algorizmi reblogged
The Decatur Herald, Illinois, May 15, 1928
tvtropes usually misses more than it hits but i do respect them for putting both chikane and shizuma on the page for the "seme" trope as examples of rare semes in the yuri genre. like. you get what i'm fuckin saying here like i'm not alone in using the term for a specific kind of yuri top. the 2000s NAILED it.
return to tradition!
one thing that's also neat about that trope is that the yuri semes were often femmes rather than tomboys/butches (although not always!) who tended to be more of the "regular down to earth girl" or the "brash and feisty girl" with the femme being more of a "femme fatale" or general "popular girl" who dazzles with her beauty and refined nature and a flirtatious streak. the confident femininity is also used to denote maturity, which ties into how yuri semes tend to look significantly older than they actually are. Mireille and Kirika from Noir exemplify that last point very well, with a two year age gap looking closer to ten years purely by virtue of seme-ness
yuri semes are a type of megafauna often considered to be extinct in the wild. we must cherish and protect those we have left if we are to save yuri as a whole
algorizmi reblogged
[Image Description:
A drawing of a realistic millipede in a bathroom. A sign says “Wash Your Hands” the millipede thinks “well this is going to take forever…”
Cartoon signed by Matron Design ]
Thing is, centipedes are famously fastidious. They wash every single leg multiple times a day and seem rather like a very leggy cat while doing it.
Perhaps it’s because they are predators. Predators seem to tend to be into washing up more.
(I know it’s a millipede in the cartoon, but that just makes it funnier since the centipede would roll their eyes at the complaining. )
algorizmi reblogged
As someone who was recently in Fukui, this isn't even scratching the surface of how mad the town is for dinosaurs.
For example, here is the outside of the train station:
If you thought that they were only outside the station, think again!
The last dinosaur has a crab, because the region is known for seafood.
You can even buy coffee emblazoned with dinosaurs!
And that's not even getting into how you get to the nearby Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum. Behold, the Dino-Liner:
And if you're like, man I don't know how the museum will top all of these dinosaurs, boy do I have news for you.
And then you get to the cafe:
But, eventually, it was time to head back to the train station...on the dino bus.
algorizmi reblogged
the cursed armor you can never take off once you put it on stays ON during sex. due to the aforementioned curse.
some people say she's undatable... heartbreaking </3
Not only that, I also use linux; So you can look forward to an extra extra 10 minutes for me to fail at pairing with your bluetooth speaker.
algorizmi reblogged
alright, about to start The Sun, The Genome, and The Internet by Freeman Dyson. Hoping for some 90s biotech hype that I haven't already heard
Solar energy is expensive today because it has to be collected from large areas and we do not yet have a technology that covers large areas cheaply. One of the virtues of solar energy is the fact that it can be collected in many ways. It is adaptable to local conditions.
The two main tools for collecting it are photoelectric panels producing electricity and energy crops producing fuel. With the exception of small units such as those used in the SELF projects, energy crops are the method of choice for farmland and forests, while photoelectric collection is the method of choice for deserts. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages. Photoelectric systems have high efficiency, typically between 10 and 15 percent, but are expensive to deploy and maintain. Energy crops have low efficiency, typically around 1 percent, and are expensive and messy to harvest. The electricity produced by photoelectric systems is intermittent and cannot be cheaply converted into storable form.
Fuels produced from energy crops are storable. To make solar energy cheap, we need a technology that combines the advantages of photovoltaic and biological systems. Two technical advances would make this possible. First, crop plants could be developed that convert sunlight to fuel with efficiency comparable to photovoltaic collectors, in the range of 10 percent. This would reduce the costs of land and harvesting by a large factor. Second, crop plants could be developed that do not need to be harvested at all. An energy crop could be a permanent forest of trees that convert sunlight to liquid fuel and deliver the fuel directly through their roots to a network of underground pipelines. If these two advances could be combined, we would have a supply of solar energy that was cheap, abundant, and environmentally benign.
