airalos

jenniferrpovey:

Gonna talk about those MRNA vaccines real quick.

So, many of us (possibly not all, because other vaccines in the pipeline) are going to be getting either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.

What vaccine you end up getting is likely to depend on your age, health, and where you live. Pfizer’s vaccine is harder to store and transport, so if you live in a big city you’re more likely to get that one.

For what I’m going to say, though, it doesn’t make a difference.

You’re going to be getting two shots, a few weeks apart. For Moderna, it’s 28 days (4 weeks). For Pfizer, it’s 21 days (3 weeks). Yes, this sucks. No, this is not ideal for mass vaccination. You’ll get a card that will remind you to come back for the second dose. The person administering the shot, most likely a pharmacist, will also ask for your cell phone number so they can text you. Because if you don’t come back that first shot is a waste of time.

We don’t know for sure if the single shot gives any protection at all, but the reasonable assumption is that it doesn’t.

This means you need to get your ass back in there for that second shot. And while you are waiting for that shot, you are not protected.

This means you should continue to wear a mask, etc. In fact, if possible, you should be even more careful, because if you get sick and can’t come in for that second shot? They’ll most likely have to start over. The trial included longer periods between the two, so you might be fine, but there is a risk here.

And once you have had that second shot?

It’s going to take two to four weeks to build antibodies, during which time you will have lower, but increasing, protection. They’ll tell you what it is…that data hasn’t been released yet, but will be.

So you should still continue to be careful for those weeks.

Finally!

We don’t know if these vaccines provide what is called sterilizing immunity, meaning you can’t be infected and can’t pass it on.

They may only provide functional immunity, meaning you get infected but don’t get sick. You could still transmit COVID-19 to others, although the risk is lower.

Which means?

Yeah, the masks have to stay on until the case numbers and other metrics are looking good.

Please don’t be those people who get that first shot and go throw a wild party. Have a bit of patience.

(via mianakenobi)

exigencelost:

exigencelost:

I’m getting really tired of the wise serene pacifist trope in fiction. Every committed pacifist, prison abolitionist, antiwar activist, etc I’ve ever met in real life has been vibrating with compressed rage at all times. Do you know what it’s like to believe deeply in your heart that doing harm to others is wrong and the goal of society should be to alleviate suffering for all people and live in the United States of America? IT’S NOT FUN. Show Us The Pissed-Off Pacifists. 

Dude there might be a word for the emotion that is forged when someone’s deep abiding love and compassion for all people and living things welds itself into decades of built-up foaming fury at how those people been treated their whole life by those in power to create a sort of alloyed super-commitment to a set of ethical principles but i promise you “tranquility” is not that fucking word

(via songofamazon)

monticellomarshmallow:

ouyangdan:

grizzlyhills:

flightcub:

interretialia:

life-of-a-latin-student:

ratwithoutwings:

i’m so upset

I just realized that the reason ghosts say Boo! is because it’s a latin verb

they’re literally saying ‘I alarm/I am alarming/I do alarm!!

I can’t

present active boō, present infinitive boāre, perfect active boāvī, supine boātum

Recte!

if it comes from the latin word, they’re actually saying “I’M YELLING!” which is even cuter

do they speak latin because it’s a dead language

get out

This is exactly the kind of content I come here for like I want to print this out, frame it and put it on my wall.

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coolcurrybooks-deactivated20230:

charbookwyrm:

ace-aro-queerplatonic-positivity:

bostoneris:

This depends STATE BY STATE (or town by town), so check out your own state’s rules. As for everywhere, only poll workers are banned from this, and people holding up signs for candidates have to be a certain distance from the building.

[Image Description:

A Screenshot of a public Facebook-Textpost by “Sandy and Richard Riccardi”.

This word of caution is from someone who has worked the polls a lot in the past: More and more I’m seeing women announcing they will be voting with shirts, buttons, masks or hats that say “Ruth Send Me”, or something similar. [Transcriptor Annotation: the late Supremecourt Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. /End of Annotation.] Remember: political messages aren’t allowed in the polling place (that could include [Black Lives Matter] shirts, unfortunately.) Also unfortunately, messages can be interpreted by whoever is in charge. It could mean, in some cases, that a voter wearing a shirt they believe is political can be denied the right to vote after waiting in line for hours. Approach this election strategically and vote smarter and cleaner than ever have before. Understand that the other side will do what it takes to advance their agenda. We need to vote in record numbers. But we need to vote smart. We can wear that wonderful “Ruth send me” shirt or mask when we get home, and raise a glass in her memory. Please copy, or paraphrase, and share with the groups you are members of, as appropriate. Help spread the word so that every vote counts! We all know what’s at stake. Do not throw away your shot. [Transcriptor Annotation: four emojis follow the text, the Peace-Symbol, a red heart, a rooster, paw prints. /End Annotation. /End of Image Transcription.]

