book. When the slogan appears out of context, it becomes open to wide interpretation, and has, subsequently, been used as a call to activism and sensational — even negative — behavior. In fact, Ulrich says, the phrase points to the reasons that women’s lives have limited representation in historical narrative, and she goes on to look at the type of people and events that do become public record. Throughout history, “good” women’s lives were largely domestic, notes Ulrich. Little has been recorded about them because domesticity has not previously been considered a topic that merits inquiry. It is only through unconventional or outrageous behavior that women’s lives broke outside of this domestic sphere, and therefore were recorded and, thus, remembered by later generations. Ulrich points out that histories of “ordinary” women have not been widely known because historians have not looked carefully at their lives, adding that by exploring this facet of our past, we gain a richer understanding of history. “People express such surprise when they discover that women have a history. It is liberating that the past can not be reduced to such stereotypes,” says Ulrich. “I hope that someone would take away from this book that ordinary people could have an impact, and to try doing the unexpected. I would like to show that history is something that one can contribute to.”
one way this is so obvious is how people know medieval European farmers spent tons of energy making bread, but what women did is reduced to “idk childcare”?
No they made cloth. All the time.
underanothername reblogged
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This is what happened when a fanfic site is profit driven. Wattpad sucks 😞
The email from Wattpad is so condescending imagine pressuring writers to update and work while they are doing it for free and fun. Also the discovery? Algorithm? Of Wattpad looks like a stressful popularity contest 😑
Hey I just wanna quickly say that you only get these if someone reports the story. I've barely updated on Wattpad in the past two years and haven't gotten any of these, mostly because I don't even have an audience over there who has the potential or drive to report my fics. So, corporate greed is bad, yes, but it's also readers being buttheads
Hmm, that's interesting! You know what happens if someone reports a story for being incomplete on AO3? Jack shit, because not churning out content for your fun little hobby is not a reportable offense on AO3! And that's because, unlike Wattpad, AO3 isn't profiting off of your work, either directly or indirectly, and so when readers are buttheads, the AO3 abuse mods ignore them, instead of sending out weird automated messages harassing writers for daring to have a wip.
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life's too short to write for an imaginary critic that you fear will hate what you wrote
to be clear, odds are good that someone will hate what you wrote, but that doesn't mean the writing is bad. That means they aren't part of your audience.
don't write for them.
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I'm doing it gang, I've spent stupider gardening money before like when I dropped $300 on shade loving perennial bulbs only to learn they were also plants that rotted with wet feet and all immediately died in my swampy gumbo soil
I'm buying two firefly petunias. I've never grown petunias much because where I live they're a winter annual but fuck it I'll grow them as an indoor plant I certainly have the sun to do it.
They're supposed to ship to me in April, I'll report back on if they immidiately die or this is the coolest thing I own. My biochemical engineering design project was using a similar chemical pathway to modify bacteria to glow in the presence of specific toxins so I absolutely need glowing petunias in my window box
Yaaalll my plants arrive tomorrow!!!! I'm so excited
My glowing GMO petunias have arrived!! I'm glad I ordered 2 one seems really leggy and about to snap off it's roots if I'm not careful transplanting. They've been in a dark box for 2-3 days so I can only just barely perceive light from the more sturdy bush if I close myself into my pantry, but it is definitely there!
I'm putting it under my aquarium grow lights for a few hours till full dark and I'll report back!!
I'll probably give them 2-3 days to recover from shipping before I transplant them
Holy shit y'all
The flower buds and new growth glow the brightest! This is so cool!!! I definitely want to know if it starts to glow more brightly with a few sunny days
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I saw a post about tumblr user ages...
Reblogs are welcomed for that sweet, sweet increased data pool (aka getting more than 20 responses 😅)
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So earlier in art class today, someone drew a characters hands in their pockets and mentioned that hands are really like the ultimate end boss of art, and most of us wholeheartedly agreed. So then, our teacher went ahead and free handed like a handful of hands on the board, earning a woah from a couple of students. So the one from earlier mentioned how it barely took the teacher ten seconds to do what I can’t do in three hours. And you know what he responded?
“It didn’t take me ten seconds, it took me forty years.”
And you know, that stuck with me somehow. Because yeah. Drawing a hand didn’t take him fourth years. But learning and practicing to draw a hand in ten seconds did. And I think there’s something to learn there but it’s so warm and my brain is fried so I can’t formulate the actual morale of the lesson.
Saying "I'm not going to draw this thing because I don't know how to draw this thing" is really shooting yourself in the foot, because you've now cut yourself off from an opportunity to grow.
I had a friend in college who was an absolutely amazing artist. I loved seeing his work! One time I said something to the effect of "I could never do that."
He told me something that, as an artist, I resonate with. He said art isn't about natural talent; it's a learned skill. When you tell an artist their level of skill is impossible for you to reach, you're assuming their level of skill is a natural gifting they have, and it discredits the hundreds to thousands of hours of hard work they've put into getting where they are today, and you're cutting yourself off from trying to reach that point yourself.
I don't remember where I heard this but I wish I could, because it stuck with me:
Talent is THE RATE at which you learn things, not whether or not you can learn certain skills at all.
And that suddenly clicked for me. I have been very talented with a lot of things in my life and once I realized that I had basically been getting XP multipliers on my normal life experiences, it suddenly felt so much less awful to realize that I did not have the same advantage with other skills I struggle with, and that's okay. I might even have some debuffs on those, and that's okay. It's still all gaining as long as I keep working on it!!
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[ID: youtube comment from Hal Sawyer:
My favorite relic English still used everywhere is the word "the" used in phrases like: "the more I look at this, the stranger it seems, or "the bigger they come, the harder they fall". This "the" is not the article of any noun, it is a different word, a conjunction descended from the old English "þā", pronounced "tha" which means either "when" or "then". Back in early Middle English the structure "if - then" had not taken over and if you wanted to express an if - then relationship you said "þā whatever, þā whatever", meaning "when such-and- such, then such-and-such". "þā" sounds almost the same as "the" and the spelling of the two converged, but the meaning remained totally different. "the more, the merrier" literally means "when more, then merrier" or "if more, then merrier'; same as centuries ago.
end ID]
this is so cool
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inkdot-deactivated20200219
This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.
A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.
Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic? She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing. But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great. She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success. So - what gives?
His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear. Jeans, blazers, dresses - everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles. He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses. You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on. Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered. He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit. That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.
I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way. I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did.
It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this. But no one ever told me. I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes. No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.
I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed. I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to. No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to. I guess I just didn’t know. I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.
I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.
I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.
So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while. But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not. Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.
This post is one of those things that I will reblog every time it appears on my dash. This is so important, and no one ever tells you about it.
skeletree
I almost didn’t read this but then I did and I’m really glad that I did.
And like, I had fiber craft lessons all through my mandatory schooling (sewing, knitting, crochet etc). “Learn to modify a store-bought item to match your body” would fit in those classes just fine.
Please reblog this every thime you see it. Make sure it spreads everywhere.