Back in the Bad Old Days of printing, if you wanted to print a book, you had to pull out all the tiny little type letters and set them by hand for each page in the book. And if you didn’t have millions of pieces of type, you had to break up each page once you’d printed it (for however many times your initial print run was) so that you could reuse them in the subsequent pages.
But what if you wanted to, say…be able to print the book again at some point in the future? Well, you’d either have to put the whole thing back together again by hand (very expensive), or you’d have to create a plaster mold of the page that could be cast in metal and printed as a single immovable unit. This was also expensive but not as expensive as having your book typeset again.
The onomatopoetic sound of casting this plate was the French “cliché”: the hissing sound when the lead hit the mold.
So how did it come to have its modern meaning? Well, people joked that with certain set phrases like “better the devil you know”, you might as well cast them as a cliché so that instead of having to put the letters together one at a time, you just grab the “better the devil you know” plate out of your drawer. (Note that, in most cases, this would not actually work.)
The really funny part? The alternative, more formal name for a “cliché” plate was: a stereotype. It got its modern meaning through the idea of an “image perpetuated without change”. Thus we get the idea of a “greedy Jew” or “lazy Mexican” (thank you Engels), as if they were standard plates you could pull out of a drawer somewhere and put in place of the real people, instead of forming your judgments individually by putting letters together one at a time.
i don’t understand why people don’t instantly respond to “what would your dream superpower be” with the ability to manipulate probability. think about it. what’s the chance someone will drop 1mil in front of me? 0%? let’s make that 100%. what’s the probability i’ll wake up tomorrow and be X gender? 100%. what’s the probability my bathtub is filled with mac and cheese? 100%.
as a casino employee I can confirm this would be terrifying as fuck
I still like teleport, no error, whether I’ve ever been there or not.
The superpower of
probability
is terrifying for other reasons.
what’s the probability my bathtub is filled with mac and cheese? 100%.
Consider all the unlikely things that must occur in just the proper sequence for this to happen. It’s not just wishing 50 gallons of mac & cheese into existence – that’d be a different superpower.
No, we’re talking about some serious reality bending here.
Like maybe: an 18-wheeler hauling a load of instant Kraft macaroni & cheese collides with a tanker truck filled with water outside your home. Both vehicles erupt into flame, which cooks the combined noodles & cheese mixture within a small non-nuclear mushroom cloud of an explosion.
The cooked mixture of mac & cheese (and burning fuel!) rises into the air on thermals a hundred feet above your house, exactly above your bathroom.
At just the right moment, as the starchy cloud of cheesy noodles reaches the apex of its hideous arc, a freak storm causes a lightning bolt to crash down out of the blue, blasting a hole in your roof above the bathtub.
Shingles and plywood explode away from the roof and are diverted to the side by sudden 50 mph crosswinds… which, because of freak weather conditions, are perfectly timed to whisk away the roof debris but stop just as suddenly before the descending cloud of mac & cheese can be blown aside.
Four seconds later there is a moist mighty THLUPPPPnoise as ~50 gallons of half-cooked, badly mixed mac & cheese & diesel fuel land in a soggy mess within your bathtub.
Ding! Your bathtub full of mac & cheese? Probability 100%.
Also: two dead truck drivers, untold collateral damage from the explosion, a wrecked roof, dangerous storms trashing the neighborhood, and a disgusting inedible mess in your bathroom.
Oh wait, you wanted it perfectly cooked, ready to eat? Too bad… you didn’t specify that. And if you had, imagine the FURTHER ridiculous unlikely events required to make that happen.
Because you’re not just wishing shit into existence. You’re shifting realities.
Which, if you’re selecting for a very improbable circumstance means moving a LOT of existing reality out of the way – which takes energy. Because reality has inertia & momentum just like a river does, and does not want to be diverted.
This might be the most terrifying super power ever, just from its side effects.
people don’t instantly respond with this, or anything else that’s isomorphic to complete omnipotence, because it’s prototypically op & no fun
malachite is a poisonous mineral. please do not fuck the malachite stalactite
@lizaleigh do you know any rock people that can confirm/deny because I am very curious and really don’t feel like getting into a conversation with my geophysicist brother that MAY somehow get back to the fact I saw a malachite that looked like a weird dildo.
…sadly, I am not on good enough terms with any of our partner geologists to just attach this to an email with the subject line: “EXPLAIN.”
