#they literally just go sure its easy science jargon

[captainadwen]

finally finished project hail mary. the last few chapters got really, really good. like, can’t put it down good.

unfortunately it took 400 pages before it got that good

[namjoonchronicles]

rough | sj

↳ pairing seokjin x you

↳ genre domestic, fluff, slice of life, heir!seokjin, husband!seokjin, established relationship

↳ words 2.7k

↳ summary again seokjin’s conglomerate family comes in between your marriage, but this time, seokjin will not stay silent

↳ song lauv ‘love like that’

↳ author’s note the 7-day writing challenge continues with seokjin! <3

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Blanket rustling. A hand clamored on the vibrating alarm. A silhouette of a broad shoulder of a man sat awake on the edge of the bed, clicking his neck right and left. Seokjin rubs the back of his neck. He slid the indoor slippers on, walked wobbly around the king-sized bed, leaving the striped curtain down for his wife to sleep longer. Hand on the knob to the bathroom, he splashes water on his face. With the tips of his hair wet, he brushed his teeth. The morning always begins the same way from Seokjin. He is up by 6am, he does all his morning necessities, plants a kiss on the wife’s cheek and checks out the daughter in the next room. Once he has gotten a good look and the situation is unalarming, he proceeds to the kitchen. He looked at a post-it note placed on the fridge door, and today, his wife wanted to take kimchi fried rice with egg to the office for lunch.

Easy. I can do that. He thought.

Lily, his 7 years old daughter is still asleep. Overnight yoghurt is ready for her.  For his wife, she would have something warm. So he took out a bowl and poured a cup of oats inside, meanwhile the coffee was brewing as it was set to start brewing at about 6:15am in the morning, everyday. Coffee is the most important beverage to start the day. Without it, civilization might not even exist. Seokjin thought as his lips embraced the warm hug of the energizing liquid, downing a sip, cascading down his parched throat. He let out a satisfied sigh. The curtain in the living room is drawn open even before the sun is up. The cold air of the morning had fogged the glass window but with a click of a button, it cleared. Seokjin begin fluffing the cushion on the sofa, fix the runner on the coffee table and cleared the kitchen counter ready for breakfast. It’s almost 6.45am. You’ll be up and you would wake Lily right after. But before that, you will steal his coffee mug.

“Morning to you too,” he monotonously said while you grab his mug from his hand.

“I hate Mondays…” You grumbled.

“But today is Tuesday…” he corrected you, glancing at the digital calendar on the fridge.

“A second monday is no different,” You placed the mug down, and leaned on his arm.

“What time did you sleep last night?” he asked, shaking his arm sporadically to keep you awake because it seemed that you snoozed on them.

“Late, late…” you muttered.

Because of that, Seokjin offered to wake Lily this time around. But only today. Lily is draped over her father’s able body as he walks around, getting the laundries to run so he could dry them on time before the noon drama begins. You are in the shower, still whining about having to leave for work, trashing and sighing and whatever adults do when they have to work to get the bills paid. Sitting in your bathrobe, Seokjin had your oatmeal ready. Lily is on his lap while he fed her overnight yoghurt. She has school this morning, online classes. Lily always had a soft spot for her dad. Technically, he’s mom. He’s the one at home while the mom works. He teaches vocal lessons online after the virus decided to return to the community. He doesn’t really prefer online classes, literally no one does. It’s just not the same. You on the other hand, would have preferred working at home instead. If only you could bring those machines home. The vaccine development is in its pilot state, and there are so many things to be done. Your present is required in all the meetings.

Yesterday, you were up late to decipher the most recent problem your team encountered. The DNAs are denatured when it is transferred into the carrier and no matter how much you argued, (how impossible it was to happen) since there was no presence of heat at all to have caused the denature,  it happened anyways.

“Phones off the table please, mummy…” Seokjin warned.

Typing frantically a few more sentences, your phone is taken away by your husband and set on the side table, mere an arm length away. Lily watches in silence and while you wretched in silent agony.

“What’s happened?” Seokjin asked. Telling him everything, explaining it in simple words. Your animated way of telling stories comes in beneficial today, even Lily is engaged. Then the shoulders dropped. The tone mellows and your lips begin to mumble when you hit the no-answer part of the story, the part where it leaves you stuck.

“And I don’t know what to do to fix that particular mishap…”

Seokjin pursed his lips. That’s when Lily reached her little arms out to you.

“It’s okay, mummy. You’ll find a way to do it today…” She even pats your knuckle while at it. You switched your palm upward and held her hand. Seokjin smiled proudly at her, and kissed her hard on the head. You both shared a look across the kitchen counter, and you know you both are thinking of the same thing; Lily surely is an angel. She may be 7, but she doesn’t know just how much that meant to you. You will walk the headquarters today, a lot more confident than you did yesterday, and when you are confident, you are able to look through windows that are otherwise shut. That reminds you of Seokjin truly. He just always had so much faith in you that even if you don’t have it in you, you would think you do just because he believed so.

He hands you your lunch by the door. A hug for a minute every day, therapists say, would be good for the mind, body and soul. Sometimes it drags longer than that, depending on the severity of the situation. But he smells like bed and toothpaste in the morning, with his little bed hair that you wouldn’t mind doing it for an hour. Lily leans down for a kiss on the cheek and she hands you a facemask before you leave while Seokjin hands you the car key. Usually he would drive you to work and fetch you home but since both of his classes and Lily’s are online, there’s no need to go back and forth, exposing themselves to the virus even more while being out. You would like it better if they never had to leave home. Lily waves you goodbye from the door and Seokjin watches you leave with a smile stuck on his face. And you looked back thinking, the year may have taken a number of things, but they’ve also strengthened the little family you have.

Walking in with a comfortable glide by the lounge of the already bustling office, wait… Bustling? Everyone rushed in and out pushing carts of files and trays. Even the decors are being moved about. What is going on? You tilted your head to one side and looked for a familiar face. But seeing no one you know, you opened the door to your office and dialled Yoongi, your trustee alliance in the building. He answered with a cocky huff, “You don’t know? The investors are coming in today!” Yoongi can be all kinds of things, but lying isn’t one. It was not impossible for investors to come in without a proper walkthrough towards the manufacture of the vaccine but, isn’t this way too early?

“I think they’re antsy, the economy is at its lowest this time of day and they want profit… Capitalists,” Yoongi swings in with his coffee mug.

“I thought this would be on Friday, I would have had everything ready on Friday,” you fussed, shifting papers and files, frantically typing on last modifications on the presentation you had prepared.

“That, you could blame your rookie assistant, the new boy, what’s his name,” Yoongi clicked his tongue, proceeds to think hard.

“Yeonjun?” “Yes, Yeonjun. He got the time zone all wrong…”

You shut your eyes in agony. Noticing your silence, Yoongi took a seat in front of, swivel in the chair in the behaviour of an heir to a convenient store chain, before stopping dead in front of you, voice deeper than the sea.

“Mrs. Kim,” he said, “Aren’t you afraid? “Of what?” “The investors that are coming are Astra Pharmaceutics…” “So?” “They’re linked to your in-laws medical centres… before your marriage with Kim Seokjin.”

Astra Pharma. It is a joint company orchestrated by your father-in-law, their first ever attempt to venture into the medical line. How could you forget the name of the company? Astra Pharma is owned by a powerful chaebol Kim clan, one of which Seokjin grew up with. They have a daughter that they wanted Seokjin to marry with. That was 10 years ago, which means that that daughter is going to pioneer the company now, and her name is Kim Yoojin. Every year she sends a bouquet of flowers to Seokjin’s family restaurant on New Year's. She never missed any stores that Seokjin family opens.

Yoongi searched her name on Naver for you. She is standing on the patio, giving out speeches. It most certainly didn’t help that she is elegant, stunning and charismatic. Even as she walked into the meeting room right now, with her entourage. She really wants to talk business. And you know nothing about that. Your defenses are science, your core is pharmaceutical and your strength is knowledge. If she begins a financial jargon with you, you will be making a fool out of yourself. Somehow, knowing that she is the preferred daughter-in-law, makes it even worse.

No room for mistakes.

Dial tone, and again, unanswered.

“Where could mummy be…” Seokjin hums. “A meeting probably…” Lily replied.

Seokjin gapes his mouth open to have his daughter feed him a biscuit. Lily, being a little rascal refuses to give up her biscuits.

“That’s right, that’s how I raised you, don’t share unless you get something too,” Seokjin joked around. Seokjin might have left the stove running when he answered a call from his mother. Lily was drawing on the dining table, waiting for her next online class. She is to take pictures of her drawings and send them to her teacher. Seokjin returns to the kitchen, placing the phone sandwiched between his shoulder and ear.

