#and a level computer science and physics

[cathoderaymission]

graduated high school today and drew my creature to commemorate. i got into yttd around my freshman year so its like we graduated together lol

[aggressiveguitarnoises]

reminder to speak ur mind as soon as u want and can especially if its about smth u wanna change cuz its gonna come out eventually and sure sometimes its better later but sometimes its also better to do it as early as possible

[400-lucky-weasels]

Jonathan pick a specific branch of science for Exoskeleton to do challenge (impossible)

[the-one-and-only-overlass]

me in programming class making an incredibly shitty and inefficient encryption algorithm that is nonetheless incredibly convoluted:

It's basically a case-sensitive wheel cipher where both wheels are randomized (a total of (52!^2 possible combinations) and then given an offset based on the number of previous characters in the message.

And when I put it like that it doesn't really sound so bad. But the thing is, that's 832 bits worth of cipher key, since each letter corresponds to an 8-bit ASCII code, and it's being used incredibly inefficiently. A single properly random 832-bit key would offer WAY more actual security.

Just how much more?

Well, 52!^2 is roughly equal to 6.506 x 10^135. A ridiculously big number, yes, but....

2^832 is roughly equal to 2.864 x 10 ^ 250.

For those of you unfamiliar with scientific notation, this does not mean that 2^832 is about twice as large as 52!^2. It means it's about 3000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 times as large.

[1o1percentmilk]

i actually think hatori is more of an electrical/hardware engineer than an informatics/information technology/software engineering person

[anxiousgryffindor7]

Good luck and well done to everyone getting A Level results today!!

Got my EPQ result back today and I got an A!

[origami-butterfly]

This poll is a joke by the way, I don't plan on basing something that could make my entire future on a tumblr poll.

[uncontrolledfission]

The woman responsible for the moon landing

#10 in Physics and Astronomy, 11/11/2023

Pictured is Margaret Hamilton, posing next to the code that she and her team wrote to guide Apollo 11 to the moon! As the lead computer scientist on the Apollo program, her skills saved the otherwise doomed mission not long before it was destined to end.

Enthusiastic about maths from a tender age, Margaret became an expert in writing software following her time at university. Later on, she took a job at MIT, learning to write software that could predict the weather. 

In the mid-1960s, MIT announced they were looking for programmers to send men to the moon. Immediately, she knew this was for her, casting aside her original plan to attend graduate school for a degree in abstract maths to pursue the space program. Shortly, she became the first programmer hired for this project.

One amusing story about her time working on this is the time she took her daughter into the lab. As a working mother, it was necessary. One day, her daughter pushed a button, causing the system to crash. She quickly realised the astronauts could make this mistake, too, so she recommended adjusting the software. This was cast aside with a callous response: ��Astronauts are trained never to make a mistake.”

On the 20th of July 1969, three minutes before the planned landing, data from a radar system overwhelmed the computer; this had accidentally been triggered by the crew. This was the exact mistake Hamilton’s daughter had made. Within hours, this was corrected, however, if it wasn’t for Hamilton’s skilful programming, the computer would not have recognised that error in the first place. 

In 2016, the 80-year-old Margaret received the President Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama. During the presentation, he stated, “Our astronauts didn’t have much time, but thankfully they had Margaret Hamilton.”

You may have wondered where the term ‘software engineering’ came from. Being a young, curious student, I wondered what drew the line between simple, creative hobbies, and real-time problem-solving. Margaret Hamilton, it appears, is one of the people who helped  paint this distinction. 

She called her work “software engineering.” And for this, she was criticised. However, retrospectively, no one laughs anymore. The importance of programming, more specifically her work, is recognised properly now.

***

Sources:

[study-with-devour]

hi hi hi

hi , i'm devour .

i am an a-level computer science , physics and maths student and i want to chronicle my studying to the masses (aka this is a study blog) .

follow me for :

ramblings about my hatred for physics /s

ramblings about my hatred for computer science /srs

my genuine adoration for maths

stem girlism

ramblings about seals

recaps on how my study session went

photos of my working out / answers

[gallusrostromegalus]

If you please; what is your Tolberone theory of knowledge?