Although I think @mollisaurus is a mineral person. Thoughts?
oh geeze, i’m kinda rusty on minerals but malachite is just copper carbonate and is really common in both antique and modern jewelry so i think like if you were really gun-ho about it you could go ahead and put it wherever you want?
It’s really only a problem if you’re polishing or cutting it. The particles would be bad to breathe. It’s rather porous too, so I would worry about bacteria growing. Well, being literal anyway… Better to leave the poor thing alone. ._.
I mean it kinda depends on where you stick it because malachite does not like acidic environments very much and the malachite will degrade and also might dye your bits blue-green as the copper dissolves out.
So use a condom when fucking rocks is the takeaway here.
Oh my god guys it’s poisonous
It is super poisonous
There is a reason we do not use it in make up any more
Not even with a condom, do not fuck the rock
Try this one instead.
malachite literally explodes in water does it not?
I… no… I think you’re thinking of pure sodium?
Malachite is however water soluble, which really just means it will poison you quicker
This is both hilarious and cool as fuck because you’re getting all this information on minerals and rocks. You’re also watching people argue over wether or not you can fuck this rock
I go on hiatus for a week and come back to find tumblr molesting my post, but hey, at least we all learned something so yay tumblr, you just keep on being you.
I’m still not sure if I can fuck this rock.
I’m looking into it.
UPDATE:
Today in “I’m so sorry, coworkers, it’s for Tumblr,” I brought this post to the attention the science reporters at BuzzFeed. Dan Vergano did a some research and weighed in on the question “Can you use malachite as a dildo or is it toxic?”
The answer is “It’s probably fine, just wash it first and maybe use a bunch of lube.”
Oh man this got so much better than the last time I saw this post
This is my favourite. Science side of tumblr: asking the REAL questions
*biologist crashes through the underbrush*
Ok so here’s the thing though
Malachite is not poisonous to YOU. BUT fucking this stalactite will probably wreck your vaginal flora and leave you with a gruesome infection within a couple days.
Want details? SO GLAD YOU ASKED, ‘CAUSE HERE THEY ARE.
• Malachite is not copper oxide. It’s Cu2CO3(OH)2. Like most carbonates it’s water soluble– that’s how it became a stalactite in the first place! And technically any given chunk of “malachite” isn’t just malachite– it’s a mix of various copper carbonates & oxides. This will become important later.
• When malachite dissolves it makes a bunch of copper (Cu++) ions. Cu++ is GREAT at killing bacteria and fungi– so good at it that sprays with Cu++ get used a lot as a spray in agriculture to stop plant disease. It takes such a large dose to harm larger organisms that copper sprays are used a lot in organic agriculture (like Bordeaux mixture).
So bottom line, yes malachite is technically nontoxic to humans. But it kills bacteria when it dissolves and releases Cu++.
• Malachite dissolves somewhat slowly in water– but vaginal secretions aren’t just any water. A healthy human vagina has a pH of 3.8-4.5 and a salinity of about 0.9%. It’s also warmer than your average underground cave at 37°C (or 98.5°F in American meat units). As luck would have it, acidity, salinity, and warmth all make malachite dissolve faster.
• In other words, the human vagina dissolves malachite.
• I have no deeper explanation for why human females can dissolve rocks with our genitals. It simply is.
• Gonna to take a quick moment to point out that sex toys that dissolve when you use them are maybe not the best investment.
• Anyway the key question now is “how fast does the human vagina dissolve malachite?” Are we talking geological timescale, a Nazis-in-Indiana-Jones situation, or something in between? If the reaction kinetics of dissolution are very slow, then there’s nothing to worry about. An encounter with a stalactite would have to last years for enough Cu++ to leach out to cause problems. If it’s quick then we’re in trouble.
• Unfortunately it looks like nobody really knows. One of the best sources on how malachite dissolves & precipitates in water– an EPA document on how to avoid too much Cu++ in municipal drinking water systems– helpfully says “The kinetic constraints on the formation of these solids in water systems are largely unexplored” (p. 42) because end equilibrium points is all you need to run a city water system safely. In other words, the experiments that would tell us how fast malachite dissolves in various types of water just don’t exist because nobody’s ever needed to know before. So we’d better assume it’s going to happen reasonably quickly, #for safety.
• So in best scientific fashion, we’re just going to bullshit our way ahead using what facts we DO have on hand: endpoint equlibria.
