I couldn't put it as a thumbnail so here's just Gideon seperatly

this is the dumbest thing ever but I had so much fun with it

arts separately cause I spent too much time on it

Is this anything?

Found this far funnier than I should have

someone please tell me if this is actually in accordance with how you spell irish stuff

I appreciate your curiosity!! This is exactly how we’d Gaelicise English names.

The J in Jason becoming an S is based on the model of Seán being the Irish version of John, and of Séamus being the Irish version of James. Séason would be pronounced Shay-son.

T is pronounced very softly in Irish, and when it’s followed by an E, it becomes a CH sound. The EA diphtong in Tead is pronounced as ‘ah’. So Tead would be pronounced as Chad, exactly the same.

As above, the EA is pronounced ‘ah’ and the combination GH is silent in Irish, so Hearraigh would be pronounced as Harry is in English, despite the initially alarming length.

Darach is already an Irish name, meaning ‘like an oak,’ and it’s usually Anglicised as Dara or Darragh (pronounced identically to each other), so suggesting Dairech = Derek is just extra funny.

I don’t think I’ll actually be able to scrub Ailfiagh out of my mind. It sounds too Irish, to the point that it’s replaced Alfie as the default spelling for me.

In short, We Need to Talk about Caoimhín (Kwee-veen) is a genius.

The Virgin latinize vs the tead gealicise

[ID: a tweet from ChickenCaoimh. It reads: “Irish name-havers: strike back by deliberately misspelling English names. Jason? Séason. Chad? Tead. Harry? Hearraigh. Derek? Dairech. Alfie? Ailfiagh.” /end ID]

a scooby-doo origin story where Daphne, Fred, Velma, and Shaggy are all serving detention together and none of them (save for maybe Fred and Daphne) have ever really talked before, but they talk in detention. they have fun, they're bonding, it's a real Breakfast Club situation, and as detention ends they're walking home and they see a dog digging through the garbage of a local restaurant

he's big, but he seems sweet and he's obviously hungry, so the gang approaches him to see if he has a collar. Shaggy manages to get to him first, and the dog immediately takes to him, giving him a big dog kiss and cuddling up to him, but the dog seems to like all of them

upon finding he doesn't have a collar, Shaggy, scratching behind his ears, rhetorically asks, "What's your name, buddy?"

and the dog answers, "Scooby-Dooby-Doo!"

after a minute of freaking the FUCK out and asking each other "y'all heard that, right?" the kids decide to take the dog (who they immediately start calling Scooby-Doo, Scoob, or Scooby for short) home, and find that not only can the dog talk, he displays human-level intelligence and is easily frightened. when they ask where he came from, he doesn't seem to know, but when they walk past an old, abandoned shopping complex on the edge of town, he completely freaks out...and there are weird noises coming from that complex at night....and some suspicious sightings....

the first mystery they investigate together is the mystery of what in God's name is going on here

@imdefnotvanessa thank you for giving me indirect permission to talk more <3

Other ideas for this concept:

The girls are exeeerrrcising

don't hide your tags bestie this is so cute

English added by me :)

i swear i made this post before but if i did tumblr search aint showing it so here we go again.

i think by now we are all intimately familiar with this particular xkcd comic

now i have some objections to this.

i disagree with the idea that the rocks on the ground are a computer, or as the comic puts it "turing complete". at best the rocks are the memory and maybe the display, but the actual read/write head, the central processing unit, as it were, it the guy moving the rocks around.

and you might say, well fair enough, the actual computer is the whole rocks-person system, right. but then that really stretches the intuitions of what a computer is supposed to be, of why we even have computers in the first place.

the point of a computer is the automatization of work, the point is that the human does not have to do the data processing, otherwise you dont have a computer, you have a glorified abaccus.

we might as well call a person doing math with pen and paper a "computer" (yes i am aware that computer was the name given to people who worked calculating logarithmic tables and what not by hand in the late 1800's, i am not talking about that kind of computer and we both know it, im not interested in semantics)

What do you mean you're not interested in semantics? This whole post is about semantics.

well technically is more about ontollogy than semantics, the difference is i am talking about what is a computer, rather than about how is the word computer technically defined, there is a subtle difference in both questions

ok but "this computer is not a labour-saving device" is a completely irrelevant point in the context of the comic. the notion of computer is used only in the sense of "thing that can run simulations"; indeed the absurd extent to which it is not a labour-saving device is an integral part of the comic.

it's fine to argue about boundaries delineating the concept of a computer but i don't think it makes sense to frame it as a complaint about a comic which is deliberately using a very noncentral notion of computer to begin with.