Our hopes for radical decrease of costs and increase of efficiency of energy crops must rest on the genome. Traditional farming has always been based on genetic engineering. Every major crop plant and farm animal has been genetically engineered by selective breeding until it barely resembles the wild species from which it originated. Genetic engineering as the basis of the world economy is nothing new. What is new is the speed of development. Traditional genetic engineering took centuries or millennia to produce the improved plants and animals that fed the world until a hundred years ago. Modern genetic engineering, based on detailed understanding of the genome, will be able to make radical improvements within a few years. That is why I look to the genome, together with the sun and the internet, as tools with which to build a brighter future for mankind.
The energy supply system of the future might be a large forest, with the species of trees varying from place to place to suit the local climate and topography. We may hope that substantial parts of the forest would be nature reserves, closed to human settlement and populated with wildlife so as to preserve the diversity of natural ecologies. But the greater part could be open to human settlement, teeming with towns and villages under the trees. Landowners outside the nature reserves could be given a free choice, whether to grow trees for energy or not. If the trees converted sunlight into fuel with 10 percent efficiency, landowners could sell the fuel for ten thousand dollars per year per acre and easily undercut the present price of gasoline. Owners of farmland and city lots would have a strong economic incentive to grow trees. Even without such an incentive, towns where wealthy people live are usually full of trees.
People like to live among trees. If the trees were also generating fuel from sunlight, the appearance of the towns would not be greatly altered. The future energy plantation need not be a monotonous expanse of trees of a single species planted in uniform rows. It could be as varied and as spontaneous as a natural woodland, interspersed with open spaces and houses and towns and factories and lakes.
To make this dream of a future landscape come true, the essential tool is genetic engineering. At present large sums of money are being spent on sequencing the human genome. The human genome project does not contribute directly to the engineering of trees. But alongside the human genome, many other genomes are being sequenced: bacteria and yeast and worms and fruit flies. For advancing the art of genetic engineering, the genomes of simpler organisms are more useful than the human genome. Before long we shall have sequenced the genomes of the major crop plants, wheat and maize and rice, and after that will come trees. Within a few decades we shall have achieved a deep undemanding of the genome, an understanding that will allow us to breed trees that will turn sunlight into fuel and still preserve the diversity that makes natural forests beautiful.
While we are genetically engineering trees to use sunlight efficiently to make fuel, we shall also be breeding trees that use sunlight to make other useful products, such as silicon chips for computers and silicon film for photovoltaic collectors. Economic forces will then move industries from cities to the country. Mining and manufacturing could be economically based on locally available solar energy, with genetically engineered creatures consuming and recycling the waste products. It might even become possible to build roads and buildings biologically, breeding little polyps to lay down durable structures on land in the same way as their cousins build coral reefs in the ocean.
interesting to read this considering it's just before the US started really scaling up corn ethanol. George Bush was advertising ethanol as part of a strategy to get off of oil imports. We do use 10% ethanol blends for gasoline in the US, I think mainly for the octane rating and to keep farmers in business. So energy crops have become a normal but limited and unexciting part of life. So it's interesting to see how energy crops looked in the beginning, at the peak of biotech hype, when they could have been the first step along the road to becoming science elves.
trying to figure out where that ten thousand dollars per acre per year value came from.
okay, using his made-up efficiency number of 10%, and a very approximate solar irradiance of 1 kW per square meter, using this wolframalpha query:
so, yeah, the energy output of an acre in a year would be equivalent to a few hundred thousand dollars of gasoline. Though a better comparison would be to crude oil, gasoline is refined and blended which costs money
You want another factor of ~0.2 for night/clouds/etc. Combine that with a nostalgic price of $20/barrel crude and you get pretty much exactly $10k/acre-year.
algorizmi reblogged
The whole "the brain isn't fully mature until age 25" bit is actually a fairly impressive bit of psuedoscience for how incredibly stupid the way it misinterprets the data it's based on is.
Okay, so: there's a part of the human brain called the "prefrontal cortex" which is, among other things, responsible for executive function and impulse control. Like most parts of the brain, it undergoes active "rewiring" over time (i.e., pruning unused neural connections and establishing new ones), and in the case of the prefrontal cortex in particular, this rewiring sharply accelerates during puberty.
