reblog my post boy

Fascinated by this phenomenon

boy who's never seen a large body of water before + insane force abilities = a very tired obi-wan

(donation doodles! // tip jar)

everyone on this site

Every time I don't drive in this city I fall in love a little bit more.

Vent art

bottom text

I'm really not apologetic with this hard stance, either. I'm very firm on this, too. My art has already been used, twice now by people who did not ask my permission, so they could "enhance it" with Gen AI. I really see nothing good coming from generative AI except poor excuses for laziness and glorified search engines that don't work.

This is an important time to make the distinction between generative and analytical AI. Analytical AI is what AI is supposed to be for. It’s all the boring stuff like analyzing data for patterns. For example, you probably heard about that AI that was designed to tell apart bear claws from croissants for a bakery that is now being used to detect cancer cells with greater accuracy than human doctors. That’s an analytical AI, while everything mentioned in the post above is generative AI. (Which sucks!)

analytical AI: saving time on data collection and pattern recognition. taking the grunt work out of science so scientists can use their time more usefully and get more out of their work,

generative AI: removing job opportunities for artists and creators, places profit over purpose, dumbing down our capacity for creation, lowering everyone's expectations for quality of media and art,

So my friend’s kid has celiac and dyslexia and reading labels is difficult for them (also they’re like 7) so he’s teaching their pigeon, Grey Boy, to read the labels and identify ingredients with gluten. It’s going well, other than Nick thought it would be a good idea to make the behavior when the pigeon does find a bad ingredient to just fucking…wing slap the box. Just beat the shit out of it like, “no! BAD gluten! BAD!”

I see a lot of “they taught a pigeon to read?” comments and thought I’d explain a bit more.

So it’s not really like their friend’s pigeon now knows how to read. He’s not going to be terribly interested in a novel you hand him (unless he decides it looks like a good nest.) However pigeons are remarkably good at pattern recognition, especially visual patterns. They out-perform humans when it comes to things like identifying artwork/distinguishing between different artist’s works. So it is pretty easy for them to recognize a visual arrangement of ink, such as a printed word, and be taught to respond to that particular pattern. So when looking at an ingredient list the pigeon learns to pick out the specific pattern(s) he’s been taught to react to among the other patterns (words.)

So he sees “wheat” and doesn’t read it the way humans do (w-h-e-a-t spells wheat), but rather sees the arrangement of pigment that he has been trained to slap. So he slaps it.

He will have to be taught every single gluten containing ingredient for it to be super useful, but it is definitely possible, which is super cool! Plus it makes a little kid’s life easier, and enriches Gray Boy.

Skinner did experiments with pigeons that showed how a pigeon can learn to respond to a visual pattern cue, if your interested more in the science behind it.

(Collab with @nicodiangeloisliterallymefr)

im on thin ice with everyone

my favorite microniche of cartoon tropes is when you look at a cartoon characters closet and it’s literally like 30 sets of the same outfit they’re in every episode

like call me easily amused but you can’t tell me this

isn’t peak comedy

i’m only on reddit for r/Kevin

After reading a post about waterproof notepads/bath crayons for capturing shower ideas i bought a pad on amazon

i expected this

but i did not anticipate…. This

UPDATE:

life

imitates art

Updated update

It’s three years later and he has not stopped raving

If it’s been a year since you last looked at my cat, look at my cat

It’s that time of year again. Time to look at my cat.

Was talking with one of my very lesbian friends about body dysmorphia and how you can look at a fucking gorgeous woman who has a lot of the same qualities as yourself and not realize that the complement also applies to yourself. I asked her if she'd been watching Dancing With The Stars this season and she said no.

So i showed her a picture of Ilona Maher from this week's episode.

Her response:

"Thigh. Thigh. Thigh. Thigh. Thigh."

So anyway, the takeaway here is that one person's 'too masculine' is another person's 'thigh.'

These tags!!!

#please know that Ilona went to the designer and asked to be as naked as possible because she wanted to feel her best#she said all the other girls get to be in pretty revealing costumes and she wanted the same without worrying about her body type#she wanted to celebrate it the same way they celebrated the other girls because she loves her body and has fought her own dysmorphia#AND!! it was to celebrate with her teammates and the strength of athletic womanhood that often gets overlooked#if you struggle with dysmorphia she was thinking of you 💕

AND WE ALL SAID THANK YOU

I am a fat afab who is

a. a performer

and b. a promoter and documentarian for queer events and I am BEGGING you to kill the cop in your mind.