ok but what counts as "running a simulation"? if i were to sit down with infinite paper and just drew a rat and that is like moving and breathing and showing signs of an evolving metabolism with every drawing i make, am i "running a simulation of a rat"? because that feels really unsatisfying, generally that is not fulfilling the motives for which we try to simulate things

well, this person is not simulating things for an ordinary reason. that's not really the point of the comic.

one may well question the idea that simulating a universe means that there's such a thing as people having the subjective experience of living in the the simulated universe. but that seems completely unrelated to the point of your first post

well my original point was that a bunch of rocks on the ground on their own are not turing complete. if a human being acting as the read/write processing unit makes it turing complete then so is an abbacus or a piece of paper where one writes down math. but usually those things are not usually considered computers, not even on a noncentral way

human plus paper was like, the paradigmatic example of "thing that can do computation" until (historically speaking) very recently.

you say in the OP "i am not talking about that kind of computer and we both know it, im not interested in semantics" but, like. I think you are?

Or at least, that the thing the comic is talking about, and if you are talking about something else then it seems weird to do so at the comic.

so, specifically: by computer, do you mean a labour-saving device that does computation faster and better than a human being? then yes, this is the common contemporary usage of the word computer. no, this is not the way the word is used in the comic. The comic is not wrong for using the other sense of computer; it's not like it's tricking people into thinking rocks are electronic circuits or that this would be easy.

Or, do you mean "thing you could in principle run a physics simulation on"? because then this is absolutely the thing the comic means, and also it's true that a bunch of rocks being operated by a human mind (who never gets tired or dies or anything, etc, etc) can do.

the comic says that its a computer in the sense that its turing complete, that is the sense in which its saying that its a computer. the quote is "its rocks instead of electricity but its the same thing* (turing complete)" and im saying the rocks on their own are not turing complete. you can argue that they are impliying that the human-rock sistem is turing complete, but that seems like a really weird definition of turing complete to me. and i dont think that weirdness is adressed when the comic says "its the same thing". randall is not saying "the human rock-system is, in a weird noncentral way, turing complete". but again, maybe a machine can be considered to be "turing complete" even when a human is performing some of the tasks required to make it turing complete.

turing completeness is a property of the set of rules by which the rocks are being placed

if you picked the right rules, then yes, you have something turing complete. and then it is physically instantiated using rocks and an immortal human. if you picked the wrong set of rules, you didn't.

how you build the machine that instantiates the rules is entirely irrelevant to the question of turing completeness, assuming it does in fact implement a turing complete set of rules.

this is also the principle behind being able to build a turing machine out of mtg cards

Wait, wait, go on

So the main method I'm familiar with is:

The gist of it is, you make a bunch of copies of Bishop of Wings, use Artificial Evolution a bunch of times to hack the creature types on them, and have the opponent gain control of them. You also need several Dralnu's Crusades, also hacking them with Artificial Evolution, plus at least one Coat of Arms. Play Arcbond on one of the opponent's creatures, play Comeuppance to protect yourself, and deal a small amount of damage to the Arcbond creature.

The Arcbond creature deals that damage back to everything else, including the players, except Comeuppance prevents the damage that would hit you and redirects it back to the Arcbond creature. This causes the cycle to repeat until the Arcbond creature dies.

In the meantime, smaller creatures will die. Any Bishops keyed to them will create tokens, which thanks to Coat of Arms, adds toughness to whatever other creatures share the same types. This lets them survive more damage, allowing us to keep the Arcbond creature alive for a very long time, as well as whatever Bishops we're using. Meanwhile, the life the opponent gains from the Bishops keeps them from dying to Arcbond damage.

It would be easy to make a loop that would run forever in this way, but for Turing completeness, we need to do more than that. The specific computational model this aims to implement is the Waterfall Model:

A Waterfall Model program has several "waterclocks", each with a starting value that decreases by 1 for each increment of time. One waterclock is the "halting" clock: when it hits 0, the program ends. The others are set to, upon reaching 0, add particular values to each clock, including itself. The values added can differ for each "clock A > clock B" combination, but each such combination must have a particular value that stays consistent throughout the program.

In the MTG implementation, the point when a clock reaches 0 corresponds to when the number of creatures constituting that clock stops exceeding the damage that has been dealt to that clock. At that point, the most-damaged creatures in that clock die, causing the others to shrink, and resulting in a chain reaction that kills all the creatures in that clock. This causes the Bishops to make more creatures, refilling clocks as specified.

