tropylium reblogged
found it. this sent me into hysterics one night
Very low-level annoyances: the way people pretend that the almond "is not a nut" according to everyday parlance just because it's not called an "almondnut". Yes, just like the only proper fruits are the dragonfruit, grapefruit, miraclefruit, passionfruit and starfruit
this is mostly harmless but must be actually some hassle at least for people with an almond allergy, and needing to constantly double-check whether "does not contain nuts" covers also almonds or not
tropylium reblogged
australian/ american/ canadian can be both adjectives and nouns. What’s the equivalent for japanese?
British doesn’t work as a noun but brit does, although that’s weird cause it’s like, informal/ an abbreviation?
"Yamato", though I think you'd be likely to get some weird looks for this most of the time.
(still really does not strike me as much weirder than "Chinese" / "Han" though that's of course much less equivalent and hence has much more of a separate function)
tropylium reblogged
Anyone have a good word for describing “cyberpunk but its positive” aesthetic? I realize I use ‘cyberia’, which I like even if its a little glitch/hacker heavy on the vibe, but maybe there is a clear word for this and its just missing from my vocabulary?
The current de facto solution seems to be to put this under the slightly clunky umbrella term of "y2k aesthetic".
tropylium reblogged
the use of the “order” in group theory is sort of conceptually elegant and mostly extremely annoying
Mathematicians should not be allowed to name any more things “order” or “degree” than they already have
The normal order equals the regular degree. Or is it the other way around?
see also: “rank”, to a lesser extent “characteristic” and “height”
anyway I propose this be fixed by using arbitrary non-metric units of physical measurement. your matrix is now three ells and 40 proof
This year let’s remember the true meaning of Θāigraciš
Honestly the Old Persian Calendar is the most badass calendar. I don’t know why anyone uses anything else. Check out those month names.
“Hey, Cyrus, what are we doing for Vrkazana this year?” “Killing wolves, what do you fucking think?”
Metal.
And later on, they have an entire month for worshiping the nameless god. Fucking metal.
“Hey, you know, I’ve always hated that month that’s like middle-late winter. It’s still cold as hell and there aren’t even any good holidays.” “I know, right? It sucks. What are we going to call it?” “Let’s go with…Suckuary.”
Metal.
Is “wolf killing” wolves being killed, or doing the killing…?
Anāmaka doesn’t seem to actually reference gods though: it could also be just “the month left otherwise unnamed”. This is quite easy to parse really: a- ‘a-, un-’, nāma ‘name’, -ka ‘deminutive suffix’, i.e. exactly transposeable as “Unnamey” in English.
Also I’d like to submit for a honorary mention: the Finnish for November is marraskuu, literally “death month”. The first component derives from the same Indo-European root as murder, mortal, etc. (Our other months are tame agricultural stuff like “earth month” or “harvest month” though, the next-most attitude we have is lokakuu “mud month” for October.)
we need accessible, helpful, meaningful alternatives to therapy, even if it just means seriously improving our practices of mutual support. we need something.
morphodyke
whatever it is, i don’t believe it could be mediated through the internet. a lot of helpful support work can be done on here, but it’s not the same as physical presence and the social, emotional, and spiritual support that can offer.
This probably has a failure mode where whatever new thing you come up with ends up being called “[modifier] therapy”. After all, “therapy” just means ways of getting treatment for your health issues.
Which, OK, would not be much of a failure; it still means that you will have a new alternative that lacks whatever downsides or fills whatever hole you’re seeing currently in therapy options. People who only know that “therapy bad”, though, would then still be left in the dark and unable to gain the support they need…
I would suggest that, if you have issues with “therapy”, you name those issues, and aim instead to de-normalize types of “therapy” that have these issues; so that you will be able to go instead something like “oh, I don’t find expert therapy / external therapy / troubleshooting therapy very useful, but mutualist therapy / private therapy / brainstorming therapy was very helpful to me”. [All modifiers in this example made up.]
(and who knows! in the process people might discover that there already are non-standard types of “therapy” that already will work for them; or even that whatever bad therapy experiences they had run into were never the standard to begin with)
History
The biscuit was originally known as the "Linzer Biscuit", and later the "Deutsch Biscuit". With the outbreak of World War I in England it was renamed to Empire biscuit (…)
Freedom fries anyone?
tropylium reblogged
Someday, I intend to write a fantasy novel set in Fantasy China, solely so that I can name everything shit like the Province West of the Mountains or Seaside City or Southern Capital or Long River and be completely and utterly justified in doing so.
tropylium reblogged
From Błażewicz-Paszkowycz et al. (2013).
