I am Medusa @random2908 - Tumblr Blog

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I seem to have gained a ton of new followers, due to a physics post (!). So I guess I should put together a master-post of all my physics posts and maybe pin it. A couple things are listed in multiple categories. I’m sure I missed some posts, especially in the “physics news” category, but I think I got most of my big explanatory and philosophical posts. [NB: This is not primarily a physics blog, although I’m nearly always happy to talk about physics. This is an everything blog, but I just happen to be a physicist.]

physics news

black hole polarization

LIGO detection of gravitational waves

changing the definition of mass

atom laser announcement and list of related topics (short post)

what is fusion? and the 2022 NIF fusion energy result

debunking of classical pilot waves

Big Mysteries poll of physicists

physics explanations

entropy

entropy followup

entropy the short version

Bose-Einstein condensation

kitchen experiment! Rayleigh scattering to simulate daytime, sunset, and eclipses using milk and flashlights

states of matter

Emmy Noether’s law of symmetry (explanation not by me)

sources of elements (explanation not by me)

how different types of medical imaging work

quantum mechanics in sci-fi, coherence, and Schrodinger’s cat

atom laser

what is fusion? and the 2022 NIF fusion energy result

double pendulum (comment on another post)

equivalence principle

a darkness flashlight

philosophy of science

second quantization (is light REALLY a particle?)

quantum interpretation as religion

many worlds (flippant)

skepticism

quantum interpretation and superdeterminism

conflicting definitions of “weight”

nothing, my first love

cautionary tale about extraordinary results

Planck constant

luminiferous ether is back on the table!

equivalence principle

blackbody radition and second quantization (silly convo with my brother)

skepticism 2, and string theory

quantum mechanics isn't causal and that's ok

brief musing on energy as topography

compatibility between science and religion

brief discussion of the paradox of verifying precision measurement

the full Planck length rant

if you pick the wrong approach for the type of physics you're asking about, you get the wrong answer to even seemingly dumb-simple questions like "where are you"

Big Mysteries poll of physicists

social stuff

worst lab safety anecdote

random anecdote of benevolent sexism at work

the social poison of being a physicist

the tolls of getting a PhD

musings on science funding vis-a-vis the military-industrial complex

rant about how science and math ARE part of the liberal arts

tumblr search for the word “safety officer” on my blog to get mad science stories

overselling your work to get funding

artisanal science

#physics #physics masterpost

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batshit-auspol

Here's our most requested item: Bob Katter's same-sex marriage speech, in all its unhinged glory

Follow for more Batshit Moments in Australian politics!

deluxe-distrait

maxwellmcgrath

remember when mattel released a t-rex extroyer toy that vomited its own skeleton for no apparent reason

segamascott

wdym for no apparent reason it's because it's awesome

politijohn

Source

Happy Pride Month!

reasonsforhope

Holy shit!!!!!!! HUNGARY DID IT!!!!

-via the Los Angeles Blade, June 1, 2026

erinbowbooks

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mevil

butchfagminotaur

the sims will never not be one of the funniest games on the planet

molly-ren

hey what's up with the "!" in fandoms? i.e. "fat!" just curious thaxxx <3

I have asked this myself in the past and never gotten an answer.

Maybe today will be the day we are both finally enlightened.

molly-ren

woodsgotweird said: man i just jumped on the bandwagon because i am a sheep. i have no idea where it came from and i ask myself this question all the time

Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?

stevita

I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.

The world may never know…

molly-ren

Maybe it’s something mathematical?

michaelblume

I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.

hosekisama

It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.

(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)

nentuaby

“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).

It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.

So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.

raincityruckus

100% born of bang paths. fandom has be floating around on the internet for six seconds longer than there has been an internet so early users just used the jargon associated with the medium and since it’s a handy shorthand, we keep it.

sassafrassarah

Absolutely from the bang paths–saw people using them in early online fandom back in 1993 for referring to things.

taraljc

I had been doing it for a very, very long time but never actually knew the actual name for it. This is exciting! I like learning things.

realmarysue

I am very glad this has been going around so folks learn the Lore, but also let’s encourage it because then we get to say “bang paths” more often.

pondwitch

cool new tumblr trend : “goodposting”

its when you share fun interesting things in a calm and friendly way

powerburial

goodposting example: hey guys, just fucked a bug

pondwitch

no!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

fascinationstreetmp3

deceptive-owls

me watching mollholland drive last night

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boomer-mythology-destroyer

sigmaleph

what does it mean to say 'trans women are the same sex as cis women'.

i can understand someone saying biological sex isn't real. I disagree, but I can understand it. what does it mean to say that sex is real, not as in 'having sex'* but as in as above saying a person 'is' a sex, and also that all trans women and all cis women belong to the same one. is there only one sex, the human sex.

i suspect people who say this do not have a coherent model for what it means for a human being to be a particular sex and are just saying things that sound nice about trans women. please prove me wrong. i also like saying nice things about trans women but i prefer them to be true and meaningful.

just-a-random-nerd

Sex is in practice defined by phenotypic expressions. With sufficient estrogen, broadly a given, trans women match much closer with the Woman phenotype than the Man one. One of the points of "trans women are the same sex as cis women" as a slogan is "hormone replacement therapy works and creates a range of changes throughout the body and thus treating these two types of women the same in eg medicine is actually reasonable and sensible" Admittedly it also has political signalling usages that you can agree or disagree with separately.

sigmaleph

With sufficient estrogen, broadly a given, trans women match much closer with the Woman phenotype than the Man one

this is not how estrogen works. quite a few of the effects of having gone through puberty on testosterone will not reverse themselves just because you threw enough estrogen at the problem, and the changes that do happen vary between trans women.

