Radical

and this is a tutorial on how to elevate your own plating, since they used store-bought sushi (very much not $300 a plate), so take your own notes in order to fancy-up your own meals.

“Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman told the crowd at Saturday’s Women’s March in downtown Los Angeles that she experienced what she calls “sexual terrorism” as a 13-year-old after the release of the film The Professional.

Portman described her pride and excitement in releasing the film, only to encounter sexually explicit messages both directed toward her and made about her.

”I excitedly opened my first fan mail to read a rape fantasy that a man had written me,” she recalled. “A countdown was started on my local radio show to my 18th birthday, euphemistically the date that I would be legal to sleep with. Movie reviewers talked about my budding breasts in reviews.”

The experience, she said, changed the way she expressed herself publicly, in order to limit the ways she could be objectified by others.

”I understood very quickly, even as a 13-year-old, that if I were to express myself sexually, I would feel unsafe,” she said. “And that men would feel entitled to discuss and objectify my body to my great discomfort. So I quickly adjusted my behavior. I rejected any role that even had a kissing scene and talked about that choice deliberately in interviews. I emphasized how bookish I was and how serious I was. And I cultivated an elegant way of dressing. I built a reputation for basically being prudish, conservative, nerdy, serious, in an attempt to feel that my body was safe and that my voice would be listened to.”

if you are in an SUV style vehicle or newer model car you may be able to find the automatic trunk release wire, pull on it, it will pop the trunk

For a start, of course a lot of science sounds dumb.  Science is all in the slogging through the minutiae, the failures, the tedious process of filling in the blank spaces on the map because it ain’t ’t glamorous, but if someone doesn’t do it, no one gets to know for sure what’s there.

Someone’s gotta spend their career measuring fly genitalia under a microscope. Frankly, I’m grateful to the person who is tackling that tedium, because if they didn’t, I might have to, and I don’t wanna.

But let’s talk about why we should care about this particular science and spend money on it. (And I’ll even answer without even glancing at the article.)

Off the top of my head?

-advances in robotics

-advances in miniature robotics

-advances in flight technology

-advantages in simulating and understanding the mechanics and programming of small intelligences

-ability to grow crops in places uninhabitable by insects (space? cold/hot? places where honeybees are non-native and detrimental to the ecosystem?)

-ability to improve productivity density of crops and feed more people

-less strain on bees, who do poorly when forced to pollinate monocultures of low nutrition plants

-ability to run tightly controlled experiments on pollination, on the effects of bees on plant physiology, on ecosystem dynamics, etc

-fucking robot bees, my friend

-hahaha think how confused those flowers must be

Also worth keeping in mind? People love, love, love framing science in condescending and silly sounding terms as an excuse to cut funding to vital programs. *Especially* if it’s also associated with something (gasp) ‘inappropriate’, like sex or ladyparts. This is why research for a lot of women’s issues, lgbtq+ issues, minorities’ issues, and vulnerable groups in general’s issues tends to lag so far behind the times. This is why some groups are pushing so hard to cut funding for climate change research these days.

Anything that’s acquired governmental funding has been through and intensely competitive, months-to-years long screening by EXPERTS IN THE FIELD who have a very good idea what research is likely to be most beneficial to that field and fill a needed gap.

Trust me.  The paperwork haunts my nightmares.

So, we had a joke in my lab: “Nice work, college boy.” It was the phrase for any project that you could spend years and years working on and end up with results that could be summed up on a single, pretty slide with an apparently obvious graph. The phrase was taken from something a grower said at a talk my advisor gave as a graduate student: “So you proved that plants grow better when they’re watered? Nice work, college boy.”

But like, the thing is? There’s always more details than that. And a lot of times it’s important that somebody questions our assumptions. 

A labmate of mine doing very similar research demonstrated that our assumptions about the effect of water stress on plant fitness have been wrong for years because *nobody had thought to separate out the different WAYS a plant can be water stressed.* (Continuously, in bursts, etc.). And it turns out these ways have *drastically different effects* with drastically different measures required for response to them to keep from losing lots of money and resources in agriculture.

Nice work, college boy. :p

Point the second: surprise! Anna Haldewang is an industrial design student.  She developed this in her product design class.  And, as far as I can tell, she has had no particular funding at all for this project, much less billions of dollars. 

‘grats, Anna, you FUCKING ROCK.

Evidence-based statements

Publicly-funded science

Critical examination of the media

Affection and investment for the natural world

And this is something I’ve been explaining for years.

And next thing you know it’s 2017 and everyone is surprised that the CDC has been told not to use the words “vulnerable” or “evidence-based” when writing their budgets. And the people running the world are able to deny the effects of climate change while the waters rise. This is how you get hurricanes while people tell you there aren’t any hurricanes. And how conspiracy theories are more attractive than the truth.

We got here on purpose because we wanted to be here. Because cynicism seemed cooler than wonder. Because of course the world is broken so why bother?

which is a SIGNIFICANT part of the fishing industry down there and how some folks literally make their living. it also ties into ecology and conservation since you don’t want to overfish shrimp populations that arent going able to bounce back from it. you also dont want to start resorting to fishing methods that will do more harm to to the environment to try to get bigger hauls to hit basic demand if theres nothing there to catch.

my own research was mostly done out of pocket w a few hundred dollars grant despite the fact that it involved potentially an entirely new mode of sensory input as of yet undiscovered by science that had LOADS of potential applications in biology and robotics. but boil it down to “put a scorpion in a maze in the dark to see if it bumps into walls” on paper and people just kinda roll your eyes at you. hell, i even built my own lab apparatuses and paid for the materials with money from my food budget. (bulk dry spaghetti saved my life)

anytime you see a “lol this science was a waste of money” it’s almost always blatant propaganda to encourage the cutting back of research and the justification of budget cuts. dig a little deeper into “dumb studies” and there’s usually some very nifty applications or hypotheses being tested that have real world applications concerning problems that exist RIGHT NOW.