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feral-ballad · 1 month

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“My name is Nour Saqer, for the name remains when all is lost. I turned 22 years old last November. Yes. My youthful time was wasted on horrible days. Yes. Those days still continue.

My name is Nour Saqer. And I am 22 years old. I am a fifth-year dental student at Al-Azhar University of Gaza. I am an aspiring student. I am eager and passionate about my studies. Until the last minute, I was allowed to stay at my house on Oct. 7th. 2023 I was still working on a scientific research proposal that was supposed to be published by me and my teammates of young researchers late in November, that year.

This picture of me was taken late 2022 during an international dental conference held in campus.

During my college years alone. Me and my family have had to forcefully evacuate, and run out of our house four times. In 2019, 2021, 2022, and finally in 2023. Each time was in fear of the same threat; meeting our deaths under rubble. My name is Nour Saqer. And I have always been a Gazan. Each of those past times. If we were fortunate enough, we would discover that our home was in repairable damage. There would be a roof over our heads still. We were still fortunate. We still had luck.

But ever since October 7th. I haven't returned home. We were among the first families to evacuate Al-Rimal neighborhood from the very first day of this genocide, we had to turn our backs to it and expect no return. Two floors of my family house, along with my father's store, and only source of income, have been severely destructed due to neighboring missiles. And my university buildings were heavily exploded. All forms of life have been reaped from my city. My hometown.

This is what's left of our campus. I was supposed to have my graduation ceremony here.

My name is Nour Saqer. And I had an enthusiastic heart. And an energetic body. I played sports and walked down every street until I couldn't. I loved my family and friends dearly. I wrote poems about them. I spent time loving them and cherishing their presence. I loved life with all its little things. With all its unattainable things. I loved the grass and the tall buildings. And I loved all people. I loved my people. All their faces. All their talents. All their hidden lives. All we shared. Until we didn't. Everything I have ever loved I lost.

This picture of me was taken during a happy moment on the roof of our house.

This is all that is left of that picture now.

I am currently sheltered in Rafah with my family of 7. Sharing a place with 30 other homeless people. By the end of Ramadan, me and my family would have to evacuate and seek shelter for yet the 8th time due to housing problems. I am so tired of not having any sense of stability. Nothing to guarantee. Nothing to call my own. Every passing minute the situation in Rafah gets worse. Every passing minute I am losing loved ones and relatives. Every passing minute costs me my sanity. Costs me health. Costs me my basic rights to simply live.

I have nothing left to lose or pay the price with except for my life.

I don’t know how to retell my life story in limited words, how to make the most ordinary moments sound precious. How do I equate my value to someone deserving a life of safety? How do I shape myself as someone worth saving?

I have been interviewing myself for days. All my stories are choking me. All my grief is piling up and muting me. I keep trying to find a way to present the best of myself. To make myself someone you'd want to look at. Listen to. And even more,

Help.

I am finally placing both hope and faith in your helpful hands. I am asking you. Please put an end to this continuing tragedy. And help me get to safety. Before it's too late.

It should be in your knowledge that:

It costs $5,000 per person to get out of Rafah through the Boarder Crossing to Egypt. The rest of the donations will be to secure my tution money for the fifth and final year of dental school.

Thank you.”

#kindly read this !!#please help nour in any way you can #if you can’t donate then at least ask your friends & family to share & donate #it will count as something #palestine #gaza #free palestine #from the river to the sea palestine will be free #🇵🇸#ethnic cleansing #genocide

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gunsandspaceships · 16 days

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Many degrees of Doctor Stark

It is widely known that 616 Tony has several doctorates. The number varies from 3 to 7, but it doesn't really matter whether he is 300 or 700% Doctor. He is one. And he doesn’t use his title 99.999% of the time.

Ok, but what about the MCU?

It is never mentioned whether Tony has a PhD or even a master's degree. Kinda weird. Both the absence of mentions and lack of degrees, since Tony is so smart and productive.

Let’s check, maybe he actually has some.

Here we have a file from a deleted scene from The Avengers (2012):

As we can see, the work is sloppy – there are inaccuracies in his hair color (it’s not black, it’s brown), and the fact that he speaks French was not included. Can we rely on this paper? Let’s not 100%, but we can still use things that don't contradict the movies.

The fact that he received his BS in Engineering from MIT does not contradict this, so we can mark it as valid. He started in 1984 when he was 14 years old and graduated in 1987 when he was 17.

We see no further education in the file. But we know something that this file doesn’t. We watched the movies.

Remember, in Civil War at 0:13:25, in the scene where Tony sees his parents for the last time, Maria tells Howard, “Be nice, dear, he’s been studying abroad”. Tony is 21 here, this is December 16, 1991. Looks like he is on winter break.

But wait… Didn’t he graduate in 1987 and stop then? Well, Maria tells us he continued.

Between 17 and 21 there are 4 years. What could he have done in these 4 years? A lot, right? He is smart and productive, we know that. A master’s degree usually takes 2 years. Tony could earn it in 1. 1 or 2, we still have 2-3 years that we need to fill with some kind of studying. I doubt he just went back and got another bachelor's or master's. That said, he was working on his PhD.

