Place for my thoughts.

✨JEALOUS SOKKA ✨JEALOUS SOKKA ✨JEALOUS SOKKA✨

To be clear, Toph has ZERO interest in Tagah… but the vibrations coming from Sokka are too much fun to stop. Do you think Sokka knows? 😂

I’m back babes!

@post-brahminism check it

Truncated text of tweet from MrPitBull, Mar 11, 2026:

She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.

Yale University, 1969.

Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program.

Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"

The faculty answered firmly: No.

Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit.

Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them.

So she started looking.

She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.

There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.

The professors had been wrong.

But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing.

Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams.

But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.

It wasn't random. It was systematic.

Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.

Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries.

Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.

She needed a name for what she was documenting.

In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870.

In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect.

The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.

Her dissertation became a lifelong mission.

For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.

Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating.

Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.

Eventually, the evidence became undeniable.

Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:

Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.

Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize.

Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.

And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.

Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.

There are a number of tells, but this is an excellent example to talk about em-dashes, which people often either take as permanent AI tells or run the other way and say "humans use em-dashes and that's why AI does, too! they're not tells!" Both are kind of right and both are kind of wrong.

What you'll see if you look closely at this text is that it ONLY uses em-dashes. Every time it needs to put in some kind of break or set off some text, it goes for the em-dash. There are no phrases in parentheses. There are commas, but only in places where the absolute rule is to use a comma (like in a series, for instance). There is one colon, again placed where the absolute rule is to use at (at the top of a list). Whenever there's an option, where a human writer would be actively making a choice about what punctuation to use, the AI defaults to an em-dash.

On top of that, look at the content. The AI bot people are obsessed with feminism, ironically. I suspect it's because very basic feminist narratives about women pushing back against barriers or doing something heroic are popular and gets shared widely. So, first of all, you should be on your guard when you see a "what this woman did CHANGED HISTORY!" kind of piece. (I wonder if the twitter/tumblr trend of BUCKLE UP history posts has affected the AI ...) And then you should check out the specific claims.

She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.

I can't find this anywhere else. The paper "The Matthew Matilda Effect in Science" doesn't talk about photos! The Wikipedia page doesn't talk about photos! This Smithsonian article doesn't talk about photos! Her piece on her career in Writing and Revising the Disciplines (2002) (good read) DOES mention photos, in that she got the Mount Holyoke archivist to send her a few from the 1880s showing women doing scientific work as a nice illustration that "epitomized" what she was already aware of.

Rossiter started with textual primary sources that documented women as named individuals contributing to scientific discoveries. The idea of her being confused by photos is a hallucination.

Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.

There's definitely something to be said about the framing of this bit as shocking!!! but since I'm talking about facts and sources, it's clear to me that the AI recognized the botany-Wellesley connection from the paper but could not parse that the reference was to a female botanist who taught at Wellesley. There is also nothing in the paper about Vermont geologists, so I have no idea where the AI got that; I would suspect it's another hallucination attempting to create a pattern from the first reference.

But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing. Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams. But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.

Again, back to the mysterious photographs. But the rest of this text is an issue as well: what Rossiter describes in the paper is not a complete absence of these women in any official documentation, but that these women were amply documented and known to be working within the scientific community and yet did not receive public credit or awards. It's not a complete smothering out, but a sort of complacent back-burnering, which is too nuanced for the AI to be able to handle when told to "write a post about the Matilda effect that will get engagement on social media". She didn't prove that discoveries attributed to male authorship actually had women involved and only she knew their names: she collected many stories that people already knew of overlooked/underplayed female scientists and put them together to say, "This is a pattern and we should have a name for it." Some of her examples were even recent enough (1970s-80s) that she was able to point to a feminist backlash.

And again ironically, the AI itself engages in the Matilda Effect by presenting this whole thing as utter silence -> Rossiter gets curious -> the case is blown open. Rossiter actually refers to the work of other female historians and social scientists! In fact, she started this line of research after noticing the female biographies in American Men of Science when her housemate, Cynthia Thompson, recommended that she keep track of them.

Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased: Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick. Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize. Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed. And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.

