Moff cross ocean

Using their likeness will spark their ire.

Encroachment upon their domain will earn punishment beyond earthly tithe.

The consequences of their regard may be intangible and long-lasting.

Rarely, you may earn their approval, but it is not worth the risk.

You must ask their permission, which is rarely granted.

Once they have you, they will not let you go for a hundred years.

You must be clever and use trickery and wordplay to evade them.

The master of each domain has their own unique and fickle nature, and some are more forgiving than others.

It's good advice.

I don't even want to spoil it. Just take a thin strip of paper, make a Möbius strip (turn one end around once and tape the ends together), draw a line along it, right in the middle, then cut along that line. See what you get.

Then do the same again, but instead of drawing the line in the middle, divide the strip into 1/3 and 2/3. Then cut that. You may think "oh it will be about the same result" NO! Totally different!

Upon seeing the outcome I vaguely remembered that I'd read at some point that cutting a Möbius strip in half gives you another full-looping Möbius strip, which makes sense in hindsight. My prediction was that it would create two separate intersecting loops, which was actually what happened when cutting the halved one in half again!

The second iteration is not the exact same strip again: it makes three turns instead of the original's one turn, which still makes it one surface but adds a loop somewhere in the strip. This... sort of makes sense? You can think of a flat strip as having made zero turns, and then when you turn it into a circular strip you turn each end towards itself, making two turns, which cancel out. But, if you do this with a Möbius strip, it tries to unspool its two halves, which it can't fully do because the original three turns are... probably not doubled, but increased to some number? It's five, isn't it? Two for each end-to-end turn and one more for the twist, which has not doubled because the continuity of the strip is maintained. So, you end up with an intact strip with a loop and a twist.

Anyway, cutting that in half again does create two intersecting loops! The only thing that changed was adding a loop to the strip, so I hypothesize that if you make a circular strip with just a loop, not a Möbius strip, and cut that in half, that must create two interlocking circular strips. Otherwise you could cut a Möbius strip in half to make a longer one, indefinitely.

You could certainly cut a Möbius strip out of a Klein bottle. Simply pick two adjacent lines that go across the length of the bottle and make cuts there, and as long as those don't intersect the hole then you have a Möbius strip, just not one that's equal in width in all places. But if you pick two opposite lines across the length of the bottle, does it create two Möbius strips?

Conveniently, there's an image of this, and I suppose it does? You can flatten the large interior of the bottle so that it's equal in width to the neck, and then the twist is apparent in the place where it curves inwards. Cutting across this plane leaves them not interlinked, obviously, and I'm not sure there is a cut you can make that does while still creating a continuous strip.

I don't know! I haven't meditated on embedding things in higher dimensions lately; it would take me a while.

But then my husband and I got curious and decided to look up the history of wheelbarrows, and we both thought it was surprisingly interesting.

The very next day, we were visiting a thrift store with family and my sister spotted a toy wheelbarrow for her son, and my husband said, “Did you know that Jesus was older than wheelbarrows? They weren’t invented until around 100 CE.”

I've seen a lot of terrible analysis of this photo.

People are either shoving it through an AI detector, asking Grok, or they are peeping pixels with expertise they don't have.

AI detection websites are mostly scams. They often have the accuracy of a coin flip. Even lab-grade tools are only 70 to 80% accurate in controlled conditions. And yet people are trusting a free website with an ad for boner pills in the corner to tell them if something is authentic.

I have been doing high level photo manipulation for two decades. I'm as close to an expert as you will get on Tumblr dot com.

So let's properly peep at the pixels and do actual forensic analysis.

First, I think this is mostly a real photo. Probably taken at some other point in time.

And I don't think this is fully AI generated. I actually think it is a traditional composite. I think the hand and newspaper are separate assets that were blended. It's possible the hand was AI-generated and then composited. And I think they may have taken a real photo of someone holding a newspaper and replaced the hand.

The first oddity is the fingers.

Typically when you touch an object it creates a contact shadow. One finger has a contact shadow and the other does not.

It should probably look more like this.

The next sign of a composite is the edge of the finger.

There is a sign of a feathered edge.

This is a lazy compositing technique to help edges blend without making a super precise selection. If you look at all of the other edges in the photo, this is the only one that has a feathered edge. You can see how clean all the other edges are by the top arrow and how fuzzy the finger edge is by the bottom arrow.