“Son,” she began, “Why don’t you take your wife to a resort this weekend so Lily could spend the weekend with her grandparents here in Hannam… wouldn’t that be nice?”

Seokjin squeezed his eyes, and set down that spatula.

“Mom….” he warned, “Is there something else you would like to tell me?”

After hearing what his mother had to say, Seokjin rushed out the door along with Lily, driving down the white Palisade to Hannam mansion where his mother was waiting outside. Seokjin drops Lily and rushes inside the mansion to grab a few more things. But before he leaves, he locks his eyes on his mother and says with utmost firmness, “You and I will have to talk after I get this settled.” His mother gave him a stricken smile while Lily smiled wickedly at her father. Blue Lamborghini, Aventador S engine roars as it sped out the garage door. Seokjin pulls down the window to speak to his daughter, “Behave, or else…” Lily gave out an ‘OK’ sign with her fingers.

The luxurious car then sped out into the street.

There weren’t any mistakes. Any investors coming would have been persuaded by the way you carry the presentation. The marketing strategy and pilot scale up plans are concise and rectified. The points are delivered extensively and with proper explanation. However, when you were prepared for scientific questions and whatnot, you come to realise that the CEO of Astra Pharma was interested in anything but science.

“How is Kim Seokjin?”

Everyone else in the room was taken aback by the strangely intimate question posed on a vaccine presentation. It was out of line and obviously, out of place. Even as a person as wealthy as her. Not only was it a deliberate display of her unprofessionalism, she was also bringing down her company’s image. It’s like she is ready to overturn the hard work her parents put into raising her, for a man who is married to someone else.

“He is… perfectly well, though I am not sure what’s that has got to do with our topic of discussion for today…”

You mumbled the last few words to yourself. What is she doing? What is she thinking of doing? Steal Seokjin back? If that’s her intention, then it's the worst strategy she could ever come up with. Not only would it fail her immensely, Seokjin will literally drag her and her family’s face down in the dirt for even trying to tear his family apart. You know him enough to know that he would fight the world for his wife and kids. Hence, that’s why you couldn’t understand Yoojin’s motive to bring this all up, ten years after. Is she trying to embarrass you? In the middle of a presentation filled by scientists who care nothing about the personal lives of one of their own? She is only making a fool out of herself, despite her money.

“You must have been so confused… as to why I brought up your husband in this…” she stood up in her Swarovski studded heels. She made her way to you around the table, enticing everyone in the room with her walk and her words.

“No, I am confused as to why a company like yours is interested in investing in the same exact study your own university is working on. It’s like buying the exact same cows doing the exact same thing, producing the exact type of product with twice the price,” you tracted.

“I guess that’s why he liked you,” she looks down to the floor and up the ceiling with a cunning smile, “You’re a sheep in the pack of wolves.” She locked her hyena-like eyes to you. The hair in the back of your neck stood up. You have no idea what she meant by that.

“I am investing for you to stop. Your formula is bound to fail anyways. So before the company suffers any more losses due to your incompetence, I suggest you halt all activity and let the high rollers play the game. This field is not for amateurs.”

“I think you might have forgotten that I am a scientist, not a businesswomen. Your concern is not mine to worry. My job is to get to my vaccines and make sure it works, and that’s what I’m paid to do. Whether or not you invested, is none of my concerns.”

You collected your things on the desk. And she smiled wickedly,

“Well then, you leave me no choice, I will have to sue you for forging the templates my company has patented…” “How do you sue me for fraud if I don’t do any forging?”

“You’re surely a meek girl… Seokjin will have to cushion the blow with an expensive legal fee now don’t he?”

Was there a mole in the company? Yoongi walks in. Along with Seokjin.

“Tell them what you did,” Seokjin said, and then, “Tell them what you did!” He thundered.

Yoongi confessed to stealing the documents and making it seem like it was forged. He also sent the emails and had them edited so the dates were wrong. He was paid handsomely by Astra Pharma to send all updates on the formula which then led the pharma company to imitate the make-ups protein-by-protein. He used the friendship he had established with you to gain all access to your files. He also confessed that he refused to continue doing it and when he decided to pull the plugs from Astra Pharma, Astra Pharma threatened him. He had no choice but to abide to the play Yoojin wanted orchestrated. When it was clear what Yoojin actually wanted (to spill dirt on your name so she could feel above you for once in her life after she lost Seokjin), Yoongi decided to come clean. He came to Seokjin’s mother and begged for forgiveness, because it was through her that he had gotten a job in your pharma company.

. . .

Seokjin leans on his blue lamborghini, waiting for you to come outside. He has his Raybans on and a black bomber jacket over a white tee.

“Are you mad at my family?” “Won’t you be?”

The car door lifts up and you climb in.

“You should have just married her and this all could have been avoided.” “Where’s the fun in that?”

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Copyright © january 5th, 2021 namjoonchronicles do not repost, and thank you for reading!

[dicecast]

The Problem with Thanos Part 2

So the first video is basically about what is actually wrong with Thanos and by extension, Malthusian theory.   Today I want to pivot to something a bit more complicated, Thanos as a character and why he is a less good character because he isn’t a racist.  

I’ve said before that Thanos is a good character and I think that is basically true but I want to clarify.  Thanos is a good character for you know…Superhero movies, where most of the characters at best are a list of consistent traits with a consistent voice and maybe one or two issues that define them . Thanos’s motivations make sense (they are morally and intellectually wrong but it makes sense), he has a general personality template, and he has more complexity than most marvel villains.  But there is a larger issue with his attatchment to Malthusian economics, namely that it doesn’t make any sense he’d be so attracted to it.  

Let me jump back for a moment here.  See, in real life, the Malthusian notions of population control and necessary brutality for the sake of preserving the world’s resources is an ideology that comes with a lot of baggage attached.  From the start, Malthusians aren’t just saying we need mass purges to keep population in check, it always comes with a larger ideological view point about which people should be purged. Malthusianism in real life was directed at the Irish, Catholics, and the poor, and theories influenced by Malthus would be directed at African Americans, Slavs, and Jews, and today it tends to be used in the context of India, China, and Africans.  While it would be a simplification to say that the Nazi concept of “Useless Mouths” is purely Malthusian, the ideas are linked.  Eugenics, Social Darwinism, Imperialism, and Scrooge esc classicism have always been associated with Malthusian though, and that is why this doctrine is still around despite being debunked in the 19th century.  Its less a factual ideology as much as a world view, one obsessed with “us vs. them” mentalities and beliefs in “Nature is a warzone” despite the fact that this is not how society works.  

      Now in theory you could have a debate about Malthusian population control without dipping into the ideologies always associated with it, but in real life…yeah good luck with that. Malthusian economics are like IQ, or Social Darwinism its some people get into to justify their existing racist prejudice, not an ideology that leads them to racism.  That is why it always falls apart so easily when you apply real science to it, because it isn’t just a false scientific theory, its using scientific jargon to justify the same old prejudice.  

 But Thanos is that, he is a Malthusian without any of the baggage, he isn’t racist, classist, religiously intolerant, or a warmonger.  Thanks to the power of the plot, his population control method is actually unbiased, unlike real life Malthusians he doesn’t target a specific group as deserving extermination.   When Thomas Malthus spoke of necessary population control he wasn’t referring to his own group of middle class Englishmen, he meant the poor, the Irish, and the Catholic.  Thanos is truly “Unbias” in this view of extermination, which is equally stupid but lacks the bigotry that comes with Malthusian theory.  

    Now let’s pretend Marvel actually understood the themes of their own movie and they genuinely wanted to talk about this world view, it is understandable they would want to desperate the idea from the baggage surrounding it, otherwise it is too easy to dismiss it.  So while in real life Malthusianism is linked to a bunch of other horrific ideologies, for the purpose of fiction it might be worth debating it on its own merits rather than as part of something else.  It’s not much of a debate because its objectively wrong, but I get the idea.  Try to argue with the theory on its own terms rather than what it is associated with.  

Here is the problem, I’m not sure if it is actually a good thing to separate these ideologies.  Cause Malthusianism literally doesn’t make sense if it isn’t linked to a larger world view, and more importantly Thanos doesn’t make sense.  What I meant by this is that Malthusianism is basically a rational that bigots come to in order to justify their existing bigots.  You embrace Malthus if you already regard the Irish as subhuman, and you need a justification killing 1.5 million of them.  Or if you already don’t want to pay taxes for social programs that help the poor, or if you already don’t want to send aid overseas or sell weapons to war zones.  It’s not a true ideology so much as it’s a way to make standard selfish bigotry seem more reasonable and palatable.  You don’t become a Malthusian because of the strengths of its argument, you become a Malthusian because you already wanted to dehumanize large groups of people and this is a method lets you not come to terms with your own actions.  And this is why Malthusians aren’t convinced by evidence, cause its less a scientific theory so much has a psychological defense mechanism.  