We don't know where. “Abroad” is a very broad concept. Maybe he went to Europe to study at Oxford? We do not know. Perhaps he stayed at MIT and just went somewhere else for the fall semester. We do not know. But he did go somewhere for (most probably) a PhD.

The question is: did he finish it?

Well, his parents died in Dec 1991, and we know from the first Iron Man (0:04:50) that Stane was the interim president of Stark Industries from that date until 1992. Most likely, Tony became CEO before his birthday, that is, May 29, which corresponds to the stated age of 21. He had a few months between.

We don’t know where he was in his degree at that time. But we know he is smart and productive. He doesn’t need 4 years to write a dissertation.

So, there are 2 options:

1) He did not complete his doctorate and devoted himself entirely to the company;

2) He completed it in the few months he had and then took over the company.

Here’s the evidence for the second option:

“Confusing matters more, a recently deleted LinkedIn profile for Tony Stark indicated he received doctorates in engineering physics and artificial intelligence.”

Source: https://alum.mit.edu/slice/who-iron-man

Given all the information and analysis we have, as well as a little logic, we can conclude that Tony has a Ph.D. Even two. He had time to do them. Why doesn't he use his title? Well, maybe for the same reason 616 Tony doesn’t? He doesn’t usually brag. Check out this post if you have any doubts about my statement.

Here are some additional hints:

He gave lectures at scientific conferences (IM1 and IM3 - Bern 1999).

His scientific expertise was not limited to engineering and his company's affairs (all the movies, but specifically I can point you to IM3– the scene with Maya Hansen and her Extremis-enhanced plants in Bern).

“He must have graduated after 1990, because the '90 Brass rat was the first one with the skyline on the edge.” MIT alumni commentary https://alum.mit.edu/slice/who-iron-man

Conclusion (actual): call him Doctor Stark, guys, he deserves it. Despite his modesty about his scientific achievements, Dr Stark has a couple of master's degrees and at least two PhD degrees in the MCU - in engineering physics and artificial intelligence.

#tony stark #iron man #marvel #mcu #the avengers #iron man 3 #captain america civil war #doctor stark

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liesmyth · 3 months

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did john decide which of his friends would be the necromancer and which would be the cavs when he brought them back from the dead, or was that random?

I wish we knew for sure! John's friends ending up 50/50 adepts vs. non-necromancers is obviously one of TM's premises and was done for doylistic reasons first and foremost, but I don't think we have enough elements to conclusively interpret it as intentional in-universe.

Putting aside any kind of authorial intentions, this is what we know:

» The rate of necromancers as part of the population hovers around 30%. John's core group being 50% adepts is way off from that, and could point to manipulation, but also we're working with a very small sample size. Think about how it's very possible to get head five times in a row when flipping coins; probabilities are much less accurate on a smaller scale. I don't believe it's out of the realm of possibilities that a group of 10 people had exactly 5 necromancers in it.

» Harrow's birth. The Reverend Parents made sure she would be a necromancer by manipulating the embryo with thanergy. It's clearly not a known practice among the Houses at large, and John calls it "a sort of Resurrection" — implying that he could be able to do the same with thalergy. However, this doesn't confirm that he actually DID.

In the same conversation, John says, "This was all different before we discovered the scientific principles," which I think is also worth noting. The fact that he understands NOW how you could get an embryo to grow into a necromancer doesn't mean that he had that knowledge at the time of the Resurrection. It also doesn't mean that the same identical process would apply to making formerly-dead-people into necromancers as they got brought back to life.

It could very well be that necromancy was a generalised side-effect of the Resurrection that affected some people more than others; or it could be that John DID do something different when bringing back some people that conferred them necromantic aptitude. Even if it's the latter, I don't think we can take for granted that 1) it was intentional and 2) he fully knew what the side effects would be.

» Ulysses and Titania. Counterpoint! It's also worth noting that John's "test cases" turned out to be one (1) adept and one (1) non-adept. Like I said above, this could still be a random bi-product of the Resurrection... but given Ulysses and Titania's whole everything, their dichotomy reeks of control group. They are a big point in favour of the "John did it on purpose" column.

Still: I still don't think we can tell for sure that John knew from the moment of Resurrection that he was giving some people death powers, and how that'd turn out in the long run. Like I said above, he could have done something different when resurrecting Ulysses vs. Titania, but it doesn't mean that he knew what would happen.

(Obviously, this argument only makes sense if we assume that Ulysses and Titania were among the very first batch of resurrected. I personally think they were, but obviously it's not confirmed)

» The inner circle. From NtN

I could only trust the inner circle. My scientists, my engineer, my detective, my lawyer, my artist, my nun, my hedge fund manager. My diehards. The ones keeping the lights on.

Putting aside the fact that Lyctors exist the way they are because Tamsyn needed them to exist, and looking at the Canaan House necro/cav pairings from John's point of view: why not give ALL his friends magical powers? That's something I struggle to wrap my head around, for about half a dozen different reasons.

Mind, I don't think John picking and choosing who gets to be a necromancer is that far-fetched, but from a #character point I find it less likely than the alternative (he didn't do it on purpose but turned it to his own advantage). IF it turns out to be canon, I'd be really curious about what the watsonian reasoning for it, beyond "this needed to happen."

