Marred Observations

Say, if you find yourself thinking "I can't have an eating disorder because I'm too fat" you might need to have a little dude in a smoking jacket with a pipe and immaculately groomed moustache around to point out "But that's PRECISELY what someone with an eating disorder would say!"

A Santa Fe Railroad train stopping for coal and water at Laguna, New Mexico.

back then i made a bunch of these but by now i lost the pic and dont know how to find the original post anymore

so anyway here is the diagram for anyone else who is interested!!

this requires pretty big carboard pieces, if you have a really big box or something you can make it from one piece, but if you don't, you can also just make each of the pieces individually and then tape them together

and then in the end you put it together like this!!

and then when you make a bunch you can put them all next to each other and stack your books like crazy

Kids: Oh so you’re going to make it illegal for gambling to be advertised to kids and make stricter guidelines on what data the companies can take? You are going to focus on how the algorithms make it addictive for social media and therefore make it difficult to stop using it?

If you're going to take away kids' smartphones, then give them back the streets.

#the fact that children are using social media so much that it's harming them is a sign of a larger issue (👈 This!!!)

#namely how lonely and disconnected everyone is

#it's even harder if you can't transport yourself (👈Speaking as a motorized wheelchair user who doesn't drive, and lives in a city with hardly any pedestrian infrastructure: "Yeah, I know.")

Evan Edinger, an American ex-pat who's been living in Britain for the last 13 years, recently made a ~30 minute video about trying to use public transport in and around the New Jersey suburb where he grew up. He (as an able-bodied, relatively fit, young man) could make it work, even if a trip that would have taken an hour, tops, if he'd gone in his own car, took an entire day -- most of that waiting around for the next bus to arrive.

I watched his impromptu documentary, and saw something that would have been impossible for me... Because the buses tended to drop him off on the side of the road where there were no sidewalks, and no curb cuts. He was able to step off the curb, jaywalk, and jog across the street through oncoming traffic, and step up onto the curb on the other side of the street. I, as a wheelchair user, would not be able to do any of that -- nor would a kid.

He did make the point that simply making the effort to use the bus system brightened his mood because it relieved the social isolation of riding alone in a private bubble of a car: getting a chance to say "Hello," and "thank you" to the bus driver, say "hi" to fellow passengers, and simply be sitting next to them in the same space.

I would never pay money for a redbox. if you ask politely and are very very persistent (i.e. annoying) they will let you take it away

here's my dad and i taking it away

luckily there are no shortage of freaks like us who will just take them away on our own volition. we did it all "by the book", too: we set up cones and caution tape, disconnected electricity properly, used an angle grinder to grind down the bolts in the concrete so nobody would trip on them, then cleaned everything up afterward and sealed off the electrical panel so the store would know everything is safe and tidy. though they were hesitant when we were first contacting them, they were honestly very relieved and grateful when we finally took it away, especially once they saw that we "knew what we were doing" (we don't) and look like we've "done this before" (we haven't).

the fun part: the reason why this redbox, in particular, was completely full and unraided is because the computer hardware inside had failed some months before the bankruptcy, and a failing company sure as hell wasn't gonna send a tech out to our podunk dipshit city to fix it, so it was impossible to rent movies or take any discs out. plus, for who knows how long, people were returning old redbox discs to this machine and not taking any out, leading to a much higher variety of movies than your average redbox.

there is a thriving community of redbox hackers and modders out there, as well, creating open-source software for repurposing the machines and not letting their very interesting and robust disc-management hardware go to waste. this one belongs to my brother (who was very annoying persistent and did all the legwork of contacting managers and securing permission) who is a programmer by trade and will be hacking it into a family-access movie library, with whatever discs we want. i mean the machine is completely weatherproof and has a built-in AC unit, it would be such a waste to not try to turn it into something cool.

if we get another one, i'm gonna try to mod it into some sort of art or zine vending machine. the disc boxes are just the right size for small print art or stickers. would make a great "little free library" too.

"No, I mean-"

Oh, maybe the woman who had to pee in a public park that only had pay toilets, so she tried to hide behind the bushes but got caught? Public urination is a sex crime.

"What? No, I mean-"

Oh, maybe you mean the homeless guy who had to strip down to get his clothes in the laundromat to clean them for the first time in weeks? He tried being subtle, but someone called the cops on him, and now he's on the sex offender registry for public nudity.

"Rapists and pedophiles! Kill rapists and pedophiles!"

Oh, like the trans woman who got called a pedophile groomer for helping a trans kid escape her abusive parents?

Or maybe the black man who got labeled a rapist because he came on to another man's wife, and he decided to get back at him by charging him with rape?

How about the 17 year olds who were fooling around, fully consensually, in one of their bedrooms? That's still technically underage sex and thus rape of a minor.

Oh, or maybe you're talking about the doctor who performed genital reconstructive surgery in a state that just voted to get that classified as rape?

People will do everything they can to get you convinced rape and pedophilia are the worst crimes possible, then accuse whoever they like the least of being either a rapist, a pedophile, or both, counting on you turning on them just for being accused of the crime.

