Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”
So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”
Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.
Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.
#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)
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it really is quite bad for your military to have an image of itself as a warrior class. what you really want is for your soldiers to think of themselves as boring professionals who will fill out a report form if someone gets a little too warrior ethos out there
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The Burger still gets made, even if you go Vegan. If you don’t buy it, it just winds up in the trash. If you want to do something meaningful about waste, you need legislation: It must become a crime to waste food in those ways.
If you care about Animal Cruelty in Factory Farms, you need to get legislation passed. It must become a crime to mistreat animals in those ways, and when malfeasances occurs, the onus of responsibility for those crimes must fall upon wealthy shoulders. That, also, requires legislation. It requires regulations, and regulators.
The largest source of Microplastics is wear and tear on automobile tires. It doesn’t matter what brand of shampoo you buy. It doesn’t matter which company you support with your dollar. The issue of Public Transit is too large-scale to be handled at anything less than the municipal level.
It’s not enough to just not participate in society
If you want the world to Change, you must leverage the mechanisms of political power.
hearing anything about the nolan odyssey is so funny. it's like "they cut the extremely important and infamous nobody scene" "the cyclops is a giant puppet that they put in an actual historical cave + gave circe animatronics for her pig transformation instead of cgi" "they dumped plastic skeletons in an environmentally protected location they were not supposed to be in" "they recreated ancient greek instruments in order to have an accurate score" "all of odysseus's agency is basically gone" "anne hathaway actually learned how to weave ancient looms" "the women in this movie are treated like shit" "they actually buried actors alive to get those underworld shots" "did you see what the fuck zendaya was fucking wearing holy shit you can't DO THAT, MA'AM" "what do you mean there was a legitimate epic the musical reference" "NOT A SINGLE FUCKING GREEK WAS CAST IN THIS MOVIE"
like did nolan have two guys standing at his side at all times whispering ideas in his ear and one told the truth and the other told lies and they didnt tell him which was which until they wrapped production cause
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just found out that accidentally in love by counting crows was literally made for shrek. they didnt just choose it. it didnt exist before. they asked counting crows to make a song for shrek 2 and thats how we got one of the best songs ever made. insane.
friendly reminder that "grace starves on the way to erid" is pure fanon. like, it's interesting fanon, but it's fanon. please tag your "grace starves on the way to erid au" as an au
To be fair, it's partially because the numbers don't add up to "yeah we can make it to Erid no problem," at least for me.
This is super long, and it's a lot of math, so I'm putting it under a readmore. tl;dr: if you choose to believe the character Ryland Grace when he says he has enough food to get to Erid plus a few months aftewards, that's totally valid, but you can also choose to believe Andy "Numbers Man" Weir's numbers, and if you do that you get 3.205-3.21 months of taumoeba shenanigans before Grace and Rocky get to Erid where you can fuck with Grace's nutritional intake quite a bit and still keep things on-timeline
Grace says he has enough food to get to Erid and then for a few months more on page 468, but he also gives us some hard numbers earlier in the book: he has 40 months of coma slurry (page 417), and 51 days of real food left the day of the taumoeba outbreak (page 434)(Grace has had like one serving of coma slurry at that point but his estimate of real food has decreased significantly which is why I'm using 51 days instead of his estimate from page 417 which is three months), meaning he's got 41.7 months of varying qualities of human chow left when he discovers the taumoeba outbreak. It also took him 35 (six weeks, page 455) to get to Rocky after the taumoeba leak, meaning he had a grand total of 40.5 months of food left on the ship by the time he found Rocky.
We can then head over to omnicalculator's space travel calculator and start plugging in numbers to get exactly how many months it'd take to get to 40 Eridani (look I did the math to calculate the distance from the edge of the Tau Ceti system to 40 Eridani, too, the difference is negligible). The Hail Mary weighs 100,000 kg without fuel (we don't need fuel for the calculation)(page 165), accelerates at 1.5 g (or about 15 m/s^2)(page 19), and it's 10 light years from Tau Ceti to 40 Eridani (9.99913031 light years from the edge of the system but it literally does not change the answer by any significant amount)(page 301). So it takes about 43.705-43.71 months to get from Tau Ceti to 40 Eridani (like I said, not much of a difference), and if you'll notice he has an absolute maximum of 43 months of food left if we're solely going from page 417's estimates, and a 40.5 months by the numbers estimate from when he finds Rocky and makes the estimate above on page 468, so that's it. Grace is on the taumoeba diet for 3 months before getting to Erid. Except it's not... quite that simple.
While we don't know the caloric value per kilogram of taumoeba or exactly what eating it does to the human body, the two named nutritional deficiencies, beriberi and scurvy (lack of vitamin b1 and c respectively), actually give us a good indicator of the timeline, whether Andy intended it as such or not.
According to this article on B1 deficiency, you have around four weeks after you stop intake of B1 before you contract beriberi, and while we don't know what type of beriberi he contracted, we know you have at most about a week before it's fatal. So, we can conclude that Grace switched to the all taumoeba diet at most a month before arriving on Erid, most likely later.