Every single performer in these photos is loved by the audience and by their fellow performers. We all work hard to build each other up and we all suffer from body dysmorphia, but we get out there and do it anyway because every time we get up on stage its a love song to ourselves and to people like us.

I'm sorry you were told the lie that you can't be fat and beautiful. The people that told you that wouldn't know beauty if it sat in front of them and ate their lunch and left without paying the bill.

I know that not everyone can be a performer- getting up on stage in front of people isn't for everyone. But every fat performer who gets up there and does their thing with their whole chest is telling the world that we exist whether they think we're beautiful or not. And they love us or we wouldn't get hired. So. I think we're beautiful.

Also, one of those photos is me. Not because I'm self-centered, but because when you're advocating for others you have to make room at the table for yourself. Have to acknowledge that when we're on stage together, everyone EATS and leaves NO CRUMBS.

Okay something that bothers me is the fact physics is seen as the more prestigious of the three main sciences, with biology at the bottom and chemistry in the middle. Like. I doubt most people could name a famous biologist, but they could name 5 famous physicists. Why are Albert Einstein and Stephen hawking household names but Norman Borlaug and Jonas Salk aren't?

Not to dismiss the accomplishments of Einstein or Hawking, or their genius, but their actual tangible contributions to society have been miniscule compared to that of Borlaug or Salk who have each saved LITERALLY hundreds of millions, if not billions, of lives each. Half the food on your plate was probably grown thanks to Borlaug and Salk is the reason half your siblings didn't die of polio as a kid.

Sure Einsteins theory of relatively is important for modern satellite communications but really though how can it compare?

This is coming from someone who studied physics. I love physics, and years ago when i was at uni I looked down at biology and so did everyone else studying physics. And I know others did too. Retroactively of course I know this was so very wrong.

If society as a whole started treating biology with more respect then maybe more students would go into that field. If we had rockstars of medicine and agricultural science that were household names rather than just physicists? think of how many more lives could be saved, how many more lives could be improved.

I'm not saying physics isn't important, and more scientists of any kind is always good, but proportionally I think societies priorities are a little skewd.

Relevant xkcd

Jonas Salk was a household name in his lifetime, and people do know the names Richard Dawkins and Louis Pasteur and Charles Darwin. But biology has been demoted to a "soft science" in recent decades, a phenomenon I can explain with a single image:

My prediction is that you will see this happen with chemistry next.

its already happening with chemistry-adjacent studies!!! chemical engineering used to be seen as the hardest form of engineering, until it became extremely popolar with women students, to the point where it is now pejoratively called ‘femical engineering’, and lookie-look which is now considered the *easiest* type of engineering. wanna venture a guess?

Someone in the notes actually took the time to inform me that "correlation does not equal causation" but there is actual scientific evidence that we value women's work so low that when women enter a field, the prestige and pay in that field drops. We have seen this in numerous fields, even outside of the sciences and engineering fields. Biochemistry is being demoted to a soft science now too, but I think we will see, as the trends continue, that more women in chemistry will lead to devaluing of chemistry.

Some sources on this phenomenon.

The above two sources are discussed on the NYT article and show that, as women enter a field, the prestige and pay drops from that field. I found an interesting article on this below:

This third link is to an article that examines the long-term change in disparate prestige and pay experienced by women over time. In some respects, the gender pay gap is shrinking significantly and has been doing so since the 1980s. HOWEVER, when you control for other factors (more women are highly educated now, more jobs require higher education now than in 1980, more fields have earned a prestige and pay boost commensurate with these events) the negative effect of female percentage on overall pay an occupation receives has become stronger over time. In other words, the sex-based discrimination women experience has intensified as our net educational level and career choices have increased.

It's interesting because there's science behind this, there's science behind the pay gap, but MRAs value women's opinions so lowly that they can rebut it with "nu uh!" and people will go "well there's really no way to tell who is right here."

I had wanted to link them before, but I really didn't want to do so in the context of an online argument. Either you believe in sexism or you don't. If you don't, then I won't convince you it exists, and I don't want to spend my free time trying.

the joy of realizing someone is a similar type of freak as you