That orange box is how many moles of dissolved Cu++ Scaife got from sticking malachite in some water that had 0.171 moles NaCl/L (body salinity is about 0.154 moles NaCl/L so this is slightly less salty than people) at 30°C. He’s got no acidity in there, and again the salinity and temperature are slightly lower than people. But this is probably the closest we’re going to get to data on how malachite behaves in vaginas anytime soon, folks. From this we can take away that if you leave malachite alone in a vagina you’ll get AT LEAST 9.12 x 10^-4 moles/L, or 5.8 ppm, of Cu++ at equilibrium.
• Recall from above that most “malachite” isn’t actually pure malachite, it’s a mix of various copper carbonates & oxides. The EPA document elaborates: “[T]raditional ‘eyeball’ identification of malachite by its blue-green color is extremely
unreliable, because almost all cupric hydroxysulfates, hydroxycarbonates, hydroxychlorides,
and even fresh cupric hydroxide can be some shade of blue-green. … Thus, the uncertainty in the computed copper
concentration in equilibrium with malachite is at least about a factor of 2 … until further experimental data focusing on this problem is generated.”
In other words, “do your math and then double how much Cu++ you think is going to be in the water, just in case.” So that gives us 11.6ppm Cu++, at equilibrium, with malachite in a (til now!) healthy vagina.
• Next step: do we have any idea what happens to bacteria in acid conditions with copper? OH MY GOD WE TOTALLY DO. Gyawali et al 2011 checked this out in the context of “so what if we rinsed tomatoes with a solution of lactic acid and copper, because that would be a safe & organic way to get rid of E. coli?” So now this post has officially ruined stalactites, vaginas, and tomatoes.
^This would happen. These are the counts of 4 E. coli strains exposed to various levels of lactic acid & Cu++ for 8 hours. This table only shows the end counts but it represents the death of 99.7% of bacteria*.
• Losing 99.7% of your vaginal flora is seriously bad news. You’re looking at really good odds of a yeast infection, bacterial vaginosis, and/or other infection issues. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to not be in the 4% of the population or so that’s sensitive to skin contact with copper.
• The good news? Biochemically speaking, you’re probably ok to put it in your butt. It’s not as acidic or salty in there, plus there’s a huuuuuge stockpile of gut microbes right upstream that can quickly repopulate the colon after spelunking is complete. However this stalactite is not flared at the base so it is the wrong shape for putting in your butt. Do not put this stalactite in your butt.
• This all looks like fun and games, but I think it’s really interesting that the internet’s mistake in concluding that this stalactite is fuckable is very similar to the mistake made by the Flint water management system. Hear me out.
• Central to the Flint lead poisoning crisis is that authorities only looked at & tested Flint’s water in its central treatment plant before it went out through the pipes. Not after it went through the pipes. They did not consider what would happen biochemically as it went through the pipes and metals started dissolving.
• Similarly, in concluding that the stalactite is fuckable, the internet only considered the stalactite itself. Not the biochemical processes that would happen to it as it, welp, went through the pipes.
• Media frequently reports that the Flint River’s water is “corrosive,” leading many to believe the river is full of industrial waste. This ain’t the case. You’d need industry to fill a river with industrial waste, and industry left decades ago. That’s why Flint’s so poor. So what IS in the water? Road salt. Plain old stupid road salt. The old Detroit-based source didn’t have salt because it came from Lake Huron which has a large, mostly rural watershed. Meanwhile the Flint River runs through a lot of towns, making it slightly salty as everything melts down in spring. And as we recall from the stalactite experience, a little salt is all it takes to get metals to dissolve.
• Information on this engineering problem was not coming through clearly from the engineering or chemistry sides. It took a biologist, pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha, to document the real-time results and provide the data to kick-start a high-level investigation.
• Morals of the story: when dealing with a biological system pls consider asking a biologist, your vagina and/or city could depend on this
• Pls use a condom when fucking any water-soluble material
• Still don’t put the stalactite in your butt -3/10 do not recommend
Epic, scientific, a visit by Buzzfeed, this post has it all.
According to the last survey, 38% of rationalists identified as social democrats when choosing between that, liberal, libertarian, conservative and communist. When given more options, only 10-15% did (i don’t recall the exact number and checking while on my phone is inconvenient)
None of the questions asked about centrism, which is probably even more sensitive to number of options, so no comment on that.
that’s relative to whatever libertarian wrote these questions:
“more social democratic than a bay area technolibertarian” is not a tremendously high bar
more to the point: the rationalist subculture takes the assumptions of right-wing libertarianism as neutrality. e.g. on lesswrong neoreaction is within the overton window of things to discuss seriously, in a way that feminism and socialism simply aren’t. this bears no resemblance to a neutral starting position.