On its own, this would not fulfill the requirement of making the refilling values consistent. But Dralnu's Crusade fixes that by making it so tokens created by the Bishops can have multiple creature types. This means we can, for example, have a clock consisting mostly of Boars, plus a Bat, and a Dralnu's Crusade saying Bats are also Boars. This means the Bat gets toughness from the Boars, but the Bishops aren't keyed to the Boars, they're keyed to the Bat. When the Bat and Boars die, the Bishops make one new Bat (so we always have exactly one), N new Boars, and probably some number of whatever other creature types we're using for other clocks.

From what I've been told, six waterclocks like this are enough to build a Turing complete program. I can't tell you why that's enough, but there's a lot of discussion on these MTG programs in the later pages of this thread, which probably have details I've missed or forgotten.

This particular implementation is built to fit the thread's massive damage challenge, so it's specifically made to fit that challenge's rules. Except it recently turned out that Dralnu's Crusade causes problems with those rules, so we've been scrambling to find alternatives. It does still allow for Turing complete programming, just not of a kind compatible with this specific challenge's rules.

dog time AKA the only reason i've been managing not to overwork myself

death of the author except when its funny

exactly what someone who regularly turns into a dog would say

im having a genuine blast this is like a gender reveal party to me

Examples of the Four Color Theorem, which states that no more than four colors are required to color in any map so that no two adjacent regions share the same color

Made by me in Photoshop

Good luck with that. It took 124 years to prove.

what makes a map a map? because a chessboard did it in 2

Any number of enclosed non-overlapping shapes on a plane is a map.

And the question isn’t what’s the smallest number possible. It’s about the largest number that’s required.

There’re maps that only need 1 or 2 or 3 colors, but no maps that need more than 4.

Even more examples because I’m addicted

You might want to get that checked.

My friend's kid gave me pinkeye and I have been on a particularly fuckt up sleep schedule about it and dreamed an entire Italian Opera on the themes of heaven and hell and the power of love and recognition of the self in other and the tragedy of loving the idea of something rather than the thing itself and the dream ended with the phrase "-And then it was banned EVERYWHERE."

The plot starts off with a hybrid of Cinderella and the Taming Of The Shrew where a woman with her own daughter marries a Duke who has an older daughter, and then the Duke dies under "Mysterious circumstances".

But he leaves in his will that his fortune won't be disbursed until his daughter (the elder one) marries.

The elder daughter (like, 20ish?) is refusing to get married because her step-mother is trying to set her step-sister (age 12) with IDK A Medieval Italian supreme court judge?? (Age 65) , but the marriage can't go through until the Duke's fortune disburses and the mother can pay the dowry.

Other thing about the Eldest Daughter: She Always Speaks The Truth. Not only does she refuse to lie, but kind of like a retroactive Cassandra, everything she says is True. As you can imagine, this is not terribly popular In Fantasy Medieval Italian High Society.

The mother, big mad about being stuck with this stubborn, awkward girl, gets a Lawyer and a Bishop and a bunch of other authority figures to modify the will so that "Should the plague take my eldest, we will not be bereft *wink*" AKA if the eldest just dies or disappears without getting married, the mother will get the money anyway. (They all know she's going to kill the girl, but they're getting a cut.) The Step-Mother then, in true operatic fashion of Going Way Too Hard tortures the Elder daughter, and locks her in the basement to bleed out and die.

There, in the darkness, abandoned by God and the Law and Family etc. the daughter turns to the last thing she has left.

BLACK MAGIC

(Come on, it's Opera. Everybody knows Black Magic)

I demonstrate the 10 types of magic ✨

Chocolate guy this, chocolate guy that.

WHEN IS TUMBLR GOING TO JOIN ME IN COLLECTIVELY LOSING OUR SHIT OVER STOP-MO GUY?

I'VE BEEN FOLLOWING STOP-MO GUY FOR YEARS AND I CONTINUE TO SCREAM AT THE CASUAL DISREGARD OF REALITY.

CLADISTICS ruined my life

yall joke but this is actually a serious conundrun with cladistic-based classification

The choice is this: 

Birds are reptiles 

Or crocodilians (and probably turtles) ARENT 

That’s it, that’s the choice 

What if Bird and reptiles are two different things that came from the same thing

Nope 

Because you can’t group (lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians) without also including (birds) 

So if you don’t want to include birds in reptiles then you have to leave out some things we’ve called reptiles 

birds are dinosaurs though, full stop. we’ve already defined what a dinosaur is and it includes birds. but reptiles isn’t really defined so much as thrown against a wall angrily. 