      And that is the problem, Thanos isn’t a bigot, so his attachment to Malthus doesn’t make any sense.  There is no reason why Thanos wouldn’t listen to anybody who suggests to him that “Hey this isn’t how like…anything works” or do some damn research on the subject.  Which means that Marvel is either

Positing Malthusian theory is correct in the universe of Marvel which is basically saying “In this world, Eugenics is real, but we should do the right thing anyways

Thanos is actually a really dumb guy who fell for the pseudo science and never checked his assumptions.  Which you know...isn’t impossible, but that isn’t how he is presented in the film, instead he is shown as a thoughtful if cruel man.  If his main flaw is not his indifference but instead his stupidity, then the movie did a very bad job of conveying that 

      Now this entire time I’ve been giving Marvel the benefit of the doubt and assuming they were doing this on purpose in order to fight back against Malthusian economics, but lets be honest, they don’t deserve that much credit.  Which goes back to the earlier post, which is that they keep mistaking Malthusian for Utilitarianism.  So it is again presenting killing half the population as “Practical but evil’ vs. the protagonists “Moral but inefficient” but as I mentioned before, this simply isn’t the case.  Malthusian theory of population isn’t just immoral, its actively incorrect.  But that isn’t how the conflict is framed, when Thanos and Dr. Strange argue, Strange is like “This is wrong because Trillions will die” while what he, a scientist, should be saying is “This is wrong because....that would not fix the problem like...at all”.  Because again, Thomas Malthus ideas were debunked in the mid 19th century, the only reason why they continue to be relevant today is that they provide a handy justification for racist practices, and as Thanos is not a racist, it doesn’t make sense that he would believe this.  

This also leads to another uncomfortable bit, in his discussion with Dr. Strange, Thanos says ‘Titan was like most planets, too many mouths, not enough to go around.  When we faced extinction I offered a solution”  That is actually quite similar to the “Useless Mouths” rhetoric used in post WWI Germany.  Historical context.  During WWI, Britain placed German under a blockade which basically put the whole country under siege.  Since Germany’s best chance of winning the war was a defensive conflict, slowly giving ground as the allies lost millions and hoping that the ally states would collapse, the steady lack of resources due to this blockade was devestating to the German War effort.  While France and Britain could endlessly resupply thanks to their colonies and the Americas, Germany steadily ran out of oil, iron, lead, and food, and the civilian population of Germany, largely unexposed directly to the war, slowly starved, particularly in the “Turnip Winter” of 1916.   While there was still food, most of it went to the army, leaving the civilians with nothing. About 763,000 German civilians*, the vast majority of German Civilian deaths during WWI, were due to the famine rather than Allied Weapons.   This is not counting those who died of the Spanish Flue epidemic, and an additional 100,000 civilians who died during the negotiation period.  This blockade would eventually lead to the fall of the Kaiserreich, as the civilian government eventually overthrew the Kaiser and negotiated the surrender of Germany.  

Hitler, a soldier in the trenches and thus not starving, was among many of the German army who felt the civilians had betrayed them, leading to the “Stabbed in the Back” myth.  One of the big right wing talking points after WWI was that “we could have won the war, if only we had killed all useless mouths, or “useless eaters”, Lebensunweertes Leben.  Specifically the disabled, though this theory would also be applied to a lesser extent to Jews, Roma, Homosexuals, Slavs, and leftists.  The term used was basically “Life unworthy of life” and the idea was that the weak Kaiser government should have killed all the ‘worthless” people so that Germany could have won the war, and Hitler’s government used this to justify their own extermination of the mentally ill, the idea was faced with starvation, Germany should have made the “difficult choice” to kill the weak for the strong to survive.  

(I hate this fucking story.)  

   Now obviously this world view is immoral but its also....wrong.  The fact is, even if Germany had killed all of the disabled, they would have lost the war anyways, its not like the disabled were using up oil and bullets that would have otherwise gone to the front, nor would it have fixed Germany’s manpower shortage or prevented the US from entering the war.  The conspiracy, like most conspiracy theories, came about because German soldiers didn’t want to face an uncomfortable truth.  That they had suffered, sacrificed, and fought heroically in a war they never had much chance of winning and all of their pain was in vain. The Useless Eater’s theory was just wrong, it was actively incorrect. 

   Now how does that relate to Thanos?  See I am not calling Thanos a Nazi, unlike Hitler or Malthus, Thanos isn’t targeting any one group, he isn’t saying “We need to kill the Irish, Catholics, Jews or disabled to survive” he is applying that same sort of Life Boat morality in a way real life advocates of it never do, because he is including his own empire and family within the category of “those who can be disposed of”  Thanos is looking at a whole vein of right wing thinking which has always existed as a cover for their real policies and taking it at face value and applying it to its own logical extreme, and there could be value in a character like that but...why is Thanos like this?  Why is he mindlessly accepting stupid theories he really should be smart enough to just dismiss this nonsense.  

And that lead to my larger issue with Infinity Wars, that I don’t think Disney realizes that Malthus was just morally wrong, but was factually wrong.  The conflict is presented as if Thanos’ ideas have merit, and so Thanos is presented as a smart guy who lacks empathy, while the actual problem is that he is incorrect.  And it fits the sort of “Status Que” feel of the MCU, where the Super Heroes are mostly preventing a worse future rather than building their own (Black Panther is the exception to this) 

(cough)

*That number is actually really disputed, there are some that put the number as low as 300,000 so don’t take that as the final word.  I tend to assume higher numbers because I don’t want to underscore the death of civilians, but this is not uncontested.  

[hashtagartistlife]

why is Optometry as a whole so USELESS. as per usual im having to find out everything of use from the websites of other health professions because THEY ACTUALLY HAVE USEFUL INFORMATION and are ORGANISED IN A LOGICAL AND COHERENT WAY I s2g everything to do with this Hell Career is just so fucking pretentious and so far up its own ass, nothing is ever done in a useful way, heaven forbid anything!!!! be easy!!!!!!! This entire degree has just been crusty old professors who got their registrations in the 18th century back when they didnt have to learn HALF the skills we have to know (that are NOW CONSIDERED BASIC COMPETENCIES) telling us this isn’t a hard course as long as we keep a good head on our shoulders but also simultaneously saying that oops they enrolled far too many of us so they’re actually going to actively try to fail some of us out. DO YOU EVEN KNOW HOW WILDED I STILL AM THAT I WENT TO A LECTURE ONE SEMESTER AND THE LECTURER TOLD US, STRAIGHT UP, THAT THERE WERE TOO MANY OF US IN THE COURSE AND SO THEY’RE GONNA MAKE THE TESTS AS HARD AS POSSIBLE TO FAIL SOME OF US OUT LIKE WHOSE!!!! FAULT IS THAT!!!! YOU DUMB SHITS!!!!! CERTAINLY NOT OURS!!!!! 

