#and floss

[whatahoop]

Puppy love 💕 💖 ❤️

#embroidery #handembroidery #needlework #my hoops #crafts #handicrafts #hand stitching #handmade #pretty colors #needlepainting #needleart #needlecraft #embroidered art #hand embroidery #puppy #a present made with love #and floss #bordado a mano #my design

[muppetsnoopy]

they need to invent magic.spell that flosses and brushes my teeth for me and also tuckes me into bed soso cozy

#i.had wine tonite #and now im so comfy on the couch but i was eating popcorns so i must floss and brush and also couch is not bed :( #i need the claw machine (from arcade) to scoop me up and deposit me in my bed #thank u #molly is wineposting #xoxo

[transhuman-priestess]

#have you been flossing?

[belladonnaprice]

@callmebliss

#😯😯😯 #very cool #fiber arts #crochet #embroidery floss

[egophiliac]

this is basically what happened, right?

(these guys are very lucky that everyone at NRC 1) has the combined intelligence of a sack of bricks, and 2) is easily distracted by shiny things.)

#art #twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland spoilers #stage in playful land #stage in playfulland #these two are SO sleazy and i am utterly delighted by them #can't wait to find out their tragic backstory in approximately 3-4 weeks! #fortunately i have like a month to figure out how the heck to draw their hair (spoiler: i will never figure it out) #also. god. i love it whenever leona accidentally reveals his Mom Side. #he doesn't care about any of this but he WILL be tagging along to make sure no one else gets into trouble #once again he has to be the Responsible Adult and he hates it. the whimsical hat weighs heavy upon his head. #anyway this is me so excuse me while i now talk about diasomnia for three hours #but lilia being all 'kids gotta have some adventure in their lives!' is hilarious #specifically because you know silver would NEVER. #100% silver not only never snuck out but he always went to bed on time AND brushed his teeth AND flossed even when nobody made him. #lilia: aww but you should be enjoying your youth! >:c #silver: i am. i enjoy being respectful and disciplined and honoring you as my father. #lilia: #lilia: maybe i'm TOO good at raising kids #you know i was going to say none of his kids would be involved in this but i actually think malleus definitely would #he would not see it as a moral quandry though. he would just be excited to be invited along. #(the only reason he isn't there is because he was busy admiring a termite-infested beam somewhere and yuu didn't get a chance to ask him) #i mean MAYBE if lilia as his single authority figure told him no then he would have some reservations #but lilia's the one who's screaming HELL YEAH LET'S SNEAK OUT AND DEFY AUTHORITY while dabbing so moot point there #sebek would never and he would rat on everyone else. unless malleus is going in which case he's already there. #and i guess if everyone else is going silver probably would too #but he'd. y'know. feel conflicted about it.

[thatsbelievable]

#What to do About Fangs #tips #tricks #life hacks #helpful hints #advice #fangs #vampire #vampires #Dracula #Bram Stoker #werewolf #werewolves #brushing #flossing #TW teeth #dentistry #TW dentist

[jununy]

i cant call my bg3 character 'tav' because it reminds me of tavros homestuck. her name is flosse !

#baldur's gate 3 #flosse #astarion

[your-stranger-halfblood-things]

No because like Percy flossing on a cliff is such a Percy thing to do

#adhd brain go brrr #percy jackon and the olympians #percy jackson #pjo hoo toa tsats #pjo #adhd #neurodivergent #flossing #walker scobell

[help-i-need-a-cool-username]

We've talked about the batkids ending up on Bruce's zoom calls with JL and WE. And they are all amazing. But heres something i haven't seen: the batfam ending up on each other's hero team zoom calls

Dick trying to look a responsible and dignified leader only for Damian and Steph to crash through the room trying to kill each other for the last cookie. Tim trying to stay composed as Jason does a sequence of the most horrible dance moves known to man in the background. Dick slapping a mask on to interrupt Damian's call to ask something super embarrassing. Bruce trying to use which ever kid is on the call as a human shield while another kid comes in shooting a water gun

#hinacu dc #batfam #batman #dc #video calls #dick grayson #jason todd #tim drake #damian wayne #bruce wayne #batkids #please picture these guys in their masks but wearing pjs. thats what im envisioning #and imagine jason doing the sprinkler. tim wants to kill him. jason starts flossing

[keldabekush]

Oonagh coverrrr I love her . Space kerrang should be real

#kushdraws #Oc oonagh #twilek Oc #Star Wars #nuclear crotch floss #the meat droids #eye strain #brother the color dif between drawing this on my ipad and looking at it on my phone....holy fuck. my eyeballs #its so so much more muted on my drawing screen LMAO

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Palantir’s NHS-stealing Big Lie

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

Capitalism's Big Lie in four words: "There is no alternative." Looters use this lie for cover, insisting that they're hard-nosed grownups living in the reality of human nature, incentives, and facts (which don't care about your feelings).

