Another month has passed - October 02021
Nov. 1st, 2021 08:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptLet's begin with the firm understanding that people are infinitely more valuable than things, expressed in a way that stuck with someone who had spent a lot of their time having negative experiences over broken things.
In the same vein, A Twitter thread about all the science we have that says hitting children is universally bad for them.
And the idea that burnout may be of different types, each requiring different solutions to get a person back on good terms with their work (or co-workers). Because all the experiences that we have in our lives contribute to the things we do and what comes out in our creative efforts.
The creator of Nimona and head of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power has a Substack of comics about his life and experiences. I really like his style of writing and drawing, which seems like a shallow thing to say with the seriousness and gravity of the topics themselves, but it's true. There's something about the style itself that helps with the subject matter. Definitely worth a look.
Simone Biles is unquestionably the greatest gymnast of a generation, not just because of what she could do on the apparatuses, but also in the fortitude involved in choosing herself and speaking up about the abuse she suffered.
The library systems of the boroughs of New York City have eliminated all fines and fees and wiped the previous accruals of their borrowers. Here's hoping that all other library systems follow suit, since fines are generally punitive and regressive and they don't actually do whatever explanation is put in favor of their existence.
A concept that emotional states are not primordial universal things expressing themselves, but various states that have cultural scripts attached to them that allow the entity experiencing the states to make meaning from them. Which might be an interesting lens to examine many of the seemingly intractable us-versus-them positions that happen, or the ways in which some states of being are less immediately understandable to people in a different culture.
3 A.M. is a perfect time for a confluence of light sleep and worry intruding, leaving us awake and going through our own faults, which may be defeatable by getting out of our own heads.
New York City public schools will be phasing out their gifted and talented programs, although I doubt that will result in the schools getting more funding to more appropriately educate all their students. (Also, testing four year-olds for brilliance in intellect is at best a bad idea. It is far more likely to test on other things that are not at all related to intelligence.)
The tendrils of imperialism reach everywhere, and sometimes the only knowledge we have of someone's existence is the papers where they get recommended for servant work. Or they passed through a specific place that came into existence to provide shelter to those who got abandoned without any compensation.
Black heroes of the slavery abolition movement of the Britain, what accounts exist of who is believed to be the first black student at Oxford University, and the iconic map of the London Underground, with all of the stations renamed for prominent Black people, grouped in lines according to similar categories and the places where they contributed.
In 2020, the creator of Your Fat Friend decided to no longer be anonymous, but even in that situation, having gotten a lot of readers and talked about the stigma around being fat, she was still nervous about what would happen when the trolls had a name and a face to match to the things they'd been railing against for years.
An artist was loaned a significant sum of money intended to be incorporated into a work showing the disparity of salary between two counties. The artist, instead, returned two blank canvases and titled their work "Take the Money and Run", which is what they intend to do with the money that's been loaned to them. Which, that seems like the sort of thing one might have gotten if one tried to get Banksy to do such a thing for you, so perhaps this person believes themselves on par with that. Or that they deserve the money for themselves.
A pseudonymous thriller author has turned out to be three men in a woman's pen name, as they revealed themselves to collect a prize they had won under the pen name. Cue much "ackpth" at how this situation has come into existence and the work that won the prize.
The official accounts of the poor and wandering tend to focus on how criminal and terrible they are, rather than the human dignity they might have been afforded. Not unlike our current accounts of "the homeless," as if they chose the life or otherwise deserved what they received by virtue of being vicious, instead of some other systemic reason why.
The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed other humans, will go forward without the dead persons being referred to as 'victims', although it is possible that they might be referred to as "looters, rioters, or arsonists" if the defense team believes there is sufficient evidence to do so.
A change of name to shift from the intended external beauty and femininity to a beautiful essence, with the benefit of messing with the construction of both beauty and gender. I'm very glad Lindo found a name that works.
Jon Kent, the son of Superman (and a Superman in his own right) is bisexual, continuing what I hope is a good trend of more people being able to see their own orientations and selves in the pages of the comics.
