Just A Reminder That Vincent Van Gogh Did Not Eat Yellow Paint To Make Himself Feel Happy, He Ate Paint,

zoned out

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Be chaotic, and never know anything

It’s disturbing how often we go into the biographies of famous and revered men and find: he was a serial cheater; he was a sexual predator; he abused his wife and abandoned his children; or even simply–he never did an ounce of domestic labor, and relied on the servitude of the women around him to support his enlightened endeavors. These are kind of viewed as unfortunate blemishes on the oeuvre of an otherwise great man…“acceptable signs of wear,” so that we will still buy and endorse the product with no remorse. Now I’m all for learning great lessons no matter where they come from, and for learning about any person who has changed history, but we as a culture are right to have started a movement toward using these men’s behaviors to shine a critical light on their work. We should think critically about how these men’s misogyny, interpersonal callousness, and entitlement constitutes a fundamental flaw in their understanding of reality, and therefore a fundamental flaw in their overall thought. And we should keep asserting that women are not cannon fodder for men’s glories, and that we should not have an automatic “acceptable casualty” perspective when it comes to women.

you must insist on being curious. curious is what we should be. ask questions, research, know. being ignorant is not cool or trendy. fill your brain with knowledge.

“Being curious is better than being smart. Being motivated and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to action. Being smart will never deliver results on its own because it doesn’t get you to act. It is desire, not intelligence, that prompts behavior.”

— James Clear, Atomic Habits

This! I'm in love.

Just wait until anti-vaxxers learn about bijections.

The 'witch' who protected a village from genocide

Zura Karuhimbi had only her wits to protect the people she hid during the Rwandan genocide.

This s the obituary of Zura Karuhimbi, who may have been over 100 years old when she died and protected hundreds of people during the Rwandan genocide. 

She did it by pretending to have magic powers. 

Picture with me for a moment the sheer gall necessary to do this. An old woman, living alone, stuffs her tiny house with people running from militias. And when the militias show up at her door covers herself with irritating plants, so that when the militia try to manhandle her it ‘burns’ and proves her powers. 

We’ve lost a legend.

when i was a teenager it felt very revolutionary to be cruel to myself. like some kind of slow passive protest against how much everything hurt. i starved myself of sleep and food and tenderness because it felt right. it felt sharp and angry and radical and i wanted to be those things. adulthood is the realisation that the world is already working to cut into you well before you learn how to do it yourself. caring for yourself and others is the real protest

I'm a physics major who works as a tutor with a bunch of math majors, and today I was explaining differentials to a student and I said to convert the dC/dt equation to one with differentials just multiply both sides by dt and that's the only difference and I could feel them all judging me hfgsgskdhdlhd trust me we know we are wrong but we are too lazy and dumb

Okay, okay, look, all is well.

Yeah mathematicians are gonna cringe a little when people say stuff like this because we know it’s not rigorous, but you know what else? We made that dy/dx notation look like fractions for a reason. Certainly what’s going on here is a little more subtle than division and multiplication and if you’re working with some really weird functions that subtlety could get you in trouble. But for most situations, you can treat that stuff like fractions, and we made the notation that way to highlight that fact and make the symbol manipulation more efficient.

We laid the complicated foundations with rigorous analysis so we would have a robust and efficient tool, and we made it user-friendly, and we gripe about its users using it the way we intended? That’s like complaining that I use my phone without understanding its circuitry or complaining that I eat pop tarts without understanding what’s in them. Those things are true, but my phone was designed to be used by someone who doesn’t understand or need to understand its circuitry and pop tarts were designed to be eaten by people who don’t understand or need to understand what’s in them. I know that someone understands my phone’s circuitry and someone knows what’s in pop tarts and I trust them.

You’re not lazy or dumb. Calculus, as mathematicians passed it off to engineers and scientists, was designed to be used by people who don’t understand or need to understand the rigorous analysis that holds it up. Engineers and scientists trust that we gave them a good tool that we built well, and they use it. It’s nice when they understand it more deeply and it serves them well but it’s not always necessary.

I’m not gonna stop joking about how silly treating dy/dx as a fraction is, because it certainly won’t fly in math circles where doing so might actually screw you over, but even more because that’s what everyone does. Every field cringes and giggles when the out-group uses their tools without deference and deep understanding, as is every field’s right, but it should never be taken too seriously, because guess what!

That’s the anthropocene, babey! That’s specialization of labor! We don’t all have time to understand everything, we just have to understand what we can and trust that someone else understands the rest! That’s science! That’s humanity! That’s beautiful! Joke about it all you want, it is a little weird, but anyone properly hating on it? Cut it out or I’ll cut you out and that’s that!