The point of "there is no alternative" is to extinguish the innovative imagination. "There is no alternative" is really "stop trying to think of alternatives, dammit." But there are always alternatives, and the only reason to demand that they be excluded from consideration is that these alternatives are manifestly superior to the looter's supposed inevitability.

Right now, there's an attempt underway to loot the NHS, the UK's single most beloved institution. The NHS has been under sustained assault for decades – budget cuts, overt and stealth privatisation, etc. But one of its crown jewels has been stubbournly resistant to being auctioned off: patient data. Not that HMG hasn't repeatedly tried to flog patient data – it's just that the public won't stand for it:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/21/nhs-data-platform-may-be-undermined-by-lack-of-public-trust-warn-campaigners

Patients – quite reasonably – do not trust the private sector to handle their sensitive medical records.

Now, this presents a real conundrum, because NHS patient data, taken as a whole, holds untold medical insights. The UK is a large and diverse country and those records in aggregate can help researchers understand the efficacy of various medicines and other interventions. Leaving that data inert and unanalysed will cost lives: in the UK, and all over the world.

For years, the stock answer to "how do we do science on NHS records without violating patient privacy?" has been "just anonymise the data." The claim is that if you replace patient names with random numbers, you can release the data to research partners without compromising patient privacy, because no one will be able to turn those numbers back into names.

It would be great if this were true, but it isn't. In theory and in practice, it is surprisingly easy to "re-identify" individuals in anonymous data-sets. To take an obvious example: we know which two dates former PM Tony Blair was given a specific treatment for a cardiac emergency, because this happened while he was in office. We also know Blair's date of birth. Check any trove of NHS data that records a person who matches those three facts and you've found Tony Blair – and all the private data contained alongside those public facts is now in the public domain, forever.

Not everyone has Tony Blair's reidentification hooks, but everyone has data in some kind of database, and those databases are continually being breached, leaked or intentionally released. A breach from a taxi service like Addison-Lee or Uber, or from Transport for London, will reveal the journeys that immediately preceded each prescription at each clinic or hospital in an "anonymous" NHS dataset, which can then be cross-referenced to databases of home addresses and workplaces. In an eyeblink, millions of Britons' records of receiving treatment for STIs or cancer can be connected with named individuals – again, forever.

Re-identification attacks are now considered inevitable; security researchers have made a sport out of seeing how little additional information they need to re-identify individuals in anonymised data-sets. A surprising number of people in any large data-set can be re-identified based on a single characteristic in the data-set.

Given all this, anonymous NHS data releases should have been ruled out years ago. Instead, NHS records are to be handed over to the US military surveillance company Palantir, a notorious human-rights abuser and supplier to the world's most disgusting authoritarian regimes. Palantir – founded by the far-right Trump bagman Peter Thiel – takes its name from the evil wizard Sauron's all-seeing orb in Lord of the Rings ("Sauron, are we the baddies?"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership

The argument for turning over Britons' most sensitive personal data to an offshore war-crimes company is "there is no alternative." The UK needs the medical insights in those NHS records, and this is the only way to get at them.

As with every instance of "there is no alternative," this turns out to be a lie. What's more, the alternative is vastly superior to this chumocratic sell-out, was Made in Britain, and is the envy of medical researchers the world 'round. That alternative is "trusted research environments." In a new article for the Good Law Project, I describe these nigh-miraculous tools for privacy-preserving, best-of-breed medical research:

https://goodlawproject.org/cory-doctorow-health-data-it-isnt-just-palantir-or-bust/

At the outset of the covid pandemic Oxford's Ben Goldacre and his colleagues set out to perform realtime analysis of the data flooding into NHS trusts up and down the country, in order to learn more about this new disease. To do so, they created Opensafely, an open-source database that was tied into each NHS trust's own patient record systems:

https://timharford.com/2022/07/how-to-save-more-lives-and-avoid-a-privacy-apocalypse/

Opensafely has its own database query language, built on SQL, but tailored to medical research. Researchers write programs in this language to extract aggregate data from each NHS trust's servers, posing medical questions of the data without ever directly touching it. These programs are published in advance on a git server, and are preflighted on synthetic NHS data on a test server. Once the program is approved, it is sent to the main Opensafely server, which then farms out parts of the query to each NHS trust, packages up the results, and publishes them to a public repository.

This is better than "the best of both worlds." This public scientific process, with peer review and disclosure built in, allows for frequent, complex analysis of NHS data without giving a single third party access to a a single patient record, ever. Opensafely was wildly successful: in just months, Opensafely collaborators published sixty blockbuster papers in Nature – science that shaped the world's response to the pandemic.