And this article on scurvy indicates you can develop it in 1-3 months, so assuming the coma slurry is formulated to store both vitamin c and b1 long term and it didn't break down (a feat on this own considering this article from NASA, and the irony is the article is about a mission testing the feasibility of producing b1 and c on demand in space) both the scurvy and beriberi were caused by a lack of vitamin b1 and c in the taumoeba, and would've developed after about a month of the taumoeba diet (possibly longer for the scurvy), which is an impressive turnaround on the Eridians' part for producing vitamin B1, even if you assume they have it somewhere in their ecology.
So, the absolute earliest he can go on the all taumoeba diet is 4 weeks before reaching Erid, and until then he has to subsist off of the coma slurry.
If you'll notice, purely by the numbers and eating only one type of food at a time, Grace runs out of human chow three months before reaching Erid.
So, we have a few narrative options here:
Grace was lying about how much food he had left so Rocky wouldn't worry
Andy Weir fudged the numbers, the quote from page 468 is accurate, and Grace didn't actually run out of human chow until after he'd docked on Erid's space elevator or possibly after he'd gotten down to the biodome
Grace miscalculated somewhere and either has way more food than he thought and was fine, or way less, and if he hadn't turned around and gotten the taumoeba idea from Rocky he wouldn't been In Trouble
Grace miscalculated on page 468 and ended up stretching the coma slurry by cutting it with taumoeba, this got him to or past the maximum time from Erid he could've possibly switched to the all taumoeba diet and survived but then he ran out of the slurry
And if someone goes for options one, three, or four (I'm an option four man myself) then we can infer that even though the taumoeba are giving him calories, he's getting 100% of those calories from microbes, and while I don't... think anyone's researched "can you shovel scoops of amoebas into your gullet and live" in a scientific capacity? I can't imagine that alien microbes are giving Grace enough macronutrients to avoid a calorie deficit, even alien microbes that eat the most energy filled thing in the book (or he gets like, protein poisoning or something depending on exactly how many proteins to carbs he's getting).
Like is Grace starving on the way to Erid fanon? Yeah, I did have to do a lot to prove that it's likely, and even then I would only put it at the tail end I've seen some people get the starvation going in like, year two somehow, but I'd argue that Grace not starving on the way to Erid is equally fanon, considering just how numbers-oriented Andy Weir's books can be and just how many numbers there are that say "oh he is not looking good"
This tiktok of Andy talking to Hank about literally stopping the print run of his book to correct the math of the pendulum which iirc only appears in the book once and it's in chapter 2 is why I trust Andy's numbers more than what Ryland Grace the Character has to say about them
It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.
Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.
So, again, do not, under any circumstance, use Sci-Hub. I mean, can you imagine a world where knowledge is free and easily accessible to everyone? Even, y'know, poor people?
Libgen also has many books online, including textbooks, searchable by name, author, and ISBN. Can you imagine textbook companies not getting their hard-earned income from poor college students? Here is the link just so you make sure that you never accidentally stumble across this horrible, unethical website.
Oh, and while we’re talking about books, if you’ve managed to stay clear from Libgen, definitely don’t go to zlibrary, where you can also find a lot of textbooks, but unfortunately they’re completely free.
Another inside tip from academia: Those papers in really expensive journals that are effectively inaccessible to anyone not in a university network? Depending on the discipline it’s very likely that same paper is on a “preprint” server somewhere, with no access restrictions.
Like if you want to read basically any physics, math, or CS paper, arXiv.org will have you covered, because everyone uploads their papers there before submitting to a journal (and generally updates it after peer review). I know all of my papers are on there. This is such common practice that journals have it baked into their licensing agreements that authors retain the right to upload their work to these places.
So the next time you get hit with that paywall, you may not even need sci-hub, just click the arxiv link on google scholar instead.
if for some reason none of this works, the old “send a email nicely asking for the paper to the author” is always a good trick. remember most scientists hate the commercialisation of scientific knowledge
Many authors of papers are on ResearchGate! You can ask for papers there, if they don’t just post a copy to download. If they’re associated with a college, you can usually find their email addresses in the department directory, also.
really tired of seeing the idea that women & girls are less likely to be diagnosed with autism because it "presents differently" so widely accepted even in progressive spaces
it is also widely accepted that women get raises less often because they don't ask as much as men. this is objectively not true.
it is also widely accepted that women are more talkative than men. this is objectively not true.
it is also widely accepted that women are taken less seriously when speaking because their speech patterns are associated with a "lack of confidence". this is objectively not true. [1][2][3]
every time we talk about gender discrimination, people look for an explanation that starts with women's behavior.
and every fucking time, actual research shows that across the board, women actually don't behave that differently from men.
women aren't diagnosed less often with autism due to "presenting differently". it's gendered medical neglect, and weaponized diagnoses disproportionately applied to women (e.g. BPD, HPD, bipolar, etc.)
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