And these fucking smug professors who have spent their entire lives w their noses in their research and have not gone Outside in like 40 yrs telling us that they’re not gonna hand everything to us in a platter, we should look up the papers for ourselves and parse through the jargon to find what we want, WHY THE FUCK AM I PAYING FOR THIS DEGREE THEN!!!!! YOU SHOULD KNOW THE SHEER AMOUNT OF RESEARCH THAT IS FLOATING AROUND THESE DAYS IS LIKE 500 TIMES WHAT IT WAS IN YOUR DAY and that time???? when they made us read a paper published like...... 70 years ago so we can learn the anatomical arrangement of the visual cortex?????? THAT SHIT HAS BEEN SUMMARIZED AND PUBLISHED IN SO MANY TEXTBOOKS AND ITS ALL ON WIKIPEDIA TOO BUT NO, NO, THIS PRETENTIOUS COURSE MADE US READ A SCIENTIFIC PAPER THAT WAS 50 PAGES LONG AND PUBLISHED 70 YEARS AGO BECAUSE ‘’’’’’PRIMARY SOURCE’’’’’’’, YOU FUCKING SHITHEADS THERE IS A REASON TEXTBOOKS EXIST THERE IS A REASON WHY SCIENCE COMMUNICATIONS WRITING, AKA BREAKING DOWN SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL JARGON IN AN EASY-TO-UNDERSTAND-WAY IS AN ACTUAL HONEST TO GOD JOB, i cannot fucking BELIEVE, every single other health profession i’ve heard about don’t fucking CARE about this, all my medicine friends and pharmacy friends and physiotherapy friends when they hear about this are like ‘that’s BARBARIC there’s no NEED for you to be reading all these papers, that’s why we go to university, it’s so that we don’t have to wade through MILLIONS AND MILLIONS of papers published in the past 100+ years to eke out the VERY BASICS OF ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY’, but NO fucking Optometry HAS to be pretentious, we HAVE to get all our knowledge like fucking cavemen, reliving every discovery made in the past century, ONLY CRAMMED INTO 5 YEARS and they wonder why our graduation rate is literally only 30~20%. And don’t even get me started on how they spend all this time up their own arses about the purity of their own education system (only peer-reviewed papers!!!!!! ever!!!!! textbooks and the vast resources of the internet are Not A Thing) so that they leave MINIMAL time for shit that ACTUALLY matters, like, oh, idk, PRACTICAL SKILLS????? We have to practice, apart from surgeons, some of the most delicate, uncomfortable, precise, unstable procedures in primary care medicine, IN EXTREMELY CLOSE PROXIMITY TO ONE OF THE MOST VULNERABLE ORGANS IN THE HUMAN BODY, ON A ROUTINE DAY-TO-DAY BASIS!!! AS PART OF OUR BASIC OPTOMETRIC EXAMS!!!! Practical skills are LITERALLY the only thing you can’t really learn on your own. Theory? You can read up on shit in your own time, catch up in your own pace, but getting good at PRACTICAL SKILLS requires so much time and experience and someone physically looking over your shoulder and giving you tips and telling you if you’re doing something wrong. On top of that, most of our practical skills we ACTUALLY CAN’T practice at home by ourselves EVEN IF WE WANT TO because they require anaesthetic drops and dilating drops and PRESCRIPTION MEDICATION we can’t get our hands on yet. So the only practice we ever get of these techniques are at school so it makes sense that they should be devoting the majority of our time there making sure we perfect these extremely crucial techniques, right? FUCKING WRONG. WRITE 6 ESSAYS AND REPORTS OF 2000 WORDS PER SEMESTER FOR 4 CLASSES, BUT PRACTICAL SKILLS? YOU ONLY GET 1HR PER WEEK STARTING IN OUR 3RD YEAR LMAO GOOD LUCK LOSERS????? Listen you pretentious whole bag of fuckin dicks, YOU CAN SIGH IN DISAPPOINTMENT AT OUR INACCURATE READINGS EVERY SINGLE CLINIC I’M ROSTERED ONTO AND TELL US TO KEEP PRACTICING BUT WHEN YOU’RE NOT GIVING US THE OPPORTUNITY TO PRACTICE HOW!!! ARE WE SUPPOSED TO IMPROVE!!! YOU KNOW FULL WELL THAT I CAN’T FUCKIN BUY ALCAINE 0.5% OR MYDRIACYL 1.0% OVER THE FUCKIN COUNTER, TELL ME HOW I’M SUPPOSED TO PRACTICE THESE TECHNIQUES YOU KEEP TELLING ME TO PRACTICE!!!!! This entire profession is so fucking ASS BACKWARD from the initial degree TO AFTER I GRADUATE BECAUSE APPARENTLY THE WEBSITE FOR THE NATIONAL OPTOMETRIC BOARD OF AUSTRALIA CAN’T EVEN ORGANISE A PROPER PAGE FOR ALL THE LEGAL REQUIREMENTS WE HAVE TO MEET!!!! I’ve been searching for 3 damn days and I still cannot believe I haven’t found a single damn page ANYWHERE on the internet listing all the laws we’re required to comply to in order to practice in australia, YOU’D THINK THAT’D BE THE FIRST THING ALL OPTOMETRISTS NEED TO KNOW but apparently the fuck not??????????? God I keep saying I’m going to become a professor out of fucking SPITE at the illogical way they’re teaching my degree but it looks like im going to spend my entire optometric career in fucking convulsions because they make things SO ASS-BACKWARD HARD FOR EVERYONE INVOLVED when, in fact, IT COULD NOT BE

[suspected-spinozist]

I’ve finally typed up my thoughts on Seven Surrenders. A necessary caveat: I really did enjoy the book; in fact, I couldn’t put it down. The notes I’ve made are mostly negative because the parts work don’t jump out at me nearly as much as the parts that don’t. At some point I get into my General Theory Of Weaknesses In SFF That Wants To Be Political Philosophy (a genre which, to be clear, I love completely and without irony). Spoilers follow.

I really thought there was going to be some deeper secret to Joyce Faust’s historical cosplay sex club. Maybe it’s because I lack a functioning sex drive, but it seems deeply improbable that modified 18th century French gender roles are such a universal turn-on that they’d work on 80% of major world leaders. Of course, part of that is Ms. Faust maneuvering her minions into positions of power, but her methodology seems much more effective than it has any right to be. I might buy gender as a general concept being that compelling, but she’s selling an extremely specific mode of gendered behavior. Hedonistic ancient regime aristocracy is at least as aesthetically specific as, say, BDSM, and it’s probably just as unlikely to ruin vanilla sex forever for the people who choose to participate. 

More to the point, she doesn’t start out with any privileged information. If someone else read enough philosophy and wanted to start cosplaying as Voltaire and company, there’s nothing stopping them. From what little I know of human nature, the least realistic thing in the book might be that there aren’t innumerable brothels with themes like 5th century Athenian hetaerae or the interwar Berlin cabaret scene or what have you. A lot of this is explained as the special training she gives her protégés/slaves, but it feels like a cop-out. Whatever it is that makes Danaë or Héloïse or Dominic so irresistible in person, it doesn’t come through on the page. 

On the topic of grand conspiracies that don’t really make any sense, I want to take a closer look at O.S. The first thing I want to know about this setup is why the database used to track flying cars has the kind of information one would need to figure out the emotional impact of a particular person’s grandson’s ex-girlfriend committing suicide. I’m fine with set-sets being able to make those calculations given the data, I have no idea how they’d get there from a glorified transportation grid. 

But even suspending disbelief about the actual mechanics, assassinations are an awfully blunt instrument. I can accept that there are cases where they’re necessary to avert immediate crises, but the question I’d ask myself, and which probably should occurred have at some point over the past twelve generations of the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash, is - what other tools are at our disposal? And how can we head things off earlier? 

Felix Faust correctly points out that that O.S. operates on the streetlight effect. Its founders were humanists, so they think in terms of targeting individuals - Sniper even says as much in their chapter - but this wouldn’t seem obvious to a Brillist or a European or a Mason. And there are plenty of problems for which assassination is not necessarily the most efficient solution. The fact that their targets are so indirect helps the Saneer-Weeksbooths avoid detection, but it also points to an important weakness - because of the limitations of their method, a lot of what they do depends on chance. 

The disappointing thing is that the plotline ultimately devolves into a fairly boring battle of utilitarianism vs. deontology. “Must we abandon our peaceful near-Utopia because it is tainted with the blood of thousands?” isn’t exactly unexplored territory. There’s much more interesting ground to be covered in picking apart why the system survived as long as it did with relatively little criticism. It makes sense that for the Saneer-Weeksbooths to have internalized the values they were raised with, but there are plenty of other people who were in on the conspiracy, and who could have tried to use all that computational power to look for other solutions. 

The Mardi/Apollo Mojave war plot has a lot of the same problems. Apollo Mojave’s case is more egregious, so I’ll start with him. He is simultaneously worried that no one will want to move to Mars, and that the prospect of moving to Mars is so tempting that it will provoke the first open war in (by that point) almost 600 years. He fears that the other hives will turn on the Utopians because they’re small and isolated, which makes sense, until you remember that most of Utopian culture is designed with the express purpose of being unintelligible and alienating. They speak in their own private jargon, cover their faces at all times, live on the moon, use their own transit, and mostly avoid terrestrials. There are so many options for defusing these inter-hive tensions. 

A few thoughts, off the top of my head: allow Utopians to join non-Utopian bashes. Tone down the U-Speak. Promote Utopian art and literature on earth, maybe host science demonstrations like Cato. Build embassies. The money being poured into terraforming Mars seems like a sticking point, so work with the other Hive leaders to find alternate sources of funding. Which should easy if you’re Apollo Mojave and all the other Hive leaders are all literally in love with you. Anything, except “start a war so that the war that we can’t possibly avert 250 years from now might be less bad!” 

The Mardis aren’t much better, though. To recap: they’re planning on starting what they see as an inevitable global war prematurely because they believe that the most important determining factor of war deadliness is length of time since the last major conflict, their evidence being WWI. I just looked up the list of wars by death toll. The biggest problem with their theory is that, while WWI might arguably have been more culturally traumatic than WWII (and that’s a huge if*), it was significantly less deadly. All that practice did absolutely nothing to keep casualties down twenty years later. The next most deadly war after WWII is the Mongol conquests, and I really doubt that 11th century Central Asia was noted for its long-lasting peace and prosperity. The Mardis are drawing from a trend line from a single data point, and it doesn’t even support their trend! 

