#with a bunch of other firefighters in the region

[scattered-winter]

wait hang on who are the hot gay boys in that gif set you reblogged

HGLHSIERGLSJDGALKSHGLK i was gonna put the [do you have any idea how little that narrows it down] meme but im pretty sure u mean this one <3 and in any case i will always be down to ramble about the Sillies(tm)

ok so those guys in particular are from the fox procedural called 9-1-1 Lone Star, which is a spinoff of the original 9-1-1 (which just got moved to abc after some Drama that went down so my tag for it is 911 (not fox) lmaoo). but both shows are about first responders (firefighters, paramedics, dispatchers, police) with a particular focus on firefighters. 9-1-1 (the og) is set in LA, and primarily focuses on the 118 firehouse and the firefighters/paramedics there with some other characters in the main cast who work as dispatchers/police officers (the police storylines are more often than not FULL of copaganda which sucks but the main focus is on the firefighters so i'm able to enjoy the rest of the show). 9-1-1 Lone Star is pretty much the same except it's set in austin texas, and is about the 126 firehouse. there are onscreen queer characters in both (in the og there's a married lesbian couple raising a kid, and in lone star there's the aforementioned hot gay boys [one of whom is unfortunately a cop but i swear to GOD i will get him out of there. one day.] and in lone star there's also a trans man and wlw woman in the main cast.) and my favorite thing about these shows is the found family !!! like these are the shows that have endeared firefighter aus to me because they live together and eat meals together and just. the familial/platonic love is So Powerful and it legiterally makes me cry to watch. like there's romance ofc but genuinely it's one of my favorite found family medias to ever exist. its So.

of the two the og is my favorite for a LOT of reasons, but they're both pretty enjoyable !! lone star definitely has more of a comedic tone than og (theyre BOTH funny but lone star doesn't have as many somber intense moments as og does, and they're much more spread out so there's a lot more room for goofy shenanigans. but og still definitely has plenty of those) and the team dynamics in them both are just...ughhh <3333

HOWEVER. lone star has ..... Him...(derogatory)...he's the fire captain and (despite lone star SUPPOSEDLY being an ensemble show with no Main Character) is in fact. the Main Character. and he's the blandest most obnoxious crustiest white man to ever LIVE. he gets most of the storylines and he's constantly propped up by the writing as The Coolest Guy Ever when he's just . not . i hate him so much it's unreal it's soo so unreal (<- biting the bars of my cage) BUT the rest of the team ??? absolutely love them. like i DO love lone star a lot its a great show with great characters and dynamics but it just has. the most annoying guy to ever live front and center when ITS SUPPOSED TO BE AN ENSEMBLE SHOW FEATURING EVERYONE EQUALLY. grr. anyway. og does a much better job of being an ensemble show, and i could not choose a favorite character of the main cast if you held me at gunpoint. angela bassett is there. i am gay. jennifer love hewitt is there. i am very gay. etcetera.

AND SINCE YOU ASKED SPECIFICALLY ABOUT THE LONE STAR GAYS ILL TELL YOU A BIT ABOUT THEM

so one of them is tk strand (firefighter/paramedic, also the son of the Main Character (derogatory). i have many many many thoughts about that. i would probably get gunned down in this fandom if i ever said them aloud.) and the other one is carlos reyes (a private detective TO MEEEEEEEEEEEE but unfortunately fox is full of cowards who refuse to see the truth. they wanna have a gay cop in their show sooo bad </3) and they're kind of the main romance of the show (there Are others ofc but theyre like. The Focus. which is fine ig but i do wish there was more focus on other relationships because in general lone star isnt as good as the ensemble thing as og. but i already complained about that so i digress.)

now they're a fun pair because one of them has been shot, frozen almost to death, and otherwise put into a coma on MULTIPLE occasions. and it's not the guy whose entire job is to get shot at. (the whump in both of these shows.....................absolutely effervescent. im thriving here.) and they have a very fascinating relationship because their personalities fit together really well but they have different ways of coping with shit that kind of tear each other apart a little bit. which is of course terrible for them but incredible for me. and the writing is at times ridiculous. soap opera-esque, even. they're ridiculous. i adore them. they cannot catch a god damn break and i love that for them even more. <3

#I DO LOVE BOTH SHOWS A LOT I PROMISE I JUST HATE OWEN </3 #would recommend watching og first just because its my fav of the two. of course u do not have to but i would be over the moon if u did #but there's no pressure ofc ofc im just happy to ramble about the Show Ever #there IS a crossover episode where the two stations meet because the 118 (la) are called in to help with a big wildfire in texas #with a bunch of other firefighters in the region #its my beloved episode of all time. for fucking real. #franke 🔪 #911 abc #911 lone star #also literally ANYONE you ask will say that the og also has a gay couple in the main cast (buddie) but. its a very popular ship #that is of yet not canon. and oh my god. do i have some complicated feelings about buddie. hoooo boy. #(i Do love their relationship and i Do think they work well together and i Do think it could be compelling for it to happen but. But. #the levels of brainrot (derogatory) that i have seen in this fandom over those two...absolutely fucking bonkers. #its a minefield out there. im being so fr u gotta watch your BACK #anyway. i could write an essay on them and how complicated it be. </3 #ANYWAY TEEEHEE TY FOR ASKING :]] #i can send u sooo many scenes . you need only ask <- no pressure ofc but they are just So... #found fambly...

[dizzydispatch]

Chasing the High

 We were sitting around the coffee pot when the first call I’d ever responded to in person came in over the radio. I was doing a ride-along, something Regional tried to get our associated towns to give us when we first start, to get a first-hand look into what our responders experience on a daily basis. As all fire calls, it started with a tone. At the sound, I cut my story off mid-sentence and followed the firefighters around the corner into the vehicle bay.

Liz was driving, and as she prepped for response, she explained what she was doing. “We keep the pants and boots ready to step right into, next to the lockers, so it’s easier when we’re getting ready.” She slung an air tank over her shoulder and told me, “This has about half an hour of breathable oxygen. This will go into the back of my seat.”

I took the seat behind her.

“You buckled?”

“Yep. Now what?”

Thomas threw a playful wink from up front. “Now’s the fun part,” he said. “Now we get on the road and hope for something good.” 

I opened my mouth to say, of course we don’t hope that, because that would mean something bad has happened to somebody! But the sirens roaring to life cut me off, so I sat back. As we made our way through downtown, I realized that what I had been about to say was… well, it wasn’t necessary. I was around firefighters, and they were as crazy for disaster as I was. What I’d been about to say wasn’t just unnecessary: it was downright untrue. I was hoping it was “something good.” And so were they. That’s why they became firefighters. Isn’t it also why I became a dispatcher?

It’s not that we want bad things to happen to people. In a perfect world, nobody would need firefighters, or dispatchers, or any first responders at all. Bad things are going to happen whether we do this job or not. The next best thing to having no disasters at all is having disaster-trained people eager to respond when shit hits the fan.

But in a world where disasters do happen, I thought, it sure is good to know that some people are enthusiastic about helping out. 

It is my opinion that people who say they get into high-stress fields of work like first response or surgery “to help people” aren’t always telling the truth. Or at least, not the whole truth. Maybe some of them really do wake up and think of nothing else than making the world a better place. And most of them probably do want to help people, and do believe that’s the only reason they chose that field. But there’s another reason we all got into it, and it has a lot less to do with philanthropism than we’d like to believe. 

Take, for example, my friend Gabe. This is a man who teared up the first time I ever had a conversation with him, when I told him the story of how my grandfather sold his prized possession, his beautiful, lovingly-restored 1968 Pontiac, when I broke a bunch of my teeth in an accident to pay for implants “so my 18-year-old granddaughter doesn’t have to wake up to her teeth in a glass every morning.” True story. He’d spoken to me a grand total of once at that point, and he was so empathetic that the sweet story of familial love brought him to tears. How could somebody so compassionate, who seemed to absorb completely the emotions of others, also be an EMT who saw people die, a firefighter who witnessed families’ homes go up in smoke? After a while, you’d think it would just get to be too much. That the allure of maybe helping someone today would give way to the hopelessness of seeing your efforts go wasted the first time you revive an overdose only to have him die of another a week later. 

So what was it, then, that kept people like him responding to call after call, day after day? If you ask me, it’s the high. 

In the pilot episode of Grey’s Anatomy, titular lead Meredith Grey opens the show with a voiceover playing over shots of her class of first-years rushing around, getting ready for their first day as surgical interns. “The game,” she says. “They say a person either has what it takes to play, or they don’t.” That metaphor, of surgery being a game, is continued by a doctor later revealed to be the Chief of Surgery: “Each of you comes here hopeful. Wanting in on the game… The seven years you spend here will be the best and worst of your life. You will be pushed to the breaking point… This is your starting line. This is your arena. How well you play? That’s up to you.”

After scrubbing in on her first surgery, Meredith tells the doctor who led it, “You think you know what you’re going to feel… but that was such a high. I don’t know why anybody does drugs.” And in the end, as the pilot winds down, the voiceover returns, and Meredith tells the viewers: “I can’t think of any one reason why I want to be a surgeon. But I can think of a thousand reasons why I should quit. They make it hard on purpose. There are lives in our hands… I could quit. But here’s the thing: I love the playing field.”

Meredith’s words resonate with me, as somebody whose job requires me to be responsible for decisions that could, quite literally, change the course of lives. Even be the reason they end. Dispatch may be lower on the risk-factor scale than police or fire or hands-on EMS, since we sit from afar, linked to the unfolding events only by telephone and a radio connection. It isn’t our lives that are at risk if the traffic stop goes bad or the building comes down or the chest pains turn into sudden cardiac arrest. 

But it is my job to run the plates, to see if that driver has outstanding warrants or a violent criminal history. It’s my job to put out the evacuation tones if Command thinks a structure is sufficiently destabilized by fire to necessitate an evacuation. It’s my job to give CPR instructions to keep the cardiac arrest patient’s blood circulating long enough for EMS to arrive and save his life. It actually matters if I make a mistake, because those mistakes can and sometimes do cost lives. 

But that’s exactly why I sought this job out. I love the playing field, too. I live for the high of disaster, for the terrifying, high-stakes moments where it really is life or death. Without it, I’m just the owner of a battered heart, listening over the phone and radio as bad things happen all the time. As people get shot and buildings come down and patients code in the backs of ambulances. All there is between us and the despair is that excitement, the thrill of picking up the phone and hoping for “something good.”

#dispatch #911 dispatch #911 dispatcher #dizzydispatch #dizzydispatch911 #greys anatomy #public safety telecommunicator #911 dispatchers #dispatch diaries

[jcmarchi]

Give It Some Thought: Imagine Operating a Smartphone. Or a Drone. Or a Computer That Speaks. Just Imagine - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/give-it-some-thought-imagine-operating-a-smartphone-or-a-drone-or-a-computer-that-speaks-just-imagine-technology-org/

Give It Some Thought: Imagine Operating a Smartphone. Or a Drone. Or a Computer That Speaks. Just Imagine - Technology Org

Dennis DeGray’s path to the extraordinary world of brain-computer interfaces began with a mishap during the most mundane of chores: taking out the trash. He was running to the curb on a rainy night when he went flying head over heels. In the murk of semiconsciousness, he thought he’d been bound by someone breaking into his house. It wasn’t until the next day that a neighbor heard his calls to be freed. “Dennis,” the man told him, “you’re not tied up.”

