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via @123i321 you can’t just leave that in the tags
[Image descriptions in order: two tweets by Joseph Mullins @josephmulli… The first says “Today, nobody showed up to my 8.15am class.
0 students of about 40. Sitting in the empty room, I email them, trying to disguise my hurt feelings.
2 mins later, I get a reply: "Professor, we think you might be in the wrong room.” So anyway off I go to live in a hole forever.
The second says “My wife really wants me to mention that I was sleep deprived because I got up at 4am to play Dungeons and Dragons with my friends in Australia.”]
[Tags that say #Sad professor in a room alone #Students no love me? Why students no love me 😭 #All 40 in the other room #Where our beloved professor? Why he not here? He ok?!]
All I can think about is the ENERGY in the room with the students when the first one looked at their email… absolutely incredible.
(via kitsparrow)
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Our system is broken. It is cruel. It is dehumanizing, degrading, and it’s vile nature is so, so unnecessary.
We need universal healthcare today in America. We needed it 40 years ago. It’s cheaper, it’s simpler, it’s more efficient, it’s more effective and it is so, so, so much less cruel than what we have.

Additional sources/references:
Universal Healthcare Cost in America would be cheaper by trillions of dollars
The US has worse life expectancies than socialized healthcare countries
We have worse generalized healthcare results
We have the most expensive care
I can’t tell you where or how to activate to help solve this. There are politicians, groups, and activists pushing for this in so many ways. I can tell you when, though.
Now.
(via mianakenobi)
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They did it again
Needing/Getting is my favourite of their music videos, but this one is good (part of me prefers the marching band version, but there’s no denying that this whole thing is amazing).
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sometimes people try to tell me that scientists are paragons of rationality and I have to break it to them that I have yet to work in a lab that didn’t have at least one weird secret shrine in it
new guy: why is all of the equipment in this room covered in toys?
me: dONn’t touch those
new guy:
me: they need the toys to function. if they don’t all have toys they get jealous.
new guy:
new guy:
me: when something breaks just take the wizard and wave it around for a while. they seem to like that.
Science is rational, scientists are human.
In Taiwan we have a special brand of snacks named 乖乖 (literally means “well behaved” but in a casual way like when one’s compliment a child or a pet of being good) that has green package.
It has become the lucky charm in the IT industry because engineers believe it will make machine acting good (like the name of the snack) and stay in green light (like the color of the snack’s package) when a 乖乖 is put on top of a server.
It is the only food allowed in a server room and the biggest semicondoctor company in Taiwan (which is also the biggest worldwide) even commissioned the snack factory to make a customized version with blessing on the package.

This is how a server room is blessed by 乖乖. You put at least one on top of each server. It’s important that the engineers change them before the expire date because legend says the snack looses it’s power after expire date.

You’ll hear engineers swearing up and down that their server room crushed down the one time they forgot to change the snack. Or some newbie ate the forbidden snack put on top of their server and caused a disastrous crush down.
The 乖乖 religion later spread to all people who want their machine to act nice. In the lab we put 乖乖 on ultra-low freezer (you really don’t want it to drop dead along with your 2 years’ worth of sample/data), mass spectrometer etc.
When Taiwan’s about to launch the first self made satellite in 2017, the develop team even put 乖乖 around the satellite model to prey for a successful launch (it did). This shit is real.