Most meta posts I've seen that take for granted John picked and chose his future necromancers ascribe him a level of foresight, knowledge, and long-term planning that I simply don't think he'd have had at the time (not to mention the mental lucidity). To quote HtN John again, "[he] had never been God" before. I truly think he was winging it at least 60% of the time.

#Anonymous #ask #tldr: I think it's possible this is the angle Taz is going with but I don't think it's a given with the elements we have so far #I think if it turns out to HAVE been intentional on John's part #it's gonna be one of these plot points that exists because the book needed them to exist and everything else took shape around it #like how everyone on the Ninth stopped making babies after Harrow was born although there was a whole generation of childbearing age #tlt thoughts #tlt theories #ejg #elle tlt posting #tlt

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janirah · 7 months

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"I feel out of place among all these eminent scientists and other laureates. And a tuxedo is not my style!" "Don't be silly, you look amazing and twice as smart as anyone here."

Having received such an opportunity, N began to drag Stanley with him to all scientific conferences and receptions! Tuxedo, bow tie and no crowbar, God help him.

At some point, Stanley began to think that he was some kind of trophy boyfriend. Fortunately, instead of quarrel, this time Mr. Rider first called the Curator with the question "what's going on?"

"Well," the woman said, "congratulations, this is a courtship ritual."

#the stanley parable #tsp narrator #tsp stanley #half life parable #stanarrator

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earhartsplane · 5 months

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Since we're all talking about plagiarism now, I'd like to share this video which came out last year about a paper accepted at the CVPR 2022:

youtube

For the people not in the know, the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference is the biggest conference in computer science. Last year, in 2022, the paper featured in the video got accepted. A few days later, this video was posted. The first author, a PhD student, apologized and the paper was retracted and removed from the proceedings. Hilariously, the first reaction of the co-authors, including a professor at the Seoul National University, was to say that they had nothing to do with it.

My point here is that scientific papers are not rigorously checked for plagiarism, and a background in academia tells you absolutely nothing about whether or not someone will be diligent in avoiding plagiarism. The biggest difference is that there are consequences if you're caught.

I also don't want people to be too harsh on the first author of this paper, or to think the situation is equivalent to the whole Somerton debacle. For starters, you don't get paid for publishing papers, you (or more commonly your university) pay the publishers. But the phrase publish or perish exists for a reason, and everyone in the field wants to get published in the CVPR, because it's supposed to show that you're great at research. Additionally, the number of papers and the prestige of the venues they're published in criteria on which you will be evaluated as a researcher and a university employee.

The way I see it, there are basically two kinds of plagiarism that are shown in the video. The first one concerns sentences that are lifted completely unchanged from other papers. This is bad, and it is plagiarism, but I can see how this would happen. Most instances of this appear in the introduction and on background information, so if you're insecure about your mastery of English and it's not about your contribution anyway, I can understand how you would take the shortcut of copy-pasting and tell yourself that it's just so that the rest of the paper makes sense, and why waste time on phrasing things differently if others have done it already, and it's not like there are a million way to write these equations anyways.

Let me be clear. I don't approve, or condone. It's still erasing the work of the people who took the time and pain to phrase these things. It's still plagiarism. But I understand how you could get to that point.

The second kind of plagiarism is a way bigger deal in my opinion. At 0:37 , we can see that one of the contributions of the paper is also lifted from another paper. Egregiously, the passage includes "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first [...]" , which is a hell of a thing to copy-paste. So this is not only lazily passing other people's words as your own, it's also pretending that you're making a contribution you damn well know other people have already done. I also wasn't able to find a version of the plagiarized article that had been published in a peer-reviewed venue, which might mean that the authors submitted it, got rejected, and published it on arXiv (an website on which authors can put their papers so that they're accessible to the public, but doesn't "count" as a publication because it's not peer-reviewed. You can also put papers that are under review or have been published on there as long as you're careful with the copyrights and double-blind process). And then parts of it were published in the CVPR under someone else's name.

I think there's also a third kind of plagiarism going on here, one that is incredibly common in academia, but that is not shown in the video. That's the FIVE other authors, including a professor, who were apparently happy to add their name to the paper but obviously didn't do anything meaningful since they didn't notice how much plagiarism was going on.

#Youtube #plagiarism #hbomberguy #james somerton #CVPR #computer science #Academia

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months

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Stinkpump Linkdump

Next Tuesday (December 5), I'm at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, NC, with my new solarpunk novel The Lost Cause, which 350.org's Bill McKibben called "The first great YIMBY novel: perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful."b

Once again, I greet the weekend with more assorted links than I can fit into my nearly-daily newsletter, so it's time for another linkdump. This is my eleventh such assortment; here are the previous volumes:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

I've written a lot about Biden's excellent appointees, from his National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo to Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chair Rohit Chopra to FTC Chair Lina Khan to DoJ antitrust boss Jonathan Kanter:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/14/prop-22-never-again/#norms-code-laws-markets

But I've also written a bunch about how Biden's appointment strategy is an incoherent mess, with excellent appointees picked by progressives on the Unity Task Force being cancelled out by appointees given to the party's reactionary finance wing, producing a muddle that often cancels itself out:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/08/fiduciaries/#but-muh-freedumbs