Opensafely was so successful that the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care commissioned a review of the programme with an eye to expanding it to serve as the nation's default way of conducting research on medical data:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis

This approach is cheaper, safer, and more effective than handing hundreds of millions of pounds to Palantir and hoping they will manage the impossible: anonymising data well enough that it is never re-identified. Trusted Research Environments have been endorsed by national associations of doctors and researchers as the superior alternative to giving the NHS's data to Peter Thiel or any other sharp operator seeking a public contract.

As a lifelong privacy campaigner, I find this approach nothing short of inspiring. I would love for there to be a way for publishers and researchers to glean privacy-preserving insights from public library checkouts (such a system would prove an important counter to Amazon's proprietary god's-eye view of reading habits); or BBC podcasts or streaming video viewership.

You see, there is an alternative. We don't have to choose between science and privacy, or the public interest and private gain. There's always an alternative – if there wasn't, the other side wouldn't have to continuously repeat the lie that no alternative is possible.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

Image: Gage Skidmore (modified) https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_Thiel_(51876933345).jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #peter thiel #trusted research environment #opensafely #medical data #floss #privacy #reidentification #anonymization #anonymisation #nhs #ukpoli #uk #ben goldacre #goldacre report #science #evidence-based medicine #goldacre review #interoperability #transparency

[youremakingmeplush]

My first project completed during The 100 Days Project! I saw this comment in a "vaguely threatening corporate speak" video and couldn't get ot out of my mind. I had to chart it out immediately.

I've decided that (other than this 😅🤞) I'm going to work on WIP from my 100 Days. Hopefully I can work through what I have laying around to make room for other new projects!

#SheSamMakes #YoureMakingMePlush #not!plush #100 Day Project #The 100 Day Project #The 100 Day Project 2024 #Cross Stitch #Aida #Embroidery #Embroidery Floss #Art #Craft #Crafts #Cross Stitch Patterns #my cross stitch patterns #2024 Finish #Fiber Arts #Needlework #email #Coperate Speak #emails #📧 #📧📧📧

[dozydawn]

French Silk Floss Embroidered Tapestry Antique Purse

#bags #embroidery #silk floss #needlework

[phoenixyfriend]

I have begun watching The New hbomberguy Video

There's some fun bits, like "Where does--and I mean this as a compliment--the most fuckable twink I've ever seen in my life get off telling me how to manage my T-levels?"

But like... man.

I think one of the things that bother me about the Internet Historian case is that it seems like, if the guy had just reached out to Mental Floss, it could have been a really cool collaboration.

He could have just. Fucking asked. Cross-advertized it with the magazine telling their readers "Now this fan favorite is narrated by [internet famous person] with some amazing animation, based on the writing of [our guy.]"

#also fun: My parents never took me to a psychologist so I assume that's normal. #and the tight rage of 'THIS VIDEO IS ABOUT JAMES SOMERTON.' #phoenix liveblogs #hbomberguy #plagiarism #phoenix talks #internet historian #mental floss

[philosophybits]

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

#philosophy #quotes #George Eliot #The Mill on the Floss #poetry #art #knowledge #sacred #divine

[copperbadge]

A while back, I remember you talking about a toothbrush that was so good you almost didn't need to floss? Do you remember what toothbrush it was? Thank you!

Oh sure! Although you may be slightly misremembering, I've definitely posted about that.

For context, as with many people with ADHD I have trouble managing dental hygiene, and while I usually manage to brush twice a day, flossing is beyond me. Especially because I also have unusually sensitive gums -- I've had dentists in the past who were like "Yeah, I can see why you don't floss." There are some people for whom the whole "if you floss regularly it'll toughen your gums" thing simply isn't true. (It's...possible that's true for everyone, there have been very few actual studies with good data on the efficacy and impact of flossing.)

My current dentist recommended that if I wasn't going to floss, I should get an electric toothbrush -- she said any electric toothbrush is at least better than only manual brushing without flossing, but the Phillips Sonicare is the one she recommended. She said that using the Sonicare, as long as you use it for at least two minutes solid and make sure you hit your gumlines, was almost as good as flossing.

I think it's a great indication of how people who struggle with certain tasks and also the medical professionals treating them can sometimes focus so hard on what you ought to be doing that they miss what you are capable of doing -- sure it would probably actually be best if I flossed, but since that's not really on the table, my dentist and I chose to seek almost-as-good alternatives rather than just go back into the cycle of "I don't floss and you scold me for it" which dominated the first 35 years or so of my life. It's one of those perfect is the enemy of good things, where your options seem to be "success or failure" but are actually "success, moderate improvement, or failure".

#teeth #flossing #dental hygiene #sam has adhd