Rossiter did not claim to be rediscovering these women. She refers to Franklin and Meitner as having been famously denied credit, in fact! Meitner specifically is "one of the best-known examples of the phenomenon". Stevens she uses as one in the list of examples in the paper, and Payne-Gaposchkin actually just gets a reference at the end that's doesn't even tell you the specific field of scientific study. (To be fair, there may be more about them in her other publications.) This was not about Badass Historian of Science Tells the Establishment What's What. Everybody knew about the concept of female scientists being publicly ignored as collaborators by 1993 — and women's history as a field had been around for 15-20 years. She was not working in a vacuum where nobody else thought that it was important to study these topics until she forced them to see the light.

but a different missing scientist that doesn't appear in the text of the tweets, Dr. Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

also, I think it's fascinating (read: typical, disappointing) that not a single one of the scientists mentioned in the LLM content wasn't white. Like say, Marie Maynard Daly, who did pioneering work in heart disease and cigarette smoking:

Jewel Plumber Cobb, one of the first to study what would later be termed "precision medicine" or how different people respond differently to chemotherapy in oncology:

or Chien-Shiung Wu, experimental physicist and Manhattan Project contributor.

and lest anyone think I had to dig hard for this information somewhere obscure, all three of these examples are from a single article in Smithsonian magazine, on the first page of results in DuckDuckGo (non-AI version). Literally less than a minute to find.

OP: On July 14, 2026, heavy rain pounded Jilin, triggering the Songhua River’s first flood of the year. Water levels surged, and currents turned dangerously violent. A kitten got stranded on a tiny clump of willow branches out in the river, trapped for two full days with waves threatening to sweep it away at any moment.

The river was far too rough for regular boats, leaving no obvious way to rescue it. Crowds gathered on the bridge, scrambling to figure out how to help. A drone pilot heard about the kitten and rushed over with his gear. His plan: hang a blue bucket from the drone as a rescue pod, baited with cat food to lure the kitten inside.

First attempt: The kitten was too scared to step into the bucket. Failed. Second attempt: It climbed into the bucket, but panicked and jumped back onto the branches the second the drone lifted off. Everyone watching held their breath. Third attempt: Another pilot on site guided the drone from a different angle. The kitten finally hopped safely into the bucket.

The rescue worked. The drone carried the kitten steadily back to shore, and nearly a hundred onlookers on the bridge cheered out loud.

#my old phone looks like this on my shelf lmao #im too scared to touch it to throw it away #idk what trash this even goes into when its at this point

The pillow-shaped object here used to be the phone’s battery. It’s not a battery anymore. Now it’s a balloon full of corrosive, pyrophoric chemicals and hydrogen gas and it’s one puncture away from burning your house down. I am 100% serious. You should be scared to touch it.

But you gotta touch it, because you gotta get it out of your house before the pressure builds up to the point where the balloon pops. This isn’t going to happen soon – there is no need to panic – but it will happen eventually.

And, indeed, it doesn’t go in the ordinary trash. You put this in the ordinary trash and you’re gonna set the garbage truck on fire. Don’t do that to the garbage collectors, their job is hard enough already.

The first thing you need to do is get a fireproof container. The most common household item that qualifies as a fireproof container is a cast-iron cookpot with a cast-iron lid – often sold as a “Dutch oven.” Any other cooking container that’s unreactive, has a very high melting point, and has a lid made of the same materials will also work: enameled or stainless steel, Pyrex with glass lid, etc.

However: Do not use a pot with a PTFE-based non-stick coating. If the battery does explode, the fire will probably be hot enough to degrade a PTFE coating, producing toxic smoke. (Not that you should breathe the smoke from the battery fire either, but PTFE breakdown products are worse.) Do not use a pot made of aluminium or copper. The fire might even get hot enough to melt those.

Whatever container you use, you might have to throw away along with the phone, so don’t use your good Dutch oven for this. Go to a thrift store and buy a cheap one.

Once you have the fireproof container:

Gently pick up the phone and put it in the fireproof container. If possible, gently tape the phone to the bottom of the container to prevent it from bouncing around. Don’t put any padding in there, that’ll just make a fire worse if it does happen. Put the lid on and tape it shut.

Put a label on the container, something like “DEFECTIVE LI-ION BATTERY – FIRE HAZARD”.

It is now reasonably safe to move the container around. However, if the battery does explode, the container is very likely to leak smoke and get hot, so keep it in a well-ventilated area and away from things that will be damaged by heat. Don’t leave it exposed to the weather, either.

You need to find either a hazardous waste disposal site, or an e-waste recycler that will accept defective Li-ion batteries. I can’t help with that because I have no idea where you live.

However, your local fire department, if you have one, will probably be happy to help. Call their non-emergency number. Nothing is on fire yet, so this isn’t an emergency, but things that can easily start a fire are still within the fire department’s responsibilities. Tell them you have a phone with a bulging lithium-ion battery, you put it in a fireproof container, and you want to know how to dispose of it safely.

If the fire department tries to tell you this isn’t dangerous or it’s okay to throw it out in the regular trash (with or without fireproof container), hang up on them and write a cranky letter to your local government representatives, then keep looking for a proper disposal site.

I suspect this was meant as a visual pun because this server is rated for 733 watts, almost exactly one metric horsepower