wolframhydroxide @ wolframhydroxide @sh.itjust.works

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12 mo. ago

Except that there's no incentive for a moderation team to implement that policy, and anyone with enough access can make a workaround to censor whatever they want without allowing people to view anyway, right?

That's a one-in-three chance of a task failed successfully, then!

I think that, in order to have this be a projection of a square, the space between the interior right angles of the space from which it was projected would have to be not just curved, but also twisted, like a Möbius strip, such that a person "walking" the square and starting from the rightmost angle leftward would start walking as if they were on your screen (their head coming out away from the screen), but then they would need to have their perspective twist so that they are now walking on the "underside" of the figure (their head now pointing into your phone). This would allow them to perceive the two "external" turns as "internal" turns, as well. Then it just needs to untwist on the way back. We just can't see the twisting, because the lines have no width.

HA, get a load of this, everyone! This person thinks researchers get paid royalties by the publishers!

<the entirety of academia grimly chuckles, a single tear of inner pain welling in each eye>

I don't believe so. IIRC from my mineralogy & petrology courses, minable quantities of most metals occur from 4 sources:

1. hydrothermal deposits: where water impregnates crustal rock at a high temperature and pressure, dissolving metals, which are then released as the water cools.
2. placer deposits: where small crystals of metal ores are chipped away by erosion and carried by fluid. Those dense particles settle out from the liquid as soon as it slows down, so they all end up concentrated in specific places in rivers, lakes, etc.
3. pegmatites & layered intrusions: these are igneous bodies which, due to the processes of their formation, tend to create either very large crystals of rare minerals (pegmatites), or significant concentrations of those rare metals over an entire magma chamber (layered intrusions). Hawaii doesn't exhibit the necessary geologic conditions for either of these cases.
4. banded iron formations: caused when, during the Great Oxygenation Event, microbes bound oxygen atoms to iron ions in the early ocean, effectively eating the energy of that reaction, as Iron ions became less stable with higher oxygen fugacity, and the Iron Oxide that was created, suddenly insoluble, sank to the ocean floor.

As a very recent mantle-plume-driven volcanic arc, Hawaii doesn't exhibit the necessary conditions for any of these in great degrees, so you would not expect to find any serious metal deposits there.

I know it's a joke, but in case you're wondering: there's no coal on Hawaii. It's too young, geologically speaking.

No, this is supply-side Jesus, and he's barrel-chested because he wants to be like his idol, Melon Husk.

And the whole reason they're evil is because the most powerful person who has one gets to choose what all the others see. I'm sure there's no metaphor there.

And not one of them is going through the public terminal.

Absolutely, but aerobic life is more able to harness efficient energy with the use of oxygen's INSANE reactivity, and that change was only possible because the anaerobes turned 20+% of the atmosphere into the elemental molecular form of the second-most electronegative element in the universe. Even plants, which produce oxygen gas during photosynthesis, use oxygen to power ATP synthesis. Oxygenation of the planet was absolutely requisite to allow the evolution of eukaryotic multicellular life.

Oh absolutely! I was just working with what we were given.

Don't forget the anaerobes, which generated so much oxygen that they poisoned themselves nearly to extinction and made the entire atmosphere a toxic miasma for themselves, without which all multicellular life would not exist!

And the system was designed by, bribed into existence by, and enforced with violence and propaganda by...

I disagree. It seems to me that it's equivocating and saying that all of these groups are equally bad and at fault, and are just pointing fingers at each other. I am trying to make it very clear that there is a hierarchy of blame, and it's the same one as the hierarchy of wealth.

Though let us consider the ch-ch-ch-ch-changes that would actually be necessary for each of these to exercise real choice in the matter at hand:

The Public: Die, because that is the only thing that doesn't actively destroy the biosphere, because you have no actual meaningful control over anything

Farmers: Change professions, likely losing everything (at which point they become "The Public"), because you can't even control what seeds you buy (See: Agricorps), let alone anything else you do with the land, and it's all a monopsony, anyway (See: Agricorps) so you can't even choose who buys your crops or for how much you sell them.

Government: Literally the only thing required here is to take a long view and invest in infrastructure that also has huge short-term benefits. Realistically, the actual reason is because the politicians get money from the corpocrats (See: Agricorps), and don't want to not get money from the corpocrats.

Agricorps: It is explicitly against their fiduciary duty to tank the value of long-term investment in their own business by making the planet uninhabitable. The only change required is to actually hold to fiduciary duty, rather than "number go up, STONKS".

Huh, it's almost as if there are very specific problems that can be traced to a single, specific spiderman here... interesting.

Fun little tidbit to tighten your trolling knickers: The finance minister of Israel said they intend to "entirely destroy" Gaza. They are doing this by raining fire upon it, from the White Phosphorus attacks going years before October 7th, to bombing hospitals and schools, and burning aid convoys and covering the ashes with sand so they don't have to look at their crimes.

Did you know that we have a word in the English language (and most others with Greek roots) that means, literally, "to entirely destroy by fire"?

That's right, the word is fucking "Holocaust".

Oh, no, the only ones I haven't read yet are ghostwritten and number9dream.

And I agree with the order notes. My very out-of-order sequence was Cloud Atlas (the movie introduced me to the book), then Slade House, Black Swan Green, Bone Clocks, Thousand Autumns, Utopia Avenue.

And I agree that reading the bone clocks before thousand autumns didn't actually make Marinus and the Anchorites make less sense without Enomoto and Dejima for context.

However, if I had read Utopia Avenue without any of the others (except Slade House and Black Swan Green), I think I would have had no idea what was going on. As it stands, the main reason I want to read ghostwritten is because I feel like I'm missing out on the context of "the Mongolian" from Utopia Avenue. I think that, in the same way that Cloud Atlas acted as a bridge into his world, Utopia Avenue was almost a culmination of his works thus far. I think that, without them, Jasper de Zoet's character and, for that matter, the whole story, would have been nigh-incomprehensible to me.

Absolutely. Since I'm not really into the music scene, I thought I wouldn't enjoy Utopia avenue, but I honestly think it's my second-favorite of his works. I am about to start Ghostwritten, though will probably stop there, because I really don't think number9dream is for me. I'm really not a fan of unsatisfying stories or bildungsroman, and I've read that n9d is both. What's your take?

I enjoyed Black Swan Green, in spite of its bildungsroman plot, but It wasn't my favourite (though it wasn't my least-favourite, because that dubious honour has to go to Slade House, which I read before the Bone Clocks, and which I expected to have a MUCH better puzzlebox feel. I felt betrayed when I realized that the alchemical symbology and map of the house on the inside cover of my first-edition copy was all meaningless, especially when the climax was just a deus-ex-horologia before I knew who Marinus was)

• A Canticle for Leibowitz
• Cloud Atlas
• 1984

Especially after he explicitly tells Job that he is the progenitor of all evil and is proud of that fact.