As hard and as ruthless as a rose petal

"Heck, if he wanted to do open-heart surgery on me, I'd probably let him. The guy is amazing at this stuff."

There's something about a lonely human walking in the snow with decaying megastructures in the background that really sings to me.

For example, I've had students ask me (in good faith) how it was possible for international medical bodies to report different counts of COVID-19 cases during the early years of the pandemic. And one of the answers is that you need to first define what you mean by a "COVID-19 case." Do you include self-reported incidences? Waste water data? Geo-fenced social media posts about people complaining about their coronavirus symptoms? Federal estimates? Hospital data? How do you compare countries/territories/substate entities with mandatory reporting mechanisms vs countries/territories/substate entities that rely only on voluntary self-reported cases? And what combination of these do you use? How you construct what you mean by "case" is going to impact the outcomes you report. These different counts of COVID-19 cases can all be true simultaneously, not because numbers are made up, but because they all come out of different methodologies that can be equally valid.

And this is true across all science, not just social science. Bill Clinton said it best lol: "it depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." This feels obvious when you look at scientific research that uses "skull measurements" as their object of analysis - the concept itself is white supremacist, regardless of how "sound" the research is. But even something as apparently self-evident as a COVID-19 case still requires a definition, and how you define your variables is necessarily going to impact how the research goes and what conclusions are drawn.

These definitions are always embedded in political & social assumptions. And again, this does not mean that science is all made up or nonsense or whatever. There is a widespread fetishism of "objective knowledge" that is itself ideological - the idea that knowledge can be divorced from all historical and political contexts, that you can scrub bias from research and simply report the facts. Valuable, well-supported, well-constructed scientific research is always embedded in these contexts. Not just as a result of researcher assumptions, but of the material context it exists in - what research resources are available, how & what research gets funded, the academy's relationship to the state & non-government bodies that both provide data and use that research to inform policy, the historical relationships universities often have with settler-colonialism and imperialism that give them access to "foreign" research subjects, etc etc etc.

Random Au idea; Miraculously, the Blip-A crew survive, but at the cost of their travel time, making it so they arrive at Tau Ceti around the same time as the Hail Mary. (Don't think too hard about it)

Grace now gets regularly hassled by many Eridians, all of whom can hold multiple conversations at once, unlike him.

Got some Grade A Senshi propaganda right he- OH GOD OH NO

Senshi... I'm so sorry oh my god I dont know what happened or where that water bucket came from jesus christ all mighty

GO VOTE

I like All Systems Red because SecUnit is having a bad day at work and Preservation crew is discovering the horrors of corporate slavery

(hopefully this is just one part of six for asr)