My theory, which I thought up a few weeks ago while sick with covid, is that all knowledge is a form of art, and that there are very broadly three basic types of knowledge arts: physical arts, philosophical arts, and scientific arts, and that pretty much all academic, artistic and practical disciplines exist somewhere in that triangle spectrum.

Physical arts are knowledges of how to actually, physically do things. The purest front of physical arts are things like dance and navigation.

Scientific arts are knowledges of things that can be tested and proven. Computer programming and Quilting are both scientific arts: they work, or they don't.

Philosophical Arts are knowledges of things which while not objectively provable, are still very real. History and Being A Good Listener are philosophical arts.

Nearly every discipline of knowledge is some combination of all three. Cooking is largely applied chemistry, a scientific art, but it's also a philosophical art because flavor is extremely cultural and contextual, and a physical art because you have to know how to hold the damn knife and heat when it's done.

The first part of toblerone theory is that, like how each piece has three sides, any given project needs at least one person who has a good grasp of each of the underlying arts involved or it's going to go sideways at best. For example:

Physical and Scientific arts, no philosophy: Jurassic Park. They need someone to point out that, while very possible, it's not necessarily a good idea.

Philosophy and Science, no physical: that dril tweet about the forum debate locked by a mod after 12,000 pages of heated debate. They need someone to drag them away from the keyboard and actually do something.

Philosophy and Physical, no science: that cult in midsommar that put a guy in a bearsuit. Without the ability to engage measurably with the world, they give into fear and behave like reactive animals. Also the "rare chicken steak" phenomenon.

You can have differing ratios of each type- Jurassic Park really only needed two philosophers: one animal behaviorist and an OSHA inspector, and 98% of the issues would have been avoided- but you do need at least ONE of each underlying art to check each other's work.

The second part of toblerone theory is that, like how the toblerone is made of many triangle pieces, there are poles to the triangle spectrum. Practical vs Esoteric arts. Short term and long term arts. High stakes vs for funsies arts.

While you have have different ratios and levels of expertise in each of the arts, you do all need them to be on the same piece of the bar, or they won't take each other seriously. A UN Diplomat and a climate scientist aren't going to take the advice of physical artist my uncle Bobby the plumber re: global warming, but they will take the advice of physical artist my Aunt Cheryl the civil engineer, a world expert in getting shit done.

The same applies for the other end of the spectrum. Aunt Cheryl the civil engineer isn't going to get much milage with the local high school student council and principal Waley when the problem at hand is "what are we going to do for this year's prom theme?"

I gotta go to therapy now, pictures later.

[quasi-normalcy]

So here’s a question that’s recently troubled me: When did average people stop knowing how their technology works?

I don’t even mean at the level of engineers or even electronic hobbyists; I mean like…at the level of general physical principles. Like “touch screens work by deforming a charged conductor layer, bringing it closer to a second layer and altering the local current to register a touch.” Did average people ever know this sort of stuff? Because it seems like they did. Like, maybe it’s just bias in the type of late-19th/early-20th century fiction I read, but it seems like people knew, at least in general principles, how, say, a victrola worked; they were interested in radio; they knew the basics of electricity.

So when did they stop? Like, how many people actually know how their computers work? How many people know about the humongous backend of physical infrastructure that’s necessary to support cloud computing or LLMs?

I mean, there’s an entire subgenre of horror stories that’s just about personal electronics doing spooky things…and why shouldn’t there be? As far as most people are concerned, they’re surrounded at all times by unfathomable nonhuman entities that mostly do what they’re supposed to, but sometimes don’t for unfathomable reasons. Honestly, I’m surprised people aren’t as superstitious about it as 17th century sailors were about the sea.

And I mean, part of it is just increasing disciplinary specialisation meaning you can’t know things fully; and part of it is just that computers and software tend to be black boxes (and to hide the backend). But also, to a large extent, we don’t even try to explain it.

Like, I assume that kids in the early 20th century studied how electricity works and how mechanics and such work in their science classes. But I grew up in the 1990s “Age of Computers” and I can’t recall anyone ever sitting me or my class down in public school to explain how logic circuits work. Did they do it for other kids in the 1990s? Are they doing it now?