"Oh, so you're saying you don't want to kill a serial rapist?"

That's exactly what I'm goddamn saying.

Once we decide a group is okay to kill, the government will do everything they can to convince you that their political enemies are either part of that group, or just as bad as that group, to get you to kill their enemies for them.

The only way out is to accept every life as worth saving.

EDIT: If you're going to go on this post to say that no, you think you really should be allowed to kill people you decide are rapists and/or pedophiles, I'm going to block you. I have already been blocking you, because it's clear that you aren't willing to engage with what I'm saying.

Also, if someone says something like that we'd be better off with rapists being dead BUT that they won't let that opinion shape their stance on public policy, and you reply to that person to accuse them of wanting to murder people, I'm also going to block you, because what the fuck that's a completely different sentence.

EDIT 2: Since so many people seem to fail basic reading comprehension, let's state it again, in different words:

1. Killing people is bad.

2. Killing someone can never be undone by any means we have.

3. If the government can kill people, they will want to kill their political opposition and other undesirables (WHICH CAN INCLUDE YOU PERSONALLY AND ANY IF NOT ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY).

4. If there is a class of people OF ANY TYPE who the government can LEGALLY KILL, they now just need to convince you their enemies count as that class (ever wondered why there's so much emphasis on claiming gay people are pedophiles? Now you know!)

5. If there is a class of people OF ANY TYPE that the public can LEGALLY KILL, murderers just need to convince people that their victims counted as that class (I murdered him because he's a rapist. Anyway now his job is free promote me into that position plz.)

6. As pointed out in the notes (thank you everyone pointing this out!), if the penalty for a crime is death, people are much more willing to silence witnesses to that crime (for example, murdering their rape victims), which is EVEN WORSE than just committing the initial crime.

Younger folk are getting really good at spotting AI slop, to the consternation of marketing execs.

The good news is that if it persists and Gen Z and Gen Alpha continue to scoff at the generated stuff, then marketing departments aiming at them will just have to give up on using it because they won't be able to figure out how to fool their targets with it.

The bad news is that this won't apply to scams and campaigns aimed at older people, so once again we're going to have a situation where the kids will be the ones lunging across the coffee table to stop Mom from giving her financial info to that really obvious fake scam mom oh my god do NOT buy that it isn't even a real thing.

This is part of why gender, like, persists as a concept.

A lot of people (particularly people who don't realize they're trans, and also TERFs) think that most people (especially women) HATE their genders and HATE their experience with gender.

That's really far from true. Most women like being women (cis or trans). They hate sexism for sure (unless they're a tradwife or antifeminist and don't believe it exists ig), they may have suffered tremendously due to sexism, but like. They generally do like being women.

Similarly, most men, like. Generally like being men and enjoy that they are men and enjoy being a man.

Three months later she told me she was trans, and three days ago, she told me she's now out as trans femme everywhere except at work <3

Think about it. It actually might change your life

If you are absolutely miserable being a man, you can just...stop being a man. Or realize you weren't ever actually one in the first place

A lot of trans people are absolutely SUFFOCATING under how much they hate being/"being" their assigned gender

So, reason for hope:

If "being a man" or "being a woman" is something you hate, or makes you feel miserable, or makes you hate yourself, or makes you feel like you're suffocating under the weight of it, you can literally just nope out of that

(This also absolutely applies if you read that paragraph and went "Okay I don't like it but it's not THAT bad." That's a level of feeling a lot of trans people experience but it is in no way necessary to be trans, and also the impulse to minimize things can be so strong)

Also reblogging to add that I'm so busy being nonbinary that I forgot to actually specify that this includes nonbinary people/identities and agender people, obviously. Whoops.

I added this to the original post an hour later but it didn't get included in all the versions going around:

You can say “Actually I’m a man” or “Actually I’m a woman.” You can say “Actually I’m neither of those.” You can say “Actually I’m both of those and more.” You can say “Actually I don’t have a gender.” You can say “Actually I’m some other gender entirely.” You can say “Actually fuck off with this entire concept of gender and get it away from me please.” You can say whatever feels most right.

If you don't publish the experiments that didn't yield interesting results, people are going to waste time repeating them because when they look in the database and see nothing published on them, they're going to assume the experiment hasn't been done???

And then my professor told me that scientists just "assume that if the experiment would be relatively easy to set up, but there's nothing published on it, that means someone has already done it with no significant results." WHAT? That means we could be assuming that important experiments have been done just because they seem to be too easy???

Not to mention that this also encourages people to fudge results towards significance for career advancement because no one wants to spend YEARS on a project they don't get any credit for.

The most dangerous part of this sort of publication, though, isn't academic dishonesty and exaggeration (which is ferretted out by other scientists after a few years, who tend to keep an eye on each other and know all the tricks) or missing something in the unpublished data (which is always going to happen). It's the opposite -- accidentally inventing trends that don't really exist.

