bastionofbibliophiles

[bastionofbibliophiles]

so: masking: good, unequivocally. please mask and please educate others on why they should mask to make the world safer for immune compromised people to participate in.

however: masking is not my policy focus and it shouldn't be yours, either. masking is a very good mitigation against droplet-born illnesses and a slightly less effective (but still very good) mitigation against airborne illnesses, but its place in the pyramid of mitigation demands is pretty low, for several reasons:

it's an individual mitigation, not a systemic one. the best mitigations to make public life more accessible affect everyone without distributing the majority of the effort among individuals (who may not be able to comply, may not have access to education on how to comply, or may be actively malicious).

it's a post-hoc mitigation, or to put it another way, it's a band-aid over the underlying problem. even if it was possible to enforce, universal masking still wouldn't address the underlying problem that it is dangerous for sick people and immune compromised people to be in the same public locations to begin with. this is a solvable problem! we have created the societal conditions for this problem!

here are my policy focuses:

upgraded air filtration and ventilation systems for all public buildings. appropriate ventilation should be just as bog-standard as appropriately clean running water. an indoor venue without a ventilation system capable of performing 5 complete air changes per hour should be like encountering a public restroom without any sinks or hand sanitizer stations whatsoever.

enforced paid sick leave for all employees until 3-5 days without symptoms. the vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through industry sectors where employees come into work while experiencing symptoms. a taco bell worker should never be making food while experiencing strep throat symptoms, even without a strep diagnosis.

enforced virtual schooling options for sick students. the other vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through schools. the proximity of so many kids and teenagers together indoors (with little to no proper ventilation and high levels of physical activity) means that if even one person comes to school sick, hundreds will be infected in the following few days. those students will most likely infect their parents as well. allowing students to complete all readings and coursework through sites like blackboard or compass while sick will cut down massively on disease transmission.

accessible testing for everyone. not just for COVID; if there's a test for any contagious illness capable of being performed outside of lab conditions, there should be a regulated option for performing that test at home (similar to COVID rapid tests). if a test can only be performed under lab conditions, there should be a government-subsidized program to provide free of charge testing to anyone who needs it, through urgent cares and pharmacies.

the last thing to note is that these things stack; upgraded ventilation systems in all public buildings mean that students and employees get sick less often to begin with, making it less burdensome for students and employees to be absent due to sickness, and making it more likely that sick individuals will choose to stay home themselves (since it's not so costly for them).

masking is great! keep masking! please use masking as a rhetorical "this is what we can do as individuals to make public life safer while we're pushing for drastic policy changes," and don't get complacent in either direction--don't assume that masking is all you need to do or an acceptable forever-solution, and equally, don't fall prey to thinking that pushing for policy change "makes up" for not masking in public. it's not a game with scores and sides; masking is a material thing you can do to help the individual people you interact with one by one, and policy changes are what's going to make the entirety of public life safer for all immune compromised people.

#public health #health #healthcare #health policy #politics

[bastionofbibliophiles]

#languages #German #hedgehogs #eagles #igel

[bastionofbibliophiles]

the beginning of the rest of our lives

#art

[bastionofbibliophiles]

tell me something cool

#water #wastewater #waste management #wastewater treatment

[bastionofbibliophiles]

Fun, someone said the words “prior authorizations” around me and now I’m pissed off at 730am on my day off. I go off on this rant all the time. ALL THE TIME.

#medical #prior authorization #health insurance

[bastionofbibliophiles]

“Lolita isn’t a perverse young girl. She’s a poor child who has been debauched and whose senses never stir under the caresses of the foul Humbert Humbert, whom she asks once, ‘how long did [he] think we were going to live in stuffy cabins, doing filthy things together…?’ But to reply to your question: no, its success doesn’t annoy me, I am not like Conan Doyle, who out of snobbery or simple stupidity preferred to be known as the author of “The Great Boer War,” which he thought superior to his Sherlock Holmes. It is equally interesting to dwell, as journalists say, on the problem of the inept degradation that the character of the nymphet Lolita, whom I invented in 1955, has undergone in the mind of the broad public. Not only has the perversity of this poor child been grotesquely exaggerated, but her physical appearance, her age, everything has been transformed by the illustrations in foreign publications. Girls of eighteen or more, sidewalk kittens, cheap models, or simple long-legged criminals, are baptized “nymphets” or “Lolitas” in news stories in magazines in Italy, France, Germany, etc; and the covers of translations, Turkish or Arab, reach the height of ineptitude when they feature a young woman with opulent contours and a blonde mane imagined by boobies who have never read my book. In reality Lolita is a little girl of twelve, whereas Humbert Humbert is a mature man, and it’s the abyss between his age and that of the little girl that produces the vacuum, the vertigo, the seduction of mortal danger. Secondly, it’s the imagination of the sad satyr that makes a magic creature of this little American schoolgirl, as banal and normal in her way as the poet manqué Humbert is in his. Outside the maniacal gaze of Humbert there is no nymphet. Lolita the nymphet exists only through the obsession that destroys Humbert. Herein an essential aspect of a unique book that has been betrayed by a factitious popularity.”

