#unit systems

[victusinveritas]

[whumpster-fire]

1-3: fuck if we know. Maybe powers of 2 were easier to work with in ye olden dayes before electronic calculators? In any case, fractional inch measurements usually go down to around 1/64". Possibly 1/128" as well but I'm not sure who uses that. I do know that I've purchased 3/32" thick plywood and possibly 1/32" at some point, and I've seen 1/64" thick sheets for sale.

However our system is simultaneously not as stupid and far more stupid than you think, because we do have decimal inches as well and these are used pretty commonly in engineering/manufacturing. E.g. something might be measured to the nearest thousandth of an inch, or "thou." Sometimes even 0.0001" for extremely precise stuff.

It gets worse: we also have decimal feet (which of course do not neatly convert to inches), used in... I think a lot of construction-adjacent stuff like architecture and civil engineering?

5-7: the tablespoon is 3x bigger than the teaspoon so this isn't one of our stupid "binches" units but that joke has a grain of truth to it because we have a LOT of stupid industry-specific units, such as nautical miles (which in all fairness are a more sensible unit than regular miles because they're supposed to correspond to a minute of latitude), and also Troy ounces and pounds used by the precious metals industry.

("grain of truth" is a bad pun: a grain is a very small unit of mass used for weighing gunpowder and bullets, and also used to be used in medicine)

10: Pound as a unit of weight is what came first. The unit of currency "Pound Sterling" was originally supposed to be the value of a pound of silver - first pure silver, then the alloy called Sterling Silver used for coinage, but it obviously isn't worth a pound of silver now, and there have been numerous competing standards for what a pound weighs throughout history.

11-12: A gallon is 128 fluid ounces, or four quarts, or eight pints, or 16 cups, with a cup equaling 8 fl. oz, as well as 16 tablespoons, so one tablespoon is half a fluid ounce. This is nominally based on the density of water, where one fluid ounce is a volume such that one fluid ounce of water weighs one ounce, a pint of water-density liquid weighs a pound, and a gallon weighs 8 lbs. As a result, 1 gallon in US units is 231 cubic inches, which is a fucking horrendous number.

Things about the metric system that confuse me

Why are there 16 parts to an inch. Like yeah it's divisible by 4 but decimals and percentages on a system based on 100 are so much easier to calculate than fractions.

What are those little sixteenths called

Why don't you have millimeters. What happens if you need to measure something smaller than 1/16th of an inch. Why is your smallest area measurement the length of my fucking thumb

BECAUSE of your dumb inches and sixteenth and fractions, nothing else makes any fucking sense to remember. What's an inch? 16 little notches. What's a foot? 12 inches. What's a mile? 5,280. How the FUCK does anyone remember that. You know what's easy to remember? 10 millimeters are 1 centimeter. Do you know what centimeter means? 1/100th of a meter. You know how many of them are in a meter? 100. Easy shit

Okay this one is at Imperial but whose tablespoon is a tablespoon based off. Why are tablespoons and teaspoons both distinct measurements, they're fucking spoons. They're almost the fucking same. Like if you had "inches" and "binches" and binches were for no reason at all 1/42nd smaller and you only used them for measuring sawdust. Fuck completely off

Okay actually still looking at Imperial and speaking of Teaspoons and Tablespoons, the names don't indicate anything. How would ANYONE simply deduce by name which is bigger or smaller. Why would a spoon for food be bigger than a spoon for a drink. They both gotta fit in your fucking mouth don't they

Did we all standardize our fucking spoon volumes before we standardized our math? And CUPS? Who in the cholera factory was using scientific standard measurements to quality control your cutlery for any of this to be at all reliable for anyone following recipes

Alright back to you Metric WHAT DOES OUNCE MEAN AND WHY IS IT ABBREVIATED AS OZ

WHY IS POUND ABBREVIATED AS LB FOR LIBRA LIKE SCALES LIKE A CRYPTIC ASS ILLUMINATI SECRET MESSAGE WHEN "P" IS PERFECTLY AVAILABLE. YALL AINT PAYING MONEY IN POUNDS AND PENCE SO WHATS THE CONFUSION

Okay also why the hell would the British using Pounds to mean money run away to make America and start using Pounds to mean weight instead. Do I weigh a hundred dollars? Does Chadley at the gym bench press a thousand cents? I hate you

What is a gallon for. What does it mean. You know what's easy to convert to milliliters? Liters. What the hell is an ounce to a gallon

On top of that, what's your measurement transference? We have grams for weight, liters for liquid, meters for distance, and they're all like 1:100:1000 and shit. What do you DO to like. Show how many square inches of mass a gallon has or whatever

Oh shit I ain't even got into Fahrenheit yet

Actually fuck all of us, the end

[feeshu09]

Just woke up from my nap and thought of that one b99 scene, but mamajiu flavored.

