Tag: message from the queue continuum

awabubbles:

jumpingjacktrash:

jumpingjacktrash:

“i don’t like either candidate so i won’t vote” what are you thinking, if enough people wuss out we’re going to have President None Of The Above? hey we’re counting the votes and ten percent of voters stayed home and jerked it to their own ideological purity, guess we just won’t have a president and all the executive level decisions will be made by a magic 8-ball for the next 4 years

i wrote this 2 years ago and – yeah. look, let’s just learn, ok? midterms coming up, pull up your big citizen pants and go do the thing.

I watched this special with Chris Hayes where he went to Michigan, where 90k people “voted” but left the box for president empty. And I could not wrap my head around it. Some white boy sitting on a stool like “well maybe you would vote if everything was going okay for you, but I need change”. And I exploded. Its the height of privilege to abdicate that kind of responsibility under the faux guise of protest. No, its not because everything is going great, but because everything could be going MUCH WORSE. And i, as a queer woman, don’t want my rights ripped away and shat on. Im sorry that you’re just starting to feel the effects of wage stagnation that’s fucked the rest of us for over 40 years, and im sorry that you dont think a few trade deals turned out great for white people, but that is THE SHITTIEST REASON to throw women, black and brown people, the queers, and immigrants under the goddamn bus. You can always fight within your party for more progress, or to move things to the left. And honestly if it took this orange disaster for you to finally give a fuck, for you to realize you cant just vote once a year and act like your part is done, that should be a point of shame, not one of pride.

The second argument, equally blew me away. “I wasn’t going to vote for the lesser of two evils”. EXCUSE ME?!?! Please tell me what’s so evil about the following:

  • Raising the minimum wage
  • Repealing the Hyde Amendment (which bans federal funds, such as medicaid, from being used for abortion)
  • Tax relief for working families
  • forcing Wall Street and billionaires to pay their share
  • relief from student debt
  • deb-free college
  • ending campus sexual assault
  • paid family and medical leave
  • expanding voter rights by: automatically registering voters, repairing the Voting Rights Act, setting a national standard for early voting, restoring voting rights to convicted felons
  • ending conversion therapy
  • passing the Equality Act “to protect people from discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation in every aspect of public life”
  • Protecting and expanding the Affordable Care Act

And if you don’t believe me read Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Platform for yourself.

Maybe you don’t think she was “progressive enough” but look what you got in exchange: Muslim Ban, nazis in the street, thousands of immigrant children being ripped from their families, thousands of refugees turned away, and possibly 2 conservative supreme court judges that will change the face of America as you know it. 

NOT VOTING IS NOT PROTEST, ITS LETTING SOMEONE ELSE DECIDE OUR FUTURE. And honestly, the rest of us can’t afford your moral purity.

metropolis22786:

Humans are from a Death World – They drink acid

The tap on the outer door was hesitant, but Captain Thrajj heard it. “Come,” he said, his deep voice carrying into the anteroom outside his office.

The door slid open, and Megis Mon, the Thrill Deputy Chief Engineer, sidled into the room. “Captain.”

Thrajj was a Bifroni, and knew that he looked intimidating to a small species like the Thrills. He stayed seated behind his desk and tilted his head to one side. “Deputy Engineer, what can I do for you?”

“It’s the Chief,” said Mon, holding xir first set of hands clasped together, nervously. “I confess to be worried about his mental state and general health.”

Thrills were known to be a race of healers and carers, coming from their evolutionary line of hive-based societies. The Chief Medical Officer on the Endeavour was a Thrill. “Why are you worried?”

“His behaviour has been… erratic, the last three shifts. His voice became faint, then disappeared altogether. Chief Medic Doran signed him off for one week, and he has remained in his quarters with his pet feline ever since. His card has not been logged through the commissary, but he has been seen using food dispensers near his quarters at odd hours of the ship’s cycle. I pulled the last three records of his usage.” Mon carefully placed a data chip on the Captain’s desk.

He picked it up and fed it into the reader on the desk. “Liquid foods.”

“We know how much he likes a solid meal, even more so than the other Humans on the ship. No, I am more concerned with the last item on the list.”

“Why is that? It looks like the standard checmical composition for water.”

“He asked for water at boiling point. I checked the chemical makeup of that last additive. It’s an acid.”

Thrajj frowned. “Acid?”

“He’s requested a gallon of boiling acid then went back to his room, and now he’s not answering his comm line!” said Mon, agitated now.

“Mon, calm down,” said Thrajj, lowering his big, horned head. “How many times have you shipped out with Humans?”

“This is my second cruise, Captain.”

“I was a young ensign when the Human Federation first took to the stars and made contact,” said Thrajj. “This is my fifty-second year of having Humans on my ships. Now, I’ll let you in on a secret.” He leaned forward, and a smile formed on his lips. “With the Humans, there is always an explanation. They are a hardy species, they come from a homeworld that will kill you or I, but not only did they survive it, they tamed it. Then they went into space, and they tamed a lot of other worlds as well. And with Humans, there is always a reasonable explanation. Come, we shall go and see what the Chief Medic has to say, and then we shall go and see Chief MacDonald.”

