mayajadeart

[mayajadeart]

Fucking, thank god for grad students. Grad students are truly the GOAT of science. A lot of scientific research is limited by what kinds of research can produce results that might be profitable for businesses, including the journals that publish that research in the first place. But grad students? They're not trying to make money for anyone, they're trying to prove themselves as scientists before entering the professional world. The only thing a master's or doctorate thesis is supposed to do is prove to your university that you have mastered your craft and are capable of producing research that meets the standards of the scientific community. The only job that a graduate student has when producing that thesis is to do good research that has never been done before. They're just about the only scientists whose sole prerogative is to look where no one else has looked to answer questions that no one else has, possibly because no one else has even asked them yet, and to compile their results, whatever they are, for the pure sake of knowledge itself.

I'm not a scientist, I'm just someone who does scientific research in my free time because I'm deranged enough to think it's genuinely fun, and because a lot of the art I do is scientifically informed. But because I'm doing this research for art rather than a more "practical" application, a lot of the times the reasons why I want to know something are completely different from the reasons why these topics are actually studied. I don't want to know how to create synthetic equivalents of Feline Facial Pheromone F3, whose function we already know, in order to reduce stress and prevent undesirable behavior in pet cats in new homes and vet clinics, I want an analysis of the components that make up Feline Facial Pheromones F1 and F5, whose functions we don't know, in order to start building hypotheses about what those functions might be, so that I can figure out how catgirls would perceive these pheromones and theorize how they might talk about them in their native languages. But nobody's gonna pay me to do that, are they?

And let me tell you, sometimes the only people who seem interested in the kinds of bizarre and esoteric questions that an artist like me will have are grad students publishing theses. I still haven't found anyone trying to figure out what FFP F1 or F5 are used for, but I have found:

A full, comprehensive description of the complete phonology and grammar of the Lushootseed language and its dialects, spoken by several Coast Salish tribes of the Puget Sound region, published by Ted Kye in 2023 for his doctoral thesis at the University of Washington. Lushootseed is the source of many words from the region, including hugely important place names like Snoqualmie, Muckleshoot, Puyallup, Snohomish, Sammamish, Duwamish, Mukilteo, Shilshole, and of course, Seattle, but the language itself is extinct, with its last native speaker, Vi Hilbert, dying in 2008. There are, however, efforts to revive the language, and that would be significantly more difficult without Ted Kye's work. I think we can all see why this kind of thing is valuable.

And, this second one is a bit more esoteric but hear me out:

The discovery that a popular ornamental aquarium fish might actually have been sequentially hermaphroditic this whole time, which was practically a footnote in a 2016 thesis by Lia Gomes and Silva Henriques from the University of Porto, in Portugal. The fish in question is the red-tailed shark, Epalzeorhynchos bicolor, which is not an actual shark, but a member of the carp family that just happens to look like a shark, and two very important things to note about it are that it is critically endangered in the wild, and in fact was thought to be totally extinct in the wild until one was found in 2014, and that they are also practically impossible to breed in captivity. The primary threat to the species is considered to be habitat destruction. The quite substantial supply of this species in the pet trade today all come from fish farms in Southeast Asia, which use hormones to induce reproduction in the species, through processes that are kept as trade secrets and are essentially unknown to the scientific community. So, we have literally no idea how this fish breeds, which means that hobbyists can't breed it themselves, and scientists don't know what conditions they even need in order to breed in the wild. This one paper, written by students in Portugal who attempted to induce gonadal maturation in the species using hormone injections, is perhaps one of the only clues we have on the path to saving this species, and it hints at a conclusion that could have HUGE implications for the husbandry, captive breeding, and survival in the wild of the red-tailed shark: all of the individuals that were dissected without having undergone hormone injections were immature females, and immature males only started appearing in groups that had been injected, suggesting that all individuals of the species might start out as females, and then at some point in their development, certain individuals, for unknown reasons, may develop into males instead, making them sequential hermaphrodites. This isn't unknown in fish (clownfish do something similar, except they all start out as males and become female when they achieve dominance in their social group), but it was completely unexpected in this species, and could go a long way in starting to explain the difficulties with breeding them and potentially be a step on the path to learning how to breed them in captivity, as well as saving them in the wild.

Unfortunately, in the latter case, I wasn't able to find any other published work by either of the listed authors, and no one else seems to have repeated the experiment. This is a real shame, because the results of the experiments, while very intriguing, weren't conclusive; they had a fairly low sample size, and would need to be confirmed by further research. But there's no indication of that research being done, and I might be the only one other than the university's board of reviewers who's even read the thing.