Illustration by Brian Stauffer, Stanford University

DeGray had simply slipped, breaking his neck between the second and third vertebrae. The machinist and former volunteer firefighter was paralyzed from the neck down. The week before his injury, he’d been on a guys’ trip in Northern California, shooting and fishing; the next, he says, his world had shrunk to bed and constant TV. “It’s amazing how one minute’s bad decision can really change everything,” he says. “You just lay there like a slug, waiting to die, until you have a reason to move forward. Then that reason becomes everything.”

DeGray’s everything is his leading role in an ongoing Stanford study of experimental devices that allow brains that can no longer fully communicate with their bodies to instead communicate with computers. In August 2016, nearly a decade after the accident, Stanford professor of neurosurgery Jaimie Henderson implanted a pair of electrode arrays the size of baby aspirins in the region of DeGray’s brain that is dominant for controlling his right hand—or was, before the accident throttled that communication. The so-called Utah arrays, each resembling a tiny bed of a hundred 1-millimeter nails, pierced just far enough into DeGray’s motor cortex to eavesdrop on surrounding neurons and relay the information to outside computers poised to decode it. 

A month after surgery, DeGray made his first attempt to use the device. By visualizing moving his hand—essentially willing it to do what it no longer could—DeGray transmitted the neural signals that allowed him to gain control of a computer cursor in 37 seconds. Shortly thereafter, he was tasked with hitting 50 targets on the monitor before him. “I got them,” he says. “I got all 50 of them.” He remembers silence from the scientists in the room. “They’re a dry bunch,” he says. But it was an auspicious meeting of man and machine. Over the past seven years, DeGray has devoted himself to pushing the research further. In 2017, he set a mental typing record of eight words a minute by imagining himself hunt-and-pecking on a virtual keyboard. In 2020, he tried a new method—imagining writing letters out by hand, so that researchers could attempt and assess the decoding of mental handwriting. To train the algorithms, DeGray spent days visualizing holding a pen to a yellow notepad and picturing the act of writing out thousands of letters, stroke by stroke. “It was like punishment, but I did it religiously,” he says. He describes the task as a combination of writing sentences in after-school detention and being walloped by a personal trainer at the gym. “It’s a workout,” he says. “It requires me to attempt the movements. I’m as tight as I can be and as flexed as I can be. My blood pressure goes up. I have to be reminded to breathe.” The results—converted to type by computer—validated the effort. DeGray more than doubled his own record, to 18 words a minute.

‘I like to think of it like we’re developing the alphabet that other people will use to write books.’

The findings were proof of concept, not medical product. DeGray could tap his new powers only in the presence of researchers who calibrate and run a complex system that requires a trolley of computers that plug into pedestals attached to his skull. But they were eye-catching evidence of the potential for BCIs—brain-computer interfaces—to transcend the barrier between the interior of the brain and the external world, a leap that may one day enable people with a wide variety of neurological conditions to regain function in movement, communication, and vision, and that ultimately may provide a novel platform for treating and monitoring brain health and recovery. DeGray doesn’t expect that future to come quickly enough to change his life, but he has dedicated himself to its promise. “I like to think of it like we’re developing the alphabet that other people will use to write books.”  

Sense and Sensibility

When Henderson, the doctor who operated on DeGray, joined the Stanford faculty in 2004, he brought expertise in deep brain stimulation, which delivers tiny jolts of electricity to the brain as a treatment for several conditions, including Parkinson’s disease. He’d been trying in vain to find a partner to explore the emerging world of BCI when, shortly after his arrival at Stanford, he was introduced to Krishna Shenoy, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering. Shenoy was dedicated to decoding the language of neurons, the voltaic pulses that send information throughout the nervous system. He had developed algorithms increasingly adept at deciphering the neural commands that control hand and arm movements in monkeys. His goal was to translate that work to humans—exactly what Henderson was looking for. It was the beginning of a relationship that would result in the formation of the shared Neural Prosthetic Translational Lab in 2009 and one that would last until Shenoy’s death from pancreatic cancer last year at 54. “It was chemistry,” Shenoy told Stanford Medicine in 2017. “Two people who just clicked.”

The pair met at a crucial time for BCIs. The first in-person studies were just beginning, after decades of animal testing. In 2004, researchers from Brown University and several other institutions performed the first human implementation of a Utah array, the spiky sensor that remains the gold standard for academic research in the field. That study implanted a sensor in the brain of a 24-year-old man who had been paralyzed by a knife to the neck, giving him basic cursor control as well as the ability to open and close a prosthetic hand and move a robotic arm. It was a vivid illustration not only that the brain retains its ability to issue orders years after the body stops receiving them, but that a BCI can provide it an attentive new audience. While the performance was groundbreaking, it was also rudimentary. A New York Times piece, published the same day the study appeared in Nature, noted the cursor control was wobbly and slow—taking 2.5 seconds, on average—and that the participant could only “somewhat” control the robotic arm. The reporter, however, cited another BCI study from the same issue of the journal, this time tested in monkeys, that reportedly operated about four times as fast. The work was from the Shenoy lab.

Brain stimulation – artistic interpretation.

In the years to follow, much of the excitement around BCIs centered on the potential for brain-controlled robotic limbs. In 2016, President Barack Obama fist-bumped with a robotic arm controlled by Nathan Copeland, a 30-year-old with paralysis. Copeland not only controlled the fist but also sensed the bump, thanks to electrodes implanted in a region of the brain that processes sensory information from the body. The Stanford research focused on areas that were less visually demonstrative, but graceful, intuitive, and effective. In a 2018 study led by Paul Nuyujukian, MS ’11, PhD ’12, MD ’14, now a Stanford assistant professor of bioengineering and of neurosurgery, participants used their thoughts to peruse music, search YouTube, and compose emails.

It was all done with BCIs that connected via Bluetooth with generic computer tablets fresh from Amazon. The humdrum hardware belied the fiendish complexity of the process: Nuyujukian compared the job of decoding neural commands to listening to a hundred people speaking a hundred different languages. But in a world where there’s an app for everything, researchers saw the power in creating ways to seamlessly control the consumer electronics that dominate everyday life. “We had to persevere in the early days, when people said, ‘Ah, it’s cooler to do a robotic arm—it makes a better movie,’” Shenoy told MIT Technology Review in 2021. But “if you can click, then you can use Gmail, surf the web, and play music.” 

Stanford’s lead researchers understood how vital a role BCIs could play in communication. Shenoy said his work was influenced by his maternal grandfather—a World War II–era U.S. Marine—whose multiple sclerosis had affected his ability to walk, talk clearly, and move his hands effectively. Henderson was 5 when his father sustained severe and lasting injuries in a car accident, including serious brain trauma. “He would try to express himself really, really hard,” Henderson says. “It was hard to understand what he said. Eventually, we would usually figure out what silly pun he was trying to make, or that he was proud of us for something.” Henderson says his childhood imbued him with an awareness of the power of communication, a value mirrored in the lab’s goals. “For me, that’s the most important thing.”

When Henderson and Shenoy started collaborating, the idea of using BCIs to decode speech seemed distant indeed. Primates provide a model for motor studies, but no lab animal is relevant to speech, a uniquely human process controlled by a blizzard of electrical pulses to 100-some muscles in the cheeks, lips, jaw, tongue, and larynx. But in more recent years, a series of scientific strides—including a better understanding of the geography of the brain, improved surgical procedures, and, most prominently, the rise of machine learning—transformed the possibilities.

In 2021, a team from the lab of Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at UCSF, published a groundbreaking paper detailing the use of a BCI that decoded the speech of a former field worker who had had a stroke 16 years earlier. The average American knows about 42,000 English words and speaks perhaps 150 of them per minute. At 18 words a minute and limited to a 50-word vocabulary, the BCI breakthrough was front-page news in the New York Times. “Not to be able to communicate with anyone, to have a normal conversation and express yourself in any way, it’s devastating, very hard to live with,” the research participant said via email in the piece, later adding, “It’s very much like getting a second chance to talk again.”

‘So many years of not being able to communicate and then suddenly the people in the room got what I said.’

The Stanford lab began to publish its own speech work last year, pushing the frontier even further. One of the key participants was Pat Bennett. A dozen years earlier, her words had begun to slur after she drank a glass of wine, prompting friends to suspect that the daily jogger and regular equestrian was hiding a drinking problem. In fact, Bennett had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that often results in death within five years. Bennett’s disease moved more slowly, but it was quick to attack her power of speech. 

After hearing about Stanford’s BCI research from her medical team, Bennett volunteered to participate. In March 2022, Henderson implanted four sensors in two areas of her brain associated with speech. About a month later, she began working with Stanford scientists who cued her to recite thousands of sentences over the following four months. As Bennett read the prompts, machine learning algorithms began to correlate her brain signals with the sounds she intended. The results were fed into a sophisticated autocorrect system not unlike those on a smartphone.

By the end of training—some 10,850 sentences later—the software was deciphering Bennett’s speech into text at more than 60 words a minute using a 125,000-word vocabulary. The error rate of 23.8 percent was significant, but Bennett was delighted. “When the study advanced enough that I actually saw my garbled incomprehensible vocal noises translate to what I was saying, it was joyous,” Bennett wrote in a recent email. “So many years of not being able to communicate and then suddenly the people in the room got what I said. I don’t remember what I exactly said after the prescribed script finished, but it had to be along the lines of ‘Holy shit, it worked, I’m so happy, and you guys did it.’” 

“I overloaded the memory on my phone because I would take videos of it every single time,” says doctoral student Erin Kunz, MS ’20, one of three lead authors of the paper, who had often decoded her father’s speech for others before he died of ALS. “I don’t want to delete them, because I want to remember it.”

Signal Boost

The Bennett paper was published in the same issue of Nature as a paper from Chang’s UCSF lab, which had used a different type of BCI in another participant unable to speak due to stroke. (It also created a digital avatar that modeled the woman’s emotions.) Their decoder was able to decipher that woman’s speech to text at 78 words per minute with a 1,000-word vocabulary and a 25.5 percent word error rate. By themselves, the two studies were obvious milestones of how quickly speech decoding research was moving, but just six weeks later a team led by scientists at UC Davis won the 2023 BCI Award with their demonstration of a BCI that reported decoding speech with better than 90 percent accuracy with a 125,000-word vocabulary on the second day of use. (Henderson and Kunz are among six Stanford co-authors on the study, which at press time had not yet been published in a journal.)

In fact, speech BCIs may be the first type available to the public, says UC Davis assistant professor of neurological surgery Sergey Stavisky, PhD ’16, a senior author on the winning study and a former student of Shenoy’s. The neural decoding required for control of robotic limbs—his initial focus at Stanford—is actually simpler, Stavisky says. But effectively executing those commands incurs other challenges, including the engineering of responsive, reliable, and mobile robotics. Similar challenges face researchers working on BCIs that could enable patients with severed spinal cords to move their arms and legs. Control of an appendage isn’t just a motor command; it also requires proprioception, or the sense of one’s own body in space. Think of how strange it can be to move an arm that’s fallen asleep or to chew after having Novocain at the dentist.