The number of restrictions for American votes, by the way, are insane.
In the UK, we roll up to the polling station, give your name and address, get ticked off, put a cross on  piece of paper, and leave. Job’s done.
You don’t need ID, you don’t need proof of anything (even a polling card), you don’t need to be dressed a certain way - nothing. The amount of loops you guys have to go through is ridiculous and honestly just undemocratic.

Also, if you’re a college student or someone else who’s state ID is different than the state where you’re registered to vote – use a passport as ID if you have it. Passports are a valid ID, and they aren’t tied to a state, so it’s less risky than an out-of-state ID. 

(via songofamazon)

revolutionarykoolaid:

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE (9/23/20): Breonna Taylor’s life mattered. There is no justice to be found under this neocolonial system. We must bring it to its knees.

(via mianakenobi)

lauralot89:

Because I remember disinformation being spread around the last election and I’m sure Russia will bring it back:

• YOU CAN’T VOTE ONLINE.
  
• YOU CAN’T VOTE FROM YOUR PHONE.
• IN MANY STATES THERE ARE LEGAL CONSEQUENCES FOR PHOTOGRAPHING YOUR BALLOT.
• DO NOT WEAR CAMPAIGN GEAR TO THE POLLS.
• DO NOT TRY TO PERSUADE PEOPLE TO VOTE FOR A CANDIDATE AT THE POLLS.
• DO NOT ENGAGE IN ANY KIND OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE AT THE POLLS.
• NO ELECTION IS EVER A SURE THING, EVEN IF YOU’RE IN THE BLUEST OR REDDEST OF STATES.  IF SOMEONE TRIES TO TELL YOU THAT YOU CAN SIT THIS ONE OUT, THEY ARE EITHER IGNORANT OR MALICIOUS.
• VOTE.

(via mianakenobi)

awkwardtodoroki:

Right now Washington, Oregon and California are experiencing one of the worst wildfires to date. The sky is orange and everything smells like a campfire and I’m bad at articulating but it’s really serious. Thousands have had to evacuate and lost they’re homes in the process. I don’t like talking about topical stuff on the blog v often but I’m in the midst of the evacuation zone in Oregon and shits scary. I’m afraid of losing my home and I’m afraid for my family and friends.

Idk what the point is of this post but I feel like not many people outside of the northwest know how bad it is rn cus it’s bad. The moment I find donation links I’ll link them to this post but I haven’t found any yet. And if you’re in the northwest rn, please be safe.

Edit: here’s a link to a California wildfire relief fund

And a link to an article explaining where to donate to help Oregon as well

And another article about how to help Washington

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thelovethatyouhad:

You did it! You broke 2020 down to its bare essentials!

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prismatic-bell:

bittylildragon:

liberalsarecool:

Let’s flip the Senate. Register. Donate. Vote.

I know people are being shown right now that voting does not fix everything, so some people might be feeling despair and wondering why we even bother to vote. Often the Democrats we vote in are still imperfect. But that does not make voting less important. We must still vote, and then we must HOLD THOSE DEMOCRATS ACCOUNTABLE TO THEIR CONSTITUENTS. Both political actions are important!! An crappy Democrat in office leaves much to be desired but is still miles better than a Republican, so we must ensure that Republicans do not win. 

A friendly reminder for those looking at Mark Kelly and going “he’s an old white guy, what difference does it make?”

1) McSally’s seat is a stolen one. There’s a lot of specifics here about how Arizona politics work, but suffice to say she lost the popular vote so the governor found a way to appoint her, instead. Electing Mark Kelly means the seat returns to the hands of the people, instead of somebody firmly in Doug Ducey’s pocket.

2) remember Gabby Giffords? The congresswoman who was shot by a right-wing extremist for being “too left-wing”? This is her husband. He was an astronaut. Gabby now has too many neurological difficulties to hold a seat, so he changed careers mid-course and went from NASA to politics to continue her work. This is a man who knows what hardship looks like, knows what sacrifice looks like, knows EXACTLY what the stakes are and is NOT going to give up and let his wife down.