— Vladimir Nabokov (tr. Brian Boyd), Apostrophes (1975)

#Vladimir Nabokov #Lolita

[bastionofbibliophiles]

#politics

[bastionofbibliophiles]

Originals have been added to online shop!

Here

#art

[bastionofbibliophiles]

The tumblr experience is having politics that make the most left leaning progressive you know irl blush and then logging on here and getting called a bootlicker fascist because you said that you dont think we should make the reign of terror happen again

#politics #political

[bastionofbibliophiles]

I don’t even want to write a review of “Top Gun: Maverick” honestly, I’ve seen 1,500+ movies and I’ve never finished one that left me more depressed about the future of this country. I just want to stop thinking about it

#Top Gun Maverick #military propaganda

[bastionofbibliophiles]

#language #English #words

[bastionofbibliophiles]

hey, wanna know something cool?

a little over a century ago, the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton lost the ship Endurance when attempting to make a land crossing of the antarctic.

soon after, the ship would be crushed by the surrounding ice as it shifted, and it would sink about 10,000 feet to the sea floor.

BUT THEN

2 years ago, national geographic was able to locate the HMS endurance and found it in an incredibly well preserved state!

the leader of the expedition, Mensun Bound, said "This is by far the finest wooden shipwreck I have ever seen. It is upright, well proud of the seabed, intact, and in a brilliant state of preservation."

#Endurance #Ernest Shackleton #shipwreck #shipwrecks #ships #boats #Antarctic #Antarctica

[bastionofbibliophiles]

The full set of features of inweb is extensive and this is not the place to go into that. In brief, though, kit section files [...] can't use any of the interesting tangling features (such as @d, or @< ... >@); but they can use all the weaving features. Inform users don't need to have inweb in order to write or use kits, and don't need to understand what the last sentence said.

I do appreciate when documentation knows its target audience.

#Tumblr #Tumblr bugs #glitch #Tumblr glitch #programming

[bastionofbibliophiles]

#trans

[bastionofbibliophiles]

Do I have to pay for the engineering college? Because I would ABSOLUTELY take five free years of college.

#polls

[bastionofbibliophiles]

hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

#art reference #reference

[bastionofbibliophiles]

This checks out! According to the United States Mint (the bureau of the Department of the Treasury responsible for producing coinage for the United States):

a modern dime (tenth-dollar, $0.10) weighs 0.08 ounces (2.268 grams),

a modern quarter-dollar ($0.25) weighs 0.20 ounces (5.670 grams), and

a modern half-dollar ($0.50) weighs 0.40 ounces (11.340 grams).

As there are 16 ounces in a pound, all three coins are indeed worth $20 per pound (or a little over $44.092 per kilogram). Inversely, they weigh 5 pounds (or 2.26796185 kilograms) per hundred dollars. Thus, any mixture of these three coins has the same value-per-mass, regardless of the individual proportions of each coin in the mix.

Regrettably, the penny ($0.01, 0.088 ounces or 2.5 grams), nickel ($0.05, 0.176 ounces or 5 grams), and dollar coins ($1.00, 0.2857 ounces or 8.1 grams) do not follow this pattern. If they did, the penny would need to weigh 0.08 ounces (0.2268 grams, or about a quarter of the mass of a typical paperclip), and a dollar coin would weigh 0.8 ounces (22.68 grams, or about half the mass of a golf ball).

so i just learned something really fucked up about US coinage...

a quarter weighs EXACTLY 2.5 times as much as a dime.

as a consequence, quarters and dimes have the same value-to-mass ratio.

and this ratio? $20/lb.

this means that a pound of any mix of quarters and dimes is worth exactly $20.

#money #mass #weight #weights and measures #coins #coinage #numismatics #unit conversion #units of measure #dimes #quarters #dollars