At this point, the question Mycroft should be asking himself isn’t “Would you destroy a better world in order to save this one?” It’s “why is everyone I know so fanatically committed to their largely unsupported predictions about extremely specific events centuries in the future?” 

This is the point, when I was thinking this through, that I realized that all my issues with this book are essentially the same thing, and that they have a lot in common with my reading of Dune and The Traitor Baru Cormorant and a lot of other fiction in this loosely-defined genre. It’s the thing that happens when authors want to make a point of how good their characters are at understanding complex systems. 

The problems inevitably crop up because, in order for all this very complicated manipulation to be legible at the level of plot, causal chains have to be drastically simplified. A novel where the Mardis or the Saneer-Weeksbooths sensibly decide to hold off on murdering anyone until they’ve conducted a rigorous statistical analysis and then decide to spearhead a series of medium and long-term economic and social programs would not be very interesting. It’s possible to do this sort of thing well, but very, very difficult. 

*edit: having thought about it for more than thirty seconds, i'm pretty sure it’s total bs. 

[radreactions]

What Christmas gifts would the companions like to recieve?

Ada – Complete overhaul of her entire frame simply because she hasn’t a taste for material items and only thing she ever really seems thankful for is Sole’s friendship. So aside from promising to forever be her pal and living for as long as they can, Sole is really only left with making her the most badass-est automatron to grace the Commonwealth which, in a way is an even better gift than they intended because to her, it allows her to better protect her friends like she’s always wanted.

Cait – Big black biker boots fit for curb stomping along with a matching black leather jacket fit with shoulder spikes and numerous pockets for guns and knives alike. Oh and of course a brand new fully automatic combat shotgun and a few bottles of drink because why not spoil the woman who deserves it most??

Curie – Somehow – whether by actually knowing where to go or by some streak of impossible luck – Sole had managed to gift to the ever curious little synth many rare chemicals whose canisters had somehow survived the Great War and subsequent post-apocalyptic damage. Curie explained why she needed them at one point in her travels with Sole, but all that science jargon went right over their head without so much as a “How do you do?” and so they were left simply saying: “Happy experimenting!”

Codsworth – The faithful Mr Handy would finally receive what he’s always wanted throughout all his long years: a pristine gentleman’s top hat, lacking the common wasteland crinkles, tears and faded fabric that sits perfectly atop his metal hull. He’d cherish it until the day he shuts down forever.

Danse – Considering when Danse had to the leave the Brotherhood he consequently had to leave behind his beloved power armour, leaving him with a sticky X-01 frame which may have had extra protection but was so obviously lacking in more ways than one, Sole knew just what to get him. Or rather, what to give him back anyway with a few extras of course. Cue the kinetic dynamo, jet pack equipped hydraulically improved T-60 power armour sporting the blackest of the black paints and almost dangerously lubed up limb actuators for better mobility while out in the field. Sole is expecting a happy tear or two.

Deacon – Finally, he’d get that Deathclaw he’s always wanted, fit with a leather spiked collar and a tag with “Fluffy” imprinted in the metal. If he wasn’t wearing sunglasses, everyone would have seen him tear up just a little bit as he grinned up at his brand new guard dog.

Desdemona – A brand new Fat Man, painted mostly black with a small white lantern imprinted on the side with the words “From the Railroad, with love” printed underneath. It may have been Deacon’s idea originally, but dammed if it didn’t make her smile like an idiot.

Dogmeat – Being the goodest boy in the whole entire Commonwealth, Dogmeat deserved nothing less than a nice cosy doghouse fit with comfy pillows, a non-leaking roof and an almost brand spanking new teddy bear to strut around with proudly in his mouth.

Gage – What do you get the man who has everything he could possibly want? A penthouse loft of course! Or something close enough anyway. Considering Fizztop Grille is Sole’s alone, they can do whatever the hell they want with it, so why not construct a secondary level just like their own for their right hand man ready to be unveiled to him on Christmas day.

Hancock – Chems is all he’d ever asked for and chems he sure did get…but with the added sweetener of Sole’s handiwork.  The best he ever really could come across was raider or novice made chems, their potency were lacking substantially which had him powering through his reserves quicker than he could get them in. That meant that with having to need to consume more for the desired high, the cost of buying more damn near sends him broke. With Sole’s Christmas gift of a load of pure, undiluted chems, he’ll be flying higher than ever for a good long while.

MacCready – The best gift Sole could ever give him was curing his son Duncan from whatever horrible disease it was that he caught and considering Sole had already done that by the time Christmas rolled around, he really didn’t want anything more from them. He’s already in debt, but of course Sole won’t listen and would instead find him a stash of Grognak comics that he says he hates but secretly power reads when he thinks no one is looking.

Maxson – A man such as him in charge of an army such as the Brotherhood of Steel would neither want much nor have time for a thing such as Christmas aside from of course enjoying the traditional turkey-based meal. So if Sole really wanted to give him something special that he’ll enjoy, then they better saddle up, stretch those limbs and flick on a stealth boy, because they sure don’t wanna get caught sneaking into the Elder’s quarters at night for a little ‘under the blankets’ awakening.

Nick Valentine – Considering both he and Sole were obviously old souls in a world full of fresh-faced youngin’s, Sole figured that maybe the old synth would like a healthy blast of nostalgia by way of intact, still legible pre-war books. Specifically, crime thrillers and sci-fi fiction that would sure give him a good laugh and be easy reading when he has those days where its best to just zone out for a little while.

Old Longfellow – What can you get an old hunter who makes everything he needs by hand and lives almost entirely off the land? A whole caravan load of whiskey that’s what. Ranging from Teeling, Redbreast, Jack Daniels and of course Tullamore Dew (my one true love)

Piper Wright – A brand new, state of the art Platen printing press whose rotating wheel doesn’t stick and whose ink reserves doesn’t spurt up into the user’s face each time a copy is successfully printed. Oh and loads of non-crinkled paper from God knows where and an entire cache of sugar bombs just for her – no sharing required.

Preston Garvey – Sole had already given him the best gifts he could ever have hoped for – the full restoration of his beloved Minutemen and also another reason for him to live – so to ask for more would seem greedy in Preston’s eyes. But of course, Sole won’t let it go that easily because under the Christmas tree for Preston would await something small but something undeniably packed with so much meaning and thought that it very well might bring the noble Minuteman to tears. It was a genuine Freedom Trail Boston Minuteman CNCL medallion. Now, wherever Preston goes with that little gem hanging from his lapel, everyone will know the hero that Preston Garvey most surely is.

Strong – Much like Ada, the big guy hasn’t really got a taste for material items so that leaves little to actually gift him with considering his frame can’t be as easily upgraded as Ada. What he does have a literal taste for however, is fresh juicy meat. So, without selling their morals and feeding him raider, Sole will get together with the caravans and organise for the biggest delivery of fresh meat, whether it’s Brahmin, Deathclaw or Mirelurk they’re not picky as long as it’s not human flesh.

X6-88 – Yet another companion with low affinity for material possessions – aside from his sunnies of course – X6 will only really appreciate a gift if it’s something particularly special, and by special its generally something that makes killing Institute enemies a sport. Taking this into consideration, Sole’s best bet is the fully upgraded Gatling Laser with more power than necessary which – by its own nature – totally makes it necessary for the Courser to use.

[scholarly-squid]

Being involved in science right now is... weird.

First post on this blog! And this one sure is going to be a doozy. Long post ahead.  I mean long.

In this time of COVID-19, being on social media has been what can only be described as an absolute nightmare.  I’ve been studying a STEM field at my university and I’ve had involvement in laboratories for years now.  Let me tell you something - this whole experience has been painful to watch.  I’m used to people, on both left and right ends of the political spectrum, passing judgement on what scientists do and how they do it.  Science is so wonderful because it is so cutting edge, but that does lead to controversial topics coming up fairly frequently.  Ethical debates, be it about testing methods or AI or what have you, are always swirling around on the internet. Thankfully, there are teams dedicated to determining ethical guidelines for this sort of debate. 

The problem with what I’ve seen on the internet lately is that there is very little scholarly debate about what actions to take, many experts are in agreement, and when scientists make an educated decision, people blatantly disregard it using a number of opinionated, jargon-heavy excuses.  Examples abound:

 I shouldn’t have to wear a mask because they said at one point that masks aren’t necessary and now they say they are. Scientists are untrustworthy.

Scientists only want to lie to you about COVID-19 so they can make more money off of you.

Well if scientists are so smart, what about this one time when a scientist did something bad?

Scientists are all elitists, trained by universities to use and abuse the common man. 

