The opposition (Labour) isn’t much better, especially when it comes to equalities. I am not looking forward to this Thursday, and having to think a lot about how grim it all is.

“gluteal clefts”.

I don’t know why I find that so funny.

Yeah, stuff like this is messy. I like that we’re all muddling along and figuring things out as they go. Much of this is a problem with distributed social media — but not “problem” in a bad way, but something to overcome.

Practically, I don’t know if there’s a better way to do it, because as you say, there’s not a one size fits all solution. I just wanted to say thanks because I probably wouldn’t have read the article myself if I had to get a no-paywall link myself, so the little conveniences help.

Which they would know, if they had read the article, right?

Edit: I shouldn’t comment just to express salt at someone, so actually also, thanks OP for the no-paywall link.

I like this comparison because it makes me think of a company that is administering a medical trial type program to improve cardiovascular health — I’m imagining a “farm” type place, where undergrads are on treadmills, taking new, expensive running shoes and running in them until they’re “well-worn”. It’s very silly, and I thank you for this mental image.

Fracking already is unprofitable now, if we account for the slimy corporate practices used to avoid paying for spent wells to be properly plugged.

Propublica has done a lot of good reporting on this topic, this is just one article of many, but this one explains aforementioned corporate slime quite well https://www.propublica.org/article/the-rising-cost-of-the-oil-industrys-slow-death

I didn’t know that. Thanks for sharing.

It’s sad that I can’t look at a beautiful photo of a UK river without wondering how much sewage has been discharged there.

In 2023, the sewer right near where this photo was taken spilled for a total of 299.25 hours, which is quite low compared to many other locations.

I worry about the long term state of UK rivers.

If anyone from the UK reads this, https://theriverstrust.org/sewage-map has info on how people can help

Now you’re older, how frequently do you think you were right in your comparisons?

Now I’m thinking about an ex-programmer supervillain who does this as her big foray into supervillainy

Thanks for this comment, I hadn’t thought about it this way before. I had realised about how being gay is framed as a thing you do rather than a thing you are, because I have a friend who is an ex-benedictine monk, and they explained about how their vow of chastity meant they were basically “one of the good ones”. A large part of why they left was because their rhetoric was “everyone has sinful desires in them and turning away from those is an important challenge”, but the unspoken part was that his gayness made his desires extra bad, like there was just some innately bad thing in him.

And of course they would apply this same logic to gender. As you say, it makes more sense when you try to see it from their angle. I think that’s important to do if we hope to ever refute them

A few posts above this one, I saw a post about how German bridges are falling apart, so your comment has done me psychic damage. Man, things feel grim.

Oh damn, I just lost the game too, and now I’m thinking about the game as if it were a virus - like, I reckon we really managed to flatten the curve for a few years there, but it continues to circulate so we haven’t been able to eradicate it

I saw some previous news coverage of the Devs saying they’d rather players pirate it than have it spoiled for them, and I went in blind and bought it full price. I don’t generally play this kind of game but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Finland is very good for people who hate smalltalk.

I love stories like this because it makes me reflect on random people I’ve seen who have stuck in my memory for years who probably never noticed me. Makes me wonder if anyone remembers me for something random like this

Social constructivism applied to science argues that an objective, observer-independent reality doesn’t exist, (or that if it does, it’s not accessible by humans, which is functionally the same thing). Under that framework, then whenever we talk about gravity, we’re not talking about some objective truth, but our attempts to model what we perceive as an objective truth. Hell, the only way we’re able to have this conversation at all is because I wrote “gravity is a social construct” and you understood what I was referencing enough to disagree.

What is your understanding of a social construct? I wanna make sure we’re on the same page about definitions

I shouldn’t have left my previous statement without any elaboration — that was a pretty inflammatory comment to make and I apologise.

When I say “gravity is a social construct”, part of what I’m getting at is that the natural world is distinct from scientific knowledge we create when attempting to model the natural world, and that our scientific knowledge is, by necessity, socially mediated.

I like gravity as an example of this because of how fundamental it is: even animals have some level of intuitive understanding of gravity — they don’t need to understand what parabolic motion is to be able to demonstrate it when they jump over things.

But also, our understanding of gravity has vastly changed over the years. In the 1800s, astronomers had measured Mercury’s orbit so precisely that they found it to be inconsistent with what Newton’s Law of Universal Gravity would predict, so they figured there had to be another planet closer to the Sun. Turns out there wasn’t though, and it was only after Einstein’s theory of relativity that Mercury’s weird orbit could be explained.

They had good reason to guess that another planet was responsible for Mercury’s orbit though, because the same guy who made that guess (a French astronomer, Urbain le Verrier) had actually predicted the existence of Neptune just a few years earlier; he had used Newtonian gravity to analyse the orbit of Uranus and found that it was slightly off from what observers had been measuring, and deduced that there must be another planet that nobody had seen yet that was causing these perturbations.

These two examples show two different ways that we can respond to experimental observations not matching with our theoretical understanding: sometimes it’s productive to assume our current theory is correct and that our observations are wrong or insufficient in some way, and sometimes we fix the disparity between what we see and what we know by amending our theories, like we did when we learned the limits of Newtonian gravity. Choosing which hypothesis to investigate is how science (and scientific knowledge) is socially constructed.

Disclaimer: I’m a biochemist, not an astrophysicist, so talking about gravity isn’t my primary domain. Many of these ideas are articulated far better in this video essay by Dr Fatima (and I suspect some of my phrasing is subconsciously borrowed from this video — this is bad citation practice on my part)

They were never going to let this man be Prime Minister