Broke: Humans are inherently good
Broke: Humans are inherently evil
Woke: Humans are, for good or evil, inherently ridiculous
(via seananmcguire)
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Star Trek is so funny. All of starfleet is so aggressively Neutral Good. Every time they’re up against something they Always do the noble thing. Every one of these motherfuckers is so ready to jump on the grenade. It’s so cute I love them
Starfleet officers come out of the academy with 2 things: a passion for science bordering on sexual and an incomprehensible desire for self-sacrifice
I love how this is like, acknowledged in lore, too. Like, the reason Starfleet is so full of these bozos is because it’s a big non-profit where you get to Do Science and Be Noble. So only people who want to Do Science and Be Noble join up. The organization has a reputation for producing the most moralistic greater-good-loving yuppies in the galaxy. It’s a straight-up hero factory. You love to see it
I bet vulcan ships gossip about how starfleet officers can’t go a day without volunteering for a life-threatening mission before they start climbing the walls looking for enrichment
sending them on dangerous missions is actually a safety measure, otherwise they start tinkering with the warp drive, and you end up as salamanders
Or start tampering with subspace rifts and end becoming a galaxy-shattering vocal ensemble
It’s a post scarcity society! At least, for the core Federation planets.
So what happens when your healthy, happy citizens (numbered in the trillions) runs out of things to do? You can only learn so many obscure skills, study so much art & philosophy, consume so much media before boredom sets in.
Time to explore!
Send those obnoxious grown-ass “I’m bored, mom” kiddos off to Starfleet to see the galaxy!
And the really super-intense ones end up on starships.
“So how’d you get your culture so noble and driven toward general improvement of society?”
“For generations, since the advent of warp travel, we’ve let our libertarians dirt farm on whatever otherwise worthless rock they find on the frontier.”
(via seananmcguire)
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He’s got the power of LIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And stubbornness.
{Check out my comics below}
(via seananmcguire)
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surely this is a good idea that doesn’t have the capacity to end real fuckin badly
Bridges aren’t supposed to have weight restrictions on them. That is, they don’t come with weight restrictions on them when they’re new. So a bridge with a weight restriction on it is a sign that something has gone wrong and the bridge does not meet current standards.
The maximum weight that a vehicle is allowed to carry on the Interstate System per federal law is 80,000 pounds gross vehicle weight (with a max of 20,000 pounds per axle). That’s 40 tons. That limit applies to every inch of pavement, not just the bridges. Since this is a known cap, a new Interstate bridge will be designed to accommodate an 80,000 lb GVW load on it. You could say the bridge’s weight limit is 80,000 lb/40 tons but that doesn’t really have much meaning, because a load higher than that would be illegal to transport on public roads anyway, and the road leading up to the bridge has the same weight restriction. (In practice, the bridge doubtlessly will be designed to have a little bit of let to it just in case some idiot tries to squeak by a few hundred extra pounds.)
Now, note that that law applies to the Interstate System only, because the federal government only has a governing interest in the Interstate System (and other roads that together make up something called the National Highway System) because they partially fund it. Most long-distance roads are owned and funded by the states. The states could theoretically set lower standard weight limits and/or design bridges with lower weight limits…but in practice they don’t.
One, because all of that 80,000 lb GVW traffic on the Interstate system has to go somewhere when it exits the system.
Two, because a group called the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO, who are best known for picking the road numbers) maintains a catalog of standard components for making bridges that meet Interstate System requirements. Engineers are expensive on a per-hour basis, so if you can direct your engineer to use standard components and make a standard bridge, that’s a lot cheaper than having them design a bridge from scratch to go over the creek in Nowheresville. As a result, most new bridges meet Interstate standards and have an 80,000 lb GVW rating even if they aren’t on the Interstate system. (This is also why all new bridges kind of look the same, but we’re not worried about how boring the bridges are for the sake of this post.)
So a bridge only has an explicit weight limit if it has been damaged in some way (through failure to properly maintain it usually) or because it predates the application of Interstate System standards and the standard AASHTO bridges.
Older bridges often have other problems in addition to the weight limits: many older designs are what we call “fracture critical”, which means that if one component of the bridge fails the whole thing collapses. Modern bridge designs have redundancy designed into them so that if one beam fails the other beams will carry the load until the damaged beam can be replaced. Older bridges also often don’t meet other standards, like height (16 ft clearance) and width (12 ft per lane plus 14 ft for shoulders) requirements.
Biden isn’t advocating eliminating weight limits and letting it be a laissez-faire free-for-all where trucks can just go wherever they want. He’s advocating for replacing bridges that carry weight limits with new ones that don’t have them.
wow i got absolutely schooled thank you for all this this is really informative. i have learned so much
This is a great explanation of what the fuck Biden was talking about in his tweet. because I will freely admit that I also went “…….wtf?????” when I read it. So thank you.
Today I learned about civil engineering.
(via seananmcguire)
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(x) and a bit more detail:
A whooooooole lot of evangelical places should get shut down
For those who don’t know what this means (like I didn’t), a church is a 501c3 organization: a tax exempt entity. In order for it to stay that way they may not get involved in legislature- including endorsing a political candidate. So if you witness someone doing this, you can report them to the IRS using form 13909. (If you’re in the US)
(via seananmcguire)
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punished-lincolnshire-poacher:
this is one of christians’ favorite things to ignore. quite possibly their all-time favorite thing to ignore.
(via ekjohnston)












