Mothematician

Or you use a plastic/silicon spatula?? Or a silicon whisk?? go to literally any dollar store they have shitty plastic/silicon kitchen utensils you can scramble eggs with without scratching up your pans

I hate this site so much.

Intelligent alien species based on bugs but specifically those moths that don’t have mouths and only live for a week after they pupate. This species’ whole conscious life is actually in the larval phase; larvae are the ones considered people, larvae are the ones with conscious and complex brains who build society, and each instar of the larva is treated as a different phase of life. Larvae become emotionally and socially and cognitively mature without ever becoming sexually mature. When they pupate, they metamorphose into something different and strange and close to mindless, with no mouth and no digestive system, whose only instincts are to mate and then quickly die. Metamorphosis is treated, functionally, like a person’s death, and the imago phase is a kind of proto-afterlife of majestic flight and the continuation of the species. Birth and death inextricably intertwined. Sex is not something people do during their lives, it’s a thing that is done as an imago after you’ve passed on from your life but before you return to the soil in death. Resultant eggs are collected by family members to raise. I think this would be fun.

@derinthescarletpescatarian Have you seen this yet?

No, but I've been incubating a society similar to this since reading Sheri Tepper's Grass about a year ago.

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*