An anatomically correct and accurate pamphlet about sex created by Mary Ware Dennett for her sons would eventually become a high-profile case that challenged the Comstock Laws. Initially convicted by an all-men jury for such a violation, the conviction was eventually overturned, and so, eventually, were the laws that banned the ability for anyone to discuss contraception with anyone else. In this day and age where reproductive freedoms are being rolled back as fast as men who want to control women's bodies can get their laws passed, and where it is likely common that the people who picket and protest will get the procedure when they are pregnant, and rely on the discretion of the clinic not to expose them to their social circles. Because if everyone around you is virulently anti-choice for women, making such a visible decision and being willing to talk about it can mean becoming a pariah.
The National Archives of the United Kingdom offers advice on how to find useful records when searching the records they have on LGBTQ+ individuals, many of which are the proceedings of government or the matters of court prosecutions, and which are indexed under the terms of the time. They do acknowledge that many of those terms are now offensive.
The conception of marriage, as it has become in mostly "liberal" places of the United States, has developed a terrifying shadow side where the spectre of divorce, and the economic and social consequences thereof, keep people in partnerships that are actively destructive to them. Which has class reasons, and who gets blamed reasons, and the idea that things can be made better through just trying harder and working more, and a whole lot of things that differentiate it from the "conservative", more religious conceptions of marriage that are about controlling sexuality. If it were easier to maintain an acceptable life as a single person or as a divorced person, much of this stigma would go away, but that would not be in favor of the structural interests that want to subordinate women and force them to work to the benefit of men, rather than themselves.
Looking at the crime records from when it was illegal for men to have sex with other men, you often find charges related to prostitution and sex work. Sometimes it was sex work, and sometimes it might not have been, but the legal code that wanted to discourage sex between men was more than happy to sexualize and criminalize what it could.
A properly run study says that laser therapy meant to "rejuvenate" a vagina doesn't actually do anything compared to sham. Which we are glad to see people doing the research on, since knowledge about vulvas and their parts is still extremely low, and that's assuming your cultural context doesn't actively discourage knowledge about these things.
The possibility that some chronic pain responses (when not indicated by actual injury) may be calmable by retraining the brain's opinion about danger, on the idea that if pain is the brain signaling that something is dangerous or needs attention, it may be possible to do work to convince the brain that it is over-reacting to something, or trying to remind us about something that's no longer a threat, or otherwise might be something that can be let go. But that really would have to be something suggested after all the other avenues of finding what might be causing genuine pain are exhausted, because we already have enough medical gatekeeping about who is allowed to be in pain and how hard a doctor looks for evidence of that pain.
Finding a lot of Roman material while excavating under a Norman church.
Rescued from poachers at two months, a gorilla that became eventually famous for photobombing a selfie in the same way that they humans that took care of her died at fourteen years, winners of picture contests of the natural world (or the interaction of the natural world and human-made things), the likelihood that earlier humans tried to raise cassowaries as domestic fowl, which was not ever going to go particularly well, a coyote that is demonstrating why the coyote alert sign has been deployed, the tulip speculation of the Netherlands was not nearly as large as moralists would have us believe (today I learned), a dinosaur fossil that suggests armor spikes fused to a rib cage, which is unlike any other dinosaur at all, and suggesting a change from "plant blindness," which is inaccurate and reinforces ablelism, to "plant awareness disparity," which is more accurate to describe how there is generally less interest in plants and humans are less likely to notice them in their environments when they are present.
AstraZeneca has filed for FDA approval to market and use a monoclonal antibody drug cocktail used as a preventative measure against the coronavirus, which could also be administered along with vaccinations to help boost immune response from people who might not get everything they could from the vaccinations. Merck believes they have an oral treatment that can hammer out the worst parts of a SARS-CoV-2 infection if given early enough, since it is meant to disrupt the virus's ability to reproduce itself. We can hope that the data from the company holds up in reality and with real people using it, since they ended the trial early because it was working so well. This will be, if it holds up, a really useful weapon in the arsenal for people to use if they get infected. That said, this pill should not replace getting a vaccination, if you're able to get one. The trials being run were specifically being run on the unvaccinated because it would not have been possible to get actionable results if it were tried on the vaccinated population as well. That said, it looks like Merck, the company that developed the drug, has a contract for it to be sold at about forty-six times what the generic version of it would cost. And with having their research and development costs covered as well. There are plenty of people in this world who think a pandemic is a perfect opportunity to profit.