All this is to say, fish testicles are interesting and I'm begging someone to do more research on them, please.

[mayajadeart]

Sunrise: Finally your two favorites are back. Char Aznable and Amuro Ray... their DNA spliced together to form the most powerful newtype. His name is Power Bottom

Tomino in an interview later: [lying] I came up with this idea years ago. [not lying] I wanted people to think, Char and Amuro... could these two men father a child together?

Sunrise: [ignoring him] This is our most heterosexual move yet

[mayajadeart]

Well? Is it?

[mayajadeart]

RIGHT! it was about WOMEN!

as a lesbian, i love hot women just as much as you do. maybe even more than you. i love hot women so goddamned much. there's nothing more important in my life than hot women. women are just the best thing ever and i want my life to be filled with nothing but...

... what was this post about again?

[mayajadeart]

as a lesbian, i love hot women just as much as you do. maybe even more than you. i love hot women so goddamned much. there's nothing more important in my life than hot women. women are just the best thing ever and i want my life to be filled with nothing but...

... what was this post about again?

[mayajadeart]

Kanji is made for lesbians because 女子 ("girl") is the same as 好 ("good").

[mayajadeart]

If you know how to pet a cat in a way that doesn't hurt them then you already know the first step to groping tits.

[mayajadeart]

I saw this screencapped on twitter and someone in the replies added this screencap. I don't know the original source but I think it's relevant to the conversation:

Twitter post

I feel it's important to emphasize, this post is not an argument about whether or not it's okay to fuck a dead chicken, it's about how we decide whether it's okay or not-- does the act itself have an inherent moral value that always applies regardless of whether anyone other than the consenting individuals participating is actually affected, or is its moral value determined entirely by the actual, measurable effect that it has only on the individuals who are actually affected by it?

This is also not a judgement on which method of moral judgement is more correct or more "good." I see a lot of people trying to weasel around the "no harm" metric by saying things like (paraphrasing) "committing an immoral act is inherently harmful to the individual committing the act, even if no external parties are affected," "committing an immoral act, whether or not any actual harm was done in this specific instance, is an indicator that someone is likely to do actual harm to someone in the future," or by citing the chicken as a harmed individual in a kind of "outrage against personal dignity" category. These are not reasons to conclude that harm was done in this instance, they are justifications for why the act should be considered to have an inherent moral value regardless of actual harm done.

It's okay if you come away from this exercise thinking "the act itself is still inherently immoral," just be aware that that's what you're doing, and be honest about what that says about your personal moral compass. Don't try to rationalize harm being done where there really isn't any, or try to convince yourself or others that you follow a moral system that you in fact do not. If you come to a conclusion that you don't like about the way you personally conceptualize and respond to morality, then you can change how you do that, through careful consideration, self-reflection, and practice. Just don't lie about what it is.

in order to not succumb to sex negative conservatism you have to accept that people will get off to things that are upsetting to you. and you cannot assume anything about what they have or have not experienced, what they do or do not believe, and how they act based solely on what gets them off. even if it's extremely confusing and disturbing to you. there are people who have only ever had heterosexual vanilla sex in missionary with the lights off, who actively contribute to more real world harm than your average fetish artist. kink is not a reliable source of information on someone's moral standing. it just feels good to think that way.

[mayajadeart]

It's not necessarily that they're gay for each other, it's just that there's no straight explanation for how much they hate each other.

[mayajadeart]

my dangerously queer, extremely anarchist partner, who also happens to be casually christian (as in, "grew up in a christian town and remains very spiritual but has just about disavowed all forms of organized religion and will drop everything to explain that evangelical christianity is a literal apocalypse cult"), just had a minor existential meltdown because they, just now, learned that christianity is not, in fact, a minority in the united states, and that christians actually make up over 60% of the population.

we both had to take a minute to marvel at just how pervasive christian martyr complex propaganda really is, that it took them this long to find that out.

[mayajadeart]

Man, the Kennedy family has really bad luck with brains.

[mayajadeart]

how's everyone feeling? i'm handling the thanksgiving existentialism of having a chill family who i like but have nothing in common with except for a general tendency towards depression and social isolation for which i have wildly different coping strategies because i am not a middle aged white lady. this doesn't hurt, but it is pain. or maybe, it isn't pain, but it hurts? i can't hate it, but i don't like it.

[mayajadeart]

Dear Cat,

Just because you took a poop and it was stinky doesn't mean you have to immediately make it my problem.