There are plenty of ways I would absolutely love to poke holes in these arguments I’ve seen later, but that’s besides the point.  The issue with these statements popping up everywhere is that there is no way for scientists to refute them logically.  Not because the arguments are right, but because they are completely illogical and based in fallacious reasoning. 

Fallacies are really easy to fall for, and a distrust of science only makes their roots dig deeper into our society. I understand though why they are so popular.  It gives people a reason to think they are different, or somehow defying the status quo, in a society where individualism is held to the highest regard (for me the US).  They also provide an easy solution where there isn’t one.  In scary times like the ones we are in, it feels good to rely on something you know, something comforting, as opposed to something you don’t know.  Science is by nature experimental, new, and groundbreaking, and that’s pretty scary.  People in the general public tend to lack a strong basis in understanding fallacious reasoning, because its really, really tricky to grasp, and isn’t frequently taught in classrooms.  I don’t want to sound like some preachy kid from the debate team or something, because believe me the last thing you should be doing to help people on the internet understand what they’re reading is yell “ThAt’S a FaLlAcY” because it will only make them feel bad, and in response, angry and defensive.  But understanding when you hear a fallacy yourself is one of the most important things I’ve ever been taught in my life. If you are unfamiliar with fallacies and want a list to keep handy, here’s a good start.  This can help you and perhaps others understand whether what they’re reading is a good source, or if the arguments are flawed.  

But why this desire to distrust science in the first place? For one thing, science has been made into the one thing it shouldn’t be: Political.  The call from the Right is typically that progress as a whole is bad unless it has been privatized, because academic scientists are untrustworthy, government agents who have been trained to look down on the rural middle and working classes of America. The call from the Left has honestly been somewhat similar, though perhaps less vocal: that major scientific progress is the work of private, rich medical companies, who don’t care about their impact on people or the earth, and that holistic methods (think essential oils, anti-vax movements, etc) should in part or entirely replace peer reviewed medicine.  Both of these views may be extremes.  But when your sweet Republican Great Aunt Mary, who has never been educated in collegiate level, or much high school level, STEM or logic courses, sees her friend Susan from the Community Republican Facebook page, post her piece about scientific elites trying to squash middle America, Mary has no way to refute it logically and it is associated with the group she is already involved in, and Mary sympathizes with Susan because she knows and trusts her.  And when Mary sees a Democrat refute it, it causes her to dig her heels in even more and double down on her support, because of how partisan politics in America has become.  If you’re not right, you must be wrong.  The same goes for the Left, of course.    

Another reason for distrust: as scientists we don’t do well communicating our findings to the public in a non-biased, yet easy to digest way.  Our knowledge comes from and is displayed in peer-reviewed, dense as hell articles that involve confusing acronyms, long Latin or Greek names and phrases that one would need a high-level physiology course to understand, and figures that screw with the head to look at without deep knowledge of statistics.  I’ve read and written scientific articles, and let me tell you, they’re absolutely awful and intimidating to look at and I hate how they are written (and I’m writing this, which is also dense and awful and intimidating.  I’m trying my best to consolidate I promise). Its no surprise that people who are unfamiliar with these topics would have a difficult time understanding them, and that could cause some to get bruised pride.  

The issue then lies in people attempting to become more scientifically literate through sources that aren’t straight from scientists.  News media, Facebook pages, Clickbait, all of that loves to make money off of clicks.  Its amazing how quickly “a chemical found in small traces in blueberries found to reduce some plaques in xyz brain region in mouse study” becomes “Could the Cure for Alzheimer’s be BERRIES?!” That sounds a whole lot more final and wrapped up and spectacular than a small minor change.  Then comes the issue of scientists in the media saying they know end all be all.  Elon Musk yelling about needing to reopen the economy, or Neil DeGrasse Tyson giving a talk on areas of science in which he is not an expert (despite training in astrophysics), is a whole lot more interesting to people than Normal Nancy giving an hour long talk on a specific subset of a specific subset of a specific subset of virus with zero intonation or emotion.  Sensationalized science is science that sells, even if it isn’t right, and people start to think of these individuals in the media of what a scientist is supposed to look like.  As a community, I respect scientists with all my heart.  Overall though, we do need to come up with a better way to reach people who aren’t open to us.  Have scientist approved websites, pages, and magazines that are specifically for the lay public. We should avoid making sweeping statements or overextending our knowledge if we somehow do gain fame.By continuing the way we have, we further alienate ourselves.  I of course don’t mean sacrificing research quality, or dumbing down scientific publication. Just finding ways to talk to people in a more relaxed way.

I suppose what I’m trying to say here is people don’t hate science without reason, even if the reasons are flawed.  And distrust of science doesn’t mean people are inherently bad people.  Perhaps they are just ignorant, ignorant and stubborn.  But people who do profit off of not listening to scientists are truly putting people at risk for selfish gain.  The problem lies in that not listening to scientists is extremely dangerous, not just right now, but all. the. time. 

Why is it a danger that people don’t have the means listen to scientists? Obviously it currently is putting people’s lives at risk. Not wearing masks to public places, being so angry at policies one doesn’t understand that they spit and cough on people in retaliation, or march in massive groups to protest.  People who do these things are a danger to themselves and others.  But we have been building up to this point.  I saw an interesting op-ed recently about the death of the expert that made a few interesting points.  The advent of the internet has brought us so much access to wonderful information.  But without education on finding scholarly sources early on and with full intent to promote gaining wisdom from those with experience, it becomes a breeding ground for dangerous mistaking of opinion (or simply wrong fact) for fact.   Anyone online can say they are an expert.  Once a person’s mind is filled with ideas that align with their own belief system, especially from someone who claims to be an expert, no researcher, academic, or other scholarly source can convince them otherwise.  If “my PhD in biochemistry” isn’t enough to answer the question “Well what makes you qualified to speak on biochemistry?”, then we’ve run into a serious problem.  People who have the true information individuals are seeking have been neglected for sources that fit with people’s personal values.  Its a natural thing to have happen of course, but when everything is online, and there isn’t much one can do to stop misinformation through regulation, these beliefs spread like wildfire, and this creates demand for pseudoscientific and untrue actions medically, politically, or socially.  These aren’t just ideas, they manifest into actions which can actively harm people.  

Its a weird time to be a scientist because not thirty years ago, your word was taken as law by many in the public, and if it wasn’t, it wasn’t out there to see all over the internet.  Now we are hit with a serious health crisis and everything is online, and the truth rears its ugly head: that no one who really, really needs to wants to listen to your life’s work. No one is respecting researchers who work tirelessly to come up with vaccinations and tests.  While you spend day in and day out working late hours trying to come up with a means to save lives, people come back and spit in your face.  Science, especially in academia, has always been a somewhat thankless job, (save for the pay if you get really lucky), and many times people won’t understand you. They know you’re smart, but they don’t really know what about, and it can be difficult to convey.  But that simply comes with the territory.  What pains me most is the severe retaliation during a time of crisis, instead of a renewed understanding of the need for science.  I don’t consider myself a scientist yet, considering I’m still learning in college. But I can’t help but feel that if we don’t find a way to educate people, and quickly, my field will be useless.  Because it’s not science that makes a difference, it’s people adopting science to inform their decisions.

If you know a scientists right now, especially someone working in virology, epidemiology, specifically COVID-19, or really any other field of life science, please thank them.  Hell, all STEM fields, for that matter.  They are truly trying their best during a time when it feels like all rationality has flown out the window.  And if they have any advice for you, listen to them.  By listening to scientists, you set a precedent for those around you to listen as well, which could get us all out of this mess quicker and healthier.

If you have any questions or comments, pop by my ask box.  Or reply too, doesn’t matter to me. My blog is all about conversations about science, science culture, and science literacy, and this may be my first post but it won’t be the last. Also this was super long, confusing, and ranty, so if you want clarification please ask! And if I don’t have answers I will try my best to direct you to someone who does. 

All y’all stay safe, and be smart.

[definitelynotablobsblog]

The Future Is Headless: A History

In an ordinary section of Glasgow, Germany, a city that had been long overshadowed by its Scottish counterpart, a very insignificant study was conducted in the fall of 2096. It was a series of one day field experiments, and very unsurprisingly the university had approved of the rather inexpensive necessities. It was a weekday so the volunteer turn up was underwhelming. Many of the old records have also alluded to the fact that it may have been the only colder of days that saw the Sun. Although it's very hard to say with absolute certainty, to the best of mankind's knowledge, it was one Dr Herman Krinchoffski that has been believed to lead the experiment that day. The very same Herman Krinchoffski who later won the Nobel Prize at the turn of the century for his huge contributions in Astrophysics. This has been a major critique among the historians, some claiming that his working in two entirely different level 3 complex fields and achieving world shattering success in both of them within few years is minuscule, others stand by that whoever studied the field was definitely capable of being such a genius and the introduction of "levels" of complexities of fields, childish to begin with, was never intended to be compared among themselves and any such conclusions would be flawed.