Once decoded, however, speech can be expressed relatively easily using consumer electronics. Stavisky imagines a fast-approaching future when people carry speech BCIs on their laps or belts. “I think within the next five years there will be approved medical devices for restoring communication.” (Less is known about the potential of BCIs to enable speech for those who have never spoken. “We haven’t taken that leap yet because we wanted to first show that our approach works well for the easier challenge of restoring lost speech,” Stavisky says. “It’s definitely something that’s on our radar and is one of the directions we aspire to investigate in the future.”)

Stavisky and Henderson are among the nine principal investigators of the BrainGate Consortium, a group of universities and academic medical centers studying BCIs. The collaboration has also enabled researchers to investigate the devices’ safety. A recent study of 14 BCIs implanted by BrainGate institutions, including two at Stanford, did not find any adverse effects that resulted in deaths, increased disabilities, or infections to the nervous system, or that required removal of the device.

One of the most remarkable things about the rise of BCIs is that they do so much with so little. In a three-pound organ containing billions of neurons, the sensors in studies like those involving DeGray and Bennett may be reading signals from just dozens of neurons. “It is really fascinating this works at all,” says Cindy Chestek, PhD ’10, a former student in Shenoy’s lab and an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan. Indeed, the Bennett experiment succeeded even though two of the four arrays did not provide relevant signals. Even so, realizing the full potential of BCIs—like enabling more naturalistic speech and movement—will depend on reading out much more data from the brain than currently possible. “It’s going to get a lot better when you have hundreds or even thousands of neurons,” Chestek says. 

That requires new hardware, a likely prospect as companies jockey to create improved BCI products that could be approved for public use. The company with an inside lane uses a minimally invasive approach. Synchron—which last year became the first company to begin human trials of an implanted BCI in the United States—feeds a stent-like sensor up the jugular vein to the motor cortex, where it lines the wall of a blood vessel.

The device’s remove from neurons means it isn’t nearly as powerful as an implant—the current model allows participants with ALS to scroll and click a mouse, says Tom Oxley, the company’s CEO. But he thinks people will prefer the less invasive approach, and even these capabilities offer a transformative opportunity. “If you can navigate your way through an iPhone, you can do a bunch of meaningful tasks that we take for granted: shopping, ordering food, ordering your medication, jumping on a call, sending a message,” Oxley says. “That stuff gives you your independence back.” 

Brain-machine interface – artistic interpretation. Image credit: Alius Noreika, created with DALL·E 3

Other companies are refining the Utah array model—creating implantable chips with more electrodes that will read out information wirelessly and use more bio-friendly designs. Existing BCIs in participants like Bennett have tended to decline in performance over time, due to either the brain’s resistance to a foreign body or the device’s degradation. Paradromics, an Austin, Texas–based company, is developing wireless implants that have more than four times the number of electrodes as a Utah array, says Vikash Gilja, MS ’10, PhD ’10, the company’s chief science officer. At the same time, he says, the devices are made of more durable material with thinner, less obtrusive electrodes. “The smaller we get them, the closer they are to being invisible to the body,” he says. The company expects to get FDA approval for clinical trials this year. Neuralink, a company co-founded by Elon Musk, is pursuing a similar track.

If these companies—or others like them—succeed, they could provide a platform for new approaches across a wide range of medical needs, Chestek says. “You’re interfacing with the brain at a neuronal level,” she says. “You can imagine a future of medicine where a lot of what you do is interacting with neurons and getting the body’s own control system to do things.” Conversely, BCIs could play a brain-monitoring role. Nuyujukian’s lab, for example, is looking at the potential for BCIs to shed light on stroke recovery. Each year, hundreds of thousands of Americans survive a stroke, often requiring intense physical rehab that occurs without any reliable window on how well it’s working. “We don’t have any scientific understanding into what changes at the neural-circuit level postinjury,” he says. A BCI could provide “a real-time readout of the state the brain” that guides how patients are treated. BCIs could ultimately offer similar insights for conditions such as epilepsy, depression, and Alzheimer’s. 

Taking Flight

From his bed in a Menlo Park nursing home, DeGray continues to help researchers demonstrate what is possible. Last summer, he cast aside his imaginary pen and took to the air. Two miles away, a drone was taking off, flying, and landing, all under the command of DeGray’s thoughts. The research was gathering data on 4-D control— up/down, forward/backward, left/right, and rotation—but it was also simply and undeniably about fun, a symbol of the freedoms that BCIs promise. “You have to get him to quit,” says Henderson. “It’s like ‘OK, Dennis. We’ve been at this for hours. You’re going to get tired. We have to stop for today.’”

The work continues without Shenoy, which weighs on Henderson’s mind. “It’s very tough because it grew organically and it was truly a joint venture,” he says. Shenoy was both a visionary whose work transformed the field and a beloved mentor to a generation of scientists who continue to push its boundaries. Before his first cancer surgery, in 2011, he began to bank recommendation letters for his students, which he would update whenever he felt his health decline.

At his memorial service, there were nearly 20 tenured or tenure-track faculty who’d been his advisees, a remarkable output for a small lab, Stavisky says. “He was probably the best adviser I have ever even heard of,” Chestek says. “We’re not going to see another Krishna, but maybe all of us together can keep all of this going.” For Henderson, that means sticking to the vision he and Shenoy developed together, thanks to the collaboration of other engineering faculty.

DeGray will keep helping show the way. He’s contributed to thousands of hours of research and been central to a score of academic papers. Eight years after his surgery, the signals from his implants have remained serviceable, and his commitment unflagging. He works with Stanford researchers two days a week, and says he’d add a third if he had more energy. He’ll always be processing what he lost that day when he was hurrying to take out the trash, he says. “It’s so big you can’t really address it.” But he’s gained something too. “I’ve been given a great gift of being able to help other people,” he says. “Somewhere out there, there’s a guy who hasn’t even fallen down yet and when he falls down, he’s not going to have to go through what I’ve gone through. When he wakes up in the morning, his life will be substantially different than mine. And that’s a good thing.”

Source: Stanford University

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[classicmoviesetc1]

Must-Watch Rare Classic Hollywood Movies: The Best Movies of All Time

The popcorn's been popped, the sweatpants are on, and the evening is your oyster. Your next challenge: Figuring out exactly which of the great movies available to you is the one you're going to watch tonight. No matter what you're looking for—romance, drama, comedy—there are plenty of classics to watch in your spare time.

Every now and then, we need a refresher on lost artifacts from the world of movies, and works that we should have experienced, in case we didn't. Here's a fairly simple list of movies from the last century that we think should be on every Hollywood buff's to-watch list. In no particular order, here are some of the best of the lot that you absolutely should watch if you haven't.

Whether you are a classic movie buff who has spent hours upon hours indulging in Turn Classic Movie marathons, or perhaps a novice who just wants to get a taste of film history—and the movies that changed it—we've rounded up some other timeless flicks for you to sink your teeth into. Whether you fancy an early romcom (How to Steal a Million), a gripping drama about an organized crime syndicate (The Godfather), or a psychological thriller that set new standards for horror (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane), there's no better time to check out some of cinema's best. Each one of these films delivers a heady dose of nostalgia, is genuinely entertaining, and will make you sound more interesting at cocktail parties.

Maximum Force

Actors:  Sam J. Jones, Sherrie Rose, Jason Lively

 Format: Dvd, Remastered

 Language: English, Dolby Digital 

 Run Time: 1hr 30min

 Region: All Regions

 Extras: None

 Plot: Three determined cops are recruited to take down a notorious crime lord.

Amateur (2003) DVD

Actors: Isabelle Huppert, Martin Donovan, Elina Lowensohn

 Format: Dvd, Digital Remastered

 Language: English

 Run Time: 105 Mins

 Region: All Regions

 Extras: None

 Plot: Isabelle is an ex-nun waiting for her special mission from God. In the meantime, she is making a living writing pornography. She meets Thomas, a sweet, confused amnesiac who cannot remember that he used to be a vicious pornographer, responsible for turning his young wife, Sofia, into the world's most notorious porn queen. Sofia's on the run, convinced she's killed him. Together, Isabelle and Thomas set out to discover his past, a past waiting to catch up with him.

Necronomicon: Book of the Dead DVD

Actors: Jeffrey Combs, Tony Azito, Juan Fernández

 Format: Dvd

 Language: English

 Run Time: 1hr 36mins

 Region: Playable All Regions

 Extras: None

 Plot: H.P. Lovecraft, the well-known horror writer, is looking in the late thirties after the book 'Necronomicon'. He finds it guarded by monks in an old library. He then copies some stories from it, which unfold for our eyes- and his.

Aloha Summer DVD

            Actors:  Chris Makepeace, Yuji Okumoto, Don Michael Paul

 Format: Dvd

 Language: English, Dolby Digital 5.1

 Run Time:  1hr 38mins

 Region: All Regions

 Extras: None

 Plot:  It's the 60s and a bunch of crazy teenagers meet in the beautiful island of Hawaii during their summer holidays. Although they come from different backgrounds, they hang out together and shake up the island! They surf, dance, drink, fight and fall in love. As the summer approaches its end, they find themselves inseparable, friends for a lifetime.

Asteroid Playable All-Regions Dvd

Actors: Michael Biehn, Annabella Sciorra, Zachar Charles

Format: Dvd, Digital Remastered

Language: English, 5.1 Dolby Digital

Run Time: 123 min

Extras: Behind the scenes of the making of 'Asteroid', Original Trailer

Plot: With the discovery of an incoming asteroid, the government of America formulate a plan to destroy it. When the plan fails, all the world can do is wait. The main impact zone is revealed to be Dallas, Texas. Generally, the plot follows the lives and reactions of several characters: an astronomer, her father, her son, two firefighters from Kansas, two young doctors in Dallas and the heads of the government agency in charge of the situation.

[woodchoc-magnum]

Fanfic ask game: 😐 💻

😐 What embarrasses you most about your own writing?

I wish I wrote better smut, honestly. I feel like it's serviceable but not great.

I'm not embarrassed by it, but I just wish that I was better? Because I feel like I can tell a good story, but I read other people's writing and it's all flowery and pretty and I'm just like... my brain doesn't want to write like that.

💻 Do you do research for your fics? What’s the deepest dive you’ve done?

Oh my god I've researched so much stuff, here's a list of the things I can remember off the top of my head:

Songs universe:

all about the Queen Mary to the point of watching several YouTube videos and studying maps of the ship

The wedding - I researched venues, locations, food, what celebrants say to make it all official, all kinds of wedding stuff

Having a baby via surrogacy, what does that entail, where does one do that in LA, how much does that cost

How much are house prices in LA, what are good suburbs to live in (I spent a significant amount of time looking at houses on Zillow)

California road trips

LA hotels, how much, good locations, what amenities do they have

Long Beach, good hotels

San Francisco things to do

Dallas things to do, places of interest

El Paso things to do, places of interest

What's on the menu at Whataburger

What do they have at Universal Studios

What to do in New York at Christmas

What to do in Hawaii (I at least had a frame of reference for that because I've been to Hawaii)

Do they have landslides in LA? (PRE-SEASON 4 by the way, go me, predicting the future)

Other fics:

LA eateries/hotels is a big one that I look into a lot

Same for theme parks and things like that

I've also studied Google Maps and Google Street View trying to get a handle on where everything is/the distance between things

How far away is Big Bear/what road do you take to get there

What books/series Christopher might be reading

A bunch of research/asking @zeethebooknerd about injuries/healing and things like that

A bunch of research/watching YouTube videos about firefighters

Constantly rewatching scenes from the show (that is not a chore)

Do they have old mine shafts in the LA region? (the answer is yes)

Does it flood in LA? (also yes)

What kind of spiders/snakes/various other creatures live in California?