Because the pace of rewiring in the prefrontal cortex is linked to specific developmental milestones, it was hypothesised that it would slow down and eventually stop in adulthood. However, the process can't directly be observed; the only way to tell how much neural rewiring is taking place in a particular part of the brain is to compare multiple brain scans of the same individual performed over a period of time.
Thus, something called a "longitudinal study" was commissioned: the same individuals would undergo regular brain scans over a period of mayn years, beginning in early childhood, so that their prefrontal development could accurately be tracked.
The longitudinal study was originally planned to follow its subjects up to age 21. However, when the predicted cessation of prefrontal rewiring was not observed by age 21, additional funding was obtained, and the study period was extended to age 25. The predicted cessation of prefrontal development wasn't observed by age 25, either, at which point the study was terminated.
When the mainstream press got hold of these results, the conclusion that prefrontal rewiring continues at least until age 25 was reported as prefrontal development finishing at age 25. Critically, this is the exact opposite of what the study actually concluded. The study was unable to identify a stopping point for prefrontal development because no such stopping point was observed for any subject during the study period. The only significance of the age 25 is that no subjects were tracked beyond this age because the study ran out of funding!
It gets me when people try to argue against the neuroscience-proves-everybody-under-25-is-a-child talking point by claiming that it's merely an average, or that prefrontal development doesn't tell the whole story. Like, no, it's not an average – it's just bullshit. There's no evidence that the cited phenomenon exists at all. If there is an age where prefrontal rewiring levels off and stops (and it's not clear that there is), we don't know what age that is; we merely know that it must be older than 25.
algorizmi reblogged
Oh wow. An SNL costume designer really bothered to look up the correct group of worms and recreate an accurate scolex.
It would've been so easy to just make a generic worm-like slimy costume or a worm with a fictional monster mouth or something but no, this is the first time I've seen correct tapeworm anatomy in any media in fact
So first of all apparently that's comedian and artist "Sarah Squirm" who I somehow wasn't aware of before and probably designed it herself.
Second, boy is there a lot of confused information about the actual parasite!
If you're unclear on what exactly it is, no it did not "eat" part of his brain like headlines say, nor is it any natural "brain parasite."
I have a few posts about this, but the reason you can get tapeworms from raw meat is that a tapeworm life cycle is supposed to begin when a grazing herbivore or scavenging omnivore, like a cow or pig, swallows a tapeworm egg from contaminated vegetation or soil.
The larva that hatches from this egg migrates into the animal's flesh, embeds there and goes dormant, waiting to be swallowed by a predator. When the predator swallows this hibernating larva, it becomes the adult tapeworm; the more famous stage that hangs out in your intestines and absorbs nutrients from your digested food. This produces the eggs, which pass in feces, and make their way into dirty water....or spread around on unwashed hands.
Humans aren't a natural host for the first larval stage; we're a natural host for the *adults* of several species, meaning we're supposed to swallow the larvae embedded in raw meat.
RFK Jr, therefore, did not actually get his "pork tapeworm" from pork. He swallowed an egg that originally came out of someone or something's feces.
In the human body, the confused larva tries to migrate into the muscle tissue, but because we're built straight upright compared to any other mammal, they quite often end up in the brain by mistake, and since we aren't the right host for that stage, they just die there.
This is why those "straight from dirt to table" diets are a bad idea. We cook or at least wash things for a reason. Of course, that won't save you either if someone with an adult worm just doesn't wash their hands after touching their own butthole, and can leave the sticky, invisibly microscopic eggs on things like doorknobs, shopping carts or touch screens.
This also means that, to be honest, it's not actually fair to make fun of this like it's an embarrassing freak condition just because this guy sucks. This can happen to anyone regardless of their hygiene or lifestyle and is much more common than you would think. It can go unnoticed your entire life because it doesn't always cause serious problems you would seek help for.