It's not just that the finance wing of the Democrats chooses assholes (though they do!), it's that they choose comedic bunglers. The Dems haven't put anyone in government who's as much of an embarrassment as George Santos, but they keep trying. The latest self-inflicted Democratic Party injury is Prashant Bhardjwan, a serial liar and con-artist who is, incredibly, the Biden Administration's pick to oversee fintech for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC):

https://www.americanbanker.com/news/did-the-occ-hire-a-con-artist-to-oversee-fintech

When the 42 year old Bhardjwan was named Deputy Comptroller and Chief Financial Technology Officer for OCC, the announcement touted his "nearly 30 years of experience serving in a variety of roles across the financial sector." Apparently Bhardjwan joined the finance sector at the age of 12. He's the Doogie Houser of Wall Street:

https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2023/nr-occ-2023-31.html

That wasn't the only lie on Bhardjwan's CV. He falsely claimed to have served as CIO of Fifth Third Bank from 2006-2010. Fifth Third has never heard of him:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-occ-crowned-its-first-chief-fintech-officer-his-work-history-was-a-web-of-lies

Bhardjwan told a whole slew of these easily caught lies, suggesting that OCC didn't do even a cursory background search on this guy before putting him in charge of fintech – that is, the radioactively scammy sector that gave us FTX and innumerable crypto scams, to say nothing of the ever-sleazier payday lending sector:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

When it comes to appointing corrupt officials, the Biden administration has lots of company. Lots of eyebrows went up when the UN announced that the next climate Conference of the Parties (COP) would be chaired by Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber, who is also the chair of Dubai's national oil company. Then the other shoe dropped: leaks revealed that Al-Jaber had colluded with the Saudis to use COP28 to get poor Asian and African nations hooked on oil:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67508331

There's an obvious reason for this conspiracy: the rich world is weaning itself off of fossil fuels. Today, renewables are vastly cheaper than oil and there's no end in sight to the plummeting costs of solar, wind and geothermal. While global electrification faces powerful logistical and material challenges, these are surmountable. Electrification is a solvable problem:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering

And once we do solve that problem, we will forever transform our species' relationship to energy. As Deb Chachra explains in her brilliant new book How Infrastructure Works, we would only need to capture 0.4% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface to give every person on earth the energy budget of a Canadian (AKA, a "cold American"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

If COP does its job, we will basically stop using oil, forever. This is an existential threat to the ruling cliques of petrostates from Canada to the UAE to Saudi. As Bill McKibben writes, this isn't the first time a monied rich-world industry that had corrupted its host governments faced a similar crisis:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/a-corrupted-cop

Big Tobacco spent decades fueling science denial, funneling money to sellout scientists who deliberately cast doubt on both sound science and the very idea that we could know anything. As Tim Harford describes in The Data Detective, Darrell Huff's 1954 classic How to Lie With Statistics was part of a tobacco-industry-funded project to undermine faith in statistics itself (the planned sequel was called How To Lie With Cancer Statistics):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

But anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. When the families of the people murdered by tobacco disinformation campaigns started winning eye-popping judgments against the tobacco industry, the companies shifted their marketing to the Global South, on the theory that they could murder poor brown people with impunity long after rich people in the north forced an end to their practice. Big Tobacco had a willing partner in Uncle Sam for this project: the US Trade Representative arm-twisted the world's poorest countries into accepting "Investor-State Dispute Settlements" as part of their treaties. These ISDS clauses allowed tobacco companies to sue governments that passed tobacco control legislation and force them to reverse their democratically enacted laws:

https://ash.org/what-is-isds-and-what-does-it-mean-for-tobacco-control/

As McKibben points out, the oil/climate-change playbook is just an update to the tobacco/cancer-denial conspiracy (indeed, the same think-tanks and PR agencies are behind both). The "Oil Development Sustainability Programme" – the Orwellian name the Saudis gave to their plan to push oil on poor countries – maps nearly perfectly onto Big Tobacco's attack on the Global South. Nearly perfectly: second-hand smoke in Indonesia won't give Americans cancer, but convincing Africa to go hard on fossil fuels will contribute to an uninhabitable planet for everyone, not just poor people.

This is an important wrinkle. Wealthy countries have repeatedly demonstrated a deep willingness to profit from death and privation in the poor world – but we're less tolerant when it's our own necks on the line.

What's more, it's far easier to put the far-off risks of emissions out of your mind than it is to ignore the present-day sleaze and hypocrisy of corporate crooks. When I quit smoking, 23 years ago, my doctor told me that if my only motivation was avoiding cancer 30 years from now, I'd find it hard to keep from yielding to temptation as withdrawal set in. Instead, my doctor counseled me to find an immediate reason to stay off the smokes. For me, that was the realization that every pack of cigarettes I bought was enriching the industry that invented the denial playbook that the climate wreckers were using to render our planet permanently unsuited for human habitation. Once I hit on that, resisting tobacco got much easier:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/03/i-quit/

Perhaps OPEC Secretary General Haitham Al-Ghais is worried about that the increasing consensus that Big Oil cynically and knowingly created this crisis. That would explain his new flight of absurdity, claiming that the world is being racist to oil companies, "unjustly vilifying" the industry for its role in the climate emergency:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/27/opec-says-oil-industry-unjustly-vilified-ahead-of-climate-talks-.html

Words aren't deeds, but words have power. The way we talk about things makes a difference to how we act on those things. When discussions of Israel-Palestine get hung up on words, it's easy to get frustrated. The labels we apply to the rain of death and the plight of hostages are so much less important than the death and the hostages themselves.

