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8 Words You Should Avoid When Writing
As always, Orwell’s final rule applies: “Break any of...
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Ultimate Writing Resource List
a massively extended version of ruthlesscalculus’ post
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I love these notes. Old school disney animation guides had the same rules for storyboarding and it’s all very very true.
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PlayFull version of the My Little Pony ~Tomodachi wa Mahou~ OP theme song, “Mirai Start” by Suzuko Mimori.
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Fascism and the right to bear arms.
There have been a lot of people lately saying the only thing standing between freedom and fascism is the right of...
Damn! Watch this railroad tanker car instantly implode:
I couldn’t find too much information on the source of this clip, but it appears to be part of a safety training video on the perils of improperly steam cleaning tanker cars. In the clip, the tanker car is filled with steam and the safety valves are disabled. The steam cools, then condenses, the pressure inside drops, and the pressure difference is big enough to crumple that huge railcar like a napkin.
(via ozyreads)
You want a physicist to speak at your funeral.
You want the physicist to talk to your grieving
family about the conservation of energy, so they
will understand that your energy has not died.
You want the physicist to remind your sobbing
mother about the first law of thermodynamics;
that no energy gets created in the universe, and
none is destroyed. You want your mother to
know that all your energy, every vibration, every
Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was
her beloved child remains with her in this world.
You want the physicist to tell your weeping
father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave
as good as you got.
And at one point you’d hope that the physicist
would step down from the pulpit and walk to
your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and
tell him that all the photons that ever bounced
off your face, all the particles whose paths were
interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your
hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced
off like children, their ways forever changed by
you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a
loving family, may the physicist let her know that
all the photons that bounced from you were
gathered in the particle detectors that are her
eyes, that those photons created within her
constellations of electromagnetically charged
neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind the congregation of
how much of all our energy is given off as heat.
There may be a few fanning themselves with
their programs as he says it. And he will tell them
that the warmth that flowed through you in life
is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we
who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those
who loved you that they need not have faith;
indeed, they should not have faith. Let them
know that they can measure, that scientists have
measured precisely the conservation of energy
and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent
across space and time. You can hope your family
will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves
that the science is sound and that they’ll be
comforted to know your energy’s still around.
According to the law of the conservation of
energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less
orderly. Amen.
When asked how it felt to be the smartest man alive Einstein’s reply was “I don’t know, you’ll have to ask Nikola Tesla.”
Good Guy Tesla
nikola goddamn tesla
(via bombasticbookman)
This is what happens when you run water through a 24hz sine wave.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(via ozyreads)
FIX IT WITH SCIENCE
8 Myths About Scientists
I stumbled across this in Thick Books and Thin Films by Adam Ruben. Pretty good.
Myth #1: Scientists frequently make “breakthroughs.”
Truth: Scientific discovery is agonizingly slow. The only time I’ve ever run naked through the streets yelling “Eureka!” is when I forgot to refill my prescription.
Myth #2: Scientists work in isolation.
Truth: Scientists are even prouder of setting up collaborations than they are of actual results. Most scientific talks end with a slide listing all collaborators like little badges of honor—and the less similar the collaborator’s field, the prouder the scientist. “Well, you know, I might have discovered a cure for tuberculosis,” a scientist will say, “but what I’m really excited about is this new collaboration with an Icelandic poet!”
Myth #3: Scientists possess useful skills.
Truth: Scientists possess useful laboratory skills. But you should never allow a physicist to wire your house.
Myth #4: Scientists follow the scientific method as it was taught in high school: Observation, Question, Research, Hypothesis, Experiment, Conclusion.
Truth: In reality, the way scientists work is more like: Fiddle Around, Find Something Weird, Retest It, It Doesn’t Happen a Second Time, Get Distracted Trying to Make It Happen Again, Go to Chipotle, Recall the Original Purpose of Your Research, Start Over, Apply for Funding for a Better Instrument, Publish Some Interim Fluff, Learn That Someone Has Scooped You, Take Your Lab in a New Direction, Apply for Funding for the New Direction, Collaborate With an Icelandic Poet, Eat Chipotle With an Icelandic Poet, Co-Write Scientifically Accurate Ode to Walrus, Get Interested in Something Unrelated, Apply for Funding for Something Unrelated, Notice That 20 Years Have Passed.
Myth #5: Experiments always yield data that teach or reveal something.
Truth: Let’s say you’re doing an experiment with five mice. These particular mice will turn either yellow or blue. So you walk into the lab expecting to see five yellow mice, which will point to one explanation, or five blue mice, which will point to the other. Instead you would see one yellow mouse, one green mouse, one striped mouse, one plaid mouse (dead), and one mouse that has somehow sewn himself a little blue jacket, though he doesn’t wear it all the time.
Myth #6: A personal tragedy can turn a scientist evil.
Truth: Very few scientists are legitimately evil, though the number rises if you ask graduate students to characterize their advisers. Besides, it’s hard to be truly evil when you don’t have any practical skills.
Myth #7: A scientist can be proficient in all branches of science.