===

“I signed him off for one ship week, that is correct,” said the CMO, another Thrill who went by Doran Dom. “He has a mild viral infection, but one I have had experience in dealing with in the past. it is not transmissible to any of the other crew except other Humans, so it appears as if he has quarantined himself to avoid infecting others.”

“Have you any idea why he would request a gallon of boiling acid?” asked Thrajj.

“As to that, I have no idea,”said Dom. “His mental state when he left here was fine.”

===

“Cap’n”, said the broad voice of Chief MacDonald. “I’d offer to let you in, but I don’t want the crew catching what I have.”

He sounded… hoarser that he normally did, as though his voice hadn’t been used in a few days and he was trying to remember how to use it. The tiny viewscreen on the panel outside his room showed the Chief’s face, as much of it as could be seen behind the flaming red beard.

“That’s fine, Chief, we can talk like this. Your deputy is very worried about you.”

“Ach, I’m fine. Or I will be in another few days. I have the dispenser down the hall and Pancake here to keep me company.” He hoisted the calico cat into the camera’s view. Pancake miaowed.

“Can you explain the boiling acid you requested from the dispenser?” asked Mon, fretfully.

“Boiling acid?” repeated MacDonald, a look of puzzlement on his face.

“Your last three requests from the dspenser were two heplings of a hot liquid meal, and a gallon of boiling acid. We’’d like to know what that’s for,” said Thrajj.

The Chief stared for a second, before bursting out laughing.

“Oh, stars, oh my, that’s…” he broke off, tears of mirth running down his face. “I requested hot water with lemon, so I could add honey to it for my sore throat. It’s an old method of getting fluids and electrolytes into a sick person. Did you think I would do something stupid with it?”

“Thrills have a duty of care to their comrades,” said Mon stiffly.

“Mon, my friend, you could have asked and I would have told you. Look, when you say boiling acid, it makes it sound so much worse than it is. It’s citric acid, from fruits grown on Earth. We take the fruit and slice it up, we add honey from bees, and we pour hot water on top and mix it all up.”

“You weren’t answering your comm!” xe shouted.

“I apologise,” said the Chief gravely. “I was probably asleep. I took a pill last night to help me sleep.”

“How soon will you be back to work?” asked Thrajj.

“If Chief Dom will sign me off, I can be back the day after tomorrow. I feel much better, but I’d rather wait and make sure I’m completely clean before I rejoin the crew.”

“Very well, Chief. Thank you for your time.”

“Thank you, Captain, Deputy.”

“See?” said Thrajj, once the screen had gone dark. “Always a reasonable explanation.”

“Boiling. Acid.”

Thrajj snorted. “This is nothing. Come, we shall have a drink and I will tell you of the time a bunch of Humans taped a knife to a cleaning robot…”

fuckyeahfluiddynamics:

Lots of applications – from rocket engines to ink jet printing – require breaking large droplets into smaller ones, so there are many methods to do this. Some techniques rely on fluid instabilities, others use ultrasonic vibration. But one of the most effective methods may also be the simplest: placing a mesh between large drops and their target.

That’s the idea at the heart of this new study, which uses a wire mesh to break large droplets into a spray of finer ones 1000 times smaller. The target application is agricultural spraying, and the researchers argue that their method would allow farmers to treat their crops effectively with fewer chemicals and less run-off. Drops impacting the mesh form a narrow cone over the plant, and the smaller, slower droplets are better at sticking to the plant instead of bouncing away. They’re also less likely to injure crops, since they don’t disturb the leaves the way larger drops do. (Image and research credit: D. Soto et al.; via MIT News; submitted by Omar M.)

A Spectre is Haunting Unicode

allthingslinguistic:

An interesting article about Japanese and Unicode. Excerpt: 

In 1978 Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange – several of the added characters had no obvious sources, and nobody could tell what they meant or how they should be pronounced. Nobody was sure where they came from. These are what came to be known as the ghost characters (幽霊文字). […]

By interviewing the catalogers involved in the creation of the standard, the investigators established that some characters were inadvertently invented as mistakes in the cataloging process. For example, 妛 was an error introduced while trying to record “山 over 女”. “山 over 女” occurs in the name of a particular place and was thus suitable for inclusion in the JIS standard, but because they couldn’t print it as one character yet, 山 and 女 were printed separately, cut out, and pasted onto a sheet of paper, and then copied. When reading the copy, the line where the two little pieces of paper met looked like a stroke and was added to the character by mistake. The original character (𡚴) was not added to JIS or Unicode until much later and doesn’t display on most sites for me.

Read the whole thing. 

A Spectre is Haunting Unicode