But how we name the thing will have an enormous impact on what happens next. Take the word "genocide," which Israel hawks insist must not be applied to the bombing campaign and siege in Gaza, nor to the attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. On this week's On The Media, Brooke Gladstone interviews Ernesto Verdeja, executive director of The Institute for the Study of Genocide:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/genocide-powerful-word-so-why-its-definition-so-controversial-on-the-media

Verdeja lays out the history of the word "genocide" and connects it to the Israeli government and military's posture on Palestine and Palestinians, and concludes that the only real dispute among genocide scholars is whether the current campaign it itself an act of genocide, or a prelude to an act of genocide.

I'm not a genocide scholar, but I am a Jew who has always believed in Palestinian solidarity, and Verdeja's views do not strike me as outrageous, or (more importantly) antisemitic. The conflation of opposition to Israel's system of apartheid with opposition to Jews is a cheap trick, one that's belied by Israel itself, where there is a vast, longstanding political opposition to Israeli occupation, settlements, and military policing. Are all those Israeli Jews secret antisemites?

Jews are not united in support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians. The hardliners who insist that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic are peddling an antisemitic lie: that all Jews everywhere are loyal to Israel, and that we all take our political positions from the Knesset. Israel hawks only strengthen that lie when they accuse me and my fellow Jews of being "self-hating Jews."

This leads to the absurd circumstance in which gentiles police Jews' views on Israel. It's weird enough when white-nationalist affiliated evangelicals who support Israel in order to further the end-times prophesied in Revelations slam Jews for being antisemitic. But in Germany, it's even weirder. There, regional, non-Jewish officials charged with policing antisemitism have censured Jewish groups for adopting policies on Israel that mainstream Israeli political parties have in their platforms:

https://jewishcurrents.org/the-strange-logic-of-germanys-antisemitism-bureaucrats

Antisemitism is real. As Jesse Brown describes in his recent Canadaland editorial, there is a real and documented rise in racially motivated terror against Jews in Canada, including school shootings and a firebombing. Likewise, it's true that some people who support the Palestinian cause are antisemites:

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/is-jesse-a-zionist-editorial/

But to stand in horror at Israel's military action and its vast civilian death-toll is not itself antisemitic. This is obvious – so obvious that the need to say it is a tribute to Israel hardliners – Jewish and gentile – and their ability to peddle the racist lie that Israel is Jews and Jews are Israel, and that every Jew is in support of, and responsible for, Israeli war-crimes and crimes against humanity.

One need not choose between opposition to Hamas and its terror and opposition to Israel and its bombings. There is no need for a hierarchy of culpability. As Naomi Klein says, we can "side with the child over the gun":

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/11/why-are-some-of-the-left-celebrating-the-killings-of-israeli-jews

Moral consistency is not moral equivalency. If you're a Jew like me who wants to work for an end to the occupation and peace in the region, you could join Jewish Voice For Peace (like me):

https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org

Now, for a jarring tone shift. In these weekend linkdumps, I put a lot of thought into how to transition from one subject to the next, but honestly, there's no good transition from Israel-Palestine to anything else (yet – though someday, perhaps). So let's just say, "word games can be important, but they can also be trivial, and here are a few of the latter."

Start with a goodie, from the always brilliant medievalist Eleanor Janeaga, who tackles the weirdos who haunt social media in order to dump on people with PhDs who call themselves "doctor":

https://going-medieval.com/2023/11/29/doctor-does-actually-mean-someone-with-a-phd-sorry/

Janega points out that the "doctor" honorific was applied to scholars for centuries before it came to mean "medical doctor." But beyond that, Janega delivers a characteristically brilliant history of the (characteristically) weird and fascinating tale of medieval scholarship. Bottom line, we call physicians "doctor" because they wanted to be associated with the brilliance of scholars, and thought that being addressed as "doctor" would add to their prestige. So yeah, if you've got a PhD, you can call yourself doctor.

It's not just doctors; the professions do love their wordplay. especially lawyers. This week on Lowering The Bar, I learned about "a completely ludicrous court fight that involved nine law firms that combined for 66 pages of briefing, declarations, and exhibits, all inflicted on a federal court":

https://www.loweringthebar.net/2023/11/federal-court-ends-double-spacing-fight.html

The dispute was over the definition of "double spaced." You see, the judge in the case told counsel they could each file briefs of up to 100 pages of double-spaced type. Yes, 100 pages! But apparently, some lawyer burn to write fat trilogies, not mere novellas. Defendants accused the plaintiffs in this case of spacing their lines a mere 24 points apart, which allowed them to sneak 27 lines of type onto each page, while defendants were confined to the traditional 23 lines.

But (the court found), the defendants were wrong. Plaintiffs had used Word's "double-spacing" feature, but had not ticked the "exact double spacing" box, and that's how they ended up with 27 lines per page. The court refused to rule on what constituted "double-spacing" under the Western District of Tennessee’s local rules, but it ruled that the plaintiffs briefs could fairly be described as "double-spaced." Whew.