Truth: Exactly what discipline did the professor from Gilligan’s Island specialize in? Chemistry? Mechanical engineering? Coconut-based transistor radio construction? Any time a problem needed solving or a device needed building, the professor knew exactly how to do it. That guy could make anything. Except a boat.
People who don’t understand science assume that scientists can master any subfield. That’s why we’re often asked for our opinions about scientific news items, and we can only reply, “Uh … sorry … I know I’m a molecular phylogeneticist, and this story was about molecular phylogenetics, but, well, I’m a different kind of molecular phylogeneticist.”
Myth #8: Scientists are not sexy beasts.
Truth: Scientists are indeed sexy beasts. Not only do our lab coats make us look dapper and charming, those same coats look even better strewn unceremoniously over a standing lamp while we make passionate love to you.
Truth #5 is the most accurate thing I’ve ever read in my entire life.
Scientists, like pretty much everyone else, have no idea what they’re doing, and are hoping no one notices.
Fortunately for humanity, science actually does work, so a decent amount of that stumbling around does eventually create progress. As opposed to, say, politics.
(via ozyreads)
Evolution Simplified
This photoset should be required reading for every citizen.
FINALLY
One of the things I find to be a common misunderstanding is that people think “Adapt to survive” means life forms mutate in ways to suit their environment, when it’s really more like mutations happen and the life form adapts to accommodate it. If they find a more efficient way to live with the mutation or it allows them to spread and flourish in previously uninhabitable territory, it kicks of a process of divergent evolution. If the mutation is too harmful and impedes them too heavily before they can adapt to it, it dies out.
Mutated life forms are often reproductively unappealing to the original population! But in nature some amount of inbreeding is fairly common, and a mutation that might be recessive will become more common in an isolated population. With divergent evolution you often see a population split into groups that change until they do not wish to mate with each other and continue to change until the cannot viably mate with each other. And by then they’re different species. Like with birds, often a group of song birds will not be friendly towards song birds that sing a different tune, even if they’re the same species. One flock of birds gets separated and after a while they begin to sing slightly different songs. the two flocks will no longer socialize with each other, any genetic quirks unique to either of the two flocks will remain within that flock. Over a few generations one flock may have ended up with bigger beaks and the other flock may have longer legs, the standards for a desirable mate in each flock will have changed.
That’s also an oversimplification of the process, but you know, I feel like I see a lot of creationists get hung up on the idea that an animal would be like “it’s cold here, better evolve some blubber into my kids”, when it’s really more like “oh no I ended up with this weird blubber gene, well I guess at least it means I can hunt in colder territory and get food no one else can”
This is all pretty cool, and I’m just going to add in:
Dogs evolved (well, were domesticated, but that’s really just evolving where “human convenience” is the relevant selection pressure) from wolves, and yet wolves still exist. Jawed fish evolved from jawless fish, and yet lampreys and hagfish still exist. Multicellular life evolved from unicellular life, and yet microbes still exist.
It’s not like Pokemon. A whole species doesn’t just “level up” simultaneously.
So even if the ancestral species humans evolved from was still around, it wouldn’t disprove evolution.
Filmmaker S.G. Collins argues that in 1969, it was easier to send people to the Moon than to fake the landing in a studio. Technologically speaking, it was impossible to shoot that video anywhere other than the surface of the Moon. Which sounds crazy.
(via devour)
Minus the childish “homo” joke towards the end, this was really interesting. I know a lot about the science of why what we saw on film was actually the moon, but haven’t really thought about what it would mean to fake it before. It’s a nice glimpse into what “state-of-the-art” was in film making circa 1969.
I did not read the “homo” joke as childish, but as a play on the scientific species name. Either in the sense that “we would not be wise, but merely men,” or else as “we would be no more developed than our prehistoric ancestors.”
Weird that a statistician would believe in a concrete statistical trend
31. “The French are insincere; it is an inborn trait with them.”
There are no “inborn traits” which account for the social characteristics or customs of a people. The entire body of scientific anthropology proves this.
A French child, of French descent, will react like an American if that child is raised in an American home in an American town. The same goes for a child of any other nationality, color or creed.
To talk about “inborn traits” is talk just as the Nazis did when they talked about “good” or “bad” blood. It just does not jibe with fact or science.
To say that the French are insincere is no more sensible than to say that Bostonians have an “inborn trait” for baked beans, or that Brooklynites have an “inborn trait” for throwing pop bottles at the umpire.
Are the French “insincere” ? The way to answer this intelligently is to define insincerity, analyze the number of Frenchmen who show these characteristics, compare this number to the number of Frenchmen who do not show these characteristics; get the relative proportions between the two groups, then compare the proportions to a similar analysis of the “insincerity” of other nations, including the Papuans.
—From 112 Gripes About The French, Published in Paris in 1945 by the ‘Information & Education Division’ of the US Occupation Forces.
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People understood this concept in 1945. 67 years later, and we’re still trying to knock this through people’s racist skulls.
USA! USA! USA!
(via wilwheaton)