I don't know; I just keep thinking that there's benefit to knowing that the world is rationally explicable, but it just seems to be getting more and more opaque to most people. I think we might be reaping the consequences of this.

[canmom]

my favourite metaphors tend to be physical/computer science ones: the feedback loop, the dynamical system, the state space, the instability, the self-organising structure, the mapping from x-space to y-space, the nth-order approximation, the evolving population, the compression algorithm, the cellular automaton, the fractal structure, the soliton, entropy. as far back as 2018 i was conceiving of gender transition's relation to society as akin to bubbles in a fluid.

i like to spice it with some more occult stuff now and again, the egregore in particular (used in preference to similar, more atomic concepts like 'meme' or 'semiotic sign' or 'stand alone complex' mostly because i like the vibe) - but that's a flavour of occultism that suits this habit of thought, isn't it? a notional abstract entity that emerges from the dynamics of a complex system, such as multiple minds? i view magic mostly in this light: a human tool for apprehending the large scale behaviour of humans. as such my go-to examples of egregores are things like 'countries' or 'organisations' or even 'gender'.

anyway i don't think this is a bad way to look at the world, i think it often leads to interesting left field approaches to subjects, but just because i invoke all these sciencey concepts does not actually entail any rigour. I'm operating on the level of analogy and i don't want to pretend otherwise. i try to be careful to keep the technical definition in mind, but it's not like I'm writing differential equations down, or even that you could in a lot of cases... and i tend to dislike the rhetorical invocation of mathematical concepts when other people do it, i am kind of a hypocrite lol

[river-taxbird]

What does AI actually look like?

There has been a lot of talk about the negative externalities of AI, how much power it uses, how much water it uses, but I feel like people often discuss these things like they are abstract concepts, or people discuss AI like it is this intangible thing that exists off in "The cloud" somewhere, but I feel like a lot of people don't know what the infrastructure of AI actually is, and how it uses all that power and water, so I would like to recommend this video from Linus Tech Tips, where he looks at a supercomputer that is used for research in Canada. To be clear I do not have anything against supercomputers in general and they allow important work to be done, but before the AI bubble, you didn't need one, unless you needed it. The recent AI bubble is trying to get this stuff into the hands of way more people than needed them before, which is causing a lot more datacenter build up, which is causing their companies to abandon climate goals. So what does AI actually look like?

First of all, it uses a lot of hardware. It is basically normal computer hardware, there is just a lot of it networked together.

Hundreds of hard drives all spinning constantly

Each one of the blocks in this image is essentially a powerful PC, that you would still be happy to have as your daily driver today even though the video is seven years old. There are 576 of them, and other more powerful compute nodes for bigger datasets.

The GPU section, each one of these drawers contains like four datacenter level graphics cards. People are fitting a lot more of them into servers now than they were then.

Now for the cooling and the water. Each cabinet has a thick door, with a water cooled radiator in it. In summer, they even spray water onto the radiator directly so it can be cooled inside and out.

They are all fed from the pump room, which is the floor above. A bunch of pumps and pipes moving the water around, and it even has cooling towers outside that the water is pumped out into on hot days.

So is this cool? Yes. Is it useful? Also yes. Anyone doing biology, chemistry, physics, simulations, even stuff like social sciences, and even legitimate uses of analytical ai is glad stuff like this exists. It is very useful for analysing huge datasets, but how many people actually do that? Do you? The same kind of stuff is also used for big websites with youtube. But the question is, is it worth building hundreds more datacenters just like this one, so people can automatically generate their emails, have an automatic source of personal attention from a computer, and generate incoherent images for social media clicks? Didn't tech companies have climate targets, once?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

FTC vs surveillance pricing

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

In the mystical cosmology of economics, "prices" are of transcendental significance, the means by which the living market knows and adapts itself, giving rise to "efficient" production and consumption.

At its most basic level, the metaphysics of pricing goes like this: if there is less of something for sale than people want to buy, the seller will raise the price until enough buyers drop out and demand equals supply. If the disappointed would-be buyers are sufficiently vocal about their plight, other sellers will enter the market (bankrolled by investors who sense an opportunity), causing supplies to increase and prices to fall until the system is in "equilibrium" – producing things as cheaply as possible in precisely the right quantities to meet demand. In the parlance of neoclassical economists, prices aren't "set": they are discovered.