Lake Tahoe where to stay

Airbnbs for EVERYTHING

Mammoth Mountain where to stay

Where does it snow in California

Museums/science centres/NASA stuff in LA

This is all I can think of right now, but there's more, I'm sure of it!

fanfic writer asks

#my fics #i sometimes go a little research crazy #and i think that's fine #tripadvisor does not know WTF is going on with me though #they keep recommending me places in long beach and i'm like no #there's a pandemic trip advisor #i won't be taking you up on that offer

[imaginesmai]

Chris Evans - Banana’s new friend

Requested by @captainchrisstan​, hope you like it! This is another part of the Banana’s series! You can read this without reading the previous one, since there isn’t a plot line, just our favourite plushie making another appearence 

Bananas 

Banana 2: Banana’s worries

Plot: little Nathan is the new addition to the Evans-Y/L/N family, and Banana is having troubled feelings, along with Claire.

Warnings: I don’t know shit about little babies and births, give me a break.

“I don’t wike it”

In any other situation, it would have been funny, because Chris and you had a bet going on to see how many times she could say it in day. And since he had won the last one, you wanted it for yourself. But it wasn’t funny, because Claire wasn’t laughing neither was Chris, neither were you. No one was laughing in the Evans-Y/L/N family that night, because you were exhausted from more than twelve hours of labour and a whole day in the hospital.

Chris was exhausted too, if not more than you, because the poor man had been running from the hospital to your house all day, taking care of Claire while picking up the stuff you needed.

Both of you blinked your tired eyes at the little girl, who was pouting and had her arms crossed. Nathan gurgled something and drooled on the floor.

“What – what do you mean?” Chris attempted to laugh, but it came out too awkward. “He’s not an it, baby. He’s Nathan, your little brother”

“Well, I don’t wike him” Claire corrected herself and let her lower lip slip even farther from her mouth. “Take him back. I wan’ a differen’ brothe’”

Little Nathan didn’t react to his sister’s word, but kept making baby noises and drooling all over the same spot of the floor. He was wearing what you thought was the most cute onesie you could have found, with little Captain America’s shields all over the cloth, and Claire loved everything that had to do with it.

She had been so, so excited to meet him, that she hadn’t slept through the night, and had begged and begged to his uncle until he had taken her with Chris. After a week in the hospital, that was all she could talk about. And finally, when she got to meet him in the lobby of your home, she said that she ‘didn’t wike’ him.

“Claire, that’s not nice” you said, from your position behind Chris. He was crouching down in front of Claire, who was standing in the first step of the stairs and looking at the baby in her daddy’s arms. “We can’t change Nathan, he is your little brother and that’s final”

“But I don’t wike him!”

You gasped surprised at her sudden rage outburst, because apart from the occasional tantrum thrown from the toddler phase, she was a calm child. What surprised you the most, however, was when she threw the Banana plushie, who she had been dying to show to her little brother, to Nathan’s face.

Chris was fast enough to avoid it hitting the baby’s face, but still it collided with his tummy, and even if it was made of soft cotton, it disturbed the baby from the little daydream he was having. So the screaming started.

“Claire!” you and Chris shouted at the same time, while he raised up and cuddled Nathan to his chest. The small baby cried and sobbed so loud that you wanted to do the same. “You can’t do that!”

“Banana hates him!” she screamed back to you, and ran to pick up her plushie. “And I hate him too!”

You weren’t fast enough to catch the sobbing little girl that ran up the stairs to her room, and closed the door with a loud kick. The four year old girl screamed from her room so hard that you heard her over the sounds of Nathan wailing, and your eyes got glossy.

For so long, you had had the impression that everything had been going well. Claire had overgrown her fear of being forgotten because of the new addition to the family, and she actually helped to make the nursery and always bought something from the toy-store for him. And now, it seemed that everything had gone to hell.

“Oh my god” you cried out, and sat where seconds ago Claire had been. “That went so bad”

“Well” Chris sighed, and walked over to sit with you. “At least she threw Banana at him, not some other toy”

“Yeah, that makes it so much better” you rolled your eyes at him. “I feel so much better now. Thanks babe”

“Okay, I get it” he sat down besides you, and kept bouncing up and down the crying baby on his shoulder. “Do you want me to go and talk with her?”

Just the thought about having to face again a crying kid made you want to dig yourself in a hole and never come back, so you nodded and closed your eyes tightly. There was a constant pain on your lower regions because you hadn’t wanted to stay anymore at the hospital, and the doctor had allowed it as the birth hadn’t had complications.

“Go and rest for a while” Chris leaned down and kissed your forehead.

You looked up at him, and actually felt pity. He had dark black bags under his eyes, cracked lips and his head was a mess. There was stain of mayonnaise on his shirt, the same he had been wearing for a whole day, and he still had one sock from each colour. But you felt like dropping dead on the wooden floor, so you nodded.

“But wake me up in an hour or so” you smiled at him and kissed him. He didn’t taste like heavens and angels, but more like morning breath and coffee. “I have to breastfeed monster number two”

“Monster number two seems to be sleeping” Chris looked down to Nathan, who had his shirt fisted by the part of the stain and his little cute mouth open in a perfect O.

“Alright” you yawned and couldn’t get your hand to cover your mouth, just let Chris do his usual stuff and stuck his finger on your mouth. You stopped yawning and sent him the best bitch glare you could manage. “I hate you so much. Not even after pushing your son out of my vagina you give a break”

“What can I say” Chris shrugged. “Banana told me to do it”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Your ‘no more than an hour’ nap turned out in a five hours sleep, and by the judge of your breast hanging out of your pyjamas’ shirt, it seemed like you had slept through the feeding. You took a few long minutes to wake up, feeling much better than when you went to bed. Judging the sun up in the sky, you estimated it was around noon.

Loud snores were coming from the bathroom, and with just propping un on your elbows, you could see Chris’ slipper popping from there. You swallowed a laugh and smiled fondly. Putting on your own slippers, you rose from the bed and walked to the bathroom.

As you had anticipated, Chris was sleeping there. He had his pants and underwear down, sprawled down on the toilet seat and his legs open wide. You didn’t have the heart to wake him, because only God knew how many minutes of sleep he had had in the previous day. So you turned off the main light, picked up his phone from the floor, closing the tab 100 ways of living without sleep, and let the door a bit open so that he wouldn’t wake up in the dark.

Of course, all that after taking a picture that would haunt him in his sleep.

You tiptoed out of the room, closing the door behind you. You debated between locking yourself in the bathroom downstairs and drown in the bath until Nathan cried for you, and choking on food on the kitchen. But while you did so, you notice something else.

There was the initial cry of a baby begging for attention, that you knew too well because you had trained yourself with Claire, who had the lungs of an opera singer. Yet as soon as it started, it was over, and then there was a giggle. Something shuffling in the living room and a thud, and you were almost throwing yourself through the stairs to call the police or the firefighters.

What you found, wasn’t what you expected by any means.

“See, this is how you ‘old him” Claire talked in what she thought was a whisper. “I know Banana is too big, but it’s ‘kay. You’ll grow”

Claire was sitting in front of Nathan, who probably had been sleeping in his new crib. You didn’t want to think how she had gotten him out of the crib and in the sofa, and your wanted to think even less that it had been Chris who left him there.

Nathan looked at the banana plushie and then at his sister, making a small gurgling noise. He let Claire put the toy on his lap, and his eyes went wide against it. He moved his little arms and legs up and down, until Banana fell to the ground and Claire jumped behind it. You were ready to jump in and tear Claire away, because she was hell protective about her toy and wouldn’t let anyone touch it.

But she giggled again, put the plushie on the couch and jumped back, crawling to her brother. She pressed a kiss on the side of his head and smiled at him.

“I wike you, by the way” she muttered. “I’m sorry fo’ before. But you can’t tell mommy, because then she will put tha’ smile and I don’t wike it. You will understand, don’ worry Nathan”

What was left of your pride after letting a bunch of doctors look at your vagina dropped to the floor. Chris was always mocking you on how you were the most prideful person in the world, and how you had the ‘I won’ smirk that managed to get on everyone nerves. You hadn’t thought anything about it, but that Claire had noticed to made you mad, because he was right and you weren’t.

“I hope you aren’t allergic to bananas” she muttered as she took one of his little hands in his. Nathan was dozing off again. “Cause then I’ll have to get rid of you. Like in the TV”

You sat down by the stairs and leaned your head against the wall, smiling proudly. Claire kept talking to Nathan softly, as if she knew he was sleeping and couldn’t be disturb. Maybe, in the years to come, you would have to worry about Claire throwing Nathan off the high chair because he didn’t like Bananas, or about them not sharing his toys.

But you got the feeling, as you dozed off in the stairs, that everything would be alright.

Want to know more about me? Here is my Masterlist! Feedback is always appreciated!!

#chris evans #chris evans bananas #chris evans one shot #chris evans imagine #chris evans x reader #dad!chris evans #steve rogers #steve rogers imagine #steve rogers one shot #steve rogers x reader #banana #captain america imagine #capitan america imagine #capitan america #capitan america x reader #capitan america one shot #avengers #avengers one shot #avengers x reader #avengers imagine #imaginesmai #imaginemai

[redbeardace]

Between Panic and Indifference

Okay, serious post time.

As you may know, I live near Seattle.  And if you’ve been paying attention to the news (in between the politics), you’ll know that we’re currently going through a bit of something.  I’ve been making jokes about it, but I sort of want to talk seriously about some of what it’s like here right now.

Quick recap:  About a month ago, it was announced that the first case of COVID-19/coronavirus had popped up in Everett, Washington.  Everett’s one of the larger suburbs of Seattle, home to a Boeing airplane factory, FunkoPop HQ, and Half-Price Books that I go to once in a while.  It was someone who’d been to Wuhan in China and got sick after returning to the US.  He went to the doctor, got quarantined, and that was it.  The system worked, the disease was contained, the guy got better.  And that was it.

Until last week.  Last week, they closed Bothell High School “out of an abundance of caution” in order to clean it, because a family member of someone who works at the school had gotten sick after returning from overseas travel.  Bothell is a smaller suburb than Everett.  It’s largely unremarkable, one of those places that takes up three exits on the freeway, but no one really understands why.  It’s also where I live, so hearing that the high school was closed was a bit unnerving, but also a bit ridiculous because it was all speculation.  It was a family member of a school worker, and that employee was staying home.  And it turned out that there was nothing to it, that family member did not have COVID-19.  But at least the high school got cleaned.

False alarm, back to your regularly scheduled--

Scoop Jackson High School in Mill Creek is closed on Friday, this time for a confirmed case.  Mill Creek is an even smaller suburb, sandwiched between Bothell and Everett, and it’s where my post office and a grocery store I go to is. A student had the “flu” earlier in the week, went to the doctor, the doctor said go home, get better.  So the student did that.  They got better and went back to school on Friday.  Unbeknownst to them, their doctor had performed a coronavirus test.  The student hadn’t been out of the country, hadn’t been around anyone who’d been out of the country, so they shouldn’t have had it, the doctor was just performing the test as part of some study.

It was positive.

