Pinned
Reblogged
Reblogged businesstiramisu
Everyone IMMEDIATELY look at the incredible incredible incredible job Vine @vinesandvellichor did illustrating my copy of the green book?!?!?!??!?!?! Literally no words. I've been screaming since yesterday. L O O K.
WHAAAAAAAA?????
Reblogged blessphemy
One of the team behind the letter was blunt. “The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60% fat.” Materić and his colleagues suggested rising obesity levels could be an alternative explanation for the trend reported in the study. Materić said: “That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong.” He thinks there are serious doubts over “more than half of the very high impact papers” reporting microplastics in biological tissue.
But the brain study is far from alone in having been challenged. One, which reported that patients with MNPs detected in carotid artery plaques had a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes than patients with no MNPs detected, was subsequently criticised for not testing blank samples taken in the operating room. Blank samples are a way of measuring how much background contamination may be present. Another study reported MNPs in human testes, “highlighting the pervasive presence of microplastics in the male reproductive system”. But other scientists took a different view: “It is our opinion that the analytical approach used is not robust enough to support these claims.”
Further challenged studies include two reporting plastic particles in blood – in both cases the researchers contested the criticisms – and another on their detection in arteries. A study claiming to have detected 10,000 nanoplastic particles per litre of bottled water was called “fundamentally unreliable” by critics, a charge disputed by the scientists. The doubts amount to a “bombshell”, according to Roger Kuhlman, a chemist formerly at the Dow Chemical Company. “This is really forcing us to re-evaluate everything we think we know about microplastics in the body. Which, it turns out, is really not very much. Many researchers are making extraordinary claims, but not providing even ordinary evidence.” While analytical chemistry has long-established guidelines on how to accurately analyse samples, these do not yet exist specifically for MNPs, said Dr Frederic Béen, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: “But we still see quite a lot of papers where very standard good laboratory practices that should be followed have not necessarily been followed.”
A key way of measuring the mass of MNPs in a sample is, perhaps counterintuitively, vaporising it, then capturing the fumes. But this method, dubbed Py-GC-MS, has come under particular criticism. “[It] is not currently a suitable technique for identifying polyethylene or PVC due to persistent interferences,” concluded a January 2025 study led by Dr Cassandra Rauert, an environmental chemist at the University of Queensland in Australia. “I do think it is a problem in the entire field,” Rauert told the Guardian. “I think a lot of the concentrations [of MNPs] that are being reported are completely unrealistic.” “This isn’t a dig at [other scientists],” she added. “They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything better available to us. But a lot of studies that we’ve seen coming out use the technique without really fully understanding the data that it’s giving you.” She said the failure to employ normal quality control checks was “a bit crazy”. Py-GC-MS begins by pyrolysing the sample – heating it until it vaporises. The fumes are then passed through the tubes of a gas chromatograph, which separates smaller molecules from large ones. Last, a mass spectrometer uses the weights of different molecules to identify them. The problem is that some small molecules in the fumes derived from polyethylene and PVC can also be produced from fats in human tissue. Human samples are “digested” with chemicals to remove tissue before analysis, but if some remains the result can be false positives for MNPs. Rauert’s paper lists 18 studies that did not include consideration of the risk of such false positives. Rauert also argues that studies reporting high levels of MNPs in organs are simply hard to believe: “I have not seen evidence that particles between 3 and 30 micrometres can cross into the blood stream,” she said. “From what we know about actual exposure in our everyday lives, it is not biologically plausible that that mass of plastic would actually end up in these organs.” “It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological barriers and that we are expecting inside humans,” she said. “But the current instruments we have cannot detect nano-size particles.”
Whoopsie it was all bad science rushed out the door.
To this day I still don't believe that anyone actually thought you could generate infinite chocolate via an optical illusion. That's a thing people tell themselves to feel superior
The defining feature of tumblr is not "the website where people actually think infinite chocolate is possible", it is defined by a group of people refusing to break kayfabe, another group being genuinely confused by an optical illusion (NOT the same thing as thinking infinite chocolate is possible) and a third group who is certain they are a lot smarter than the other two.
Reblogged andmaybegayer
family reunions are really awkward because there's that one uncle you have who isn't pro-choice and he's also really bad at reading the room so he's just really loud about his Opinions and he's always like
"oh they're teaching crazy things in schools these days you know" and everyone buries their face in their hands as he launches into a tirade about how he thinks products of nonempty sets can be empty, and how ω_1 and ω_2 are supposedly measurable and ω_n purportedly are singular with cofinality ω_2 for finite n > 2. And then he goes into a tirade about how the next few regular cardinals are just this completely unhinged random list of course.
and just when he's finished his rant and everyone's about to move on someone makes the mistake of thinking he can be reasoned with and they're like "well uncle Bob surely there's nuance--" and he's like "NO!! NO NUANCE!! EITHER YOU CAN FORCE A WIN OF A TWO PLAYER GAME WITH COUNTABLY MANY POSSIBLE POSITIONS, OR YOUR OPPONENT CAN." and everyone buries their heads in their hands.