In antitrust law, there are many sins, but they often boil down to "price setting." That is, if a company has enough "market power" that they can dictate prices to their customers, they are committing a crime and should be punished. This is such a bedrock of neoclassical economics that it's a tautology "market power" exists where companies can "set prices"; and to "set prices," you need "market power."

Prices are the blood cells of the market, shuttling nutrients (in the form of "information") around the sprawling colony organism composed of all the buyers, sellers, producers, consumers, intermediaries and other actors. Together, the components of this colony organism all act on the information contained in the "price signals" to pursue their own self-interest. Each self-interested action puts more information into the system, triggering more action. Together, price signals and the actions they evince eventually "discover" the price, an abstraction that is yanked out of the immaterial plane of pure ideas and into our grubby, physical world, causing mines to re-open, shipping containers and pipelines to spark to life, factories to retool, trucks to fan out across the nation, retailers to place ads and hoist SALE banners over their premises, and consumers to race to those displays and open their wallets.

When prices are "distorted," all of this comes to naught. During the notorious "socialist calculation debate" of 1920s Austria, right-wing archdukes of religious market fundamentalism, like Von Hayek and Von Mises, trounced their leftist opponents, arguing that the market was the only computational system capable of calculating how much of each thing should be made, where it should be sent, and how much it should be sold for.

Attempts to "plan" the economy – say, by subsidizing industries or limiting prices – may be well-intentioned, but they broke the market's computations and produced haywire swings of both over- and underproduction. Later, the USSR's planned economy did encounter these swings. These were sometimes very grave (famines that killed millions) and sometimes silly (periods when the only goods available in regional shops were forks, say, creating local bubbles in folk art made from forks).

Unplanned markets do this too. Most notoriously, capitalism has produced a vast oversupply of carbon-intensive goods and processes, and a huge undersupply of low-carbon alternatives, bringing the human civilization to the brink of collapse. Not only have capitalism's price signals failed to address this existential crisis to humans, it has also sown the seeds of its own ruin – the market computer's not going to be getting any "price signals" from people as they drown in floods or roast to death on sidewalks that deliver second-degree burns to anyone who touches them:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91151209/extreme-heat-southwest-phoenix-surface-burns-scorching-pavement-sidewalks-pets

For market true believers, these failures are just evidence that regulation is distorting markets, and that the answer is more unregulated markets to infuse the computer with more price signals. When it comes to carbon, the problem is that producers are "producing negative externalities" (that is, polluting and sticking us with the bill). If we can just get them to "internalize" those costs, they will become "economically rational" and switch to low-carbon alternatives.

That's the theory behind the creation and sale of carbon credits. Rather than ordering companies to stop risking civilizational collapse and mass extinction, we can incentivize them to do so by creating markets that reward clean tech and punish dirty practices. The buying and selling of carbon credits is supposed to create price signals reflecting the existential risk to the human race and the only habitable planet known to our species, which the market will then "bring into equilibrium."

Unfortunately, reality has a distinct and unfair leftist bias. Carbon credits are a market for lemons. The carbon credits you buy to "offset" your car or flight are apt to come from a forest that has already burned down, or that had already been put in a perpetual trust as a wildlife preserve and could never be logged:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/18/greshams-carbon-law/#papal-indulgences

Carbon credits produce the most perverse outcomes imaginable. For example, much of Tesla's profitability has been derived from the sale of carbon credits to the manufacturers of the dirtiest, most polluting SUVs on Earth; without those Tesla credits, those SUVs would have been too expensive to sell, and would not have existed:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

What's more, carbon credits aren't part of an "all of the above" strategy that incorporates direct action to prevent our species downfall. These market solutions are incompatible with muscular direct action, and if we do credits, we can't do other stuff that would actually work:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/31/carbon-upsets/#big-tradeoff

Even though price signals have repeatedly proven themselves to be an insufficient mechanism for producing "efficient" or even "survivable," they remain the uppermost spiritual value in the capitalist pantheon. Even through the last 40 years of unrelenting assaults on antitrust and competition law, the one form of corporate power that has remained both formally and practically prohibited is "pricing power."

