A Damp Loser

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.

It's actually in decent shape, though, so I'm going to see about getting it into usable form as a backup/storage tent for historical and fantasy camping. And I've been wanting to experiment with dyeing a tent, but haven't wanted to risk ruining an expensive one--so this is perfect as a test.

I used a clean trash can, 30 gallons of water, and half a gallon of flat interior acrylic paint to get this robin's egg blue. It's still drying--I wanted a pale color to use as a base, with the intention of either painting darker stripes or contrasting patterns as an accent. I dunked the whole tent into the trash can of paint water, and spread it out to dry. It is a bit splotchy, but it's probably close to 80 lbs dry, so with the added weight of water saturation, and a 12x14 normal footprint, it gets pretty hard to maneuver by myself. I am going to have to reapply waterproofing to this tent, due to its age, but for now it works to my advantage while dyeing it. I will update as this process continues, but for now it seems like a good way to get non-manufacturer color onto a natural fiber tent.