If offered a vaccine booster, take it, as the opportunity to redirect the shot to someone that needs it as a first dose has already passed, which is, unfortunately, leading to the sobering reality that millions of vaccine doses go unused and destroyed, because not everyone who is eligible for one is getting their doses.
In those parts of the world that believe drugs with no indication they would be effective are somehow effective, the evidence they use to make those claims and the studies providing those evidence have serious faults that suggest incompetence or malice. The people investigating this are looking at the data provided, when they can get it, and noting various inconsistencies or things that are too perfect in the data to be random. When the study people aren't making things up out of whole cloth.
Beijing wants the 2022 Winter Olympic Games to go off without any issues regarding the virus, although they may not be able to make it true.
Based on the official policies he pursued, a commission has voted to recommend criminal charges against the Brazilian president in regard to the deaths from SARS-CoV-2 in the country. There may not be any charges filed, but the commission recommended such be done.
There may be a link between a particular gene, the herpes simplex virus, and the likelihood of developing Alzheimer's disease. And also the possibility that coronavirus might also do similar things in the brain from its own infection.
In technology, the data that we use to track our health is not necessarily our data, nor is it always accurate, nor are we necessarily going to be able to continue not tracking it. As with so many things, the likelihood that private data will become something public or aggregated and sold, or decisions will be made on data, which will be assumed to be accurate rather than not, because some techbro said so, well, enjoy the future where capitalism believes your digital self is more real than you are.
Creating an electroplated cosplay accessory that can stand up to the voltage and current put out by Tesla coils.
Google's parent company continues to fire AI ethics researchers, which is not a good look for a company that is doing lots of AI research.
The source code to video streaming site Twitch has been released, along with several other tools and technical data associated with the site. Along with creator payout reports. So, password changes, and also, most likely, keep a weather eye out for when the second part supposedly drops.
A developer of a tool that allowed people to use their Facebook accounts without using the infinite scroll of the News Feed was served with a cease-and-desist for the tool, permanently banned from using any Facebook service ever, and told they could not develop any more tools for any Facebook user ever, at least according to Facebook's ToS. This is overbroad, obviously, but you have to be able to fight Facebook and possibly lose to have a chance at winning, which most people don't have the assets for. And so, until someone challenges them, Facebook continues to assert things that it has no business asserting.
An artificial intelligence was trained upon the corpus of Beethoven's work, then fed the fragments of the unfinished Tenth Symphony and tasked with completing the work. And now, you can listen to the results of that training. [YouTube]
The Hanford nuclear testing, reactor, and waste disposal site in eastern Washington State is grappling with the legacy of things that do not decay in anything short of geologic time, and a government agency that's supposed to be keeping it all safe and is doing anything but, or so it seems.
Last for tonight, Medusa laments being a plaything of the Gods, even if there are a couple perks that go along with it.
And reasoning like an engineer when confronted with a novel problem or a black box. Which, coincidentally, was the name of a "guess where the stars are in this unknown box based on knowing the rules of how beams fired into it should behave" that I never was all that practiced at.
A playlist of two songs, constructed based on the responses to a survey about what styles, instrumentations, lengths, and so forth of music the respondents enjoyed and what they detested. This was in 1996, but the "Most wanted song" sounds pretty much like popular music of the 2020s, so clearly they were on to something about how replicating what most people have been taught to believe is musical, even if on closer look it's chaotic, still produces a general feeling of enjoyment. On the Most Unwanted Song, the seams are more obvious as it's intended to be wrong. (All the same, there are genuinely enjoyable parts of that piece, and I have to congratulate the musicians involved for doing exactly the thing that was written on the page without trying to make it better.) The lyrics are available for both songs if you would like to know what's being sung.
And finally, building an October holiday skeleton that is house sized, rather than large sized.