In science, there is always the possibility that your result is random chance. I could give ten tomato plants fertiliser A and ten fertiliser B and mix them all up and it's possible that all ten fertiliser A plants will do great and all ten fertiliser B plants will die by completely random chance, even if fertiliser B is better, or even if both fertilisers are exactly the same. Most non-medical sciences have a confidence interval floor of p=.05 -- that is, the chance that your result was just coincidence has to be one in twenty (5%), or lower. (In applied medicine they're usually stricter).

So, as an example, let's say that 40 people do experiments that involve MRIs. One person might be checking the effect of sugar on the pleasure centres of the brain, one might be looking at some new medication, one might be pinpointing how imagining stuff translates into brain activity; it doesn't matter. Beforehand they do some baseline tests, and one of them finds, completely unexpectedly, a major difference int he baseline brain activity of their male and female subjects (p=.025)! P=.025 is pretty damn confident! They have to publish that, of course they do! So they do!

Running forty experiments, you expect this result if there is no difference, with a confidence interval like that. In context, this result means absolutely nothing. There's no difference. But the other 39 people aren't going to publish papers about a difference they didn't find while looking for something else, are they? They might mention having done preliminary tests on their subjects in the unrelated paper they do publish, and leave it at that. So what the scientific community sees is a paper finding a difference, and no papers contesting it.

Now, what you're supposed to do in a situation like this, is consider this preliminary and run another experiment. But this lab is studying something else with the brain. They threw this paper out because it's an interesting thing they found, it's not their focus. It's not anyone's focus. And a few years later, another lab does the same thing. Until you end up with a handful of pretty solid-looking papers about this difference between male and female brains, and nothing contesting it.

"Oh, but surely someone will eventually run the experiment properly and -- " and what, write one single opposing paper? Maybe someone will, if for some reason there turns out to be enough attention tot he topic to make it worth it. Maybe a few people will. Maybe someone will write a meta-analysis, comparing all the papers on the topic and diving into a few that weren't on the topic to try to find what the standard results are, trying to find the truth. It's unrewarding work, but people do it. In the meantime, ten years of popular science books have been written casually citing the "fact" that male and female brains think differently and it's been proven with MRI, and second and third generation tests have been built on this utterly failing premise to say things like "MRIs show that women are better at social stuff and men are better at physical stuff because [horrible misreading of the data from some such paper]" and "trans women's brains behave like female brains and not male brains in an MRI" (yes, it's still bullshit even if it's used in support of something good instead of something bad; bullshit science is bullshit science on both sides of the fence). And while the MRI stuff is being debunked, is the stuff about diet that help autistic kids being debunked? Or the differences in metagenomic analyses of the microbial life in different parts of the world? Or the effect of boats on dolphin populations, or whether the colour blue is calming for infants, or what types of music different fish can distinguish, or data on lion pride social structures, or whether or not almonds help with high blood pressure?

Let’s say you have three therapies/treatments (Tx) for, say, dementia. Something objectively awful for both patient and caregiver. Something time-sensitive, where effective, timely Tx can have an enormous effect on quality of life. So you, a researcher who cares deeply about this cause (why else would you have spent a decade of your life reading and talking and writing about it 12 hours a day, 360 days a year), test Tx A. A sister lab tests Tx B, and a third lab tests Tx C.

You find that Tx A doesn’t have a significant treatment effect. Tx B and Tx C, on the other hand, do have a significant effect.

Here’s where the problem comes in: you, because your treatment didn’t work, will almost certainly not be able to publish. What you have is a “negative result.” It’s interesting. It’s extremely interesting. Other researchers and clinicians absolutely should know that Tx A doesn’t work for the circumstances/population you tested.

Except, because you got a negative result, nobody will ever know.

What this means in terms of outcomes is that (1) people keep doing Tx A for dementia because there’s no contrary evidence; (2) you as a researcher have nothing to show for your time/grant money (which threatens your “publish or perish” career / any future funding); and therefore (3) researchers, not being willing to gamble their careers, tend to reach for the lowest hanging fruit lest they end up like you, with nothing to publish for their efforts, or (4) other labs will waste their time doing the same study of Tx A and getting the same results you got, not knowing it’s strengthening the case against Tx A and not being able to publish their findings, either.

(This is not hypothetical, btw, my own research was tanked by taking on a topic that had negative results too often, too early in my career.)

You also tend to see fewer repeat studies because everyone wants to be cited as groundbreaking, but repeat studies are where the strength of science comes from.

(Well, I was going to include Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results but apparently they discontinued it in 2022. :/ )

(Again, was going to include the All Results Journal but they have also stopped publishing since I left academia, which is a shame: http://arjournals.com/)

Because the sort of apparent difference we’re talking about is a random chance result, it will happen sometimes no matter how you divide up your participants and compare them. The choice of comparison determines the nature of the false positive result - so always choosing to group and divide participants by gender will result in more false positive gender differences. This is an example of how pre-existing biases can affect scientific results without anyone fudging the actual numbers.