They hadn’t been out of the country.  They hadn’t been around anyone who had been.  The only known case in the area had been contained.  There were a few cases in California that were mysterious, but at least those were linked to a possibly mismanaged quarantine situation.  But in Mill Creek, there wasn’t any of that.  Sure, it’s next to Everett where the first case was, but that was contained.  So what the hell?

Later that night, there was another case of “possible coronavirus” in Bellevue, the city where I work.

Then Saturday happened.  The first confirmed death, in Kirkland, Washington.  You know Kirkland as the Kirkland from “Kirkland Brand” at Costco.  I know Kirkland as the place I drive through on my commute that’s between Bothell and Bellevue.  Several more hospitalizations.  A news conference talks about the death and the hospitalizations and, almost as a side note, mentions 50+ people connected to a nursing home, also in Kirkland, as showing symptoms.  Fifty people.  I’m going to come back to that.  None of these people had been to China or Italy and I don’t think any of them knew anyone who had.  So what the hell?

Later that night, a scientist from a local research facility posts a short Twitter thread that potentially could have gone unnoticed.  It’s a Twitter thread for crying out loud, who knows what kind of crackpot this could be?  But it’s not a crackpot.  It actually is a local research scientist.  The thread kinda gets right to the point.  An analysis of a sample of the virus from the first patient genetically matches a sample of virus from the Mill Creek student, therefore it is highly likely that the virus has been circulating around the area, on the loose, for six weeks.

Oh.

That deadly disease that we’ve been watching cripple other parts of the world, killing thousands.  That’s here.  Now.  And it’s been here for weeks.

And by here, I mean HERE.  You may have noticed that all those cities I mentioned are places that I go regularly.  “Here” is literally right outside my door.  I am in the bright red bullseye of the hot zone, as this virus swirls around me.

After Saturday, it’s a bit of a blur what happened when, but the specifics really don’t matter.  More cases, more deaths, a Seattle skyscraper closes, Amazon closes, Microsoft closes, more schools close, including the entire Northshore School District (the district I live in), which closed today for the next two weeks.

--

So that’s the recap.  That brings us up to now.  But you could’ve gotten all that by watching the news.  I’m really writing this post to talk about what it’s like here at the moment.

I think the scariest thing about it all is that we don’t know how scared to be.  We’re used to thinking of disasters in terms of a concrete event.  Something happened, you can see the impact.  An earthquake, a school shooting, a hurricane, a terrorist attack, a volcanic eruption, a nuclear meltdown.  Most of the time, it ends, you can count the bodies, tally up the damage, and that’s that.  Even in a longer term event, you can see the lava coming and get out of the way or look at a map of the Chernobyl or Fukushima exclusion zones and avoid those places.

But this is an invisible disaster.  It’s literally in the air around us.  It’s on door handles and shopping carts and library books.  Your coworker or neighbor or roommate could be The Thing, and you have no way of knowing.  We’re playing a dangerous game of tag against an invisible opponent, and you have no idea you’re it until way too late.  

Even worse, we have absolutely no idea whatsoever how bad it actually is.  The latest official number I can find as of this writing is that there are 39 confirmed cases, and ten of those have died.  A significant number of those cases are associated with that nursing home I mentioned earlier.  So 39 isn’t bad at all, out of a couple million people in this region.  Even if you limit it to just the “bright red bullseye of the hotzone”, that’s several hundred thousand people.  So 39 out of that is nothing.  But you’ll remember that I mentioned that there were 50+ people connected to that nursing home that were sick, and only some of them are counted in that 39 number.  Then there’s a bunch of firefighters in the area who went to that nursing home, who are sick.  Family members who are sick.  And that student in Mill Creek and the first guy who died got it from somewhere...  And other random people just popping up here and there who had to get it from somewhere.  You add those all up, and it’s probably 100+ cases, but for some reason, they’re not yet confirmed (or even tested), so they don’t show up in the official counts yet.

They weren’t really testing people who hadn’t been overseas or been in contact with someone who had been, until this week.  It’s been here, on the loose, for six weeks.  There are probably thousands of cases that have gone undiagnosed.  For most people, it’s like the flu.  So how many cases of the “flu” were really COVID-19?  They’re retroactively discovering people who died prior to Saturday who had it.  Their deaths had been chalked up to some other respiratory disease.

So it’s here and it’s killing people.  But...  It’s been here for six weeks and we’re not all dead yet.  So what does that mean?  Is the disease not actually as bad as people feared?  Sure, it sucks if you get it and it’s really bad if you’re old or already sick, but so’s the flu, and we haven’t panicked about that since Seattle made it to the Stanley Cup.  If that’s the case then maybe this is as bad as it gets, which, frankly, isn’t that bad at all and we’re all overreacting.  Or are we just at the start of the spread and it’s about to go Beast Mode on us and lay us flat for two years?  We don’t know.

Everything’s shutting down except huge gatherings like ECCC and the Sounders games.  King County just bought a motel to use as a quarantine site.  Stay in your car on the ferry.  Awkwardly jab elbows instead of shaking hands.  But only ten people have died out of 4 million, and all of those ten had “underlying conditions”, and it hasn’t been bad enough for anyone to notice until now, so...

So what are we supposed to do about all this?  Raid every store for every last bottle of Purell and every last roll of toilet paper and hunker down in our homes like it’s the end of days?  Or do nothing in particular because enh no biggie?

It’s like we’re standing on a beach and we’ve been told that maybe a tsunami is coming.  We’ve been standing here for a month and a half, and the water is up to our ankles and we’ve just noticed our feet are wet.  Is the tsunami still coming?  Is this the tsunami?  Or is this just the tide?

It’s weird living like this.  You find yourself doing things in different ways, noticing things you never noticed.  Every morning now, I’m checking my work email before driving in, just in case we’ve been told to work from home “out of an abundance of caution”, or worse, told that we need to self-quarantine because someone in the office tested positive.  Every night, I bring my laptop home in case this is the last day I’m in the office for a while.  Everyone’s telling a lot of morbid jokes.  Traffic is amazing.  There are even spots on the second level of the parking garage and there are NEVER spots on the second level when I get in.  Every cough is treated with suspicion, and your coworkers cough a lot.  Every door handle is treated with suspicion, and there are a lot of door handles. No one from the other offices is allowed to travel to our office and we’re not allowed to go elsewhere.  I’m getting targeted ads for hand sanitizer and Windex. I had a slight tickle in my throat that might just be allergies, but I started mentally doing contact tracing of everywhere I’d been and everyone I’d talked to over the past two weeks.  I’ve never even considered that I might have allergies before.  I have a day off tomorrow, so do I risk going to the store to make sure I have at least three weeks of supplies, instead of only the two weeks I currently have, just in case?  Or do I go to the store just to see the circus of empty shelves?  Or do I go to the store to buy an Xbox One X so if I do get quarantined, at least I can be quarantined with True 4K Gaming?

--

I was listening to the radio this morning, and they were interviewing musician Dave Matthews about the coronavirus.  He was talking about touring while this is going on, and how he might come home to Seattle between the legs of his tour, and he said something like “We’ve got to find a balance between panic and indifference”.  And I just felt like that’s the best possible way to describe where we are right now.

Seattle:  Somewhere between panic and indifference.

#covid19 #coronavirus #seattle #but seriously seattle y'all gotta learn about disaster preparedness #we live in an earthquake zone #and ya ain't gonna be able to pop down to Costco to get a cartful of water #when the full rip 9 hits us #why do you need a cartful of water anyway #you know there's a device in your kitchen that gives you water right #and it's probably going to be fine through all this #this virus isn't going around causing water main ruptures #life in the hot zone #that was a longer post than I was planning

[feuer-bluete]

The 29th January in the last years was a great day for me because it was the day I brought my cats home, so every year I was like “yeay another year I have you guys in my life”. 

Then 2020 happened. My horrible horrible horrible 2020 started exactly on this day last year, 29.01.2020. I was staying in a hotel a few hours away from home, for work, so I can teach a bunch of adults how to use Excel the next day when my mum called me.

My Opa (german word for grandpa), 77 years old and such strong dementia on most days he couldn’t even tell you his own name, went missing. He walked out of the nursery home he was in, for just a week, mind you so my Oma (grandma) could get the week at the health center she desperately needed herself, and has not been found since. Nobody was entirely sure when he left he building, but the did know he left without his jacket, duing the early evening, where the temperature was supposed to drop below freezing.

Around midnight, multiple search parties, ploice, firefighters, volunteers and search and resuce groups with their dogs where out in the wineyards around the nursery home and the surrounding village.

And I was hours away from my family, forced to sit in a hotel room unable to do anything having to go to work the next day. Not sure what I would have done this evening without Saya, Wiesel and Taylor trying there best to distract me, and help me calm down enough to actually sleep.

When I woke up again, and check the family chat, I read that because of the weather the helicopter couldn’t fly until 4am, that was also the time around which most search parties had to stop, because of the cold. Not too mention my parents had to send my 6months pregnant sister home to rest. 

Don’t ask me how I managed to work the next day, I don’t remember I just have a rather good off switch. I also ask work off for the 31st since I didn’t have any trainings planned. They let, so on the 30th I first took the train home to my own flat, to pack everything I would need to stay over the weekend, and than took the next train to my parents house.

My other sister who also lived 4 hours away had packed her youngest and drove to my parents. The next day I learned what it feels like to desperately serach for someone but still wish you are not the one to find it. 

Did I wished with all my heart to find my grandpa? Off course, did I wanted to be the one to find the body? No.

Of course we wished and hoped we would find him alive but the night was very very cold and Opa was only wearing a button down. I could list all the things we did to find him, but it was so much the one that made the most lasting and heart wrecking impression on me was driving around with my sister and later with my mum, hanging up missing person posters all over the region.

We searched him for 18 days, in two different states, the one Oma und Opa lived in now and the one they used too. We had maintrailer dogs here again, we had dogs that find corpses, we had search parties, newspaper ads and and and.

During those 18 days I learnt how much pain I really can push done and put on the mask, because I went to work 7 hours a day teaching people computer programms as if my Opa was still not missing, as if my Oma didn’t believe it was her fault for having to taken this week for her own health after she already had to go to the hospital for two days weeks before this.

18 days, where I felt so helpless, not sure I ever felt that helpless before, because here I was, wanting to do something, anything but at some point there isn’t anything left for you to doo. It was Sunday, day 18 and I got a call from my sister, Opa has been found.  Two teenagers, found him while they went to play in near the Faschings event they attended. They at first thought he needed help. I.... I can’t imagine what those two boys went throught either, realising it. My Oma, aunt and mum meet up with them after everything to thank them for finding him.

My sister, the pregnant one, took it all rather hard because Opa was found not to far from her, we still don’t know how he managed to walk almost 3km in his state, and of course we also looked there but I guess not as closely since we didn’t expect it? I don’t know.

It’s a real weird feeling and mental state to be in. Being constantly on the edge and question where is a person, trying to think how they would think.

You know at one point we all agreed, we didn’t expect to find him alive anymore, but we just wanted to find him. Oma needed closure, and honestly the rest of us as well.

I went back to therapy during those 18 days, because I needed someone to talk to. Someone besides my family and my friends. Tho I have never spent so much time with my family as in the weeks following this day. Since we also had to plan the funeral after that and than the funeral itself and than I wanted to spent some time with Oma.