In the same vein, A Twitter thread about all the science we have that says hitting children is universally bad for them.
And the idea that burnout may be of different types, each requiring different solutions to get a person back on good terms with their work (or co-workers). Because all the experiences that we have in our lives contribute to the things we do and what comes out in our creative efforts.
The creator of Nimona and head of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power has a Substack of comics about his life and experiences. I really like his style of writing and drawing, which seems like a shallow thing to say with the seriousness and gravity of the topics themselves, but it's true. There's something about the style itself that helps with the subject matter. Definitely worth a look.
Simone Biles is unquestionably the greatest gymnast of a generation, not just because of what she could do on the apparatuses, but also in the fortitude involved in choosing herself and speaking up about the abuse she suffered.
The library systems of the boroughs of New York City have eliminated all fines and fees and wiped the previous accruals of their borrowers. Here's hoping that all other library systems follow suit, since fines are generally punitive and regressive and they don't actually do whatever explanation is put in favor of their existence.
A concept that emotional states are not primordial universal things expressing themselves, but various states that have cultural scripts attached to them that allow the entity experiencing the states to make meaning from them. Which might be an interesting lens to examine many of the seemingly intractable us-versus-them positions that happen, or the ways in which some states of being are less immediately understandable to people in a different culture.
3 A.M. is a perfect time for a confluence of light sleep and worry intruding, leaving us awake and going through our own faults, which may be defeatable by getting out of our own heads.
New York City public schools will be phasing out their gifted and talented programs, although I doubt that will result in the schools getting more funding to more appropriately educate all their students. (Also, testing four year-olds for brilliance in intellect is at best a bad idea. It is far more likely to test on other things that are not at all related to intelligence.)
The tendrils of imperialism reach everywhere, and sometimes the only knowledge we have of someone's existence is the papers where they get recommended for servant work. Or they passed through a specific place that came into existence to provide shelter to those who got abandoned without any compensation.
Black heroes of the slavery abolition movement of the Britain, what accounts exist of who is believed to be the first black student at Oxford University, and the iconic map of the London Underground, with all of the stations renamed for prominent Black people, grouped in lines according to similar categories and the places where they contributed.
In 2020, the creator of Your Fat Friend decided to no longer be anonymous, but even in that situation, having gotten a lot of readers and talked about the stigma around being fat, she was still nervous about what would happen when the trolls had a name and a face to match to the things they'd been railing against for years.
An artist was loaned a significant sum of money intended to be incorporated into a work showing the disparity of salary between two counties. The artist, instead, returned two blank canvases and titled their work "Take the Money and Run", which is what they intend to do with the money that's been loaned to them. Which, that seems like the sort of thing one might have gotten if one tried to get Banksy to do such a thing for you, so perhaps this person believes themselves on par with that. Or that they deserve the money for themselves.
A pseudonymous thriller author has turned out to be three men in a woman's pen name, as they revealed themselves to collect a prize they had won under the pen name. Cue much "ackpth" at how this situation has come into existence and the work that won the prize.
The official accounts of the poor and wandering tend to focus on how criminal and terrible they are, rather than the human dignity they might have been afforded. Not unlike our current accounts of "the homeless," as if they chose the life or otherwise deserved what they received by virtue of being vicious, instead of some other systemic reason why.
The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed other humans, will go forward without the dead persons being referred to as 'victims', although it is possible that they might be referred to as "looters, rioters, or arsonists" if the defense team believes there is sufficient evidence to do so.
A change of name to shift from the intended external beauty and femininity to a beautiful essence, with the benefit of messing with the construction of both beauty and gender. I'm very glad Lindo found a name that works.
Jon Kent, the son of Superman (and a Superman in his own right) is bisexual, continuing what I hope is a good trend of more people being able to see their own orientations and selves in the pages of the comics.