Reblogged blessphemy
What I really want is that it is a *hidden* room with a cool secret entrance
Reblogged vassraptor
there’s definitely a gulf between someone who knows how to play chess and someone who plays chess, but it’s nothing compared to scrabble
specifically, “uwu” is being added to the international english scrabble dictionary, which is apparently a big deal because uuw is a terrible tile combination otherwise
(via @airlock)
Liam: "Let's see--'How hard was it to simplify Molly's coat?' That's a good question for the moment."
Travis: "It was quite the challenge, actually. We tried to save as many pieces of the coat as we could--the sleeves, the symbols on the back, the different textures and designs on the pants, the shirt, there was...there was a lot. Taliesin's an asshole, basically. He created an asshole..."
Liam: "Yeah, from...from clothing, to naming conventions, elaborate to a fault, just to be...a bit of a cock--"
Travis: "...tattoos, he also had charms on his horns in the original design, there was all sorts of shit--"
Liam: "And don't get him started talking about antique firearms..."
Travis: "That's right. And he really negotiated very hard, he tried every trick in the book to get as much of it as possible. And we said, we told him--either Molly could be in The Mighty Nein, or The Mighty Nein could just be Molly-less."
Liam: "Look at him though! So handsome."
Travis: "So good."
Liam: "Look at that puckish, puckish sexy legged man. I love how--the curl of his shoes..."
Travis: "He's definitely a main character."
Jess: "The sacrifice made to the coat saved many animators' lives, so..."
aHHH ohh I do feel sad that we had more charms in the original design but they were cut, although I understand why. ; ; Would love to see all the different alternate variations on his design--
I want someone to make a website that shows you paintings etc depicting women one after another and you have to guess the gender of the artist, so you can find out how well calibrated you are on that, because my subjective impression is that the thing people say about "you can tell this woman was/wasn't painted by a woman" is true and spookily consistent, but this is surely fraught with potential confirmation/selection bias
Here is some rudimentary AI slop with a bunch of paintings I pulled from Wikimedia.
Note: They're not super well-filtered, so some of them are more "paintings containing a woman" than "paintings of women", and there are going to be some differences in... like, the choices of painting type between men and women that aren't really assessing the intended thing. But it does exist nonetheless.
This is very cool thank you for making it!! What a world this is where I can ramble idly about something I want to exist and the universe just brings it to me...
After guessing on 50 paintings I was on 48% accuracy which definitely suggests that my initial instinct in the OP (which I'd already softened in the tags) is maybe total nonsense. I would like it if more people tried this and posted results! Presumably some art history knowledge helps you cheat at this but from my non-art-history-knowing perspective I didn't find the most obvious genre correlations to be consistent enough to be "useful".
i'm too embarrassed by my score after ~15 tries to even post it, so let's leave it at "worse than chance"
One thing that’s very fun to compare between people is the completely arbitrary rules they have for what it means for a space to be neat.
For instance, I have a very strong rule of “keep the walkways clear”—even if there’s plenty of room to walk around, say, a laundry basket at the side of the hallway, I can’t deal with constantly having to route around it. On the other hand, a lot of people have the neatness rule “squareness”—objects should be aligned with the surface they’re placed on—that I don’t meaningfully have (I have the much weaker rule “stacks must be stable”, which allows non-structural wonkiness).
Reblogged sheshallfromtimetotime
Somebody please give the WSDOT social media folks a raise.
I was catching up with a friend and told him about Worm, and he said "oh, some of my friends had to read that for a class they took"
???
I tried to clarify. "There are two webcomics called worm, are you sure it wasn't one of those?" And he said "yeah, it has superheroes right? My roommate hated it, she read it out loud to me, I remember the main character being on public transit?" I asked if she was in a sundress and he said yes.
So to be clear. There is a professor in Florida who is making their students read *the entirety* of worm for a freshman media studies class.
Reblogged centrally-unplanned
for the purposes of this question "alone" means you had exclusive access to a shower, toilet, cooktop, fridge, and bed (or whatever you sleep on) with some physical barrier between you and any other occupants of the building. living with a partner is not alone. use your judgement on edge cases- i don't want to hear "well my roommate moved out and my new roommate didn't move in for a week" as a yes
Reblogged essektheylyss
Wizards dance💃🏻
Reblogged ducktoothcollection
so i'm no huge fan of rideshare and delivery apps, but this? this post?
completely fake. the article linked above thoroughly debunks it.
Perhaps the most jarring accusation in the post, which the whistleblower cited as his main reason for quitting, was that the platform calculates a “desperation score” for its drivers based on when and how often they accept deliveries. The whistleblower wrote: “If a driver usually logs on at 10 PM and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as ‘High Desperation.’ Once they are tagged, the system then deliberately stops showing them high-paying orders. The logic is: ‘Why pay this guy $15 for a run when we know he’s desperate enough to do it for $6?’ We save the good tips for the ‘casual’ drivers to hook them in and gamify their experience, while the full-timers get grinded into dust.” .... [T]he rapid spread of the whistleblower’s post illustrated yet another maxim they taught us in J-school: A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. With AI tools at their fingertips, hoaxsters can make those lies travel even faster.