That's why the DoJ was able to block tech companies and major movie studios from secretly colluding to suppress their employees' wages, and why those employees were able to get huge sums out of their employers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation

It's also why the Big Six (now Big Five) publishers and Apple got into so much trouble for colluding to set a floor on the price of ebooks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_(2012)

When it comes to monopoly, even the most Bork-pilled, Manne-poisoned federal judges and agencies have taken a hard line on price-fixing, because "distortions" of prices make the market computer crash.

But despite this horror of price distortions, America's monopolists have found so many ways to manipulate prices. Last month, The American Prospect devoted an entire issue to the many ways that monopolies and cartels have rigged the prices we pay, pushing them higher and higher, even as our wages stagnated and credit became more expensive:

https://prospect.org/pricing

For example, there's the plague of junk fees (AKA "drip pricing," or, if you're competing to be first up against the wall come the revolution, "ancillary revenue"), everything from baggage fees from airlines to resort fees at hotels to the fee your landlord charges if you pay your rent by check, or by card, or in cash:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

There's the fake transparency gambit, so beloved of America's hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

The "greedflation" that saw grocery prices skyrocketing, which billionaire grocery plutes blamed on covid stimulus checks, even as they boasted to their shareholders about their pricing power:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-12-war-in-the-aisles/

There's the the tens of billions the banks rake in with usurious interest rates, far in excess of the hikes to the central banks' prime rates (which are, in turn, justified in light of the supposed excesses of covid relief checks):

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-11-what-we-owe/

There are the scams that companies like Amazon pull with their user interfaces, tricking you into signing up for subscriptions or upsells, which they grandiosely term "dark patterns," but which are really just open fraud:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-10-one-click-economy/

There are "surge fees," which are supposed to tempt more producers (e.g. Uber drivers) into the market when demand is high, but which are really just an excuse to gouge you – like when Wendy's threatens to surge-price its hamburgers:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-07-urge-to-surge/

And then there's surveillance pricing, the most insidious and profitable way to jack up prices. At its core, surveillance pricing uses nonconsensually harvested private information to inform an algorithm that reprices the things you buy – from lattes to rent – in real-time:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Companies like Plexure – partially owned by McDonald's – boasts that it can use surveillance data to figure out what your payday is and then hike the price of the breakfast sandwich or after-work soda you buy every day.

Like every bad pricing practice, surveillance pricing has its origins in the aviation industry, which invested early on and heavily in spying on fliers to figure out how much they could each afford for their plane tickets and jacking up prices accordingly. Architects of these systems then went on to found companies like Realpage, a data-brokerage that helps landlords illegally collude to rig rent prices.

Algorithmic middlemen like Realpage and ATPCO – which coordinates price-fixing among the airlines – are what Dan Davies calls "accountability sinks." A cartel sends all its data to a separate third party, which then compares those prices and tells everyone how much to jack them up in order to screw us all:

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

These price-fixing middlemen are everywhere, and they predate the boom in commercial surveillance. For example, Agri-Stats has been helping meatpackers rig the price of meat for 40 years:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

But when you add commercial surveillance to algorithmic pricing, you get a hybrid more terrifying than any cocaine-sharks (or, indeed, meth-gators):

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291

Apologists for these meth-gators insist that surveillance pricing's true purpose is to let companies offer discounts. A streaming service can't afford to offer $0.99 subscriptions to the poor because then all the rich people would stop paying $19.99. But with surveillance pricing, every customer gets a different price, titrated to their capacity to pay, and everyone wins.

But that's not how it cashes out in the real world. In the real world, rich people who get ripped off have the wherewithal to shop around, complain effectively to a state AG, or punish companies by taking their business elsewhere. Meanwhile, poor people aren't just cash-poor, they're also time-poor and political influence-poor.

