happybadger [he/him]

“I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees”

I’m going to look for some kitschy artwork at the thrift store and make this into a “Live Laugh Love” style wall decoration.

No worries at all! I like Scott’s work a lot. Weapons of The Weak is one of the books that got me into peasant studies and changed my whole urbanism outlook.

I’ve suspected a dyscalculia diagnosis for a while. Everything up to elementary algebra clicks with me in some fundamental way where I can intuitively do a four digit multiplication table in my head or a pharmacological weight calculation in an ambulance. It’s just like any other knowledge base to me. But then everything after that, at least through the high-level trigonometry and general calculus classes I took along with the sciences that are equation-heavy like chemistry/physics, feels like I’m illiterate no matter how much I read. Meanwhile classmates in those labs were doing the same work as intuitively as the practical side of medicine comes to me.

Applied science is definitely the route for me to take either way. I like doing anti-Cartesian science with a sense of praxis to it. I’d be shitty at the level of programming or biochemistry it takes to be a good research horticulturist, but I can interpret those studies and use them as best practices while turning my city into a living lab for my politics.

:yea:

me: “I would have job stability if I studied a harder physical science, but there’s no way I could do all that maths. I should study plants. I can touch them, so surely they aren’t just maths.”

plants: exist in fucking calculus

Marxist ecology/Marxist geography are what I’m trying to go all the way to a PhD with but there are very few avenues for it. The work of theorists like Richard Lewontin, James O’Connor, David Harvey, Paul Burkett, Kohei Saito, and especially John Bellamy Foster is exactly the kind of stuff I want to do in applied science. Urban greenspace is one of those ultimate interdisciplinary subjects that demands being as radical as reality itself.

Luckily it meshed well with my other interests and politics so it was just one more piece in the Manmade Horrors Beyond Comprehension Puzzle. I can deal with the rest as an absurdist and absurdism lends itself beautifully to a field like horticulture.

:yea: Whenever I’m working next to a turf lawn, I always take the time to remind whoever I’m speaking to that living within 1.6km/1mi of a golf course increases your risk of Parkinson’s Disease by 126% and that sharing a water supply with them in our drought-stressed region increases the risk by 96%: https://www.parkinson.org/blog/science-news/golf-courses . Whenever a suburbanite reaches Peak American Psychosis and gleefully describes how they murder any wildlife that touches their property, I start going into cascading impacts and zoonotic disease. If I wasn’t a communist, the socioecological side of horticulture would force me to become a communist or a prepper. When you can see the world ecologically it’s just a world full of slow motion car crashes with all the drivers cheering at each other.

I can’t look at something like a Terry’s Chocolate Orange and see “natural processes”. This was the divine work of Willy Wonka.

I hated when my posts got popular on reddit. 10k-1m+ people suddenly being aware of my existence, trawling my profile, filling up my inbox with replies and PMs- just a miserable experience that made the website overwhelming for days. Hexbear topping out at like 120 upvotes is the sweet spot for not being overwhelmed but still getting quality engagement in the comments. At most I think a post could get 1000~ without becoming nonsensical, which I think might have been where /r/chapotraphouse topped out.

Whenever the subreddits I ran surpassed 50k subscribers, the algorithmic incentives immediately undermined the things which made that community good. The volume of posts is so high that any individual one is lost unless they can grab attention quick. That’s where the “epic narwhal bacon” shit comes from. In the time it takes to read a multi-paragraph comment, users can upvote a dozen meme ones. Newcomers only see the memes and know that’s how they fit in, so the whole thing snowballs into a parody of whatever the community was originally about. Quick growth comes at the expense of the forum’s ideological coherency and all the internal struggle sessions that form it.

This appears to be supported by the findings of a 2022 paper, in which scientists describe the results of taking C. sphaerospermum into space and strapping it to the exterior of the ISS, exposing it to the full brunt of cosmic radiation.

There, sensors placed beneath the petri dish showed that a smaller amount of radiation penetrated through the fungi than through an agar-only control.

The aim of that paper was not to demonstrate or investigate radiosynthesis, but to explore the fungus’s potential as a radiation shield for space missions, which is a cool idea. But, as of that paper, we still don’t know what the fungus is actually doing.

That’s where it seems really cool to me. If we have nuclear spacecraft or even just passive cosmic radiation exposure, what’s otherwise a waste/threat could become a factory. Reinforcing the hull with a regenerative radiation shield, genetically engineering it like E. coli to biosynthesise needed compounds, mass producing it as food for something we can eat- it’d be so useful to have something like that in space where you’re surrounded by energy you can’t use.

Certified Anubis Moment. Straight to The Devourer with you.

Poors drink water. I need emotional support water that costs $10 per bottle. Prestige water.

Yeah but it looks cool as hell when I do it.

I mean, the guy didn’t know that water and ice are the same thing.

What was his logic here? I still believe that but I’m curious to hear a scientific reason why.

I wish I had been born into the era of science where I’m smart enough to discover things. I can’t code. I can’t do calculus. I would have thrived in the 19th century where I could invent washing my hands and be considered a world-class doctor.

I mean the period of heat death beyond that. The black holes have to be fed and eventually that matter will dry up. The universe will keep expanding and chasing thermodynamic equilibrium until some maximum point of entropy where every particle is spread out over increasingly vast distances, with such a total loss of interactions between them that temperature across the universe is 0 K. We’d be doing the Alpha Centauri generation ship thing but to find the next electron.

As existentially bleak as living through climate change is, I’m glad my brain only has to deal with the crisis of watching one planet in one solar system die. The average schmuck in Warhammer 10¹⁰ will be chasing the last sparks of warmth in a blizzard that will only get worse. The last habitable planet, the last active star, the final energy source they can find that will keep the temperature above 0 K for their grandchildren. They’ll have every beepboop gizmo the universe ever achieves to counter the crisis but there’s nowhere they can go short of making a new one, the same kind of deus ex machina we hope for but representing a new kind of hyper-death instead of just clean energy. Maybe they’ll still be able to grow crops if scientists manage to duplicate physics perfectly in some kind of thing outside of everything within the next 18 months according to the latest IPCC report. Individuals aren’t built to manage whatever psychic damage that causes no matter how much we abstract what it means to exist.

She’s an unstoppable chaos queen with a stink-nipple on her butt

New Jordan Peterson book just dropped

I’m considering applying this to my plant science research. In response to drought stress we observed that the tree became -3 smaller marijuana. Accelerometer data reflects the impact of this change in biomass, with hotdog levels variably +2 to +5. We demonstrate that as the tree becomes smaller marijuana it also becomes bigger hotdog.

Me screaming that Fred Rogers had a preeminent jazz pianist improvise every episode’s theme song to no one in particular.