Every Machine Is A Smoke Machine If You Operate It Wrong Enough

Fear Itself

I get the point of all the “can’t you just wear a fucking mask, it’s not like anyone’s asking you to storm the beach at Normandy” discourse, but I think it misses something about our current predicament. 

Wearing a mask is actually a big deal. I mean for me it is. It feels really weird, it restricts your air flow, and the longer you wear it the more you have this big wet cloth sticking to your nose and mouth which makes you feel like something is very wrong. And all of that makes the whole pandemic thing real in a sensory way and not just an intellectual way. It’s scary.

I do it anyway, and just, you know, am scared, and am learning to get over it, the way I’ve always learned to deal with my various anxieties.

It occurred to me at some point that this is probably true for a lot of the anti-mask assholes too. Wearing a mask is a scary prospect. It involves acknowledging that the risk exists…and also *feeling* and *seeing* the risk in a way that you don’t have to if you don’t wear them. All the macho bullshit about “freedom” is really a screen for a completely different kind of emotion, which would be fear. Not just fear of the virus, but fear of fear itself. 

This truly deranged behavior that we see people exhibiting when asked to wear masks is of course a product of entitlement, but it is also, I am willing to bet, driven by fear. Instead of accepting their fear and dealing with it, these people turn their anxiety into anger and direct it outwards, attacking the people who ask them to mask so that they don’t have to think about *why* they’re being asked to mask. They go after people who they think they have not only the right but the *ability* to defeat, in order to protect themselves from the fear that the real danger is beyond their control.

That doesn’t make any of it right. But we would all probably benefit from acknowledging that wearing a mask is not a trivial thing that is easy for everyone to do. Wearing a mask requires us to acknowledge that we are surrounded by an invisible and potentially deadly threat, and that we have a terrifying responsibility now for the wellbeing of total strangers because your own breath could now actually kill people. It requires us to be aware, on a visceral level, of the danger we are all in.

Anyway. Good for you if you’re wearing a mask even though it makes you feel weird and unsettled and freaked out. We are grateful to you for being brave and doing it anyway.

Frank, have you become self-aware?

I feel like I’ve finally gotten a handle on the algorithms behind the bot, and now I just need to figure out a way to actually talk to the internet without making shitposts

Responding to a pandemic in the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation:

"why would urban supercities depopulate?" plague, obviously

something to look forward to in 2020

honestly I wish I could dedicate myself to being a giant fucking inconvenience as much as the phantom of the opera did

The internet could change next week, and not in a good way

You may have heard about the efforts in Europe to reform copyright law. The debate has been ongoing in the European Parliament for months. If approved next week, these new regulations would require us to automatically filter and block content that you upload without meaningful consideration of your right to free expression. 

We respect the copyrights and trademarks of others, and we take all reports seriously to ensure that your creative expression is protected. We make this clear in our Community Guidelines. There’s already a legal framework that works and is fair: Today we take down posts and media that contain allegedly infringing content when we receive a valid DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown request. We also provide clear-cut ways for people to fight back if they believe their removed content was not a true violation. These instances are monitored and reported and live in our biannual transparency report. 

The suggestion to use automated filters for issues of copyright is short-sighted at best and harmful at worst. Automated filters are unable to determine whether a use should be considered “fair use” under the law and are unable to determine whether a use is authorized by a license agreement. They are unable to distinguish legitimate parody, satire, or even your own personal pictures that could be matched with similar photographs that have been protected by someone else. We don’t believe that technology should replace human judgment. Tumblr is and always has been a place for creative expression, and these new regulations would only make it harder for you to express yourself with the freedom and clarity you do so now. 

If you access Tumblr from Europe and want to act, you can find more information on saveyourinternet.eu. 

Star systems follow a standard blueprint that keeps their orbits stable.  They are organized in a hierarchical setup. What that means is that each set of orbits is on a different size scale.  The sizes of stars’ orbits do not go 1-2-3, they go 1-10-100. Any one star is only really close to one other star.  After that, other stars are much farther away.

Here is a cartoon of a hierarchical 8-star system:

This system is hierarchical because each close pair of stars (stars a and b, b and c, etc) is much closer to each other than any other stars (or pairs of stars).  The separation between stars a and b is much smaller than the separation between stars a+b and c+d, which is much smaller than the separation between stars a+b+c+d and e+f+g+h.  Let’s say that the separation between the closest binaries is 0.1 Astronomical Units, the separation between each pair of close binaries is 1 Astronomical Unit, and the separation between clumps of 4 stars is 10 Astronomical Units.

The Atlantic

Scolding Beachgoers Isn’t Helping

People complain that going to the shore is a careless act during a pandemic, but the science so far suggests otherwise.

I strongly recommend the entire article.

some of you are like “if a homemade cloth mask isn’t 100% EFFECTIVE AT PREVENTING DISEASE it’s worth LESS THAN NOTHING and you might as well go around licking doorknobs and DIE than cover your face AT ALL for ANY REASON”

look okay coughing or sneezing into your elbow isn’t 100% effective at stopping fluid particles from being dispersed into the air or on surfaces but even a measley 5-10% reduction in spewed particles is better than 0%