If I were cutting out his other hand and taking the time to do it properly, I would clean up the edge to make sure it was consistent with everything else in the photo.

If I were in a hurry, I would just feather the edge and hope no one actually zooms in.

And then there is the edge of the newspaper.

This is called a matte line. The newspaper was most likely against a dark background when they cut it out, and they did not clean up the edge.

Again, it's lazy. Because Photoshop has a tool dedicated to fixing this exact issue.

In my expert opinion, I think they generated an AI hand, took a photo of someone holding a newspaper in similar lighting, and then manually blended them into an existing photo.

But I don't think this was 100% AI-generated. You typically don't see compositing errors in generated images. They probably couldn't get the AI to generate the newspaper without garbled text.

What's curious is that the pixel resolution is just barely bad enough that you cannot tell if the text is authentic. But it's not blurred or distorted. It is just low enough in resolution to give a sense of text without being legible. And I think that made people suspicious due to AI's reputation when text is involved.

But from what I can tell, the print size and letter spacing does seem to match.

So I don't think that is the clue people are making it out to be.

Last thing, image analysis like this is not 100% conclusive. I'm pretty sure there are shenanigans, but anyone who tells you with absolute confidence that an image is fake... is probably bullshitting or ignorant.

The missing contact shadow could be explained by the angle of the light filling it in.

The feathered edge could be motion blur.

The edge of the newspaper could be a sharpening artifact.

'Medicinal' does NOT mean 'good for you and safe to eat all the time'. A plant being 'medicinal' does NOT mean that eating it, without any idea of WHY and HOW it's considered medicinal, is a good idea. It is UNWISE to consume a plant that has a long history of use in a way that DOES NOT have a long history of use.

In addition to learning that a plant is edible, you need to learn how it is eaten, what part is eaten, when it's harvested, and how to harvest it sustainably and in a way that supports its continued existence (unless it's invasive). If people only eat the ripe berries as food, then don't eat unripe berries. Don't. Eat. Unripe. Berries. UNLESS! There's! precedent! For that plant!

Anyways, yes. Medicinal plants are medicines. They have drug interactions and side effects. You can overdose. Modern pharmaceuticals are a good thing because you know exactly how much of the active ingredient you are consuming, and there is a lot of information on the safety.

I honestly feel that the uses of medicinal plants are pretty narrow in a world where pharmaceutical drugs can be manufactured, because of all of these reasons

There is no hard boundary between "natural" and "unnatural," like, lots of medicines are the exact same compounds found in medicinal plants, except when it's manufactured you know exactly how much of the active ingredient you're ingesting.

And lots of those compounds are REALLY toxic above a certain dose because. well. They Are Drugs.

The ongoing "Jason Todd is a cop" debate has reminded me of a brilliant brief image essay by Joey deVilla. So here it is, images first and the full essay text below:

You'd want to be careful with their shit.

Not because it's bad. It's not bad. It's BIG. Bigger than you would think. Which is why you tripple check the measurements.

Why has somebody commented the Declaration of Independence here??

For context, my mom is the one who taught me to forage, and it was and is just part of life. She regularly added foraged foods to our everyday meals. I knew how to identify huckleberry before I learned the alphabet. Foraging was just another part of feeding ourselves, along with gardening, raising chickens, and going to the store. And the firmest rule was that you didn't eat a plant unless you were willing to bet your life on it being what you thought it was.

So to watch my coworker see a berry, say 'strawberry!' and then pick it and have it three quarters of the way to his mouth before I could point out that it was actually an unripe blackberry...

Well, it was a striking moment. Because while that particular mix up would not actually hurt you, the lack of paying attention it takes to mistake an unripe blackberry for a strawberry and the lack of caution it takes to put a plant that you've hardly looked at into your mouth- no wonder some people think bittersweet nightshade is a look alike to red huckleberry!

And it explains a lot about how secretive most people are about their foraging spots. If you don't care enough about your own health and well-being to actually look at the plant you're eating, how could I trust you to care for the health and well-being of the plants you want to forage and the ecosystems you want to forage from? I want my foraging spots to be better off for my interactions with them. I want to be able to go back to the same spots year after year and decade after decade and see the native plants thriving, the invasive species losing ground, and the biodiversity increasing.