[texas-gothic]

This Luigi business has, I think, really exposed something we all knew about in the US justice system, but has for so long been pretended to not exist by all of this country's communication and media controllers.

Despite the fact that we are all meant to be private citizens, all held within equal respect by and to the law, there are some very different classes of people as far as courts are concerned.

If Luigi Mangione had shot some middle class, pencil pushing office schlub or retail salesman, there'd have been a however temporary stink made about on the television. And if they ever did catch him, he'd be dragged through the courts, and maybe become the center of a "shame on you" piece on the 6 o'clock news. But in all likelihood they never would have bothered to catch him. They'd say "we're doing our best" and they'd forget about it. No manhunt, no media circus, no $60,000 bounty put on his head by the FBI.

If Luigi Mangione had shot, say, a black man, nothing would have happened at all. It's unlikely we would even have any inkling of it.

But Luigi Mangione didn't kill someone from the lower class, he didn't even kill someone from the middle class. He killed Bryan Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a Fortune 500 company. He killed a nobleman. And that means he's to be dragged into court surrounded by a small army of guards, charged with crimes wholly unrelated to whatever he's allegedly done, and before all of that, made the subject of a national manhunt.

If nothing else, it's become abundantly clear just who the courts consider to be worth their time.

[onlytiktoks]

[mushramoo]

The media acting like celebrating the death of a CEO is shameful, meanwhile every comment on every news video is in support of it? Even the official ones? Yeah fuck off we love whoever it was, they can make as many videos as they want, we’re never gonna condemn anyone for allegedly killing a man responsible for millions of deaths. They’re gonna run out of people who are blind to it sooner or later.

[gingerswagfreckles]

It's also a little bit funny that other people are calling the guy who shot a healthcare CEO with bullets that said "deny defend depose" and was carrying a manifesto about how corporate America is evil a "Nikki Haley Republican" or part of the "center right." I guess based on the fact that he went to an expensive private school was messing around in Hawaii pretending to develop a video game as work until recently? Like. This guy left a goodreads review about how the Unibomber was an "extreme political revolutionary." While also traveling around the world on the money his parents made off of real estate and owning a chain of senior rehabilitation facilities.

I think a lot of you are really uncomfortable with how common champagne socialism is and frankly I think a lot of this is projection. This guy is very obviously someone who considers themselves a leftist revolutionary, and yet everyone is kind of re-framing him as a "Nikki Haley Republican" because they're uncomfortable with acknowledging that far leftists are often very privileged and hypocritical people. I've been talking about this for a long time, but a lot of the left (at least on the internet) is quite in denial about the fact that a lot of their beliefs aren't widely shared by the working class. That often, the loudest voices in the movement are those belonging to the wealthy, who are at the end of the day cosplaying and are more interested in acting out heroic fantasies than improving life for the working class.

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Adult SFF Books Bracket: Round 1

Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:

The Murderbot Diaries series (All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry, System Collapse, and other stories) by Martha Wells

Endorsement from submitter: "Asexual and agender main character. In later books side characters are revealed to be in poly relationship."

"As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure."

In a corporate-dominated space-faring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. For their own safety, exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.

On a distant planet, a team of scientists is conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid--a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, Murderbot wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is, but when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and Murderbot to get to the truth.

Science fiction, novella, series, adult

Hunger Pangs series (True Love Bites) by Joy Demorra

In a world of dwindling hope, love has never mattered more...

Captain Nathan J. Northland had no idea what to expect when he returned home to Lorehaven injured from war, but it certainly wasn't to find himself posted on an island full of vampires. An island whose local vampire dandy lord causes Nathan to feel strange things he'd never felt before. Particularly about fangs.

When Vlad Blutstein agreed to hire Nathan as Captain of the Eyrie Guard, he hadn't been sure what to expect either, but it certainly hadn't been to fall in love with a disabled werewolf. However Vlad has fallen and fallen hard, and that's the problem.

Torn by their allegiances--to family, to duty, and the age-old enmity between vampires and werewolves--the pair find themselves in a difficult situation: to love where the heart wants or to follow where expectation demands.

The situation is complicated further when a mysterious and beguiling figure known only as Lady Ursula crashes into their lives, bringing with her dark omens of death, doom, and destruction in her wake.

And a desperate plea for help neither of them can ignore.

Thrown together in uncertain times and struggling to find their place amidst the rising human empire, the unlikely trio must decide how to face the coming darkness: united as one or divided and alone. One thing is for certain, none of them will ever be the same.

