Mothematician

blood being frequently described as having a "coppery smell" in fiction is kind of funny considering that there is a metallic component to blood and it's not copper

in fact if your blood smells or tastes like copper you probably have more urgent things to worry about than it being outside your body. it's probably better that it's not inside you anymore actually.

story where blood is described as smelling or tasting "coppery" and it's actually early foreshadowing that all the characters are suffering from heavy metal poisoning

I don't remember telepathic trees being part of the creation of Rome

Hell yeah

the replacement of websites with apps sounds so backwards when you actually describe it. like hmm you have to download an entire program onto your device each time you want access to a portal, where it takes up storage indefinitely. somebody should invent an app where you can "browse" any portal just by typing in its address... 🥴

Has anyone noticed that translating poetry is not easy

It's kind of like if you were in unrequited love with the crossword puzzle

i dont like how "trust-based" a lot of advanced math is. like, a lot of papers will at various points say "we did this calculation, and got this", (like, two steps in equation manipulation will be related in a very unclear way) and not show you the calculation. and i get it, typing up the calculation is annoying. but often, i will try to replicate the calculation, and will not be able to! and generally i assume this is because i am much worse at math than the author. but like. i guess i just have to take your word for it that the calculation works! this sucks! math isnt supposed to be like this! thats the whole point!

The worst part is when this happens *in a textbook*, i.e. the thing that is *supposed to be teaching you*. "The derivation has been left as an exercise for the reader" fuck you

yeah i mean the crazy thing about leaving it as an exercise for the reader without putting the answer in the back or something is like. if youre doing advanced math, theres a good chance an explicit derivation doesnt exist in public writing, literally anywhere.

papers should be published with a series of expandable sections so that you can skip proofs choose-your-own-adventure style. and if a result is cited you should be able to immediately view that result's proof by expanding a section. maybe if proof assistants become more commonplace this could be automated.

my intro linear algebra textbook did this and it was *so good*

Really cannot explain how absurdly charming I find the plot beat of 'demon possesses magician, gets really enthusiastic about the chance to be human and kind of scandalized by what a bad job its host was doing beforehand. Immediately pours out liquor cabinet, starts eating exclusively healthy, home-cooked meals, working out daily, and spending all its leisure time keeping up with relevant news and academic literature'.

an interesting thing about clothing in late medieval and early modern europe is that, while lower class people generally did wear brightly colored clothing instead of muddy brown clothes, there were very distinct differences in the color of clothing people of different classes wore. clothing was done with all natural dyes, of course, but they were either dyed locally with cheap and easily accessible ingredients, or they were dyed in holland, italy, the ottoman empire, or even further afield using a jealously guarded secret combination of difficult-to-access ingredients, including (crucially) better-quality fixatives. this means that not only did expensive imported fabrics maintain a dark, rich tone much longer than a locally dyed one, which would get a washed out look after a couple of years, but there were also certain colors that a working class farmer literally couldn’t afford to wear, and even though the difference between a cheap local lincoln green and an expensive imported popingay green might seem subtle to us people then seem to have been very sensitive to those differences. that’s also why the colors puritans tended to wear seem uncharacteristically bright to our modern eye—black was such a rich and expensive color that it would be inappropriate to wear to anything other than a portrait sitting, but the colors orange and kendall green were deeply humble in their origins

Is it… a sign of the times, perchance?.. 👀👀👀