At the very least, it wasn't an impossibility. And if Krinchoffski did lead the experiment, he was also the only person to have won a Nobel Prize in two fields in his lifetime without the use of Conscene Division Stimulee, since it wouldn't be until after he had studied the results in his office and noticed the anomaly that the very basis of the study that led to CDS would even begin. Or for that matter, everything that defined this century.

Very little is known of the original study or the conclusions or even what the anomaly was. But historians have been quick to at least capture the sentiments that followed. The anomaly as Vermees wrote in his New Era, was very small, in fact it might have even looked insignificant to some of the experts of the neuroscience. But once pointed out, it made everyone who could understand its importance uncomfortable. He writes that in the first appearance of the problem, in sort of layman terms they called it the "Hippocampus anomaly", which received criticism of being amateurish and proof of some experimental error. Over the years it was sometimes playfully just called the "Hippo" because “it wasn't threatening but it attacked the very understanding of the field whenever it was approached.” Many people who have been trying to find what the anomaly was, each year increasingly, start with a detailed study of the brain from that very part, lamenting that the very first appearance of its name was so vague. Some of the ignorant extremists even think that Vermees was being literal when he said it attacked on being approached, and these studies have led to brutal injuries and were one of the few urgent reasons to outlaw studies regarding the anomaly.

Nevertheless, the curiosity that the results have brought us, and the claim that the study was inexpensive has incited people from all over the world, young and large, to pursue it sometimes even illegally. The Council of Consciology never even took down the offer of direct entry to anyone who found the "Hippo", which only led to an unstable society norm and has been said to be one of the top reasons for the mess that the world is today, on popular mediums.

The Hippo was very hard to reproduce but that year, one by one the results started popping up all over the world, when the experiment was published in reputable journals. The Hippocampus anomaly was one of the most challenging spheres of understandings, and grew a social cult that wasn't enjoyed by any previous problems. Some compared it to the Ultraviolet Catastrophe, and claimed it could be the next big thing after the Revised Theory of Relativity. Though it might be easy for us to claim that, the people who actually understood its gravity were few at that time. Even Vermees concluding his New Era stated, “This might be inappropriate for me to out myself, but [the title] New Era might just be blind optimism. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if it turned out that the Hippo was just a moose.”

It was after all a surprise that in 2109, someone sat down in a coffee shop and said that they were fed up of the rush and the delays and so solved the problem. We, of course, don't know if they were in a coffee shop or what they thought, but in the spirit of the tradition of attaching genius stories (Archimedes in his bathtub, Newton under his tree, Einstein in his patent office, etc) to landmarks of history people readily agreed that that is exactly what must have happened.

Alas, that is all what history has to tell us. What we know for sure is that the person who did end up solving it after a decade of research and a tenfold boost in the applicants of neuroscience, was in fact the same person who led the experiment in Glasgow in 2096. And that he won the Nobel Prize in 2111, the only Prize that has been erased from the records.

What followed is still debated to have been exaggerated sometimes, but overall it lead to a general understanding of Consciousness with a capital C outside of philosophy jargon, for the first time. The biggest question in the history of mankind was solved. We were close.

But were we ready to face its consequences?

It didn't all happen at once, we know that of course. It might hardly be that the solution to the Hippocampus anomaly was a perfect understanding to the Consciousness. But it was definitely the first step. The field had its first model that could describe a reason for a thought. We know that the discovery led to the overlap of the neuroscientific field of science and Physics to a much larger extent. So we know that a detailed knowledge of the two were of high importance, which isn't a surprise. We know that the anomaly was related to the Hippocampus region of the brain. And we know that for a decade, life was unaltered.

In 2123, the best of our sources tell us, another major breakthrough took place. It was this time at the University of Berkeley, where the first instrument that recorded the brain waves — as they called it then, which we know now as the Conscene code — was recorded and translated almost perfectly into language. This was actually found in a corrupted source file that was one of the original records which was thrown away and so wasn't destroyed in the infamous Burnout of 2134, and was released on the Free Web before someone could cover it up.

This was before the Constant Signalia was set up so it took some time before the team responsible to curb the spread of it, which didn't have a name then, could know. The information spread like wildfire. It would be entirely impossible to do this today obviously since the now named CCB (Control and Coordination of Burnout) would erase any such information the moment it was released with the Constant Signalia going through millions of documents and thoughts in one sixteenth of a second. But this is one of the few info that was later saved in the Strictly Free Web, that developed in the following years by anonymous, which made it impossible to delete anything present on it. The Council of Consciology offered brilliant riches, increasing each year, to anyone who could counter the Strictly Free Web but only met with half hearted failed attempts.

So the pursuit to erase it was given up considering it a waste of resources. This would be the first time this information is published outside of the Strictly Free Web.[1] The story behind the corrupted file of Berkeley, nevertheless, was much more captivating than what it contained.

The file just had a few graphs of the Conscene code (brain waves) of a student that volunteered for the research. And its translations which read "Holy Sh&t, there%s n% way."

Holy Sh&t. Take a breath and look at it. This might not be the first time you've seen it. But it would be foolish to take it for granted. Those two words comprise of the first translations of thoughts using imaging. Those two words right there are what has changed the world into this whole new one that we live in. This is what separates the two eras beyond recognition.

Holy Sh&t.

The symbols existed because the file was corrupted, although this might also be evidence of the inaccuracy of the instrument. This has been one of the most famous phrases that the world knows, and it has received great enthusiasm, from vintage T-shirts to celebratory fests. It might then be almost ridiculous to know that the CCB has attempted to outlaw its usage many times.

Nevertheless, as is history's law, this phrase has also been the subject of the most number of conspiracy theories of today. The fact that the word "Holy" was unaffected has been brought up by people throughout the generations since the file was first found in 2163, in debates regarding religion which was in uproar during the first comings of the study of Consciology. However, unless "way" was a religious term too, it is highly improbable that it meant anything. There were also many linguists who unanimously believed this to be the Rosetta Stone of our lifetime which would help us to find the Hippo in a reverse order some way. The 60s saw a massive increase of neurophysicists who started studying etymology and there was once a time that if there were a person who was even scarcely interested in the subject and wasn't a part of the Council of Consciology (CoC), they also had a working understanding of language and its origins. This was supposedly one of the preliminary fears of the CoC and what-was-going-to-become-the-CCB which made them pursue acts that were considered to lie on the ethical boundaries by everyone who heard about it. What they did, however, disappeared from unwritten memory in a very similar fashion as the information to this point has been.

But within a year, CoC started ignoring the issue, which was first encouraging for a quick bloom of more people into the area of etymology, but which soon became concrete evidence that the corrupted file was never going to play out as the Rosetta Stone and that it was indeed more complex than that. Nearly three decades later, every person who searches for the anomaly is sure that the graph is just as helpful as an actual Hippopotamus, but the study of etymology remains an attractive set for its intense relations with the search and a crude understandings of the evolutions of thoughts.

A rich piece of trivia, for instance, stood out that when the phrase was first spoken it meant Holy Excrement, which was just used as a vague and vulgar exclamation at that point of time. It was in fact till the 60s when people used it. But with the very introduction of this phrase more formally into the modern culture, it lost its meaning in just a decade and was solely associated with its appearance here. It is still fun to imagine the first people who stumbled into the file and could understand this as just a childish sentiment from the people who changed our world.

This is where the history blurs into its ends even more. The oldest text alive on the Strictly Free Web is very unreliable, but records that the world dove into a sea of debates. Nations all over found it urgent to discuss whether such a device would be a violation of privacy. This isn't a very far stretched imagination. Records from before 2109, have always contained raging debates of how the Internet of Things [2] were seen as a threat against individuality and secrecy. We can only assume that this debate was far more important and threatening than the Internet of Things.

People who said that any restrictions were outrageous believed that anyone against it would just go on to show that they had something to hide. Others found it entirely unacceptable to even debate that such a technology exist. There were still more people who had varying degrees of opinions on the spectrum. But in general, if the turmoil was ignored, most people were excited to see how things turned up. This time, everyone knew how important this would turn out to be for the future progress of Earth.

This might in fact be historically placed at the time when the nations formed a united League. Before the 22nd century, the Nations weren't governed by a single body but were sovereign states themselves. We can say that for certain till 2109. A "United Nations" did exist but it was just a common membership organisation and had fairly restricted say in most matters. It is in fact fairly possible that it was the United Nations that evolved into the League of Nations we find today. This is also particularly funny because United Nations evolved from an even older organisation named the League of Nations founded in the 1900s after the First World War. The debate of the "control of thoughts" definitely was the biggest reason the decision to form one control group took place. After all, the scientific progress affected the entire world equally. Many of the experts who study the field agree that the situation would have landslided even more if that decision wasn't taken, since there would have been an unimaginable imbalance of power and a possible competition that could have lead to another and a far more horrible World War.