An anatomically correct and accurate pamphlet about sex created by Mary Ware Dennett for her sons would eventually become a high-profile case that challenged the Comstock Laws. Initially convicted by an all-men jury for such a violation, the conviction was eventually overturned, and so, eventually, were the laws that banned the ability for anyone to discuss contraception with anyone else. In this day and age where reproductive freedoms are being rolled back as fast as men who want to control women's bodies can get their laws passed, and where it is likely common that the people who picket and protest will get the procedure when they are pregnant, and rely on the discretion of the clinic not to expose them to their social circles. Because if everyone around you is virulently anti-choice for women, making such a visible decision and being willing to talk about it can mean becoming a pariah.
The National Archives of the United Kingdom offers advice on how to find useful records when searching the records they have on LGBTQ+ individuals, many of which are the proceedings of government or the matters of court prosecutions, and which are indexed under the terms of the time. They do acknowledge that many of those terms are now offensive.
The conception of marriage, as it has become in mostly "liberal" places of the United States, has developed a terrifying shadow side where the spectre of divorce, and the economic and social consequences thereof, keep people in partnerships that are actively destructive to them. Which has class reasons, and who gets blamed reasons, and the idea that things can be made better through just trying harder and working more, and a whole lot of things that differentiate it from the "conservative", more religious conceptions of marriage that are about controlling sexuality. If it were easier to maintain an acceptable life as a single person or as a divorced person, much of this stigma would go away, but that would not be in favor of the structural interests that want to subordinate women and force them to work to the benefit of men, rather than themselves.
Looking at the crime records from when it was illegal for men to have sex with other men, you often find charges related to prostitution and sex work. Sometimes it was sex work, and sometimes it might not have been, but the legal code that wanted to discourage sex between men was more than happy to sexualize and criminalize what it could.
A properly run study says that laser therapy meant to "rejuvenate" a vagina doesn't actually do anything compared to sham. Which we are glad to see people doing the research on, since knowledge about vulvas and their parts is still extremely low, and that's assuming your cultural context doesn't actively discourage knowledge about these things.
The possibility that some chronic pain responses (when not indicated by actual injury) may be calmable by retraining the brain's opinion about danger, on the idea that if pain is the brain signaling that something is dangerous or needs attention, it may be possible to do work to convince the brain that it is over-reacting to something, or trying to remind us about something that's no longer a threat, or otherwise might be something that can be let go. But that really would have to be something suggested after all the other avenues of finding what might be causing genuine pain are exhausted, because we already have enough medical gatekeeping about who is allowed to be in pain and how hard a doctor looks for evidence of that pain.
Finding a lot of Roman material while excavating under a Norman church.
Rescued from poachers at two months, a gorilla that became eventually famous for photobombing a selfie in the same way that they humans that took care of her died at fourteen years, winners of picture contests of the natural world (or the interaction of the natural world and human-made things), the likelihood that earlier humans tried to raise cassowaries as domestic fowl, which was not ever going to go particularly well, a coyote that is demonstrating why the coyote alert sign has been deployed, the tulip speculation of the Netherlands was not nearly as large as moralists would have us believe (today I learned), a dinosaur fossil that suggests armor spikes fused to a rib cage, which is unlike any other dinosaur at all, and suggesting a change from "plant blindness," which is inaccurate and reinforces ablelism, to "plant awareness disparity," which is more accurate to describe how there is generally less interest in plants and humans are less likely to notice them in their environments when they are present.
AstraZeneca has filed for FDA approval to market and use a monoclonal antibody drug cocktail used as a preventative measure against the coronavirus, which could also be administered along with vaccinations to help boost immune response from people who might not get everything they could from the vaccinations. Merck believes they have an oral treatment that can hammer out the worst parts of a SARS-CoV-2 infection if given early enough, since it is meant to disrupt the virus's ability to reproduce itself. We can hope that the data from the company holds up in reality and with real people using it, since they ended the trial early because it was working so well. This will be, if it holds up, a really useful weapon in the arsenal for people to use if they get infected. That said, this pill should not replace getting a vaccination, if you're able to get one. The trials being run were specifically being run on the unvaccinated because it would not have been possible to get actionable results if it were tried on the vaccinated population as well. That said, it looks like Merck, the company that developed the drug, has a contract for it to be sold at about forty-six times what the generic version of it would cost. And with having their research and development costs covered as well. There are plenty of people in this world who think a pandemic is a perfect opportunity to profit.