That's your Saturday linkdump, jarring tone-shift and all. All that remains is to close out with a cat photo (any fule kno that Saturday is Caturday). Here's Peeve, whom I caught nesting most unhygienically in our fruit bowl last night. God, cats are gross:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53370882459/

It's EFF's Power Up Your Donation Week: this week, donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation are matched 1:1, meaning your money goes twice as far. I've worked with EFF for 22 years now and I have always been - and remain - a major donor, because I've seen firsthand how effective, responsible and brilliant this organization is. Please join me in helping EFF continue its work!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/02/melange/#defendants_motion_to_require_adherence_with_formatting_requirements_of_local_rule_7.1

Stinkpump Linkdump

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gingersforeverbox · 4 months

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Hi, no one asked for this, but have some Nathan Bateman x Reader headcanons/ drabble ideas

A/n: Howdy, I know it's been a hot minute since I posted something of my own, but I've been a simp for this stupid-genius bastard for a while now, and here is just a dump of the thoughts that are bouncing around in my head about Bitchman himself :)

Fem!Reader x Nathan Bateman btw

Content warnings: Nathan for obvious canonical reasons, the good kush🍃, swearing (probably), suggestive material that is +18 (If I find a minor on my lawn I swear to all that's good that I will tell your parents/guardians that you're being inconsiderate of boundaries Ya lil gremlins), that's all I can think of for now, but let me know if I missed anything! <3

Pretty little homemaker Reader? Yeah. Pretty little homemaker Reader who got to happily retire once they married Nathan and be a domestic, feminine person without care? Even better!

Pregnant Reader where we learn about what it’s like to be expecting with him (spoiler: he is a pain in the ass up until you have to snap at him to be considerate to the person who will give him his child, then he surprisingly gets his head out of his ass to try and be better for you and y'all's child).

Reader and Nate have to go to a gala or some shit for the first time as an official couple then there’s a bunch of questions from the press and coworkers about y'all being together, and he is basically like "Honey, I own the planet, whatever you don't want public won't be public. it's that simple, now let me show you this ice sculpture that looks like a dick if you look at it right >:)"

Stoned Nathan and Reader. She does it for fun, he insists that he’s gonna be chill, but he is such a fuckin nerd that he babbles about how scientifically interesting weed is while Reader is just like “M’kay babe, keep talkin’, you’re cute like this iloveyou” and Nathan kinda just buffers for a minute before then is high as a kite when he realizes "oh fuck this woman makes me feel things and I'm too high to try and hide it iloveyoutoo"

Nathan getting genuinely confused when Reader treats Kyoko with basic dignity despite her being an AI, and Reader basically being horrified with how he treats her and actively goes out of her way to be nice to Kyoko. Does Nathan learn to be nicer to his AI? Does he still treat them like shit and it bites him in the ass? YOU DECIDE!

Bossy!Reader who is one of BlueBook's communications experts, and he can't wrap his head around the idea of Reader, the same lady who doesn't hesitate to call one of his ideas bad-shit crazy, being the same lady who easily schmooses his business partners for him until he sees her in action at a conference they both have to attend. Nathan then realizing that he likes his organic women to be a lil fiesty.

*forewarning that this one is a little self-indulgent:* Nathan and a Psychologist reader? I would pay Money to watch those two bicker about everything. like come on, Nathan's fuckin' nuts and Reader deals with emotionally/ mentally troubled people for a living. Just imagine BlueBook deciding to assign him a psychologist since he lives in the middle of nowhere all the time, and Reader taking one look at him and being like "Oh, he's not just a narcissistic rich man, he's a narcissistic rich man with a literal god complex.... interesting :)))" then proceeding to actually help him regardless. Bbgorl wouldn't know what hit him.

That's all for now folks, as you were 😊

....psst, hey, if anyone is interested in reading something with any of these ideas I would happily see what I can do to make a lil somethin'-somethin'. Also, if you wanna take a stab at writing any of these, all I ask is that you tag me so I can get some credit and so I can see y'all's awesome work <3

#Seriously though I'm REALLY considering making the last one #even though I want to do all of them #but that one would itch my brain right #nathan bateman #nathan bateman x reader #ex machina #my stuff

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csuitebitches · 1 year

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January Monthly Checklist

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I have two types of goals - non negotiable (daily goals) and add ons (monthly goals). You can see more here.

Daily Goals:

Reading

My read for this month:

• Ancient wisdom for modern times - Anjana Chokshi

Working out:

Minimum days of working out : 20 days

Meditation

10 minutes consistently everyday : 20 days

Brain games (mental math)

Mental math everyday: 25 days

Add Ons:

✨Career, Conferences and Learning :

* January 1: My family business’s founding anniversary event

* January 7: An Ivy League’s Economic Forum (international)

* January 8: Launching my free newsletter for you guys!

* January 10: Attending a virtual conference about a scientific study on happiness

* January 11: Attending a session for the first time by an organisation I’m a part of, for future CEOs

* January 20: hosting the first session of my start up resource initiative that I’ve founded

Online course

* Emotional intelligence course on Futurelearn

Philanthropy

* Charity work (waiting for approval from a couple of charities I’ve reached out to)

My Weekly Newsletter (!!)