Fantasy, romance, paranormal, series, adult

[reasonsforhope]

"A clinical trial studying severe allergic reactions in the U.K. is being called “life-transforming.”

Five United Kingdom National Health Service (NHS) hospitals are participating in the £2.5 million ($3.2 million) trial to help patients live with their food allergies.

The study is being funded by the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, Sky News reported. The foundation was formed in the memory of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, who died in 2016 after eating a baguette that had sesame in it...

The trial is studying clinical oral immunotherapy treatments in which patients are given small doses of the food to which they are allergic to build up their tolerance. The food is given under medical supervision by trained staff, The Telegraph reported.

The study has 139 people participating who have allergies to peanuts or cow’s milk. They range in age from 2 to 23 years old, the BBC reported.

The Food Standards Agency said 2 million people in the U.K. have a diagnosed food allergy. In the U.S., about 5.5. million children have a food allergy, the National Institutes of Health reported.

One 11-year-old who was diagnosed with a severe peanut allergy when he was an infant can now eat six peanuts.

A 5-year-old with a milk allergy can drink 120 ml of milk every day and can enjoy a daily hot chocolate, the BBC reported.

“To have a patient who has had anaphylaxis [Note: Anaphylaxis is an allergic reaction so severe that it's potentially fatal without immediate treatment. It is very common with peanut allergies in particular. x] to 4mls of milk to then tolerate 90mls within six to eight months is nothing less than a miracle,” Sibel Donmez-Ajtai, a pediatric allergy consultant and principal investigator at Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, said, according to Sky News.

The final results of the study are expected to be released in 2027.

Similar studies have been conducted in the U.S. To find one, visit FoodAllergy.org.

Earlier this year, the NIH released the findings of a study of an antibody treatment that would help children consume allergy triggers safely."

-via WHIO 7 Local News, May 8, 2024

[victusinveritas]

[brushstrokesapocalyptic]

after all of murderbot's unreliable narration as relates to personal relationships, plus its off-handed mention of three's "possibly apocryphal friends", i can't help but suspect that this: (ASR)

might be narratively equivalent to this:

[cowardlybean]

i have been playing limbus and it’s to nobody’s surprise that my favorite character is the crazy old father

[haberdashing]

Musings on the "depose" part of "deny, defend, depose":

When I first read those words, my mind, like most people's I think, read "depose" in the sense of "overthrow". Like how you'd depose a king, kicking him out of his position of authority, in a way that may or may not involve him losing his life as well as his power over others.

But when I mentioned it to a friend, that friend brought up that the word has a second meaning that might be relevant here as well.

In the legal field, "depose" is the verb form of "deposition". Deposition itself is one of the ways you can go about getting evidence from somebody. A deposition is when you get someone to swear that they're telling the truth, and you ask them questions, or ask them for explanations, and they have to answer truthfully. Documents might be part of a deposition, but it's not about the documents themselves, exactly; it's about what they mean, the essential truth behind what the documents describe.

(In my line of work, this might be something like, "Does that income amount listed on your court filing include this bonus listed in your bank statements?" but with a lot of questions leading up to that one to establish things like the bonus being from their employer and deposited into their bank account.)

In a way, it's like the cross-examination part of a trial isolated. (Assuming that it's the other side being deposed; it could also be a witness or third party, but almost by definition you only do depositions on a party that isn't your own client in the case.) One side asks the hard questions, and unless those questions break rules, the other side has to answer them. And like cross-examination, if someone's not truthful in a deposition, that can cause them to face all sorts of sanctions for perjury.

Now, it's very probable that the assassin in this case meant the word only in the more commonplace sense of the word, comparing the CEO to a ruler that needs to be removed from power. But when you consider the legal definition of the word, it seems almost like an ultimatum:

Tell the truth about your unjust business practices, or else lose your power to enact them.

Be deposed, or else be deposed.

[boringkate]

Killing CEOs (that are themselves responsible for unimaginable suffering and death) sounds fun and morally uncomplicated, but the assasin will likely spend the rest of their life carrying the psychological burden of knowing that the secrecy now required of them about their actions is keeping them from getting well earned sloppy toppy.

Just infinite free and enthusiastic sloppy toppy! From anyone! Even from pornstars!

Harrowing.

[oddlittlestories]

Oh, a suggestion from my mom

We start a social media hashtag about terrible experiences with healthcare in this country. Kind of like a #metoo but for healthcare.

I’m not good at hashtags but this is tumblr. Someone is

[without-ado]

Vulcan at sunrise l John Kraus