a claim that 'trans women are phenotypically much closer to cis women than cis men' can only be true if you are smuggling a lot more assumptions in there than just 'was on estrogen long enough', and as a trans woman for whom that is not true, i object to trans women positivity posts with the tiny asterisk of "*not including you or anyone who looks too much like you in the category of trans woman"

also. trans women should not be treated the same as cis women or cis men by medicine. we should be treated as appropriate to the amount of medical transition we've undergone. i want my doctors aware of my estrogen levels, and also that i can't get pregnant and I have a prostate.

she-ramen

the she-ra reboot makes this video relevant again which means we are in the best timeline

she-ramen

the kids these days dont know this masterpiece…they will learn

did-you-know

The oldest living tree ever found was a pine named “Prometheus.” It had been alive since before the Egyptian pyramids were built. Some guy cut it down in 1964. Source

aclockworknick

he was actually a forestry graduate student who was doing research on bristlecone pines (Pinus langaevea) and got his increment borer stuck in the tree. this tool costs almost $800, so he asked the forest service if he could cut down the tree to recover the tool. after cutting it down, it became apparent that the tree was actually the oldest living organism. ever. (around 8,000 years old). so, not just some asshole. the guy feels extremely guilty and has even broken down in tears during an interview about the accident

wellshitcaitlin

OH MY GOD SO LET ME TELL YOU A STORY

So after the grad student cut down the tree and discovered it was the oldest tree in the world he quit studying forestry and went to study salt flats (can’t cut down the oldest trees in the world on salt flats no siree none of that happening) and he was being interviewed about his research, but in the middle of the interview the reporter just stops and says “wait aren’t the guy that…”

And he just takes off running. Literally. Turns around and runs across the salt flats away from the interview and I feel so bad for him but I can’t help but start crying I’m laughing so hard about it imagine a guy high tailing it across salt flats away from a dude with a recorder

thoughtsofadame

its so different to know it was an accident and that NO ONE was aware until after. its not like this was one ignorant guy cutting down a fucking relic.

cbk1000

As a society, we need to go back to understanding that strangers on the internet are, you know, strangers. I feel lately that I'm seeing a rise in 'An author I love blocked me because they took my comment the wrong way' posts on the ao3 subreddit, and then the comment is them calling the author a fucking bitch or something like that.

Don't do this. Tone doesn't translate well in text, and if you don't have a rapport with that author, they are not going to interpret, 'You're a fucking bitch' as, 'Author I hate you for being so talented and making me feel so keenly.' They're going to interpret it as you being an asshole. You can shit talk with your friends because you have an established relationship with them and can distinguish between playful banter and genuine anger. You do not have this with a stranger, no matter how much you like their fics. You will have a much more pleasant time in fandom and not get cockblocked from interacting with your favorite writers if you remember this.

derinthescarletpescatarian

#I don't often see comments like these when I'm reading a fic but there have been a few that made me raise an eyebrow#I don't know if I would block over someone calling me a bitch on a fic I wrote but I'd probs try to gently tell them it's not right#coz honestly I feel like this is an issue with younger age groups who are new to reading fics and might not understand fandom culture#or at least I hope it's younger people who simply don't know better 😬#otherwise... yikes

This isn't some esoteric niche aspect of fandom culture, strangers at the potluck also do not like being called a fucking bitch.

theothin

I think the disconnect comes from the fact that people have a much easier time understanding, on an emotional level, that strangers at the potluck are strangers.

With someone you're meeting at a potluck, you can get a pretty good estimate of how well the two of you know each other based on how much time you've spent in their presence. But with one-way communication online, that metric can get thrown off completely, letting people feel emotionally close to people who don't know them at all. That's where all the issues with parasociality come from - people picking up on things that feel like signals of emotional closeness, and not knowing how to assess and respond to situations where they don't actually signify that.

cbk1000

I agree, and also, I would add that I think readers, especially young readers, sometimes take their cue from other comments without taking into consideration that they do not know what the author's relationship is with other readers. It isn't just strangers in our comment sections; you might be looking at an exchange between a writer and someone who is a good personal friend of theirs. The communication between them is going to be much more familiar. That doesn't mean you should imitate their tone. If a friend and I are playfully shit talking one another in public, that doesn't mean a rando should assume it's all right to come up to me and use the same language. The same concept applies here. Do not assume someone speaking familiarly to an author is also a complete stranger to them and that you can safely follow their example without offending or upsetting the author.

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strictlyquadrilateral

i used to hear a lot of "you're not really a man, you just hate how women are treated" directed at trans men, and lately i've been hearing a lot of "if you don't like how women are treated, you're probably not actually a woman" directed at women, and i've gotta say i'm not a fan of either of these.

ymutate

Filippo Palizzi (Italian painter 1818–1899)

Excavations in Pompeii, 1870

Oil on Canvas

119.5 × 86 cm.

Private Collection

rabid-transcendentalist

@anthropologist-on-the-loose get peer-reviewed because your shared experience with the subject of the painting really heightened the emotional impact of this artwork for me ( An impact which was already high tbh. The idea that Pompeii was built by generations, buried by generations, uncovered by generations. What if I just started screaming and never stopped. )

anthropologist-on-the-loose

"Built by generations, buried by generations, uncovered by generations" is ruining me, thanks

anthropologist-on-the-loose

But it was buried by generations! Yes, it was buried in a volcanic eruption, but it was also figuratively buried. Over the centuries the location of Pompeii was lost, and it was found again by accident during construction projects. The ruins were not conclusively identified as the city of Pompeii until the 18th century (more than a millennia and a half after the eruption!) and it has been excavated ever since. People have been digging there since before the formation of the United States.

It's truly an incredible, one-of-a-kind site.

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