When the dollar store duopoly forces all the mom-and-pop grocers in your town out of business with predatory pricing, and creating food deserts that only they serve, no one cares, because state AGs and politicians don't care about people who shop at dollar stores. Then, the dollar stores can collude with manufacturers to get shrunken "cheater sized" products that sell for a dollar, but cost double or triple the grocery store price by weight or quantity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

Yes, fliers who seem to be flying on business (last-minute purchasers who don't have a Saturday stay) get charged more than people whose purchase makes them seem to be someone flying away for a vacation. But that's only because aviation prices haven't yet fully transitioned to surveillance pricing. If an airline can correctly calculate that you are taking a trip because you're a grad student who must attend a conference in order to secure a job, and if they know precisely how much room you have left on your credit card, they can charge you everything you can afford, to the cent.

Your ability to resist pricing power isn't merely a function of a company's market power – it's also a function of your political power. Poor people may have less to steal, but no one cares when they get robbed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/19/martha-wright-reed/#capitalists-hate-capitalism

So surveillance pricing, supercharged by algorithms, represent a serious threat to "prices," which is the one thing that the econo-religious fundamentalists of the capitalist class value above all else. That makes surveillance pricing low-hanging fruit for regulatory enforcement: a bipartisan crime that has few champions on either side of the aisle.

Cannily, the FTC has just declared war on surveillance pricing, ordering eight key players in the industry (including capitalism's arch-villains, McKinsey and Jpmorgan Chase) to turn over data that can be used to prosecute them for price-fixing within 45 days:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/ftc-issues-orders-eight-companies-seeking-information-surveillance-pricing

As American Prospect editor-in-chief David Dayen notes in his article on the order, the FTC is doing what he and his journalistic partners couldn't: forcing these companies to cough up internal data:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-07-24-ftc-opens-surveillance-pricing-inquiry/

This is important, and not just because of the wriggly critters the FTC will reveal as they use their powers to turn over this rock. Administrative agencies can't just do whatever they want. Long before the agencies were neutered by the Supreme Court, they had strict rules requiring them to gather evidence, solicit comment and counter-comment, and so on, before enacting any rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Doubtless, the Supreme Court's Loper decision (which overturned "Chevron deference" and cut off the agencies' power to take actions that they don't have detailed, specific authorization to take) will embolden the surveillance pricing industry to take the FTC to court on this. It's hard to say whether the courts will find in the FTC's favor. Section 6(b) of the FTC Act clearly lets the FTC compel these disclosures as part of an enforcement action, but they can't start an enforcement action until they have evidence, and through the whole history of the FTC, these kinds of orders have been a common prelude to enforcement.

One thing this has going for it is that it is bipartisan: all five FTC commissioners, including both Republicans (including the Republican who votes against everything) voted in favor of it. Price gouging is the kind of easy-to-grasp corporate crime that everyone hates, irrespective of political tendency.

In the Prospect piece on Ticketmaster's pricing scam, Dayen and Groundwork's Lindsay Owens called this the "Age of Recoupment":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/03/aoi-aoi-oh/#concentrated-gains-vast-diffused-losses

For 40 years, neoclassical economics' focus on "consumer welfare" meant that companies could cheat and squeeze their workers and suppliers as hard as they wanted, so long as prices didn't go up. But after 40 years, there's nothing more to squeeze out of workers or suppliers, so it's time for the cartels to recoup by turning on us, their customers.

They believe – perhaps correctly – that they have amassed so much market power through mergers and lobbying that they can cross the single bright line in neoliberal economics' theory of antitrust: price-gouging. No matter how sincere the economics profession's worship of prices might be, it still might not trump companies that are too big to fail and thus too big to jail.

The FTC just took an important step in defense of all of our economic wellbeing, and it's a step that even the most right-wing economist should applaud. They're calling the question: "Do you really think that price-distortion is a cardinal sin? If so, you must back our play." Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388

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/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

[spirk-fic-recs]

AOS Spirk Fic Recs! (Pt. 1)

I've only posted about TOS Spirk as of late-- how about some AOS Spirk? Still like TOS Spirk best, but the AOS universe has a lot of storylines and twists that can be explored! Here are some gems I've uncovered while I procrastinated memorizing bones and muscles:

Dream a Little Dream of Me (AOS, 9529 words) by ItsClydeBitches

After Kirk receives a vaccine from McCoy he begins having strange dreams, each of which brings him a little closer to his First Officer.

The level of human emotional and physical sexual satisfaction as determined by one’s partner; an examination of the accuracy of the tiered interpretation as applied to male, homosexual couples (AOS, 4784 words) by Aerlalaith

Or, in which Kirk and Spock have sex for science.