If offered a vaccine booster, take it, as the opportunity to redirect the shot to someone that needs it as a first dose has already passed, which is, unfortunately, leading to the sobering reality that millions of vaccine doses go unused and destroyed, because not everyone who is eligible for one is getting their doses.
In those parts of the world that believe drugs with no indication they would be effective are somehow effective, the evidence they use to make those claims and the studies providing those evidence have serious faults that suggest incompetence or malice. The people investigating this are looking at the data provided, when they can get it, and noting various inconsistencies or things that are too perfect in the data to be random. When the study people aren't making things up out of whole cloth.
Beijing wants the 2022 Winter Olympic Games to go off without any issues regarding the virus, although they may not be able to make it true.
Based on the official policies he pursued, a commission has voted to recommend criminal charges against the Brazilian president in regard to the deaths from SARS-CoV-2 in the country. There may not be any charges filed, but the commission recommended such be done.
There may be a link between a particular gene, the herpes simplex virus, and the likelihood of developing Alzheimer's disease. And also the possibility that coronavirus might also do similar things in the brain from its own infection.
In technology, the data that we use to track our health is not necessarily our data, nor is it always accurate, nor are we necessarily going to be able to continue not tracking it. As with so many things, the likelihood that private data will become something public or aggregated and sold, or decisions will be made on data, which will be assumed to be accurate rather than not, because some techbro said so, well, enjoy the future where capitalism believes your digital self is more real than you are.
Creating an electroplated cosplay accessory that can stand up to the voltage and current put out by Tesla coils.
Google's parent company continues to fire AI ethics researchers, which is not a good look for a company that is doing lots of AI research.
The source code to video streaming site Twitch has been released, along with several other tools and technical data associated with the site. Along with creator payout reports. So, password changes, and also, most likely, keep a weather eye out for when the second part supposedly drops.
A developer of a tool that allowed people to use their Facebook accounts without using the infinite scroll of the News Feed was served with a cease-and-desist for the tool, permanently banned from using any Facebook service ever, and told they could not develop any more tools for any Facebook user ever, at least according to Facebook's ToS. This is overbroad, obviously, but you have to be able to fight Facebook and possibly lose to have a chance at winning, which most people don't have the assets for. And so, until someone challenges them, Facebook continues to assert things that it has no business asserting.
An artificial intelligence was trained upon the corpus of Beethoven's work, then fed the fragments of the unfinished Tenth Symphony and tasked with completing the work. And now, you can listen to the results of that training. [YouTube]
The Hanford nuclear testing, reactor, and waste disposal site in eastern Washington State is grappling with the legacy of things that do not decay in anything short of geologic time, and a government agency that's supposed to be keeping it all safe and is doing anything but, or so it seems.
Last for tonight, Medusa laments being a plaything of the Gods, even if there are a couple perks that go along with it.
And reasoning like an engineer when confronted with a novel problem or a black box. Which, coincidentally, was the name of a "guess where the stars are in this unknown box based on knowing the rules of how beams fired into it should behave" that I never was all that practiced at.
A playlist of two songs, constructed based on the responses to a survey about what styles, instrumentations, lengths, and so forth of music the respondents enjoyed and what they detested. This was in 1996, but the "Most wanted song" sounds pretty much like popular music of the 2020s, so clearly they were on to something about how replicating what most people have been taught to believe is musical, even if on closer look it's chaotic, still produces a general feeling of enjoyment. On the Most Unwanted Song, the seams are more obvious as it's intended to be wrong. (All the same, there are genuinely enjoyable parts of that piece, and I have to congratulate the musicians involved for doing exactly the thing that was written on the page without trying to make it better.) The lyrics are available for both songs if you would like to know what's being sung.
And finally, building an October holiday skeleton that is house sized, rather than large sized.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-02 07:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-02 02:56 pm (UTC)Or, you know, finding a reason or other method of getting someone's life to have meaning and success in it, instead of refusing to help them and then scolding them when they use substances to not have to experience what's been told is their fault and their decision to be in that state.