But don’t turtles and alligators have more in common with modern reptiles than modern birds have in common with modern reptiles? I’m not trying to contradict, I’m trying to understand. Mammals and reptiles have a common ancestor as well, but we do not make them the same group.

It’s not about having things in common. It’s about common ancestry, which is how we classify animals in light of extinct species, which defy trait-based classification. 

And, the common ancestor of [lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians] by definition is also the common ancestor of birds. It is NOT the common ancestor of mammals. 

So, either we decide that Tuatara Lizards and Snakes are the only reptiles, or we include birds as reptiles. Or we just decide reptiles are no longer a thing. 

don’t throw reptiles against the wall? please? some of them are small and delicate. you could hurt them.

Basically, unless we’re maybe talking massive horizontal gene transfer, everything is still part of the group that came before it. 

You are technically a fish.

IIRC the fish thing is so frustrating that scientists have decided fish is just not real cladistic grouping at all

hey could we go back please to the bit where the closest relative of Birds is Crocodiles? bc I am alarmed

Well, technically they’re equally-closely related to crocodiles, alligators, gharials and tomistomas. As archosaurs, they’re all descended from small reptiles that looked something like this 

The two main groups of archosaurs are the Pseudosuchia, or crocodile-line archosaurs, and the Ornithodira, or bird-line archosaurs. Both groups were massively diverse in prehistory, with the Pseudosuchia dominating most land-based niches in the Triassic, and the Ornithodira, especially the dinosaurs, doing the same during the Jurassic and Cretaceous. However, most of them have been wiped out due to the Triassic and Cretaceous mass extinctions, leaving them each with only one surviving clade: Aves, the true birds, and Crocodylia, the semiaquatic, ambush predators like crocs and gators. 

This entire post sums up everything we’re not allowed to mention in our Vertebrata classes because the last time someone started that argument they had to break up a fistfight.

I’m just hung up on the humans evolving from fish comment.

Like, we evolved from tiny tree-climbing squirrels. To the best of our knowledge.

…which evolved from tiny tree-climbing reptiles

…which evolved from amphibians

…which evolved from fish.

*runs in ten minutes late with a plucked chicken* BEHOLD A LIZARD

you could have left the feathers on this time tbh

It was already plucked. They just STOLE IT from philosophy 101.

Every turn on this post has been a left, but somehow it hasn’t hit itself, and instead just spiralled outwards like some Ancient Greco-Roman floor design, enveloping taxonomy Tumblr in chaos.

“i equip my trusty laser revolver. there’s basically no point in it being a revolver and not an automatic pistol except for the aesthetic. honestly it’s just really inconvenient to have only six shots of fuckin light energy at a time but it’s a labor of love for a space cowboy”

ok but consider: capacitors that recharge automatically but not instantly, so in the few seconds between each shot, you have 5 other capacitors to cycle through, leaving the first capacitor ready to fire again by the time it is again aligned with the lens assembly and trigger mechanism.

in that sense, the purpose of a laser revolver’s cylinder would be like the cylinder of a traditional ballistic revolver and more like a rotary barrel assembly (which is used to allow each barrel time to cool down before another round is fired through it, reducing wear-and-tear), though due to the fact that its direct function is to align the ordnance with the weapon assembly, it would still be considered a cylinder, making the weapon properly a revolver.

Yes!  I want SCIENCE in my science fiction. Thank you.

just made a pretentious uquiz that brought me so much joy it’s embarassing

here’s the link! put your results in the tags, i’d love to see what you got 👀

Nice.

A common misconception is that the skin of an airplane is smooth. This is just an optical illusion due to their shine; their skin is actually incredibly rough.

there must be something wrong with your hands. planes are smooth.

No. I have touched dozens of planes with my bare hands. Every one had very rough skin, like medium sandpaper.

fun fact: plane skin is actually smooth when felt in one direction and rough when felt the opposite direction! this is because plane skin is covered by millions of tiny teeth :)

this is false. I’m touching a plane right now and it’s rough in every direction

Yes but are you touching the plane in its natural habitat?

I’m 30,000 feet in the air as we speak

Time traveler: Ah yes, I have studied your memes. *ahem*  “You said the copper ingots you sold me would be smooth in every direction, but they are rough and poor quality. I showed them to my friend Spiders Georg and he said they should not be counted.  Give me my money back and also I like your shoelaces.”

Original Sin

iI already know what my sentence will be, long before the judge begins to speak. In my unconquerable, relentless optimism, I imagine that there will be a miracle, that It will instead call for an immediate execution.

I’m wrong, of course. There can only be one sentence for the slaughter of a god.

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