UPDATE: you guys I found the paper and this is real. Just fyi, Keska sei is a deepsea crustacean.
I AM SO MAD
@markscherz I cannot handle biologists right now
This is magnificent
Finally the myth of the kangaroo has come true
tropylium reblogged
Remember also that clear speaking goes both ways. For example:
- Expression of opinions that you disapprove of or consider to be based on untruths or misanalysis is not per se propaganda;
- Refusing to divulge non-public facts or refusal to be interviewed is not censorship;
- Electoral campaigning per se and exercise of legitimate power are not authoritarianism;
- Anything whatsoever that does not involve, at minimum, both militarization and coerced homogeneity is not fascism.
- (I got nothing to add on corruption off the cuff, it doesn’t seem to get overdiagnosed much at all.)
Plain speaking on complex issues requires commitment to honesty, clarity and honesty. No term is intrinsically clear. (Indeed, many would claim that “propaganda”, “censorship” and especially “fascism” are themselves meaningless insults that need to be eschewed in favor of plain speaking.)
Contra an earlier poster, "use these terms just because They™ don’t like it” is shit advice that naturally degenerates right back into lies, slander and crying wolf. Accuracy and truth are only achievable if you care about false negatives and false positives both.
Obfuscationism might be effective for immediate gains; that’s why you probably see your enemies using it, after all. But the reason you should still stay away from it is not just for the sake of moral high ground as an abstract title. It’s because after you get caught of obsfuscation (and do not think that you will not; no-one can mislead everyone for all time), it will be a lot of work before you can reclaim the trust of people who catch you doing it.
tropylium reblogged
On social construction
“X is socially constructed” has a meaning that falls on a spectrum from “X is an abstraction: The map is not the territory“ via “X is a fuzzy, continuous concept, although it is based on a real thing, the way we draw the line around it is determined by cultural conventions“ to “X is a shared fiction that gains its power from the fact that people buy into it“
- Category Theory, Classical Mechanics, Mendelian Inheritance
- Maleness, The Color Blue, Species of Animals
- Paper Money, Virginity, Breakfast
But all of these are either motivated by objective reality, referring to physical phenomena, or influencing the outside world.
Even when a concept could be constructed in different ways, it usually is currently at a Nash Equilibrium or Schelling Point, and efforts to reconstruct it differently would be costly, and most attempts from scratch would naturally convert on the status quo.
In many ways, we use “X is socially constructed“ to mean that X does not exist, that X is not real. Even if X is socially constructed, X is still about something real.
This is really helpful
This seems true enough, but at the same time it seems largely orthogonal to what I find another important dimension in the typology of “socially constructed”. This is not the nature of what is being constructed, but how the process of “construction” happens.
Writing this out in full would be a whole effortpost of its own, but preliminarily I could call the main sub-types “constructed from statistics”; “constructed by consensus”; “constructed by authority”; “constructed by experience”.
Solubility vs. Temperature
A fact of chemistry that people sometimes find counterintutive is that the temperature dependence of solubility is the inverse for solids and for gases.
- Solids dissolve better in hotter solvent than in colder solvent;
- Gases dissolve better in colder solvent than in hotter solvent.
Chemistry textbooks that I have seen, though, usually try to motivate this by calculations involving stuff like partial vapor pressures in the solvent, or enthalpy of crystallization, none of which is especially memorable or intuitive.
This pattern can be reduced to a more general chemistry rule of thumb, however: like dissolves like. Hotter solids are closer to melting, which means they will mix better with other liquids; similarly colder gases are closer to liquifying, which again means they will mix better with liquids.
It’s still possible to get confused and remember this the wrong way around, though. If, say, colder CO₂ is closer to liquid and therefore dissolves better in water, why does colder water — i.e. closer to ice but further away from steam — not become a poorer solvent at the same time?
The thing to do here is to think about what kind of a mixture are we making in the first place. If you are trying to make a gaseous mixture, colder water indeed "dissolves” worse (— in other words, colder air, or the like, is able to retain less moisture). Buf if we’re trying to make a liquid solution, it does matter if the water is 1°C or 99°C, it’s already liquid in any case. There is no way to stabilize water as a solid or a gas in a homogeneous mixture, when conditions are within its liquid range (gels exist of course, but they’re not truly molecular-level homogeneous, as much as little networks to trap water in pouches and such). The “work” is in making the dissolved material also into a liquid; to coax it to not solidify or evaporate. And the closer we are to liquid range, the less work this will be.