He’s not “just another old white man.” He’s a man for whom this is INTENSELY PERSONAL.

(via mianakenobi)

bunjywunjy:

bunjywunjy:

brain-cells-for-sale:

bunjywunjy:

bunjywunjy:

nuggsmum:

crochetninja:

bunjywunjy:

bunjywunjy:

bunjywunjy:

bunjywunjy:

digitaldiscipline:

bunjywunjy:

bunjywunjy:

bunjywunjy:

bunjywunjy:

bunjywunjy:

I was walking through the toy aisle at Target when I found this thing and had a VIOLENT AND IMMEDIATE FLASHBACK to when JP first came out and they had a bunch of REALLY COOL T Rex toys that I would have sold one of my scrawny small-child limbs for but my mother wouldn’t get me one because they were “too violent and also ate people” :(

hnn I WANT IT SO BAD

on closer inspection, it makes a lot of really obnoxious noises and is also Too Expensive. BUT FEAR NOT I found this slightly smaller dude wedged in the back!

IT HAS BITE ACTION, AND THAT’S THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS

now we enter the testing phase

yup. looks good.

Extreme Chompin T-Rex says IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS

Can we take a moment to appreciate that we can use this as a rosetta stone to say “EXTREME CHOMPIN’ “ in four languages?

OH SHIT YOU’RE RIGHT, let me check the garbage to see if it’s still there! hopefully I didn’t destroy it in my excitement

*roar sound effect*

IMPORTANT UPDATE:

update update: I re-sized her collar and found a bag of toy bones at the craft store. I haven’t put this much effort into a non-school thing since my last job search, help

(secret bonus: the other side of her tag)

There’s more!

I love.

I saw that people are reblogging the thread again, so I thought I’d give you all an update on how Wexter is doing!

(just fine)

Wexter And The Case Of Her Continuing Marvelously Naughty Garden Adventures

OP and Wexter can break all my toes and I would still send a thank you card

Wexter says SHE WOULD NEVER DO SUCH A THING (but she might chew your ankles a little bit maybe)

so it’s come to my attention that at some point this weekend Wexter blew past 100,000 notes, and I for one think that’s very cash money of her.

(via mianakenobi)

itsinthefrakkingship:

swords-n-spindles:

the-fibre-stuff:

moiraecrochet:

synebluetoo:

costumersupportdept:

butts-for-days:

dollsahoy:

isnerdy:

rolypolywardrobe:

systlin:

darkersolstice:

max-vandenburg:

eldritchscholar:

So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.

Hi fun fact!!

The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:

Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.

This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer. 

But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine. 

Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:

But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!

Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,

and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.

tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.

@we-are-threadmage

Someone port Doom to a blanket

I really love tumblr for this 🙌

It goes beyond this.  Every computer out there has memory.  The kind of memory you might call RAM.  The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory.  It looked like this:

Wires going through magnets.  This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily.  Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1.  Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:

You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is.  But these are also extreme close-ups.  Here’s the scale of the individual cores:

The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers.  Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.

And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon.  This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive.  It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.

(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)

Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”

I mean let’s also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the “weaver yelling at Draw Boy” technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles “raise these and these, lower these!” and hope that he got it right. 

With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY. 

ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon. 

And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC. 

The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, I’ve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They don’t seem interested these days)

This is fascinating. I knew there was a correlation between binary and weaving but this just takes it to a whole nother level. 

I’m in Venice, Italy several times a year (lucky me!) and last year I went on a private tour of the Luigi Bevilacqua factory.

Founded in 1875, they still use their original jacquard looms to hand make velvet.

Here are the looms:

Here are the punch cards:

Some of these looms take up to 1600 spools. That is necessary to make their many different patterns. 

Here are some patterns:

How many punchcards per pattern?

 This many:

Modern computing owes its very life to textiles - And to women. From antiquity weaving has been the domain of women. Sure, we remember Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr, but while Joseph Marie Jacquard gets all the credit for his loom, the operators and designers were for the most part women.

I’ve seen this cross my dash a few times, but I’ve never watched the video before. Maybe I just didn’t pay attention when I was a kid, but I don’t remember ever seeing just how the Jacquard loom works. I just knew that the punch cards controlled which threads were raised. It’s cool to see the how, not just the what.

Don’t hide this in the tags, @drylime :D

@circuitsmaximus

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