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🎉🎉Happy Birthday to the NX-01!!!! 🎉🎉

#ent #nx-01

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🎉🎉Happy Birthday to the NX-01!!!! 🎉🎉

#ent #nx-01

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hardest a tweet has made me laugh in a while

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Do you know anything about GIS?

Geographic Information Systems? Some. I took an intro course in undergrad and have used it on occasion in other courses and research. I'm by no means an expert. (Though it is one of those things I want to know more about).

#asks

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Okay. This is basically my field. So I am about to ramble a bit because a lot of folks don't have the best understanding and it is also extremely fascinating to me and I care a lot about it. The coast moves. Like, even completely absent of human caused climate change and global sea level rise. (Which adds another layer to this).

Examples:

- Rivers, such as the Missippi, form coastal deltas of all that sediment they carry, which have these big old lobes. Naturally, the river "avulses" (shifts) on a cyclical basis from lobe to lobe, building one up with a bunch of sediment the switching to another and building that up.

-Inlets to places we use as ports, going out to fish, recreation, etc. like to move. They do this because all the storms, waves, currents, and boats push around the sediment regularly.

-Barrier islands, like those we have on the Gulf of Mexico and Carolina/ Virginia coast roll towards the mainland. (The process is often literally called roll over). Big enough storms will wash sand from the offshore beach, knock over dunes, and create something called an overwash fan (pic below). Overtime, this moves sand from the ocean side to the back side. During times of sea level rise, this can actually prevent an island from disappearing. Which is cool af in my professional opinion.

^ Example of a washover fan from USGS and NOAA (Source)

Major problem though: We have a desire or sometimes a need to keep the coast in the same place. If you build homes, hotels, and roads on the coast, you obviously don't want that river or inlet to suddenly go through them or the sand to washover on top. The place where your building is can't now be in the ocean. If you are using a boat, not having a consistent navigable waterway is dangerous (see why the Carolina coast is the "Graveyard of the Atlantic"). And that doesn't even touch on folks wanting to make waterways even wider than the norm to accomodate big ass cargo ships.

So people, who can afford it, do stuff like build giant dunes to protect their houses. We have to regularly carve out the paths to ports so that they remain navigable. We do beach nourishment (putting sand on or near the beach face) in order to widen narrowing beaches. We put up jetties to keep currents from moving sand into an inlet. We put in hard structures to keep the river in place. There's so many modifications. All of these things cost money. All of these things have ecological impacts. They either don't work permanently or cause other issues, like depriving another area of sediment. There's no perfect fix.

What about moving? Moving, when you have the resources to do so (like presumably the folks in the houses in the original post) is one thing. But it becomes a big issue when you are talking about people with less resources. Who also have less resources for these modifications and temporary fixes and are often in the most low lying vulernable areas because that's where land was cheapest (see New Orleans). Then there's the social cost of relocating and uprooting a community.

There are programs designed to help people move out of vulnerable areas, but there's a lot of caveats, including the implications of giving a bunch of poorer, often minority, people money to move away. Because even with help, finding an affordable place to relocate to nearby is a problem so you are potentially dissolving a community. And that is assuming well intentioned actors. (Also see New Orleans, post Katrina, for an example).

So yeah, it is a bit of a mess. While there are a few obvious things we can do to help, like halt development on vulnerable areas and invest in the science to better understand the coast and build resilient infrastructure, there aren't easy solutions that really fix things for good. (And I haven't even touched on a bunch of the social/ economic/ historical issues around this. My area is more the geology and physics side of it.) Climate change and sea level rise continue to make this even more of an issue. But I will continue to roll my eyes at companies that manage to convince millionaires to put big artificial dunes infront of their houses that wash away immediately or are a giant investment for a couple of years (Although, was it even their money being spent in this case? Sometimes they manage to get the town/ state to pay for it.)

absolutely losing my mind that a bunch of nimby assholes spent $500k to build a sandcastle that was promptly wiped away

#sorry but this activated ramble mode #this connects to so many other issues in so many ways and i could literally talk about it for days #and the geology and physics involved is actually the coolest shit on its own #coastal change #coastal erosion #coastal geology #marine science #marine geology #sea level rise

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new kind of estrogen administration method where a spider full of estrogen bites you

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My brother

hello garaks padded bra. thank you for holding me, elim garak big naturals

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advice i think we should tell children is that when adults say stuff like ‘now that i’m an adult i get really excited about stuff like coffee tables and bathrooms and rugs etc’ they don’t mean ‘and now i don’t care about blorbo and squimbus from my childhood tv shows anymore’ bc your average adult still loves all the same pop culture stuff they always did; they just have a greater appreciation for the mundane as well. growing up just means you can enjoy life twice as much now. you can get really excited about a new stuffed animal AND about a new kitchen sponge. peace and love

#joy

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not nearly enough people are fuming about the cass review. do you understand the eventual implications? trans people in the uk will be considered children up until the age of 25, and denied HRT/surgery/even basic measures like legal name change and social transition. all owing to a biased and largely unscientific study. you know what “treatment” for gender dysphoria is recommended by the review instead? conversion therapy.

this will kill people and they know it, because they prefer us dead and out of sight. the government, the NHS and even the opposition have made this clear again and again. a twenty-five year old can have sex, get married have children, join the military, earn a living, be halfway up the corporate ladder or highly successful in their chosen career field by that age, but they can’t transition under NHS rules. this is a death sentence for trans teenagers and they are going ahead with it. it’s trans genocide, same as across the pond.

i’m so afraid for my trans siblings and our futures. i’m so scared for myself. what are we to do if not even the party that is supposed to be on the “left” gives a shit about our safety and mental health as long as they get voted in? labour have become tories with a red coat of paint. it all feels hopeless

#holy fuck #it is horifying #nhs #cass review

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What I learn from Science & Technology Studies is that you shouldn't blindly trust science because there's a fair amount of fuckery (mostly unintentional but sometimes not) going on in the background, but you also shouldn't *not* trust science in the way that most people who don't trust science don't trust science.

Anyways, hope that helps!

#science #academia

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#do i actually want the riker holdeck option? no #but would it be hilarious af? #YES #lower decks #lwd

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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.

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New reaction pic for y'all to be used when you get into an argument about trans healthcare and your opponent starts talking about the 0.8% or whatever or trans people who regret transitioning

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NASA advertising "do you want to be an astronaut" to tumblr users surely means something. What have you found out there, NASA? What have you found that you believe tumblr users, specifically, are best equipped to handle?

#i think the actual reason is probably #there are some nerdy people on this site #nasa runs on nerds

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