Thank you

[mayajadeart]

I love that jan Misali first learned about the academic field of game theory when people kept mentioning it in the comments of their video about hangman, and now they're on tumblr posting shit like this. Truly a jan who speaks for our generation. sina pali e ijo pi namako nasa mute la mi sona ala o awen. pona! anu... pona ala... anu pona! pona ala li sama e pona. anu... ala? mi sona ala! ;-;

the additive group of day-2 normal partizan games

recently I've been trying to gain a deeper understanding of one very small subset of the class of normal partizan games: the games that are born on or before day 2. I've explained the general concept on main before, so I'll assume you're already familiar with the idea.

to recap, there are 22 games under the normal play convention that end after at most two moves. three moves extends that to 1474, and beyond that many moves it's an open question.

normal partizan games can be added together to form new normal partizan games. analyzing when a complicated game can be broken down into the sum of multiple other simpler games is one of the most important concepts in combinatorial game theory.

the sum of games has the properties that it's associative ((F + G) + H = F + (G + H)) and commutative (G + H = H + G), just like regular addition. so what I'm interested in is what happens if you ignore the game-ness of these games and just explore the behavior of the sums of these particular small games as an abelian group. that is, given two games G and H expressed in the form of some number of day-2 games all added together (allowing duplicates), when does G equal H? and I uh, almost understand it? but not everything.

the generative set

while these 22 games are all very simple, we don't really need all 22 of them. I'm not 100% sure how small of a generative set you can reduce them to, but I've been able to cut it down to just ten:

*2 = {0,*|0,*}

½ = {0|1}

-½ = {-1|0}

↑ = {0|*}

↓ = {*|0}

±1 = {1|-1}

±½ = {½|-½}

{½|-½*}

{1|0,*}

{0,*|-1}

the ones I've put in red are not actually day-2 games, but they can be expressed as the sums of other day-2 games, so they're fine to use. they could be replaced with actual day-2 games, but I think these particular forms make the math easier. and the last two are uh, weird. I don't know what their deal is.

anyway, all day-2 games (and by extension all sums of day-2 games) can be represented as the sum of some combination of members of this generative set. I won't explain how for all of them because it's pretty trivial a lot of the time, but here are some of the highlights:

the zero game can be reached by adding any game to its negative, or alternatively it just doesn't need to be part of the generative set because the "empty sum" comes for free

the switches {1|0} and {0|-1} can be represented as ½±½ and -½±½, respectively

the hot game {1|*} has the property that {1|*} + {1|*} = 1 + * = 1*. this suggests that it could be broken down into a "one half" component and a "star halves" component. */2 is not a unique value (there are in fact infinitely many games which when added to themselves equal star), but {½|-½*}, one half less than {1|*}, does indeed have the property that when added to itself you get * as we'd expect, and since * is its own negative, three copies of {½|-½*} can be added together to get its negative.

adding these games together

a lot about the behavior of the sums of games is already very well-documented. as I said, this is one of the key concepts in combinatorial game theory.

within this generative set, three games are their own negatives (*2, ±1, and ±½), which simplifies things a lot. they essentially don't interact with anything else in the group. "star halves" works in a similar way, as described earlier.

numbers and arrows also don't interact with each other. ↑ is infinitesimal, smaller than every positive surreal number but still positive.

if we ignore the hot fuzzy game {1|0,*} and its negative, everything else then is pretty straightforward. games in this group can be broken down into a number part, an arrow part, a "star halves" part, a *2 part, and two switch parts. the sum of two games in this group can then be handled in all of those parts individually without needing to worry about any of these parts bleeding into each other.

but what of the hot fuzzy games {1|0,*} and {0,*|-1}? do they interact with anything else?

and I don't have the answer to that. they're really weird! {1|0,*} is hot (players have an incentive to move) and fuzzy (whoever makes the first move wins), but {1|0,*} added to itself is positive! I don't think these games will ever combine with something in this group to form something that could have been expressed without using them, but I also don't know how I would go about proving that.

anyway that's just what I've been thinking about recently

[mayajadeart]

So I have this heat-sensitive rubiks cube that's supposed to be all black until you warm it up with your hands. It looked like this just sitting on my shelf today:

Stay hydrated.

[mayajadeart]

Tumblr Top Ships Bracket - FINALS

This poll is a celebration of fandom and fandom history; we're aware that there are certain issues with many of the listed pairings and sources, but they are a part of that history. Please do not take this as an endorsement, and refrain from harassment.

[mayajadeart]

I think it's socially acceptable to shame people for not understanding how trans people work. And if it isn't socially acceptable then I think we should do it anyway until it is.