Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

Anne Carson, from “The Glass Essay”, Glass, Irony, and God

the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy's way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn't expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.

day 28 / 30

regarding the röttgen pietà, elle emerson

Collection of lachrymatorys (or lachrymosas), these tear catchers or tear vials - sometimes worn on a necklace, sometimes merely held - were used to gather the tears wept by mourners at funerals, to hold the tears of people mourning the passing of loved ones. One type of lachrymosa had a special top which allowed the tears to evaporate (signifying the time to stop mourning), others had a sealed top to allow the tears to last for a year, at which point they would be poured on the grave of the person whom the tears were wept for, Victorian era, 19th Century.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

you need to get it out of your mind that psychosomatic illness is just “making up symptoms” when it’s actually much more like your body is being actively poisoned by chemicals released from your brain

Throwback to when I took painkillers and woke up with Photoshop open on my computer to this image I had made

is anyone else feeling stuck and waiting for something that will never come in order to start living or is it just me?

This machine kills AI

❁ pyrex ❁

One of the best stories humanity ever produced was a draft of a rewrite of the Epic of Gilgamesh written by a Ecuadorian poet in 1935. It was tossed into a fireplace by an angry boy and lost forever. Another of humanity's best was told 65,000 years ago and was overheard by a small tribe of embarked Neanderthals boating down a river in what is now northern Georgia. A short woman at the bank scrubbed a wooden idol in the water and sang an ancient tale in an unknown language. These two are eclipsed by everything produced by two brothers at the coast of what is now Cameroon between 503 BC and 490 BC, which they shared with some family and friends, and were beloved by everyone except a sour uncle.

A volcano erupting in Iceland. (Source)