Also from the last survey
percent of people who identified as neoreactionary: 1.8%
percent of people identifying as socialist: 8.3%
percent of people who say they have a favourable or very favourable opinion of feminism: 61.2%
There was no ‘are you a feminist?’ question, so I’m using favourable opinion as a proxy. Imperfect, I know, but I think it makes my point.
Our overton window does not look like you say it does.
Every group that likes feminism also likes spending hours and hours arguing over it and what is really constructive feminism and so on. This is what defines the project. It’s founded on literary criticism. Eventually that has to translate into action but dissing a group as not feminist because they like to spend hours and hours tearing apart the doctrine and picking over the rubble would wind up disqualifying, uh, most of feminism pre-pop-culture-adoption, and honestly is still a fair amount if not a majority of it now.
Don’t listen to counterrevolutionaries who wish to stop discussion of the merits and particulars of feminism because they believe feminism is a “settled question.” All hail the Perpetual Revolution! May our discourse turn a thousand dynamos.
Actually the data quite obviously states its case in a not-really-ambigous way:
25% are libertarians
5% are conservatives
30% are “roughly as left as Dems/Labor”
40% are to the left of the two biggest “leftist” parties of the Anglosphere
Or for a more thorough breakdown: (rep/lib/dem party split %)
Roughly centrist:
65 moderates (9/0/19)
129 other (5/2/21)
129 pragmatists (4/2/17)
=
323 total
Generally rightist:
37 conservatives (43/0/4)
5 fascists (0/0/40)
30 futarchists (13/4/29)
5 monarchists (0/0/50)
28 neoreactionaries (7/11/4)
2 totalitarians (0/0/50)
189 libertarians (12/5/4)
10 objectivists (25/0/13)
=
107 non-libertarians
199 libertarians
=
306 total
Generally leftist:
50 anarchists (0/4/11)
13 communists (0/0/18)
244 left-libertarians (4/2/31)
215 progressives (1/1/40)
237 social democrats (0/0/34)
126 socialists (0/0/39)
=
641 other leftists
244 left-libertarians
=
885 total
Or in other words:
629 non-leftists
641 the kind of leftists who definitely do support higher taxes and minimum wages
and the median person is a left-libertarian (which I’m bundling a bit separately from the rest of the left only to pre-empt accusations that not being totally on board with higher taxes and minimum wage laws invalidates their leftism)
Or for a different formulation:
40 far-right (~3%)
67 right (~4%)
199 right-libertarians (~14%)
323 various centrists (~21%)
244 left-libertarians (~17%)
528 left (~36%)
63 far left (~4%)
Or consider that self-identified socialists alone outnumber the entire non-libertarian right, while the libertarian right in turn is outnumbered by both progressives and social democrats (who seem to be indistinguishable from socialists by eyeballing their survey answers; the natural objection would be that the survey is better at distinguishing right from far right but the resolution on the left side of the spectrum is lacking)
Or if we look at US parties, there are maybe 60 republicans, 30 libertarians, and 350 democrats. Yes, I know, “dems not really left blahblahblah”, but the other parties are utterly insignificant, constituting only ~20% of the voters. Do you think that a community which votes 13% rep, 6% lib, and 80% dem would not contain a significant amount of ~actual leftists~ too, for whatever value of “actual” you wish to use, and if so, please explain your logic.
Or we could look at specific policies, on which the consensus is basically: “more left than the mainstream, or way more left than the mainstream?”
The only way one can make this look like “leftism is marginalized” is by defining the left very strictly (sure, you can squeeze them down to ~12% at which point they only strictly outnumber the statist right) and the right very very loosely in a way which makes the distinction mostly meaningless for anything other than revolutionary purity testing. Sure, you can argue that $15 an hour and a basic income on top of that and high progressive taxation is basically rightist scum only one step away from Mossack Fonseca, but at that point I’m going to call bullshit and say your categories are bad and you should feel bad. Feminism is basically a background assumption the exceptions from which are noteworthy, and so is “being way less shitty to the poor than any current state is”.