There is also a pre-existing concept for this line of thinking that is already in use, which may also help in better understanding solutions, but it requires some termological care.
Consider e.g. a solution of sugar in water. We may not usually think of this as a mixture of liquid water and liquid sugar. But this is still the same kind of a thing as e.g. a solution of antifreeze and water. A cooled antifreeze solution can be thought of as water whose “freezing point has been lowered” — but also, as “a solution of ice in antifreeze”: with the antifreeze being the solvent, ice being merely a dissolved solid. Equally well, a thick sugar syrup that contains more sugar than water could be considered simply liquid sugar, with water serving as an “antisolidifier” than as a “solvent”. There is no fundamental difference: they’re both the same thing, seem from two different angles.
In other words, the colloquial use of “to melt” for “to dissolve” is indeed motivated. For a solid, to be dissolved IS to be molten, no matter if aided by solvent molecules rather than by heat.
Note though that I use above the adjectives dissolved and molten, specifically. If we now consider the verbs, dissolve and melt still cannot be considered synonyms (this much we must grant to all the high school chemistry teachers out there to insist on the distinction). But this has more to do with the way a mixture is prepared. Antifreeze solution is made from liquid water with added antifreeze, and then cooled below freezing point; sugar syrup is made from solid sugar with added water, and heated above the mixture’s melting point. In principle we could do the opposite as well — dissolve ice in liquid antifreeze, or mix liquid sugar with water and then cool the mixture. This would not be very practical, given the usual temperatures we do our work at… but the resulting solution would be the same in any case.
…in which meteorology embraces the shitpost method of naming things
we could probably use a distinct term of its own for sub-Saharan Africa: it might be geologically connected to the Mediterranean Africa of antiquity, but in pretty much any other terms (biological, cultural, economic, political) the Sahara is the actual southern limit of Eurasia, and the modern metonymic use of “Africa” for mainly the southern part of the continent mostly just seems to beget/enable confusion
“Nigeria” would maybe make a reasonable default Latinate recourse, if that wasn’t already used for a specific country (cf. “Columbia” versus “Colombia”). Unfortunately, native sub-Saharan African terms for the continent don’t really seem to exist either — it’s still e.g. Afirka in Hausa, Afrika in Somali and Swahili, Afrig in Wolof, Afirika in Yoruba, lAfrika in Zulu…
something Arabic-derived might be another option though: “Sudan” is also taken already, but “Zanj” only partially… I’m tempted to suggest “Zania” (cf. Tanzania), or maybe “Zenia” — the latter would have some synergy with “zenith”, perhaps in turn suggesting equatoriality?
tropylium reblogged
oh lord the shitty “special interest is an autistic-only term/hyperfixation is an adhd-only term” is back
oankali
to clarify:
- they’re literally exactly the same symptom
- autism and adhd share like half their symptoms/diagnostic criteria, and people with the same symptoms are routinely diagnosed as one or the other, and trying to prevent people “with one diagnosis” from using terms associated with “the other diagnosis” reifies these diagnoses, prevents the formation of alliance between people with the same goddamn symptom, and ultimately causes far more harm than it claims to prevent
- this does not mean that some of these people were diagnosed “incorrectly”, since diagnosis is literally just a label for a collection of symptoms
- in fact, this is a really good example of why a psychological system based on diagnosis rather than symptoms is such a bad system
People only use “male-bodied” and “female-bodied” when they care about those exceptions. More specifically, in my experience people use “male-bodied” or “female-bodied” when they want to be able to describe the bodies of transgender people, or to talk about the general population in a way that won’t have trans people as a glaring exception. So the merit of “_-bodied” terminology is entirely in its ability to more precisely classify the bodies of trans people.
This is not a bad reply, but it goes off the rails around the time of this assumption.
People deserve words for talking about their own bodies; this goes especially for gender-non-conforming and genderweird people, for whom your proposed “just speak of wo/men” approach doesn’t quite work. And yet when they attempt to do this, they get shouted down by dyadic and genderqueer trans activists alike for being another politically inconvenient exception. (Well, rhetorically it usually comes out similar to your critique: everyone who utters The Forbidden Words is presumed to be “really wanting” to rather talk about trans people and not about their own experiences. I dout if it can be 100% due to incharitability, though.)