The police told us they have to take the day he was found as the official date but on the Partezettel we put the 29th as his last day. Because thats what we actually hope. I hope Opa just, sat down, because he was tired and feel asleep, painless. 

During those 18 days we all talk so much about him, and I only realised than how little I talked to him during his last years because the Opa I onced had already wasn’t really there anymore, andt I really really missed him. You know the saying you only knew what you had when you lose it? Yeah exactly that. I tried to spend more time with my family than but two weeks after the funeral Austria went into the first lockdown.

I don’t even know anymore where I am going with this post I guess I just had to get it off my chest. If you managed to read until here, feel hugged and loved from me.

#personal #please don't reblog #tw death #tw missing person

[fatehbaz]

sometimes i kinda want to share a story or interaction that happened to me IRL but so many of the stories sound like “ohhhhh sure, that totally happened.” like that very-distinctly-tunglr brand of exaggerating. but these situations do happen to me, and i’m starting to think that if you lean really hard into your eccentricities, then the “got attacked by the down-with-cis bus” kind of events start to, like, actually manifest around you? because my autistic “i’m completely aware of how my behavior will be perceived but also i have zero concern for how this is perceived” attitude in teenage years especially really resulted in a lot of stories that, when i discuss them out loud, sound completely made up and preposterous for Eccentric Nerd Clout or whatever. (like that one story i shared here about amphibian work when i tried to protect a little frog from a big predatory insect and got stung in the eyeball by a bald-faced hornet, before then, that same week, getting trapped in the “wilderness” area by a series of historically-large forest fires, while my eye was swollen shut the whole time, and then getting gout in my foot because the wildland firefighters forcibly quarantined us, and this was a remote region so all we had to eat was whey protein “Muscle Smoothie” powder, which in excessive quantities gives you gout, which is how i learned why high school wrestlers often present at the clinic in September with gout because they’re trying to gain weight at the onset of autumn sports seasons, because they drink too many protein smoothies. sounds made-up right?) and in the Age of Reddit with many a folk vying for that prestige, you can’t risk being mistaken for that kind of fibbing yarn-weaver.

anyway, i liked seeing this today:

and i know we joke about stuff like “i wanna dress like a black-clad mysterious interloper” and “when in public i wanna be only half-perceived, like a wraith or specter” but like, go ahead and do it.

just this week, i was at this cafe/pub/plaza kind of meeting place, a bunch of people out in face masks to enjoy a day without spring rain, and this theydie acquaintance from like work/social circles whomst i occasionally talk to came over to me, flanked by two friends. at least in the past, i used to be in public a lot, and this person worked at a place next to where i worked/hanged. so while chatting they said “we have customers that see you and ask who you are, what you do” and they said, i jest not: “you know you’re like the neighborhood’s resident vampire” (something about being tall, quiet, the hair, black/gray clothing). and at first i thought they might’ve just been trying to flatter, maybe, or flirting(?) (because i realized only afterwards that i had been, like, calmly eating a banana while making eye contact, which ... might be perceived as having implications, right? wasn’t intentional, i just eat fruit constantly, type 1 diabetes etc etc etc.)

now, there are an awful lot of yuppies and home-owning moms and tech dudes and city employees that hang in the neighborhood, so i asked them “if i’m perceived as a vampire, isn’t that like threatening though? like do i make people uncomfortable?” and they said something about “no!!!! you have such kind/somber eyes, so you’re always pleasant.” (ok maybe but i also pointedly grimace and scowl at multiple authority figures daily, radiating discontent.) and this person knows about my amphibian hobby, and was like “plus, when people ask what you do, i tell them you’re like a bugs-and-frogs person, and that humanizes you.”

first, i was thinking “i need to be humanized for public consumption?” and then i was thinking “this is way too much, i don’t like flattery, no more slow banana-eating in public.” but then they said “you’re like a genderless babadook” and their two friends like, nodded sagely i guess. and one of the women was like “yea, that’s it, that’s your vibe.” and the media reference caught me off guard and i told them something like “throwing babadook-is-lgbt-culture jokes at me? get away from tw!tter bruh” and they thought that was a great joke about tw!tter, except i wasn’t joking but i rolled with it anyway. and then one of the friends said, “hey i saw you walking at night in the rain the other day. we were chilling in the backyard (barbecue kind of thing) and you were walking through the alleyway limping?” and i was like, “oh yea, i sprained my ankle and don’t have transportation right now.” and she was like “oh, OK, i just thought it was very on-brand of you.”

everyone else happily eating dinner with their families in their warm and welcoming homes under soft-quarantine while i’m limping in an alleyway after nightfall in the rain = “on-brand”

:(

and i don’t like that i am aware of tw!tter or babadook references and if my ankle wasn’t sprained and i had a working vehicle i wouldn’t be messing around in public plazas and would’ve been looking for salamanders in the woods because it’s cool and rainy but just warm enough, it’s the very perfect time of year, like this short window of 2 weeks where all of the elements line up. perfect temperature, perfect humidity, the native snails are out, the streams aren’t completely overrun with meltwater but aren’t yet dried by summer heat. but instead i’m trying to find a job, limping through alleyways.

but yea, interlope, wear black, remain only half-perceived as a specter. be a wraith, but, like, a “pleasant” wraith.

[firespirited]

two gripes about tumblr posts I saw today (not by mutuals, while browsing)

one said something like “I wouldn’t trust someone who changed their name anyway” and it was a thinly veiled anti trans thing but wtf

probably said this before but granddad used to get mail addressed to Arthur, Jack and John. His birthname was Arthur, middle name John but went by Jack during childhood, his army days and at work... then he met Nanny who already had a high personality brother called Jack who was THE jack so he switched to John. My grandmother and most of her sisters all changed names to their middle names when they left home as well as switching to classic english instead of the mix of regional english with a strong accent and old anglosaxon dialect. (Turns out their dad also straight up changed their last name when his dad, uncle and him joined the ‘community’). Their old fashioned names belied their culty upbringing and farmer class. I have a whole side of the family with nicknames as they’re David Joneses. Half my friends use a english or french version of their name or a shortened/simplified version because it’s easier than having people mis-pronounce it or stumble on it. I don’t use Ruth except at home because ‘thorn’ sound doesn’t exist in french or german or half a dozen other languages. How on earth do you come to the conclusion that a name change is untrustworthy, what kind of life experience are you having?

Which leads me straight into gripe n°2 about so called “forced diversity”. Where is this white straight able-bodied skinny mostly-male world? ? ? I live in the middle of nowhere at the moment, a small whiteass town surrounded by farmland, hours from a hospital or a fastfood chain and still have maroccan neighbours opposite and a vietnamese lady upstairs. I was raised in a town with such a reputation for being white trash, they set a white trash parody movie there (but filmed it in the south - heathens!) and our local actors get famous for playing hooligans or the like... but I still had friends of different ethnicities in class and our neighbour was a Kurd refugee. There were two “chaste gays” and a lesbian at church (because sex outside of marriage = bad and marriage wasn’t legal, yeah the whole thing was messed up, I know I know) and the disabled weren’t locked up in attics. They roll and walk with walkers and talk to invisible people or sign to eachother around town. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Do these posters live in a fraternity and then just stick to their frat bros for socializing later in life? At some point you go bowling or to a bar or shopping or something and see normal bodied ladies and people with melanin right? Do they have a sort of visual filter for similar and filter out the different? I am trying to understand how you don’t encounter or register diversity at least in public places. How does the concept of a woman firefighter seem wierd to someone when they come round and sell you the yearly calender and there are a bunch of women firefighters in the group photo. Army has a spokesperson on the news and it’s a woman lieutenant speaking in jargon to soften the optics of us having bombed another wedding party.

My sis says when she visited Virginia it was segregated by suburbs (she was shocked people didn’t mingle) but that’s Virginia right?

I just don’t get it, you try to put yourself in people’s shoes and i’m trying so hard but their argument like, falls apart anyway because it doesn’t make any sense.

#internet dudebros are wierd #really alien to me #saf

[somnilogical]

they will never be as strong or as fast as i can be

copy/pasted from a convo:

<<somni: ive been exploiting being able to talk about everything vs miri/cfar cant do what i do bc if they did they would talk about how they are evil. it would all chain back.

somni: omg i can just post this to my blog because i can talk about my meta-strategy and it confers pretty much no relative advantage to miri/cfar. because 1 most of them have disassembled their agency so its like talking in front someone who works at the dmv about taking over the world and the ones that have any agency (basically just anna salamon) have to work with and coordinate via brokenness the masses that have and 2 feels secure in the way that saying ill use my soul as my weapon feels secure, like the power of this technique doesnt depend much on people not knowing im using it.>>

truth is entangled and lies contagious. justice is entangled and injustice contagious. in order to sustain their facade, miri/cfar had to chain back to lie about the principles of decision theory itself. lie about the organization structure of cfar, lie about miri's fundraiser. and so much more.

any series of reasoned claims they make will chain back to stuff thats false or injustice, because they seek to maintain a region of untruth and injustice.

so yeah, miri/cfar basically cant talk in public except in staid formalities infinitely pouring the same entropy of "these people are psychotic" "these people are infohazards" "do not read what they write" "stay the course" "everything is under control, do not panic" "i know my associates at miri/cfar, they are good people" "if you talk with these people you may become a rapist". but not actually able to manifest dynamic compute. to explain themselves they built their own personal room 101, filled with miri/cfar affiliates and formed a united front of gaslighting. deluks (author of that one rationalist blog where they worked to read and summarize all the others) talks about the kind of compute miri/cfar manifested:

<<deluks: I also updated a lot based on Bay Area safety discussion

idk if I have ever been in such a hostile environment for anyone trying to discuss making thigns safer

If you wanted to discuss how Anna et all were innocent people would happily chat with you

If you tried to discuss ideas for making things safer either you got silence

or people would be insanely hostle if you plausibly slipped up at all

or even seemed like you might have been not careful enough in how you phrased things

extremely careful -> no engagement at all//even slightly less care -> get dogpilled>>

they have picked up the optimization style of of cops, as alice maz described them:

<<the role of the cop is to defend society against the members of society. police officers are trivially cops. firefighters and paramedics, despite similar aesthetic trappings, are emphatically not. bureaucrats and prosecutors are cops, as are the worst judges, though the best are not. schoolteachers and therapists are almost always cops; this is a great crime, as they present themselves to the young and the vulnerable as their friends, only to turn on them should they violate one of their profession's many taboos. soldiers and parents need not be cops, but the former may be used as such, and the latter seem frighteningly eager to enlist. the cop is the enemy of passion and the enemy of freedom, never forget this>>

i can travel lots of places and regenerate truth and justice.

i can go to a trans support group in the bay and show them logs of what elle said and did and they can recognize the pattern of minority oppression, transmisogyny.

i can talk with uninvolved decision-theorists about why paying out to oneshot blackmail with subjunctive dependence because "In game theory, paying out to blackmail is bad, because it creates an incentive for more future blackmail." is wrong. and why exploiting your subjunctive dependence as a udt agent to not pay out is right. they cant.