The decision was quick. Reading the few scattered records that survive of the 22nd century, the League formed within three years of the experiment at Berkeley in 2123. It was quick, but it wasn't quick enough.

A mass hysteria had spread, especially with the vast roots of the Free Web. Even though Free Web appeared in the late 2000s, this was probably the time it had taken a sound structure within itself. Before Free Web, the Internet was a commodity you had to pay for — albeit the prices had been dropping. The connections that the Internet granted were huge to begin with, but it still exempted a large population that couldn't afford it. With the coming of Free Web, now almost every person had a connection, except people who refused to (a very small minority) and people who couldn't even afford the most primitive hardware (also a small minority). This meant everybody knew what was going on out in the world. This meant people who never heard of the Consciology or even knew what it was called could read articles written by absolutely anybody. That meant people who didn't even have the opportunity to be educated were influenced by evilmongers, and they were swayed completely.

This population was not small. The percentage of population that was hysterical might not have been fairly large, but because the population had grown despite the increasing awareness, the actual number of people were overwhelming. And they were gathered close together in masses, spreading the fake facts beyond proportions. The words of the evilmongers had grown so much, no one was sure what was true. This is, in fact, the first place in history the word "evilmonger" is known to be used as the meaning we have today: "a person who perpetuates hysteria inducing myths".

Even after all information of the Free Web and the memories of the rumours were erased from the memory of all humans in the Burnout of 2134, people who lived at that time reported to still know the general feeling of insecurity that had gripped the world. Crimes must have been at a high because this is the period when the advancement of security grew to become almost foolproof. That is a rather troubling state, and it's hard to claim it was exaggerated if the urgency for the development was so much that it is known to have happened in just a single year.

For the people who wish to know more of Consciology, this has always been a point of contention. They come back to the fact that so many people still remember the feeling when the memory was after all erased. A lot of people think that as such, this points to a possibility that our theory, whatever it may be, is incomplete, or that there is some deeper consciousness that we still have to discover. This, however, may also be explained by the fact that the Burnout happened in 2134 and the instruments available weren't of the highest grade precisions. Although there aren't any concrete records of further such "Burnouts", but manipulations of memory that we know have took place over the six decades since then, have never accompanied such "general feeling". So it might just be the inexperience of the working theorists that left something to say.

The hysteria wasn't the worst that the world was going to see however. Almost the same year that the League decided to establish the Council of Consciology and a legal organisation that meant to have a final say in all matters regarding any developments in the particular field, the final discovery took place. The final nail in the wood. The worst part about it? The hysteria was right.

The world became headless.

(contd.)

[1] In fact, if you had followed the trial against the publication of this book, you might know that this was part of the information violation that was filed against it.

[2]Internet of Things was what the Web of Things used to be known as.

[fakebookcascadia]

1.0: Dissecting Dan Harmon’s “10 Minute Long Song” Metaphor

POSTED ORIGINALLY TO FAKEBOOKCASCADIA.TUMBLR

>You walk into a room in which a song has been playing for 8 minutes and everyone in that room tells you that the song sounds pretty well like it is going to end soon. It is on its third chorus, and you seem to hear the beginnings of what sounds like a bridge. Also you are pretty sure it is a pop song.

It is difficult to know where to begin, personally, with “problematizing” a theory postulated by the very man who opened my eyes to the concept of “problematization”-- by all means a sociology jargon. Dan Harmon is misunderstood in much the same way still today as he has always been, for the cult of personality surrounding him. But he is an impressively intellectual protege to both Joseph Campbell and (less notably) Spalding Grey, one of the most original writers in American history. I, like Dan Harmon, would agree that the work of Campbell and Grey might be a bit more worthwhile for fireside chats than say, Stein and Mensch, Ryan and McCain.

We are way way way way past the days when some headline from the frothy tops of the Today Show daily news has the potential to stir up a national conversation about fascism and apartheid. This might have been true in 2015 when Black Lives Matter protests were still attracting sizeable crowds. It is worth talking about that crowds at protests have dwindled. It is worth asking why.

So we dig deeper than the Today Show, into the realm of visionaries-- Camus, Laozi, hell, even Orwell. Zamyatin anybody? Harmon.

I hate to break it to him and to you, but our president half-consciously tweeting jibberish about coffee in the middle of the night really was the ultimate shark jump for this whole charade. But rejoice, because that means that we’re one step closer to taking it off air.

And I want to problematize the problematizer, but that does not make me his adversary. I have a respect for Harmon to the point where I am actually hurt by the arrogance and the ignorance and the anger that spews forth from these people who claim to actually follow him, but hey, that is a whole different story for a whole different day.

I want to dive right into what the point of this whimsical but officially inaugural post for FBC is about: Please refer to the meat of the opening monologue to the free E250 of his Harmontown podcast-- in the absence of actual transcriptions by yours truly all I can say is that it is easy to access and is between the 10 and 30 minute mark.. Recently Dan Harmon has taken on a bit of what we could call a “pro-praxis” position as an anarchist, meaning simply that he is willing to apologize for politicians. I am putting words in his mouth, only not. (paraphrase: ‘I just want to go back to the horrible thing with the two corporations rigging debates;’ ‘politics used to be the enemy but now it is actually the thing that we need to use to work against Trump supporters’-- yes, he was being glib, to an extent.) This represents a shift in ideology, since prior to the 2016 campaign of Trump Dan soundly swore against essentially all things polis, “political,” all things having to do with reptilians in suits doing corruption and greed.  The metaphor he used was, as far as I can tell, “a ten minute long song that you are just entering the room to hear, it is 8 minutes in, and the ‘older’ people are there (here) to say that the ‘song’ is going to end in two minutes because they know the general structure of ten minute long songs throughout history.” “If they tell you the song is about to end, listen to them.” I’m sorry Dan, but first of all, what? Second of all, what? And thirdly, what? Impeachment? Also, as an additional aside... really? Number one is painfully obvious- you just literally said that you haven’t been paying attention to the song these past eight minutes. How ageist is that? What about my 19-year old ass in 2008 getting a call from my best friend who worked for the Obama PAC, 10pm November 8th, listening to a parade of college students screaming on the streets of Bellingham, Washington, while you washed the cheeto dust out of your hair? You said yourself you weren’t listening to the song that whole time, and fifteen years of age under your belt doesn’t amount to a time machine, bruh. I was talking about Elizabeth Warren in 2011. I was lost in Adbusters and Mother Jones and Democracy Now! as a teenager. I debated socialist theory with my friends in middle school. Secondly, and this is crucial, what the hell is a 10-minute long song? “21st Century Splendid Man?” “Roundabout?” Beethoven’s 9th? Good god man, do you actually think that people still listen to that music? No, we are on future shock time, and there is no time for Manheim Steamroller in the life of a real life Millennial. Ever heard of a little band called Charles Bronson? Or a genre called Break-core? To extend your metaphor, we have to examine the actual science of music theory, which operates as so: pop song, like “art music” and traditional folksong, is an abstract form that is and can only be understood by the light of the historical existence of individual works. (so, to go along with point 1, not only would you have had to have been listening to the first 8 minutes of the song, you must also have had to have an actual set of historical data involving songs that last ten minutes with codas near the eight minute mark, which by all means would make you a scholar of little more than, yes, one good King Crimson album and a couple of Yes songs and Beethoven.) Epistemologically we should contend with the idea that there are in fact many 30-second pop songs for every 10-minute pop song**, just like there are 4-year terms for every giant unending empirical world megastate.  **(see: Philip Tagg’s “axiomatic triangle” theory-- this is actually very important to fully understand my argument involving this VERY imperfect extended metaphor.) Third, and there has to be a third because, style: where is this leading? All I am hearing is the exact opposite of what Barack Obama said in 2004 at the DNC, which by all accounts is an evocation of Jeff B. Davis’ post-neoliberal and anti-praxis, nonpartisan stance-- if Democrats want to act like they are saving the world while they secretly wage wars and profit off prisons, they really, really, are not any better than the other side. It seems to me that if Dan Harmon himself is saying to bring in the suits, the alt-right has literally already won. They have detached the anarcho-syndicalist arm entirely from the American left and replaced it with an ersatz. To ask the question was it the Russians, or is Democracy to blame? is the best way to completely fool and bamboozle yourself if you are the sort of person who likes to have faith in the common sense of her neighbor, but I suppose that is the way the tides are turning, so so be it.