...Or, when it does, it's not always obvious that they should check your brain for the presence of dead animals. I know that sounds like a wild way to word it but these are animals. Animals that can, regrettably for both of us, accidentally kill themselves in your brain.
This is one of the reasons for all those "staff must wash their hands" signs in the bathroom anywhere that serves food. Touching your ass and then touching food is Bad.
algorizmi reblogged
A dis-integrated circuit project to make a complete, working transistor-scale replica of the classic MOS 6502 microprocessor.
algorizmi reblogged
also at the end when they ask you "any questions?" and you can't think of anything: ask about parking. even if you don't have a car.
I have an interview today in a couple hours, how did the algorithm know I needed this
Btw when they ask if you have questions some actual good options are stuff like “what’s a typical day like in this role” or “is this job open because someone is leaving or is this a new position”
reblorb
algorizmi reblogged
Dog Date
algorizmi reblogged
discord calls "servers" internally as "guilds" because a discord "server" is not a server, and this is something you get to learn when you start writing discord bots
and now they introduced "guilds" as a specific kind of "server", quoting their community post
What's a Guild? It's a small, exclusive server that members can apply to join. These servers are tight-knit communities where members can relish in shared identities, hobbies, play styles, and more!
I wonder how they will resolve this conundru... oh, they're internally calling them "clans", way to go, this will totally not get confusing
algorizmi reblogged
BIG SILLY?
this is actually the coolest thing i've heard in a minute. there's something really reassuring about it, honestly. that there's a place in nature, carved out by these creatures, and that even with hundreds of years of separation, they slot back into these spots where they're meant to be
BISON WALLOWING!!
It creates a whole other type of habitat within the habitat!!!
Lots of plants need bison to wallow in order to create a place where they can grow and prosper!
Bison are a keystone species, they build and engineer the ecosystem, maintain it and give it life!
Bring back the bison!
Bison wallows are so important. You'll even see other species utilizing wallows as shelter, especially on short grass prairie where there's little shade and high winds.
There's a great book called Ecological Buffalo that I recall having photos of pronghorn sheltering from the wind in a wallow that hasn't been used by a bison in over a century.
algorizmi reblogged
Here are the information pages for the legislators that introduced this bill. There is relevant contact information at each link:
At this time I am unable to find a contact script or anything of that nature thus if you do reach out to them it may be best to discuss the parts of the bill you disagree with and why. It should be mentioned all four of them are old, white, Republican men.
I think it’s also worth noting that this is very clearly and specifically targeting protestors.
To overview:
This bill would make the public wearing of masks, even for health reasons, illegal in NC, and would enforce harsher punishments for those that are found wearing a mask while committing another crime or for blocking traffic, rather than doing those same acts while not wearing a mask. Republican lawmakers are trying to say that they doubt people would actually get arrested just for wearing a mask in public, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be a possibility. Similar to jaywalking, in a way. You can do it, and maybe a cop will look the other way, but legally speaking, you very well could be charged for it.
This bill is very directly targeting protestors especially, as well as will harmfully affect those that are immocompromised and is against religious freedom (unless they more clearly define what constitutes as a "mask" and, even then, the line would be blurry. And I dont need to explain the problems this would exacerbate, America's track record speaks loud enough for that as is)
Notably, our laws used to be centered around this same notion, hence why it's being called a strike through. In 1953, it was ruled to be like this to limit KKK activity (because then they couldn't hide their faces). It was a messy law to start, and didn't change until COVID, when exceptions were made for obvious reasons. This bill would remove those exceptions. This article in particular talks about this more in depth.
This is extremely worrying, and I say this as someone who lives in North Carolina. Even if you don't live here, get informed about this, because many other states may very well try to adopt similar policies.
Anti-mask laws might have been motivated by the KKK in North Carolina, but in New York state the law dates back to 1845 and was meant to hinder serfs protesting feudalism and high rent. In NY it's always been intended to target protestors.
algorizmi reblogged
new animal just dropped
sorry to add on but youre missing the best animals
Yes yes, these are all silly animals, but can we acknowledge the skill