* Launching my weekly Sunday newsletter on January 8th 2023

* Creating 4 newsletters

Beauty

* Manicure

* Schedule a massage

✨How I Found Out About These Events

1. Sign up for existing organisations and charities in your city.

2. Look up online constantly for events happening near me. My country has a very popular events app that we use to go for all sorts of events (entertainment, music, conferences) so finding these out are quite easy.

3. Newsletters. Newsletters of the local art museums; banks; charitable institutes; B School events…. The list goes on.

4. Starting an initiative. If you can’t find one around you, create one. Get a couple of your friends to help out and create something beautiful!

#c suite #powerful woman #ceo aesthetic #personal growth #that girl #productivity #strong women #getting your life together #feminine energy #balance #social calendar #conferences #events #socialising #connecting #January 2023

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wildpeachfarm · 1 month

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Off topic but do you know a way to beat (or take care of) impostor syndrome? I’m struggling recently with it a lot

Honestly, I struggle with it a LOT

The first day I worked at NASA i called my mom sobbing because I was so convinced I did not belong there, and I did the same thing at my first scientific conference despite the fact that BOEING paid for me to go lmao. Sounds ridiculous but it happens to anyone and everyone and I really do find it hard to cope with sometimes

Some things I do to tamper down imposter syndrome:

talk to my friends about it (they will be honest with me and so I trust them to tell me when I'm being tough on myself)

watch youtube videos on imposter syndrome that are catered to the type of person you are (gender, identity, race, if you're a student, employee, etc.) because those things all definitely contribute to imposter syndrome

come up with a mantra to tell yourself in order to cope through intimidating situations that may cause your imposter syndrome to flare up (sometimes I will say things to myself like "I am here for a reason, people believe I am capable of this for a reason")

be honest to myself about why I feel inadequate in certain situations and try to work through that. I calm myself down a lot by breaking down the situation and rationalizing each part of it- that can be different for everyone tho

I hope this helps a bit! Sorry, I may have given you some absolutely useless tips but I hope you are able to conquer your imposter syndrome anon <3 its a hard mountain to climb but I believe in you!

#ask #anon

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chaifootsteps · 8 months

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"I first met Tokitae (also known as Toki, Lolita and Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut), a female orca who had been captured off the coast of Washington, in 1987. I was a biology graduate student at my first professional conference, and the scientific society hosting this event held the opening reception at the Seaquarium.

Toki was 20 feet long and 7,000 pounds, and should have been in the Salish Sea traveling 40 miles a day and diving 500 feet deep with her mother and siblings. Yet there we were, a few hundred marine mammal scientists who mostly did field research, watching this magnificent being perform silly tricks in a bathtub.

That’s not really an exaggeration in Toki’s case. Toki’s tank was the smallest enclosure in the world for her species. It was only 35 feet at its widest point and 80 feet long. It was 20 feet at its deepest; if Toki hung vertically in the water, her tail flukes touched bottom. Captured in 1970 when she was 4 or 5 years old, she lived in this tiny space for 53 years.

The federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA), administered by the US Department of Agriculture, has a ludicrous requirement for tank width — only twice the length of an average adult orca (or 48 feet). But Toki’s tank didn’t even meet that weak standard. For years, the USDA offered various excuses for not taking steps to revoke the exhibitor’s license. None of them made sense, as the tank was plainly not to code. Activists repeatedly tried to sue the USDA for failing to enforce the law, without success.

Toki’s was a strange, lonely life. Despite many campaigns to repatriate her to her family (the L pod in Puget Sound), years passed. The stadium around her slowly and literally crumbled.

The ‘Blackfish’ Effect,” named after the 2013 documentary that eventually reached tens of millions of people globally, has shifted the captive cetacean paradigm in the past decade. Businesses have severed ties with marine theme parks, and policymakers have passed laws ending the commercial display of orcas and other cetacean species. SeaWorld, the company that built its brand on Shamu, is phasing out orca display — no longer capturing, breeding or trading them.

And still Toki languished in the South Florida heat. The Seaquarium’s two owners during Toki’s first 52 years there were adamant that she would never leave the park and disdainfully dismissed talk of returning her to her family.

In March 2022, however, Toki’s outlook finally seemed brighter. The Seaquarium was sold to a company whose business model relied primarily on swim-with-dolphin encounters. An orca didn’t fit that model, and these owners were willing to let her go. Efforts could finally begin in earnest to return her home. The Lummi Tribe, who gave her the name Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut and considered her a relative, had prepared detailed plans for a seaside sanctuary in the Salish Sea.

Then, last month, Toki died. The hope felt by so many that she would finally go home disappeared in an instant.

Captivity robs orcas of a true life in the deep open sea. It robs them of family, of purpose, of change and challenge. Captivity is tremendous monotony for these socially complex, wide-ranging, intelligent animals. We should not perpetuate that.

Zoos and aquariums long ago relegated dancing bears and tricycle-riding chimps to circuses, but still claim that cetacean shows — loud extravaganzas featuring leaping orcas and cavorting dolphins — are educational (they are not). The industry could and should invest in seaside sanctuaries — it’s a win-win choice, as the industry would be heroes and the animals’ welfare would improve.

Let Toki’s miserable, isolated life and sad death mean something for her fellow captives. These amazing beings should not have to die to finally be free."

Dr. Naomi Rose is senior scientist (marine mammal biology) for the Animal Welfare Institute in Washington, D.C.

