Mad Miscellany

answering a couple questions i got on this post since i realized ppl genuinely wanna know:

tl;dr:

the post linked above has examples of how donating to individual families can help a lot. if you want to help more than one family at a time, there are many gazan-led initiatives focusing on rebuilding their infrastructure and distributing aid fairly that are worth donating to instead of large charities that already get the majority of donations.

as i mentioned in the last post: @/careforgaza on twitter is a nonprofit started by gazans, it's been endorsed by multiple palestinian journalists.

the sameer project is a collective organized by diaspora palestinians offering emergency shelter to gazans.

ele elna elak is a project aiming to bring water, food, shelter, etc. to gazans and has been promoted by bisan owda.

and the municipality of gaza itself is fundraising to rebuild water infrastructure.

all of these organizations are active inside gaza right now and are being run by gazans. if anyone knows of other gazan-led mutual aid projects, nonprofits or charities feel free to link them in the notes! hope this helped!

long answers under the cut!

plugging gaza soup kitchen for those with the means to donate! it's another gazan-led initiative currently providing food, water, classes for children, and medical care across the north and south. you can donate through their website or their gofundme, or follow them on instagram for news about their projects

So it's come my attention that there are a lot of students, particularly in humanities and social sciences disciplines, who need to hear this, so here goes:

Do the readings.

Oh my God, just do the readings. I promise, it gets easier once you get into the habit of it.

What makes a good student? Doing the readings. Literally just doing the readings is enough to make you a good student.

The readings *are* the course. The lectures are just priming you for the readings. The tutorials and seminars are just how we collectively process the readings. If the readings were intended to be optional, they would have been listed under the "optional readings" heading.

"Oh but I hate this reading! The author's an idiot, they're wrong about everything" Good. Do the reading and then tear it apart in class. This isn't high school, you're not expected to mindlessly absorb things anymore

If you're in physics, do the derivations. Don't believe that any equation given to you is true. Derive it. Convince yourself that it must be true, and understand the limitations of its truth.

The very first lecture I give my students emphasizes that they do not have to accept the readings as truth from on high. They don't even have to like them! Critical reading is perhaps the most important skill I hope they take away from my course, and you can't develop it if you're not doing the fucking readings!

has anyone figured out how to turn off the thing where you love your pet so much it slides inexorably into grief-borrowing

A reminder that sell-buy dates or best-used-by dates are not the same as expiration dates.

I love that a food bank is providing this info as they are experts in stretching food budgets and knowledgable in shelf-stable food items

So I followed the link to the website and found the longer list.

The website puts a link to the USDA site which links to foodsafety dot gov who really wants you to use the app, but you can bypass it.

Also a link to the Canadian government's advisory on best-before dates.

Both sites have links to pages that get more into food storage.

As it is food drive season I'd like to remind people that while food might be edible past these dates, food banks and food pantries will not use food past those dates, so please don't waste their time by donating things they will not use

Saying, “no, I need to prioritize this for myself”, over someone else’s desires for your time and attention is BIG self care.

broke: many worker ants are reproductively viable; the neat division of ants into reproducing queens and nonreproducing workers is a human social construct.

woke: many worker ants are reproductively viable, but the eggs and young of these gamergates are frequently eaten by other workers, and sometimes they are punished for reproducing; the neat division of ants into reproducing queens and nonreproducing workers is socially constructed by ants

the thing about body horror is that there's nothing you can come up with that can compete with what the human body will do to itself under a sufficient amount of stress

EXCEPT ‼️ radiation poisoning. that shit is fuuuuuucked.

I humbly suggest that true crime freaks should get into learning about scammers instead of serial killers. I LOVE reading about fraud and grifts and pyramid schemes. true crime ppl have all this paranoid energy about murder, which is rare in the grand scheme of things.....maybe instead that could be channeled into some productive rage toward capitalism.

