Nice, I love a good battle jacket

A few years ago, I read about how Mary Molony was an Irish Suffragette who disrupted a speech Winston Churchill was giving in Dundee by ringing a bell every time he tried to speak. She wanted him to apologise for remarks he had made about the women’s suffrage movement.

I remember when I read this, it reeked of something awesome that you find online that’s actually false (the story was shared on social media via a captioned photo with no sources), so I went digging for a proper source to check. I found some newspaper articles from 1908 and I learned that this event did happen, but also that people fucking hated Molony for this. There was a lot of “see, this is why everyone hates the Suffragettes”. (Sorry for saying this and then not sourcing)

It makes sense that people would be salty - Churchill was an asshole, but also a great orator, so I can see why one might be disappointed in missing the chance to see him speak, but I was shocked at the level of vitriol aimed at Molony and other Suffragettes from the time. Until this I hadn’t realised just how unpopular they were at the time. It’s drastically changed my perspective on protests and public perception.

I love the word “Epochalypse”, from the wiki page you linked

I think you’ve excellently captured the difference here. I didn’t get heavily into Elite Dangerous, but on one of my longest journeys, I scanned a few things that no-one had ever scanned before. I didn’t discover any awesome looking space phenomena that would be worth sharing (at least, none that hadn’t been discovered before), but the prospect that I could was exciting.

Even just the idea that my name would be on other people’s screens if they came and scanned the same things I did, because we were all sharing the same world.

I don’t generally like AI generated images, but this is great

Yay, learning!

I think I would probably be a jerk a few times, and it would escalate until I hurt someone unthinkingly, and seeing the results of that would shock me back to reality and I’d feel so uncomfortable with myself that I’d hopefully go back to being less of a jerk.

To be fair, in many cases, the observable behaviour of things is different at scale. A single water molecule has different properties to a cup of water, in much the same way that a high density crowd of people (greater than 4 people per square meter) starts to behave as a fluid.

I study biochemistry and I’ll never stop finding it neat how when you get down to the teensy tiny level, all the rules change. That’s basically what quantum physics is, a different ruleset which is always “true”, so to speak, but it’s only relevant when you’re at the nano scale

I suppose what I’m saying is that I agree with you, that fathoming scope is difficult, but I’m suggesting that this is a property of the world inherently getting being a bit fucky at different scales, rather than a problem with human perception.

Badly. I have an awful short term memory, so my priority when making notes is capturing fleeting thoughts I’d otherwise lose. This means I end up with snippets on random pieces of paper or a random note on whatever is the default app on my phone. Then, every so often, I have a big clear out where I aggregate and process all these fragments, usually when I am finding fragments everywhere.

I need to have an inbox of sorts, and make processing things from there a more routine activity. Alas.

My domain is more bioinformatics than GIS, but the way I imagined it was that if one was arguing that [thing] data is better, they’re arguing that if more people recognised the innate benefits of [thing], we wouldn’t have to rely on software that uses [other thing] so much, and that to properly utilise [thing], it would take a bit of radical reworking of workflows, but there would be significant long term net benefit.

Basically, I think arguments like this tend to be more grounded in the socio-cultural practices of a research field than the absolute technical merits of an approach. Like in my domain, a DNA sequence is just a long sequence of 4 different letters (A, T, G & C), but there’s a bunch of ways we can encode that data into a file, many of which have trade-offs (and some of which are just an artifact of how things used to be done)

Ea-Nasir has got to be one of my favourite internet phenomena

Explainer link for people who are blessed enough to be hearing of this for the first time: https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/who-is-ea-nasir-and-why-are-people-complaining-about-his-copper-the-viral-complaint-tablet-meme-explained

Not the person you were asking, but I can provide an answer. Pansexual generally means attraction to people regardless of gender - sort of gender blind. A bi person (like me) might find that the attraction they experience to different genders is shaped differently, qualitatively — or the magnitude of attraction may be different — like if you were a 1 on the Kinsey scale, which means “predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual”. Someone who’s pan is more likely to be a 3 on the Kinsey scale, but also, it’s possible to be bi and a 3, and that’s subtly different.

There aren’t set rules on this, it mostly comes down to what terms resonate with people. I’m someone to whom pansexual as a label could apply, but I identify as bisexual because that was the word that made me go “wait, this is a thing that’s possible?”. The terms people use are often rooted in history, personal or otherwise.

It’s trickier to explain the lexical niche when I myself am not pan. It’s like if you’re working on a project and have someone passing you tools, and you reach a step that needs a particular spanner, of which you have two. You ask for one of those spanners, but despite it fitting many of your requirements on paper, it isn’t quite right for what you’re trying to do. You try the other spanner and it’s perfect. Keeping both spanners is probably useful because on simple jobs, they are interchangeable, but when getting into nuanced, complex situations, having the choice is useful.

By this, I mean that I have also had the thought that “[Pansexual] seemed a meaningless term because bi already covers basically everything”, but when you’re talking to someone about different spanners and they say “that one isn’t the same as that one. I need the other one”, it’s generally wisest to assume that this person has some insight that you don’t have on these spanners, or their particular use cases — who am I to tell people what tools are most useful for them, after all? Like a lot of identity stuff, it’s hard to explain, but it matters a lot to some people.

God, I love the internet.

There’s not a shortage in stores, to my knowledge, but I directly know a large number of people struggling to make ends meet. Multiple people being made homeless due to gas and electric bills, or building their life schedules around opportunities to get a free or cheap meal because even people with jobs are feeling the pinch.

So mostly what many others elsewhere in the world are experiencing, it just feels extra grim because much of the problems can be directly attributed to the Tory government who are currently in power. They’re almost certainly going to be voted out next year, but I wonder whether it’ll be possible to repair the damage that’s been done since 2010.

Oof. A friend of a friend who was studying in Israel cried when Netanyahu was elected and I feel like I increasingly understand why

Finally, something that isn’t vetoed

Your instinct is right, because it does take a little bit of time to be familiar enough that it’s automatic, but it doesn’t need to be a big daunting thing - I first dabbled with Linux running in a virtual box. Then I dual booted for a while. Now I’m running just Linux. Dipping your toe in the water is good

I think the term is as much a comment on maturity as it is literal age.