Avatar

Jurassic World Was Shit

@evebuscemi / evebuscemi.tumblr.com

Avatar
Avatar
hairtusk
'Wool waulking is a traditional Scottish process of finishing and strengthening newly woven woolen fabrics. It is a significant social and cultural activity, often carried out by women in the Highlands of Scotland. The Gaelic songs that are sung during waulking have a distinctive rhythmic pattern that aids in synchronising the work.'
(Video and text via Inverness Outlanders)
Avatar

You might think that I'm joking when I say that we need cyborg rights to be codified into law, but I honestly think that, given the pace of development of medical implants and the rights issues raised by having proprietary technologies becoming part of a human body, I think that this is absolutely essential for bodily autonomy, disability rights, and human rights more generally. This has already become an issue, and it will only become a larger issue moving forwards.

Avatar
mmeveronica

No but seriously we need cyborg rights, in case you don't know how many people count as cyborgs here are some examples;

  • People with cochlear implants are cyborgs
  • People with pacemakers are cyborgs
  • People with insulin pumps are cyborgs

There are even edge cases revolving around how much electricity and integration into the body are necessary to make someone a cyborg.

  • People with replacement hips or other bones are by some definitions cyborgs
  • People with implanted medical devices such as artificial valves or stents are by some definitions cyborgs
  • People with prosthetic limbs are by some definitions cyborgs
  • People with ostomy bags are by some definitions cyborgs
  • People in wheel chairs, electric or not, are by some definitions cyborgs

The list could go on but I think I made my point that cyborgs are a lot more than just people with robot arms, they are the disabled deserving of the rights to the technology their lives literally depend on.

This is needed.

Earlier this year, a woman was forcibly deprived of a brain implant that was treating her epilepsy because the company that made the implant went bankrupt. Here's a link to one of several articles about it:

This story happened back in the 2010s according to the first article but is still relevant. Also if my cochlears were repossessed by the company for some asinine reason I would literally stop being able to do 80% of the things I do and my future would be ruined. Cyborg rights are necessary and should have been codified decades ago

Avatar
elfwreck

This was in 2020, and the patients weren't even informed of it - one day their eyes just stopped working because the company that made them went out of business.

Avatar

Hey so you remember this thing that everyone on mathblr got excited about recently?

Image

This is the hat, and it's what's called an "aperiodic monotile". This means that no matter how you arrange copies of this tile, you can never get an arrangement that will repeat infinitely (think of it like the irrational numbers of tilings). This was big news in mathematics as while sets of more than one tiles have been found that are aperiodic (e.g: The Penrose Tiles), this was the first tile that's aperiodic by itself, hence "monotile". (There are some caveats to this but that's not important for understanding this post)

However.

If you look at images of the hat tiling, you may notice something.

If you look at the tiles labled 1 and 2, you'll see that one's a reflected copy of the other. In fact, any infinite arrangement with hats requires you to you mix unreflected and reflected tiles. Which raises the question: is it possible to have an aperiodic monotile that doesn't need reflections?

Presenting the Spectre, A chiral aperiodic monotile.

Using only translation and rotation, any arrangement of copies of this tile will never repeat.

Mathematically speaking, this is really fucking cool.

The paper on it is still in preprint, but hopefully I won't need to retract this post. A copy of it can be found here and a post going into some more details of how the shape was discovered is here.

Avatar
Avatar
quoms

Just saw a post suggesting babies' behavior in the womb is affected by their astrological star signs, which apparently they are assigned before actually being born. The causality implications of this are nothing short of exhilarating

You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.