Melting Pot of my Interests

https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/solar-biodiversity-birds

Study above, very small amount of birds prefer arable or intensively grazed solar land, big difference on birds who enjoy wildflower meadows under solar panels.

Not too surprising but good information. Farmland birds are the birds who have been most at risk and the stats here are very good, especially on the increase on solar panels the UK is doing - on earth day recently almost 40% of power was generated by solar.

Horsfield's Baron (Tanaecia iapis puseda), family Nyphalidae, Singapore

114 people died in the Hyatt Regency collapse, and in the US it's the third largest structural collapse fatality count, behind 9/11 and the Pemberton Mill collapse in 1860.

I've learned about this tragedy in my physics classes, to demonstrate tensile strength, and as a reminder about the importance of calculations being done right. I've also learned about it in my legal classes as an example of construction defect lawsuits. I've seen it referenced in disaster response classes.

Between AI and the current Presidential administration, we're barrelling right back towards this nightmare.

There are multiple errors that resulted in this collapse, but these stand out to me:

1. Kansas City was facing high unemployment and needed to attract jobs and business into the city. So the planning and inspection departments may have looked too closely at the designs.

2. An engineering firm too lazy to double check their designs or design changes by the manufacturer before approving them. The error that resulted in the collapse was one that the owner of the engineering firm said that a "first year engineering student" would spot.

3. The steel manufacturer treating preliminary plans as final plans, not verifying the math on their end.

The bridges' original design could only hold 60% of the minimum load required by city code. The design changes recommended by the manufacturer halved that. Less than a year and 3 weeks from opening to the public, the whole thing collapse.

Articles about the collapse say that everyone "trusted" the other party to have done the calculations correctly.

A significant portion of the population trusts what the computer or AI tells them, without checking. Imprecisely calibrated AI hallucinate information. The US economy is going into a downturn and federal regulatory agencies are being gutted.

We are going to see the Hyatt Regency Collapse repeat over and over for decades, not just in buildings, but in medicine, manufacturing, the environment, etc.

Some of this we're just going to have to weather, but the message for AI users comes straight from IBM (once the world's leading computer manufacturer) back in 1979:

"A Computer Cannot Be Held Accountable. Therefore A Computer Should Never Make A Management Decision."

The owner of the engineering firm that designed the Hyatt Regency spent the rest of his life lecturing on the disaster, to serve as a warning to his fellow engineers about the real-life consequences of sloppy design.

I don't think Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk will have the courage or the honor to do that when OpenAI / Meta / xAI are responsible for getting people killed.

It is important not to walk away from it thinking "but I'm not going to be an engineer, so that's fine."

In my adult life, I have (among other things) run a small business, I have managed a bank branch, and I have been a mortgage processor. In any one of those three jobs, not knowing the exact correct laws and procedures for what I'm doing could really fuck up someone else's life.

If I don't set up payroll correctly, I could create a huge disaster for myself and employees, either immediately or come tax time. QuickBooks keeps trying to get me to let AI manage my payroll and I would rather stab myself in the hand.

If I didn't handle deposits and Fincen reporting correctly in my branch banking days, I could end up accidentally committing many many crimes and making it harder for people to catch some of the really big, really terrible crimes. (Hint: this was important to uncovering all the Epstein shit!) That's not even counting all the actual cash I was responsible for. (It makes me want to throw up thinking about the fact that I literally handled about a million dollars in cash every week for 2 years.)

If I didn't handle my mortgage processing exactly right, people could lose their homes. I cannot stress enough how easy it is for shit to get REALLY FUCKED UP if deeds and mortgages are not filed exactly right. People get their homes (legally!) stolen from them every year.

I think what people have difficulty with is the idea that there are people out there who aren’t experiencing sexual attraction at all until a certain point, if ever, because we’re taught that sex, libido, and sexual attraction are all the same, both in and out of queer spaces.

And when you’re learning about asexuality and demisexuality, you may learn that people have romantic and aesthetic attraction separately from sexual attraction, and that sexual and romantic attraction aren’t necessarily intertwined, and that may challenge your worldview on sex.

But “I trust you enough to have sex with you” isn’t the same as “I’m not sexually attracted to anyone but you, and the reason I’m sexually attracted to you now after we’ve established this close bond is literally because of the bond of trust we’ve been able to form”.

It’s easy to see how those can get conflated. On the surface, if you’re unfamiliar with asexuality, they may sound the same. But it’s important to acknowledge the difference between “no sex until I trust you” and “no sexual attraction unless I trust you and maybe not even then”.

Demisexuality is housed under the asexuality spectrum. It’s part of the gray area between being allosexual and asexual. It’s part of why the definition for asexuality includes “little to no sexual attraction”. It’s a mostly asexual experience with an asterisk.

While being demisexual may have impacts on a persons sexual activity, even demisexuals have a varied relationship to the act of participating in sex. Libido and sexual attraction are not always intertwined either, which can make telling the difference tricky.

I think of sexual attraction as libido that has a compass. Since I rarely ever experience sexual attraction, but do have libido, it’s noticeable for me when that libido actually has a direction to go, rather than being a floating, nebulous, independent thing.

Remember, not everyone is demisexual. There’s a difference between waiting to have sex and not having sexual attraction at all until a certain point. This also inherently ties demisexuality to romantic attraction and relationships, and not all demisexuals are alloromantic.

[ID: an illustration of a white and gold unicorn and dragon. The unicorn is running to the right, with a cloud in the colors of the trans flag behind it, and the dragon is flying to the left breathing rainbow fire. Text reads "respect our existence or expect our resistance". End.]

Multi-Generational

Game Of Telephone.

Of course, I am now the fourth generation who bakes this cake. (I never met my great-grandmother. She died shortly before my dad met my mother, but he tells me stories about her. She spoke three languages and was trying to learn Portuguese when she died. She wore a fur coat over a muumuu and owned a wolfdog. When she was widowed in the Great Depression, she supported her family by playing piano in a honkey-tonk before lying her way into a radiology position. Her second husband was a British naval officer who was trained on a ship with sails and who gave her jewels by pouring them into a bowl and handing it to her at breakfast.)

My mother used it to make a wedding cake for my sister’s wedding. (My dad insists his grandma would have loved my mom, both plain-speaking women from the midwest.) My brother-in-law fell in love with this cake, to his own surprise, as he loves chocolate and the wedding cake has none. Now it is his birthday cake of choice. I have baked it for him multiple times.

One day my sister will teach her son how to make the cake from his great-great grandmother’s recipe. I will tell him stories about her, this woman I never met but who is so real to me.

yeah. and you can even include "thing that reduces the barrier to doing the task" as a catalyst/enzyme

TAGGED SPOILERS!! Shadowheart x my Tav (Rhani) on words she says to you in act 3 that got me all soft for her even more and wanted to draw out her dream :,)