And u know a side effect of learning about scam artists is that you start to understand certain things about economics, and just how STUPID these systems are and how easily they are taken advantage of....and I'd much rather people gained a passing familiarity with economics than whatever armchair psychologist shit these true crimers get on. We need fewer people who think they're experts on "sociopaths" and more people who understand how people like Elizabeth Holmes and the WeWork guy were able to do what they did

Here are some of my favorite books about financial scams:

The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust by Diana B. Henriques.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis (about the 2008 stock market collapse).

The Caesar's Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Corruption of the Private Equity Industry by Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap. (I admit I've never finished this one; the writing is hard to read.)

The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, by Zac Bissonette. I bought this book because of the subtitle and I have never regretted it. You must read it.

Catch Me If You Can by Frank Abagnale. They turned this one into a movie! The book was very different and is worth reading.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion, by Elliot Brown and Maureen Farrell. I haven't read this one yet, but it's on my tbr pile!

Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church, by Gareth Gore. I'm reading this one right now. The author is a financial journalist who stumbled onto this story by unraveling a bank failure in Spain.

And here's a list of more non-fiction books about fraud and financial scams. The first book on this list is about Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, which I also haven't read yet.

Enjoy!

My first time operating CCTV cameras I was handed control over what was essentially 50 independently moving eyes that collectively covered an area about the size of a football field and from that experience I now know that

And on top of that, having operated CCTV at multiple locations now- my favourite and most comfortable one having excess of 60 cameras- it can be REALLY hard to suddenly jump to a different operating interface and display configuration, because all the muscle memory is wrong

On my COMFORTABLE system, the one I spent the longest time on, I never had to think about what code I needed to punch in. If I needed to watch a specific person, I could follow them all over the site without thinking about it.

Now at a different location, all the manual equipment and codes and lag and resolution are different, and it feels like going from playing the piano to driving stick shift on the left side of the road with my feet

The closest I imagine I can equate it to is like. Getting really really good at painting with a pair of prosthetic hands, and then suddenly having them swapped out with someone else’s

Not the best depiction, but. Feels like this

nuclear power is impressive until you get up to why. "we use the most precisely engineered machinery ever created to split atoms to release energy" oh yeah how come? "boil water to turn a fan" get the fuck out

The power of atom turns out to be, yet again, the power of steam

The thing about scientific research is that 90% of the labyrinth is dead ends. And therefore, every single dead end that we can verify is important information. You really do need to make a peer-reviewed study to prove that no number of vehicular accidents has a statistically meaningful positive impact on bone cancer, just in case your moron cousin Greg decides to get rich by offering people bone cancer cure tours where you drive a monster truck off a cliff.

Name it "No Shit, Nobel".

“That’s why it’s hard to make friends when you’re older,” she said. “Friendship is rude.”

Her friend’s eyes widened. “What?”

“Think about it! When we’re kids we decide who we like and stick by them no matter what. As adults, we’re taught to be polite.

But, friendship is an imposition— at least, I want it to be. Call me after nine o’clock. Don’t think you’ll ever wear out your welcome. Overshare, show up at my door, go to the grocery store with me so we can waste another hour chatting.

We’ll never be friends if we spend all of our energy trying not to bother each other.”

“That’s why it’s hard to

make friends when you’re older,” she

said. “Friendship is rude.”

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

What no beaver does to a mf

The problem with giving advice to angry and suffering people is that rather frequently the thing they need to know to improve their position is the last thing they want to hear and not something they have the capacity to internalize or accept

Unfortunate truths you can tell people that would help if they could hear what it means and not just what it sounds like

sometimes we are childish. sometimes we do something our 16 year old self would have done, think something our 11 year old self would have thought, cry like our 7 year old self would have cried. why is this so embarrassing? why does it make us feel such shame? when you’re 20, 30, 40, are you not also every age you’ve been before? do all of your previous incarnations not still live inside of you?

Not knowing that you have a villain inside you, a hero, and a bystander is a lesson that everyone should learn.

What is the quote from Jingo, by Sir Terry Pratchett, to the effect of "when someone does something terrible, we want it to be one of Them, because if it isn't Them, then it is Us?"

“It was because he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.”

Jingo. 1997. Pratchett, Terry. NY, London, and Ankh-Morpork: Harper-Collins. p. 205

Discworld Heritage Post