“helping” seems like an odd word to use for “threatened at gunpoint”.
“helping” seems like an odd word to use for “threatened at gunpoint”.
I think I saw a paper on this kind of thing over a year ago. Iirc, it said that engagement is lower on Mastodon, but higher quality.
To be fair, the way the Krebs cycle is taught is usually pretty grim (speaking as a biochemistry major)
I don’t understand this, but it sounds cool.
Perhaps another way to think of it is that we’re a patch of localised order in an overall disordered universe
Damn it, the word “enshittification” has itself been enshittified!
(I am aware this is also an incorrect use of the word. That’s the joke I’m making. It is a bad joke.)
This reminds me of this quote by Alfréd Rényi (often misattributed to his friend, Paul Erdős)
“A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems”
That’s so pretty. What did you use to take the super zoomed in photo?
I live near a city and it makes me want to study enough botany to identify the various plants that spring forth in unexpected places. Some of them are quite beautiful and I find myself moved by their improbability.
As we saw with the COVID pandemic, even in “1st world countries”, poorer people were disproportionately affected. Fewer humans won’t help when the majority of harm to the Earth is perpetuated by a small fraction who would be disproportionately represented in a world where the majority of people died.
I sympathise with your sentiment, because it often does feel like humans are the problem, but the reality is that we’re not. Although it can feel weirdly comforting to think of humans as inherently and innately destructive, thinking this way is a pipeline to eco-fascism, which doesn’t offer productive ways forward.
I haven’t self harmed for a long time
I would love to be a kid sitting in this with it packed up but my head poking out.
Your comment has made me understand this better than anything I’ve previously read has. Thanks for sharing your perspective.
Oh yeah, Bluey is pretty great. I have a couple friends who don’t have kids who put it on when they need soft, warm, background noise. It’s better than a lot of stuff for the same age range — I have a brother who is significantly younger than me, so I’ve seen my fair share of children’s TV trash and Bluey is a freshing contrast
Ask her what her favourite episode is. Once you get small kids talking, it’s actually great, they tell such great stories.
Share (age appropriate of course) opinions of your own along the way. Like, don’t just say “have you seen [episode with pots and pans]”, expand it by saying stuff like you’ve not seen much Bluey, but you have seen the one with the pots and pans — does she know the one you mean? I suggest this because kids are actually pretty socially adept and I’ve found myself in analogous situations where I caused confusion by mentioning something I barely knew and the kid reasonably interpreted this as “this person wants to talk about this thing”, and then when I didn’t seem to know anything about the topic I had suggested, the kid seemed pretty thrown off and uncertain how to respond.
Or completely open ended questions, like “I know you like Bluey, but I’ve never seen it before. What’s your favourite episode?”, which could lead into asking for more details on what happened in that particular episode and why she likes it.
The thing about small talk is that I’ve found there’s a distinction between being good at it, and enjoying it. I used to think I was awful at smalltalk, before I realised that actually, I just didn’t find it enjoyable. I think to some extent, the point isn’t to enjoy it, but to build a conversational back and forth rally which builds initial rapport to figure out what common ground exists between two people (which can lead to more enjoyable proper conversation). Some people do enjoy small talk though. The rally model was useful for me because it underscored how I need to serve the other person options to hit back with.
For example, most kids go to school, so that’s a decent enough topic for if you’re running out of ideas. With kids, you can get away with clunky conversation starters like “What’s your favourite subject at school?”. Better than that though is something like “My favourite subject at school is science, what’s yours?” because it gives your conversation partner the option of responding either to your statement (such as with “ugh, I hate science, [teacher] is so mean!”), or your question, and having multiple options to hit back with allows for flow to help. Once you hit on a topic the kid is excited to talk about, you’re golden: just keep being interested in their perspective and give bits of your own perspective so they don’t feel like they’re being interrogated.
Edit: This was a great question, btw OP — It’s led to a lot of interesting discussion, thanks for asking it
Oh my gosh, that’s incredible. It’s so cool to compare it to This one from 12 years ago
Oh no, now I’m going to have to search for an old floppy disc
I think that’s a subset of an already existing conspiracy theory, possibly linked to “effective accelerationism”
In accord with the other person who replied to you, I enjoyed learning about the design process for packaging of the Xbox accessible controller. Had to find an archive link for it, but here: Link.
Okay, I think you win on the “insignificant decision” part of this question. That’s hilariously butterfly-effect. You tell the story well; I bet you’ve told it before.
I can’t help but wonder whether some people are aiming to scapegoat her. Like, this is a huge trial, with many defendants (I’m unsure whether anyone else besides her was sentenced to death at the first trial), but maybe pinning more stuff on her will make others (who may be more culpable for some of the charges than she is) less likely to get the death penalty.