So no matter how one looks at the data, the only explanation that makes sense is that the diaspora fails on some ridiculous criterion of ideological orthodoxy and is thus concluded to be basically Mossack Fonseca despite all the evidence to the contrary.
reality tv show where teenage anti-communists are forced to work in food service for a month
Whenever people talk about some facet of non-communist life, my first instinct is to wonder what the equivalent would be in the soviet union. In this case, I wonder what food service jobs in the soviet union were like.
it seems that the Soviet Union was automating some of them before automation of that sort of thing was cool.
As a teenage anti-communist, forced labor is coercive and wrong and if I have my way your TV show is going to have a counterrevolution and subsequently a lawsuit on its hands.
You go Ilzo! Unite those anti-communist teenagers who are being forced to do work they feel alienated from solely for the benefit of the singular employer, into a revolution against that employer! Yeah!
This is a brilliant distillation of the inherent paradox of statist communism. Any coercive system necessitates its own downfall, no matter how much it may have been a reaction to the previous coercive system, and thus the only true solution is to abolish coercion instead of simply painting it red and pretending it goes faster now.
…now would you have a moment to hear about our not!lord and not!savior anarchism?
Hold on to your horses, people, I’m gonna bring back an age-old meme for this one:
At New York’s Kennedy airport this week, an individual, later discovered to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide rule and a calculator.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said he believes the man is a member of the notorious al-Gebra movement. He is being charged with carrying weapons of math instruction.
“Al-Gebra is a very fearsome cult, indeed,” Ashcroft said. “Its members desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on a tangent in a search of absolute value. They consist of quite shadowy figures, with names like “x” and “y”, and, although they are frequently referred to as unknowns, we know they really belong to a common denominator and are part of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. As the great Greek philandererIsosceles used to say, there are three sides to every triangle.“
When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush declared, "If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes.”
A member of the Presidential group, who spoke without attribution said, “I’m extremely grateful that our government has given us a sine that it is intent on protracting us from these math-dogs who are so willing to disintegrate us with calculus disregard. These statistic bastards love to inflict plane on every sphere of influence. Under the circumferences, it’s time we differentiated their root, made our point, and drew the line.”
President Bush, under questioning, said, “These weapons of math instruction have the potential to decimal everything in their math on a scale never before seen unless we become exponents of a Higher Power and begin to factor-! in random facts of vertex.”
Attorney General Ashcroft added, “As our Great Leader would say, read my ellipse. Here is one principle he is certain of – though they continue to multiply, their days are numbered and the hypotenuse will tighten around their necks.”
(From, well, EVERYWHERE during the Bush Administration, but I copied this from here.)
Basically:
REPENT SINNERS! PARODY IS DEAD! THE OLD MEMES WALK THE EARTH!
Tag yrself, I’m Every Breath a Black Trans Woman Takes.
Are you sure you aren’t
In his latest book, An Entrepreneur’s Manifesto,
the author posits that to sell a product or service to another is a
revolutionary act, “an act that has the power to transform lives,
rebuild families, and forever change communities.”
It certainly feels quite embarrassing to admit that in a certain sense I do kind of agree with that person because it’s politically correct to reject anything that can be pattern-matched into “just pull yourselves up by your bootstraps” but the thing is that I do think poor communities would benefit from their members having better access to ways of making a living for themselves and each other, independently of big faceless minimum-wage corporate monsters; and that while removing state barriers to it (Eric Garner was excactly that kind of a small entrepreneur and look where it got him) is crucial for properly achieving such change, the culture itself could also use some changing to rekindle all the dreams it’s taken a lifetime to destroy. Author seems kind of a “structural issues what structural issues, parents of Flint children can fight lead poisoning by eating a diet which minimizes absorption and should see a holistic doctor to remind them that electromagnetic waves are harmful too [sic]” (uncharitable description omitted) but there is a certain dignity in being less dependent on outsiders and a lot of troubled youth probably have ADHD which can often be constructively channeled into an entrepreneurial attitude in an environment where such a thing is possible and people’s future prospects aren’t systematically ground down.
TL;DR: in my utopia most people would be basically entrepreneurs (or at least a lot closer to it than the standard-issue interchangeable munitions-grade wage workers our current system produces), buying and selling whatever their comparative advantage is (and if the answer to that is “insignificant”, nonetheless enjoying the abundance of a low-scarcity society where people who are unable to make a dignified living for themselves can still trivially access what they need), so I can’t exactly complain if someone is saying things that constitute a part of it even if they seem to be Problematic.