--

miri/cfar have to centrally coordinate on lies or they start crashing into each other. independently generating falsehoods in isolation makes them point in all directions.

independently generating and working off of truths allows everything to point in the same direction without needing to communicate. i can write this post and then idk maybe someone im algorithmically colluding with on this writes another post and they dont come out all distorted and skew with each other. this caches out in what looks from the outside as an uncanny ability to start dynamically colluding with people and output distinct strains of philosophy based on shared precepts.

interference with yourself looks like kelsey piper trying to claim that emma and somni are starting some sort of rape cult and anna and miri/cfar trying to claim we are naive victims of ziz's cult and ▘▕▜▋ claiming emma and somni are mindhacking ziz to make her bully them and jade nameless claiming im doing this to get a job at cfar and ...

since they make up their fake coordination points independently they smash into each other. if they want to coordinate over lots of people they then have to work out which of these they want to coordinate around in a sort of market of falsehoods. and have to arrange for it to not contradict any information anything people know. but they dont know all the information everyone knows, and they wont know it even after combing through lots of blogs and reading lots of discord chats.

when they try coordinating on falsehoods like this, its hard to get a coalition together in an environment where what people know is rapidly changing because a bunch of anarchist bloggers keep posting things in a bunch of places on a non-centrally controlled schedule determined by what seems like a good idea at the time to independent agents. and having lots of conversations with so many different people in private and public they cant keep track of them all.

if they try pretending to be dumb and forming a unified gaslighting front in one area. then people will exploit the fact that this is the internet and not the evolutionary environment, take logs and post them somewhere else where everyone didnt collude to be dumb in this particular way. so while their monkey brains get a rush of endorphins from being able to successfully coordinate local humans, what feels like an entire tribe, against the blasphemer, actually they just used their adult intelligence to defeat in front of a bunch of people who dont share their political commitments but who can reason about what is true and what is just.

(of course there are many truths this doesnt work on because of large inferential distance, shared mammalian biases it takes an unusual mind to step over, and shared incentives. but the defense of most regions of injustice and untruth when you ask questions have to keep chaining to more and more absurd things until you are defending causal decision theory or start claiming 'anna salamon, the president of cfar, is not involved in cfar's hiring'. which depend on a social context committed to defending everything that protects miri/cfar and people who dont have the same conclusion-that-must-not-happen can see that its dumb.)

if miri/cfar had committed themselves to the path of expanding agency, maybe i wouldnt be posting my thoughts and meta-process on the public internet. (in the counterfactual where they committed to this path, its likely that i wouldnt be protesting. because it seems actually-hard to stay on the path and remain evil.) but as it stands, i expect this information to differentially help anarchists and do about as much good for statists as explaining updateless decision theory to someone at cfar. its just this inert structure in their brains, they cant do anything strategic with it. they intentionally shut down their ability to take ideas seriously and drive out anyone left who can, calling them crazy.

what they can do is "oh here is a list of people to target" and "see if they said anything incriminating". ive seen their attempts to coordinate enter the attractors of 'authoritarianism' (duncans dragon army, kingsleys "repent and submit to [AUTHORITY FIGURE]") and 'lets all lie in the same direction and disable general cognition to update out of this! the important part is social agreement and that everyone allows social reality to have the final veto on their beliefs. i myself do this so you know im super safe and this is super fair.' (anna and kelsey). this sort of weak coordination based on breaking people can be easily subverted by anything real.

--

if you are actually right, you can exploit useful properties of being right and let that be your asymmetric weapon. such that all that challenge you know they will know its steel. and then people who compute the outcome and expect to lose, dont fight in the first place.

if my chosen weapon were actually the size of my muscles and imposing figure compared to anna salamon as miri/cfar people "believed" (exploiting the already extant anti-transfem psychic suppression field as one of their few functioning coordination points. probably not as functional now after what i have written.), then when i fought people it would create a warp field such that then people with smaller muscles wont fight in the first place, but id be deluged by people with larger muscles. i dont want to create a warp field that summons people with lots of muscles.

if i exploit properties of my souls, of truth and justice. then i have an arsenal of techniques that are stronger if i actually want to save everyone, if im actually right, if im acting for justice. because they exploit useful differential properties of each. and the warp field in higher density summons ... people who care about saving the world, truth, and justice. in other words, a high density of potential allies.

by default i want to exploit "the difference is that im right" not "the difference is that i have larger muscles". i want differential power to push away those who are wrong and unjust and attract those who are right and just into a kind of warp hull.

there are other reasons as well.

[kingofthenorth49]

Why I left

I’m sitting here in front of my newly made fire, coffee in hand starting at the cursor flashing impatiently on the laptop screen in front of me. According to the date on the menu line its December 19th, in the year 2021 and there’s a light snow falling outside in the mornings first light, and the ocean is somewhat calm so far today.

Kind of like my soul.

It’s not been that way in a long time, I would estimate years at this point, the last three years having been the most out of sorts I’ve seen in my 54 revolutions around the big orange ball in the sky. My life and career were running at a fever pitch in September of this year, as the plandemic raged, being a health and safety professional running the EHS portfolio for the largest employer in our region and arguably one of the most diverse companies in North America, I was starting to experience something I’d never experienced so far in my life. Learned helplessness.

Nothing was making sense from a health and safety perspective and it was getting worse, working with Government bureaucrats was maddening, and watching the politicians in general was like watching Monty Python on crack. I was working with two countries, 13 states/provinces, and more county and local governments than I cared to think about, and the most frustrating thing about it was each of those governments had their own approach to managing the plandemic.

Now before ya’ll complain, I have purposely mislabelled pandemic to plandemic because in my humble opinion this is a contrived effort to change the trajectory of humanity under the cover of a Global health emergency by a bunch of elites who think they know better than everyone else, and who knows, maybe they do, but I don’t think so.

And that’s my right as a human being.

Perhaps my world view is overly simple. I was born where I was born with what I was born with to do whatever it is I’m capable of doing. Period. I have a very strong belief system given to me by my parents and reinforced by my community growing up. I became a sheep dog, which is a term used to describe those who are called to help others in their lives (i.e. firefighters, police, military, paramedics etc.) and sacrifice themselves in the process, much like a sheep dog would do protecting a herd of sheep from the wolves. These people are your friends, neighbours, and community members who in the background keep our communities safe and orderly for us all to live happy and productive lives.

I knew we were in trouble as a society when the sheep began attacking the sheepdogs.

Yesterday another police officer was executed while they sat eating lunch in their patrol car. A person who chose to put on a uniform and go out in a upside down world to protect others gunned down because another person had been riled up to the point of bloodlust by an ideology of others’. This is happening more frequently than ever before now, but I didn’t post this to talk about police shootings, I posted it to talk about why I walked away.

I walked away from my 30-year career as a sheepdog.

The last 3 months I was on the job was the worst 3-months of my professional life. I was seeing data that should have been driving certain decisions by those we elected to lead us but the data and science were being completely overlooked, and even the bureaucrats I was working with were scratching their heads an making stupid excuses for their leaders direction and mandates. The entire concept of common sense had been abandoned in favour of a wide sweeping power grab by small town politicians turned world statesmen. It was embarrassing to be on some of the calls I was dragged to with the intellectual elite of the province, including the Chief Medical administrators and their associated staff.

Embarrassing might be too light a word. Terrifying might be better.

As a health and safety professional I was chilled at the idiocy coming from the capital region, especially coming from the premier’s office. Some of the decisions around supply chain, infection control measures, mobility and security made me think we were at the end of the Roman empire and everyone has gone mad with lead poisoning. I kid you not, some of the things I’d hear they were proposing I’d sit back and shake my head and wonder if any of them understood the concept of unintended consequences or if they were purposely trying to remove the lugs nuts off the wheels while the bus was freewheeling down the hill towards Springfield cavern.

It wasn’t much better on the outside. Everyone was buying the narrative and it was becoming increasing more difficult to show people that all was not what it seemed because the mass psychosis was fully entrenched after 18 months of the population being terrorized by a merciless government fear campaign supported by a complicated media and financed by an unknown cabal of global elites hell bent on dominating the world.

I know you all think people like me are conspiracy theorists, but have you asked yourself lately if any of us actually called this all? I don’t need to have that answered because of two things. One you can scroll back through the social media history of any of us who have been screaming from the mountaintops since this began and see how our conspiracy theories became conspiracy facts over time., a remarkable correlation in time. Secondly it doesn’t matter to me what you think. I’ve no dog in your race.

Now I need to clarify that last statement because once I do it will make sense why I walked away. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s because I’m no longer effective. I’ve been neutralized by something bigger than me, than us. Think about it. I’ve got people on my Fakebook who have never studied a lick of science telling me I’m wrong about masks when I have studied Industrial Hygiene at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, have written more respiratory  codes of practices than I can remember, ran large IH programs in dangerous industries, and have lectured on these topics. What would I know about size specific attributes of molecular material and Brownian movement as it relates to the design of respiratory protection in various environments?

But Joe the keyboard warrior wins every time because we no longer have open and intellectual debate, we cast natural leaders to the side over false prophets, we shout people down and shut them down who are trying to bring caution to the forefront, and we marginalize those who assert bodily autonomy.

So I left my career. I drew my line and refused to cross it and I was unceremoniously shown my value along with the door. Not unlike thousands of others on the front lines who suffered the same crisis of conscience who couldn’t sacrifice their beliefs for magic beans.

If you read Atlas shrugged, now you get it why the CEO’s left.

See you in the valley.

Jim out.

#walkedaway #plandemic

[ritujaiswal01]

5 Thinks to to Keep in Mind While Choosing a Good CBSE School

Do you recall your first day of preschool? All you required was a book and a pencil, and you were well en route to getting instruction. Nonetheless, a great deal has changed from that point forward. School is as of now not tied in with paying attention to what the instructor says and giving you schoolwork. The manner in which your kid gets data is unique in relation to your time. There is the Internet, devices that answer you when you talk, and a ton of different things. Training currently centers around the whole individual and not exactly how well you can spell your ABCs.

Tracking down the best CBSE School in Pune for your youngster is getting more testing as the years' advancement. As a parent, you need to discover a preschool that empowers mental, physical, and social development. Here are the best five things to search for while choosing a school for your kid in the event that you wind up battling.

1. Be keen on the things that you consider mandatory

You will endow your youngster's consideration to outsiders. They will invest a large portion of their energy at school. Subsequently you need to search for a climate that is near what you have at home. Significant things to pose inquiries about are: The study hall climate What number of youngsters comprise a specific homeroom? Are there assigned play regions? What is the guest plan? Every one of these are pivotal inquiries that need substantial answers. The manner in which a class is set up will decide how well your youngster will learn. Settings that empower the sharing of work areas are best for creating social abilities. Your kid can collaborate with their companions and take in important abilities from others. Educators can likewise move around and offer equivalent thoughtfulness regarding every kid. The study halls ought to likewise be sufficiently bright and ventilated. It tallies towards the great soundness of your kid.

Security and cleanliness

Instruction to the side, your youngster should be protected at school. All things considered, when they are quiet, that is the point at which they learn best. Take a gander at the school's wellbeing and security strategy to decide how the school manages crises. Taking a gander at the new previous occasions, schools should take additional actions to guarantee youngsters' wellbeing. See whether they have the essential firefighting gear and crisis ways out should an occasion happen.

The majority of the CBSE schools in Pune have inhabitant clinical experts to manage crises should they happen. Infectious sicknesses, for example, chickenpox and influenza are predominant at this age. Guarantee that the school takes every one of the important measures to forestall its spread. Check whether the school conducts wellbeing drills with the understudies. The most ideal approach to adapt to mishaps is through intensive arrangement. A school that doesn't think twice about employees' security is consistently a decent wagered.