#orcas #orca #tokitae #animal welfare #actual blog post #I'm still having a tough time with this one.

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rebouks · 1 year

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Previous | Next

Transcript:

[VIOLENT SNEEZE] Mack: Fuck’s sake! You n’ your fucking plants! Bruno: Are you allergic to oxygen now?

Mack: It’s not the bloody oxygen I’m allergic to. Kobe: Aren’t we all technically allergic to oxygen? Mack: Boy-.. what.

Kobe: I’m pretty sure it messes with your cells n’ causes aging. Bruno: You mean like.. oxidative stress? Mack: Christ, that sounds like a conspiracy theory.

Bruno: It’s a scientific theory. Kobe: Alright, nerd; some of us didn’t ace biology. Ivan: Shh! Holy shit, listen…

Chief Commissioner Ford was arrested earlier today following reports of his involvement with several high-profile gang members. Rumours first began circulating after a damning article was featured in the San Myshuno Gazette just before the holidays; Ford blasted the piece as hearsay at the time, disregarding it as a desperate publicity stunt from a declining publication. Deputy Commissioner Gomez declined a press conference at this time, though we’re told an investigation is already under way.

It’s thought that among other unscrupulous activities, Ford may be implicated in the cover up of an underground trafficking ring. In his annual statement last year, he appeared adamant that dismantling and disrupting organised crime was a key priority of his for the city and surrounding areas.

Bruno: I doubt it’ll be long ‘til we’re summoned; they won’t want anyone turning on them as a get out. Ivan: Man.. I don’t wanna deal with Artie anymore, my nerves can’t take it. Mack: The lad’s right, you should ignore him.

Bruno: He’s not someone to be ignored. Would you rather he come here? Kobe: Hell no! Bruno: Exactly.

…

Courtney: Oh-… Oscar: [cackles] Fucker! I hope his lawyer’s fucking dogshit. Courtney: I’m not so sure we should be amused right now..?

Oscar: Karma, Cookie.. karma. Courtney: Yeah, but what does this mean for you; us? Oscar: Ask me later. I’ve waited way too long not to enjoy the shit outta this moment.

#somnium #sims 4 #storytelling #ts4 story #sims story #simblr #ivan harper #bruno clarke #arthur mackey #kobe mackey #oscar finch #courtney mcmahan #spencer ford #boy.. what #get fucked spencer #twtrafficking

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enbycrip · 9 months

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ID: a Facebook post by Em Jay:

“Do any of you remember when I was posting about the recent scientific revelation that Cheddar Man was actually very dark-skinned and how pale skin is soooo much of a newer phenomenon (according to studies, pale skin began appearing in the human genome roughly 4,000 years ago as opposed to the previous assumption of 40,000 years ago) than originally surmised? A new genome sequencing study adds the famous 'Otzi the Iceman' to the list of incorrectly reconstructed (referring to the long-haired, pale-skinned rendering of him found in the Italian museum next to his real remains) ancient humans, as it has been revealed he was dark skinned and balding! The initial discovery of Otzi the Iceman in 1991 (on the Italian side of the Italian/Austrian border) was of enormous import for the scientific community for several reasons; Otzi is the oldest 'wet mummy' yet found and the clothes and equipment he was unearthed with are incomprehensibly unique as no other organic material from the Copper Age has survived. He also became popular for his 61 tattoos, which are the oldest preserved tattoos known to date. I absolutely love studies/revelations like this because (borrowing a lovely sentiment from co-author of the study Johannes Krause) they truly reflect our own biases in assuming what a person from that time looked like, and to use my own words, challenges many of us to re- examine the appearance of our ancient human ancestors in general. "The Iceman's new genome also reveals he had male-pattern baldness and much darker skin than artistic representations suggest. Genes conferring light skin tones didn't become prevalent until 4,000 to 3,000 years ago when early farmers started eating plant-based diets and didn't get as much vitamin D from fish and meat as hunter-gathers did, Krause says.

“As Ötzi and other ancient people's DNA illustrate, the skin color genetic changes took thousands of years to become commonplace in Europe. 'People that lived in Europe between 40,000 years ago and 8,000 years ago were as dark as people in Africa, which makes a lot of sense because [Africa is] where humans came from," he says. "We have always imagined that [Europeans] became light-skinned much faster. But now it seems that this happened actually quite late in human history!" (excerpt in quotations from Science News article by Tina Hesman Seay) Below are photos of Otzi, the first taken in 1991 shortly after he was discovered by 2 hikers, his naturally mummified body after he was carefully unearthed from the ice and his incorrect/false rendering with pale skin of 2011, and I hope to return to add a correct/more accurate rendering of him if/when a new one is made!”

Photos show 1) a pair of light-skinned, brown-haired hikers with brown beards, dressed in very 1980s clothing, with the exposed body of Otzi in situ in the ice where they found his body; 2) two photographs of Otzi’s preserved body from the top and back, 3) a close-up photo of Otzi’s preserved hand 4) an inaccurate reconstruction of Otzi in life, showing him as a light-skinned white man.

#otzi #otzi the iceman #historical racism #scientific racism #prehistoric humans #human physiology #whiteness is a construct and a really shitty one we should do everything possible to denaturalise and deconstruct #whiteness is a construct #male pattern baldness

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