spinnetrouble

It sounds counterintuitive at first, but if you think of real world examples, it makes a lot of sense. It’s the entire principle that casinos and blind bag toys operate on: you do the requested action (like placing a bet or buying the blind bag), you get something you didn’t want or expect, and you get a little mad that it didn’t go the way you wanted, so you do the requested action again. When it does end up giving you what you wanted, all the times you did the requested action get reinforced, not just the ones where you got the optimal outcome, like a big, “HAH! I knew I was right, I just needed to keep going until my ship finally came in!”

I don’t know what other psychology concepts have similar reliability, but another really interesting one is “diffusion of responsibility” or bystander effect in which the more people witness something terrible, the easier it is for everyone to stand around doing nothing because they assume someone else is taking charge. It’s why pointing directly at someone and saying, “You, call 911!” helps.

I’m not familiar with quilette, but there was a great Washington Post op-ed that broke down exactly why trying to recycle plastic is a bad idea. Here’s a link to it, no paywall: https://wapo.st/3VRnTNl

1.) Plastic breaks down into micro- and nanoplastic particles and get inhaled or consumed by everybody, and we’re just starting to understand how these bits affect our health (like increased systemic inflammation). Recycling facilities breaking down used plastic release untold amounts of plastic bits into their surrounding environments.

2.) “Recycling” old plastic into usable material requires the addition of a LOT of brand new, never-recycled plastic. It’s not a process where you put in used plastics and get some amount of usable plastic out, recycled plastic is like 30% old plastic and 70% new plastic to hold it all together. This is a process we’ve been trying to optimize for 50 years, and the improvements are negligible.

3.) The recycled plastic we get out of it isn’t safe to use for food and drink. (Have you seen those 20 oz. Coke bottles that say “I’m 100% recycled!”? Don’t drink those.) Nobody’s laying down the law and saying they can’t do that, and it’ll be a long time before anyone overcomes the social inertia and corporate lobbyists to stop that from happening.

Plastics are for landfills. I feel like such a piece of shit every time I throw another piece of plastic in the trash, but it’s the option that’s safest for everybody. (I feel like the French climatologist in Project Hail Mary every time.) Recycling isn’t a goal that will help; we need to adapt and reduce how much plastic we use.

They missed that thing on Matabele ants treating wounds on each other with antibiotics. The ants have done this for so long that they’ve evolved goo pockets to hold their ant-ibiotics https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/ant-antibiotics/

Not scabies (caused by tiny, parasitic bugs), but scrapie. Scrapie is the sheep form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and it’s caused by an abnormal protein in the brain–nothing to do with parasites. The misshapen protein can be found in the brain and spinal cord, and it turns out that grinding animals up wholesale to turn them into meat and bone meal can spread those abnormal proteins to the animals eating their ground up cousins.

Similar illnesses are found in other animals like elk (chronic wasting disease) and humans (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, kuru). If I remember right, spongiform encephalopathies are usually rare conditions that come from gene mutations. That’s why BSE (sensationalized as “mad cow disease”) made headlines 30-40 years ago–these sick sheep and cows were showing up in unexpected numbers because of consuming tainted feed, and there was a lot of uncertainty around whether or not humans could develop CJD from eating tainted beef and mutton. It’s really, really unlikely to happen–the last I’d read about it, the people who were confirmed to have contracted CJD all had a super uncommon genetic quirk that made their normal proteins less able to maintain their healthy shape and increased their risk for disease.

Hold on, shifting paradigm

Kinda wish I’d taken some comparative biology when I had the chance

Anybody else weirded out by the terrestrial shrimp? Hahaha if they’re on land, do they count as bugs-akin-to-roaches or food-source-like-aquatic shrimp?!

Parents in the '90s yelled about how their kids shouldn’t be saddled with the stress of the impending climate catastrophe in school.

“Let our kids be kids! They don’t need the stress of adult problems!” they said, AND THEN DID FUCKING NOTHING FOR THE NEXT 30 YEARS.

You can be short-sighted and wrong, but it’s better to re-examine your beliefs and the way you understand the world. It’s a good thing to grow out of this phase.

Seems weird to me that you think helping marginalized people wouldn’t help everybody. That’s the whole point, finding solutions to problems that work for everyone, not just those in the middle of the bell curve.

As someone with a learning disability, a history of trauma, neurodivergence, and is part of a racial minority, I really don’t give a fuck if the majority are kept quiet for five minutes lol

What this means in this context is considering the viewpoints coming from many different groups–people of different races, religions, disabilities, neurodivergence, etc., so issues that affect men with disabilities, for example, are as important as issues that affect men without disabilities. They don’t get ignored or sidelined in favor of more mainstream conversations.

Can we get a study on how shaving ants against the grain fundamentally differs from humans doing it? (I mostly just want to see how much patience people have for shaving ants, though)

Further proof that grad school makes people weird

I’m picturing someone struggling to hold on to their last vestiges of human consciousness while getting ready to blast blue-brown vomit everywhere. “Worth… it…,” he manages to rasp out, before collapsing to the ground to watch as his hands detach and skitter their way over to an instrument panel to begin their own Work.

It takes a little more effort on your part, but there’s an awful lot of good information to pull from this piece.

1. These are socialists speaking from their points of view. They want the people to have the power, and they’re pissed at all the other players who are trying to keep the people of Haiti from governing themselves.
2. There’s more than one other country trying to influence where the power to rule ends up. One country would basically be an invasion; what do we call it when more than one country, especially from opposing sides, tries to steer another country’s direction? We need to take a really hard look at how Haiti is being used as a proxy battleground between capitalist and communist nations.
3. The writer references the US’s Global Fragility Act of 2019, which can be found on Congress’s website. Look at this bit in the synopsis: “The State Department shall select priority countries and regions that are particularly at risk, and report to Congress 10-year plans for each. Each plan shall include information including descriptions of goals, plans for reaching such goals, and benchmarks for measuring progress.” Next, search for “Global Fragility Act” and “Haiti” to see if Haiti really is being targeted for US intervention. The State Department and Council on Foreign Relations say that, yes, the US is involving itself in Haitian politics, explicitly with the goal of being an investment (CFR) and “stabilized” according to standards laid out by the US (State Department).

Basically, we can insert Team America: World Police gifs as desired here. Ignoring the socialist bias entirely, we have to look at why Haiti is important to the US and Canada, how it’s being used as a proxy for the cold war between the East and West, and why we don’t think the Haitian people are capable of governing themselves. You’re welcome to ask your own questions about it, including why you want to dismiss the opinion as totally worthless right away.

You know what this tells me? It tells me that Dr. Avi Loeb would touch space goo and press any button placed in front of him. Hasn’t he read/watched The Expanse?! 😂