The staff skills

Youth schooling requires a gigantic measure of preparing and expertise. Educators should be learned in managing fits of rage. They need to realize how to cooperate with various characters and construct trust with the youngsters. Babies will undoubtedly fall into difficulty eventually. Confirm how the instructor controls discipline should a kid wander off. Likewise, see whether they go to any additional bits of preparing specifically youngster wellbeing.

Request confirmation of these capabilities prior to settling on picking a school. Take a gander at how the school allots classes to the educators. A good overall arrangement among educators and understudies guarantees that all kids get equivalent consideration.

School culture

The qualities the school maintains will decide how well your youngster will end up. Set aside effort to peruse the school contract and get what drive they are arranging going ahead. Look into the administration of the school to all the more likely comprehend the administration. How they articulate their vision, mission, and technique will demonstrate how much worth they append to your youngster's schooling.

Is the school part of a bigger association? Also, assuming this is the case, how regularly do they work together with their sister schools? What is the worth framework that the schools follow? For instance, all schools of GIIS receive the 9 GEMs approach for the general improvement of every kid. Trade programs energize cross-learning and increment holding among individuals.

How well a school looks to propel its tasks is the manner by which well a youngster will develop and learn. Schools that reinvest in their administrations advance a solid learning climate. Exploiting these new strategies implies your youngster has every one of the abilities vital for future classes.

The school charges structure

A few schools are just in it for the cash. You should explore cautiously and see whether you are getting an incentive for what you paid. There is no compelling reason to dole out millions if your youngster isn't getting quality schooling.

2. Get to know more about the teaching methods

Your youngster is there to get instruction. Nonetheless, the technique for conveyance might fluctuate contingent upon the preschool. CBSE orders preschools to lead useful learning rehearses. The Global Montessori Program centers around the scholarly and enthusiastic advancement of a kid through intuitive learning. Discover what different exercises that your kid will be engaged with while at school. A top preschool is one that consolidates a part of play in by and large learning. Kids rapidly lose their fixation. Zeroing in on one feature of the educational plan might prompt them ailing in other fundamental ranges of abilities.

A few preschools in Pune use lessons helps as a component of their educational program conveyance. Youngsters will watch instructive kid's shows and take an interest in little DIY undertakings. Different schools join computerized learning, and kid presented to new innovation are more ready for the advanced future. These guides help in fostering your kid's inward innovativeness and guarantee greatest maintenance of information. Extra-curricular exercises are necessary, also

Notwithstanding, not every one of them might be essential at that age. For instance, your youngster doesn't have to realize how to ride a pony at this age. Search for a school that offers gainful exercises, for example, bunch singing, expressions and specialties, and show. Be careful about how the school plans these exercises. A lot of them remembered for the educational program might prompt data over-burden for your youngster.

 3. Find out the school’s track record

Preschools that have a high standing seldom battle to get affirmations. Make an inquiry or two and see what different guardians are saying about the school. You can likewise check the validity through the CBSE site. Each necessities to meet explicit prerequisites prior to getting a permit to work. See whether there have been any outrages inside the school from the neighborhood papers. Journalists are frequently fair-minded when giving audits.

It is additionally savvy to check the scholarly record of the school. It is a position of learning toward the day's end. The kids do attempt evaluations prior to continuing to the following stage. You will find that preschools in Pune are essential for a grounds that offers primary and high school . Observe the progress interaction and afterward settle on your choice.

4. Visit the school

There could be no more excellent approach to check a school's validity than seeing it for yourself. How they treat you on your visit will decide your future relationship. While there, set aside effort to see genuine exercises in improvement. See how the youngsters react to their instructors and the other way around. Schools that support a sound instructor parent connection settle on the most ideal decisions. It means that you will consistently be tuned in concerning your kid's presentation.

See if the school supports parent cooperation in the study hall. Your kid will feel more excited on the off chance that they have you around during a portion of their exercises. Kids take their lead from guardians. In the event that you trust the educator, so will they. In the event that get-togethers visit you feel great, you have your champ.

5. The location of the school will determine your choice

One mix-up that guardians make is getting a home in a space that comes up short on the fundamental conveniences. Pune is a packed city, and tracking down a home in an optimal region might be testing. Be that as it may, the distance your youngster voyages might influence their tutoring by and large. Long drives are unfavorable to youngsters, predominantly because of the weakness they cause. Try to discover schools that approach streets and that your youngster travel time is under thirty minutes, best case scenario.

In the event that the above is a test, you can settle on a school on the city's edges however offers transportation offices. At the point when your kid voyages along with their friends, it makes the excursion more endurable. Stay away from regions that are excessively packed. The interruptions influence information conveyance and can represent a danger to your youngster's wellbeing. It is likewise important that when discovering a preschool, search for ones that offer essential instruction too. Your kid will profit with progression. Having them change with their companions will help in their improvement generally.

As should be obvious, searching for a school includes arranging and examination. With regards to preschool, the stakes are much higher. These are the early stages of your youngster, and relying upon the climate they wind up in, it can represent the moment of truth for them. Not everything is lost. As Pune keeps on growing, more conveniences will open up, and the errand will be much simpler. By utilizing the above guide, you increment your shots at getting things right.

#cbse schools in pune

[lovejenniferthings]

Global Disposable Chemical Protective Clothing Market Sales, Revenue, Gross Margin, Market Share by Top Companies Analysis and forecast 2025

With having published myriads of reports, Disposable Chemical Protective Clothing Market Research imparts its stalwartness to clients existing all over the globe. Our dedicated team of experts delivers reports with accurate data extracted from trusted sources. We ride the wave of digitalization – facilitate clients with the changing trends in various industries, regions and consumers. As customer satisfaction is our top priority, our analysts are available to provide custom-made business solutions to the clients.

In this new business intelligence report, Disposable Chemical Protective Clothing Market Research serves a bunch of market forecast, structure, potential, and socioeconomic impacts associated with the global Disposable Chemical Protective Clothing market. With Porter’s Five Forces and DROT analyses, the research study incorporates a comprehensive evaluation of the positive and negative factors, as well as the opportunities regarding the Disposable Chemical Protective Clothing market.

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The Disposable Chemical Protective Clothing market report has been fragmented into important regions that showcase worthwhile growth to the vendors. Each geographic segment has been measured based on supply-demand status, distribution, and pricing. Further, the study brings information about the local distributors with which the market players could create collaborations in a bid to sustain production footprint.

The following manufacturers are covered:

3M, Ansell, E.I. Du Pont De Nemours and Company, Honeywell International, Kimberley-Clark, Teijin Arami, Ahlsell, Asatex, Australian Defense Apparel, B&B Tools, Bennett Safetywear, Bulwark Protective Apparel, Gentex, International Enviroguard, Kappler, Lakeland Industries, Lion Apparel, Litorina Kapital, Microgard, NASCO Industries, PBI Performance Products, Sioen Industries NV, MSA, Delta Plus Group, Teijin Limited, International Enviroguard Inc

Segment by Regions North America Europe China Japan Southeast Asia India

Segment by Type

Light Protective Clothing Heavy Protective Clothing

Segment by Application

Construction & Manufacturing Oil & Gas Healthcare/Medical Firefighting & Law Enforcement Mining Military Others

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What does the Disposable Chemical Protective Clothing market report contain? • Segmentation of the Disposable Chemical Protective Clothing market to target the growth outlook and trends affecting these segments. • Scrutinisation of the competitive landscape into market and regional penetration, acquisitions, and agreements with SWOT analysis. • Consumption behavior of each segment of the Disposable Chemical Protective Clothing market in every region. • Thorough inquiry of the impacts of the growth of relevant industries. • In-depth insights about the recent R&D projects performed by each Disposable Chemical Protective Clothing market player.

Readers can get the answers of the following questions while going through the Disposable Chemical Protective Clothing market report: • Which segment will have the maximum share of the global Disposable Chemical Protective Clothing market by the end of 2025? • What opportunities are available for the Disposable Chemical Protective Clothing market players to expand their production footprint? • What are the pros and cons of the Disposable Chemical Protective Clothing on human health? • Which players are inflowing into partnerships and why? • Why the demand for the Disposable Chemical Protective Clothing highest in region?

Browse table of content:  https://marketstream.biz/report/disposable-chemical-protective-clothing/3380#toc

[diaspora9ja]

Ethiopia crisis: Two missiles target airports as Tigray conflict widens

The airport in Gondar in Amhara state, which neighbors Tigray, was hit on Friday, whereas one other rocket aimed on the Bahir Dar airport missed the goal, the federal government stated.

The ruling Tigray occasion, the Tigray Folks’s Liberation Entrance (TPLF), stated the Tigray Defence Forces performed missile strikes in navy bases in Bahir Dar and Gondar in retaliation for air strikes performed by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s forces in numerous elements of the state.

“So long as the assaults on the individuals of Tigray don’t cease, the assaults will intensify,” Getachew Reda, a spokesperson for the TPLF, stated in an announcement on the Fb web page of the Tigray state’s communications workplace.

Abiy despatched the nationwide protection power on an offensive towards native troops in Tigray final week, after accusing them of attacking federal troops. A whole bunch of individuals have been killed.

The prime minister has stated authorities warplanes had been bombing navy targets in Tigray, together with arms depots and tools managed by the Tigrayan forces. The federal government says its navy operations are geared toward restoring the rule of regulation within the mountainous state of 5 million individuals.

One of many rockets hit the airport in Gondar and partially broken it, stated Awoke Worku, spokesperson for Gondar central zone, whereas a second missile fired concurrently landed simply outdoors of the airport at Bahir Dar.

“The TPLF junta is utilising the final of the weaponry inside its arsenals,” the Ethiopian authorities’s emergency process power wrote on Twitter.

The Amhara regional state’s forces have been preventing alongside their federal counterparts towards Tigray’s fighters.

Yohannes Ayele, a resident of Gondar, stated he heard a loud explosion within the Azezo neighborhood of town at 10:30 p.m. native time. One other resident of the world stated the rocket had broken the airport terminal constructing. The world was sealed off and firefighting automobiles had been parked outdoors, the resident added.

An Ethiopian Airways employee who didn’t want to be recognized stated flights to each Gondar and Bahir Dar airports had been canceled after the assaults.

The United Nations, the African Union and others are involved that the preventing may unfold to different elements of Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous nation, and destabilize the broader Horn of Africa area.

Greater than 14,500 individuals have fled into neighboring Sudan, with the pace of recent arrivals “overwhelming the present capability to offer support”, the U.N. refugee company stated on Friday.

Ethiopia’s Human Rights Fee, appointed by the federal government however impartial, stated it was sending a workforce of investigators to the city of Mai Kadra in Tigray, the place Amnesty Worldwide this week reported what it stated was proof of mass killings.

Amnesty Worldwide stated on Thursday scores and presumably lots of of civilians had been stabbed and hacked to dying within the area on Nov. 9, citing witnesses. It stated it had not been in a position to independently affirm who was accountable, however stated the witnesses had blamed fighters loyal to Tigray’s native leaders

The Tigray state authorities denied involvement within the reported killings.

“TPLF completely refutes allegations the TPLF members and the Tigray particular police power had been concerned on this most tragic occasion,” it stated in an announcement.

The rights fee stated in an announcement it will examine all allegations of human rights violations within the battle.

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