Greetings, James Tiberius Kirk! (AOS, 13017 words) by GravitationalSingularity

Greetings, James Tiberius Kirk! You have [88] new messages. James Tiberius Kirk:: [PSA] Beware the Nexus! Christopher Robin Pike:: [REMINDER] SFR-03-9102-1393 CO Authorization for Intimate Relations between Commanding Officers Leonard Horatio McCoy:: OBSERVE SFR-03-9102-1391 RE: INTERSPECIES SEX & STD PREVENTION, CMO ORDERS… [Read more…]

THE SUM OF BOTH OF US (AOS, 207623 words) by spicyshimmy

Jim Kirk is nine when a massacre on Tarsus IV leaves him without a family and without a home. Spock is twelve when a strange boy in the desert saves his sehlat. Families aren't born; they're made. The look in mother’s eyes at his correction remained a mystery long after the colors of the night sky and the complex patterns of distant nebulae had become translatable by means of distinct and relatively straightforward equations.

Bitter Frost (AOS, 20163 words) by IvanW

Spock travels back in time to the Eastern United States in the 1950s to save Jim's ancestor from being murdered by alien time travelers, thus ensuring James T. Kirk is never born.

like blood, the stars (AOS, 38704 words) by startrex

'You feel nothing! It must not even compute for you! You never loved her!' He regrets the words the moment they come out of his mouth. But that other, older Spock said that he needed to get command of the ship, and to do so, must get his younger counterpart to acknowledge his emotions. Spock is not the first Vulcan Jim has had dealings with, and he can think of few things that would get T’pri as riled up as quickly as insinuating that she doesn’t love him. He gambles that Spock is the same about his mother, and it pays off. (Or, the one where Jim has a Vulcan daughter, and it leads to all sorts of emotions.)

Enjoy!

- M

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Some Science Vocabulary

for your next poem/story

Word — Science Meaning; Public Meaning

Bank - land alongside a river/lake; a place where people store money

Bar - unit of measure of atmospheric pressure; place to drink alcoholic beverages

Belt - collection of asteroids in a disc shape; materials worn around waist to support clothes

Bonding - electrostatic attraction between atoms; making an emotional connection

Charge - force experienced by matter when in an electromagnetic field; demand a price for rendered goods/services

Code - software/computer language; encrypted message

Crust - outermost layer of planet; edge of pizza/pie

Current - water or air moving in a direction; belonging to the present time

Cycling - flow of nutrients or elements; riding a bicycle

Dating - determining age of site/artifact; initial stage of romantic relationship

Driver - influential factor; someone who drives a vehicle

Dwarf - celestial body resembling small planet; characters from Snow White

Fault - fracture in a rock with movement; responsible for accident/misfortune

Fetch - distance traveled by wind/waves over water; go far and then bring back something/someone

Force - strength/energy of action/movement; make someone do something against their will

Grade - gradient/slope; level of proficiency

Hertz - the SI unit of frequency; rental car company

Jet - gas stream ejected from an accretion disk surrounding star; an aircraft powered by jet engines

Mantle - planet layer between crust and core; important role passed from person to person

Matter - physical substance in general; be of importance, have significance

Model - computer simulation; promotes fashion/product

Mole - SI unit used to measure amount of something; small rodent-like mammal

Plastic - substance that is easily shaped/molded; synthetic material

Pressure - force per unit area that gas/liquid/solid exerts on another; use of persuasion to make someone do something

Productive - creating organic matter through photo/chemosynthesis; busy and efficient

Sample - to take a sample for analysis; a small part of something

Scale - system of marks used for measuring; device used for measuring weight

Shear - difference in wind speed/direction; cut wool off of

Shelf - a submarine bank; a surface for displaying/storing objects

Stress - pressure/tension exerted on a material object; mental/emotional strain

Submarine - existing/occurring under the sea surface; a ship that stays submerged under water for extended periods

Surf - line of foam on seashore from breaking waves; riding a surfboard

Swell - sea movement in rolling waves that do not break; to become larger in size (e.g. a body part)

Source ⚜ More: Word Lists