Author: Brin

Anonymous asked: I will never be able to ethically be vaccinated (because by the time it’s my turn in the queue, variants will mean everyone has to be vaccinated again, whee), so I’m kind of resigning myself to never seeing anyone I care about ever again. And I can deal with that *except* for people like you constantly reminding me that even feeling bad about being alone for the next 3-5-10 years means I’m morally evil.

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

Okay, let me try this one more time:

Here is a link to a respirator base unit: https://www.amazon.com/3M-Facepiece-Respirator-Respiratory-Protection/dp/B008MCUT86

Here is a link to a reputable dealer in larger packs (6 pairs) of P100 filters: https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-20007/Reusable-Respirators/3M-7093-Hard-Shell-Particulate-Filter-P100

Here are semi-reputable links to dealers in smaller packs (3 pairs, 1 pair) of P100 filters: https://www.amazon.com/3M-2091-Particulate-Filter-Pairs/dp/B00KYX8JBU, https://www.amazon.com/3M-50051131070009-Particulate-Filter-2091/dp/B07571LKP4  Counterfeits occasionally slip into the Amazon warehouses: try the filters on when you get them, and if you can still smell anything while wearing them, demand a replacement.

(I gave American links because statistically those are probably the most useful: if you’d like help finding links for other countries, let me know and I will help you look.)

A P100 respirator offers slightly *more* protection to the wearer than the vaccines do. Since people who don’t *have* COVID-19 can’t *spread* COVID-19, this also prevents you from infecting others; for even greater protection of others, tape a layer of cloth over the valve on the bottom of the respirator.

If a filter falls off, it means it wasn’t screwed on tightly enough: I had the same problem my first time, but now that I’ve screwed them on tighter they stay put. A single set of filters can last for months as long as it doesn’t get wet: the way a filter wears out is that it gets clogged with fumes from the construction work you’re (presumably) *not* doing, so as long as you can still breathe through it and it hasn’t gotten wet beyond the occasional raindrop, you’re good. (Note: the ULine link is to water-resistant filters, which are hard to find on Amazon.)

Yes, you won’t be able to eat and drink indoors with your friends, and ideally you should take a break every hour or so to go outside and drink something because filtered air is quite dry, but you can have physical presence.

—

(Edit, re: tags: you know what, I *am* going to write a broader public-service-announcement version of this. If you were thinking of reblogging this post for the info, please wait and I will update you with a better-for-reblogging version when I have finished writing it.)

(Edit 2: here)

Tags:

#covid19 #illness tw #vaccines #the more you know #I disagree with your narrative but I don’t think I can talk you out of it #instead let’s try granting it and talking about how you can *still* make things work #@everyone: feel free to treat this as a respirator PSA #if there is interest I can write a broader respirator PSA with less negativity involved #I said I would never write another Tumblr-hosted OP but for something this important I can probably make an exception #anon hate cw? #tales from the askbox

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

titaniumelemental:

titaniumelemental:

The thing that’s frightened me about the COVID restrictions from the very beginning was a lack of the idea that the mental suffering from social restrictions was something worth balancing with the intended effects. Not that it necessarily does outward the benefit, just that it was at least worth considering. Instead you either got people totally dismissive of the danger of the virus, or people saying “how could you think about [need for human contact phrased to sound as frivolous as possible] when people are dying because it of it?!”

But the thing is, everyone not only accepts some level of risk for themselves, but also accepts some level of risk for other people. That amount isn’t ever zero. In 2019, I had contact with a lot of people that could have potentially spread influenza. I got my flu shot as always, I washed my hands the normal amount, but I did not become a hermit. Now you could argue that my selfish desire to see multiple friends in my apartment at the same time was increasing the possibility of other vulnerable people catching the flu. Didn’t I think about how as much as these people mattered to me I should be putting the needs of others first? But I didn’t, and in that situation no one expected me to.

We are not in that situation now. The magnitude of that risk is radically higher and that’s why I’ve continued to live a radically altered life. But I plan to someday inch back towards the old thing, and we’re all going to have to figure out how much and when. It’s going to be more complicated than treating “your actions affect other people” as a trump card that justifies any and all restrictions.

My lingering, probably paranoid fear since last spring has been: if people around me accept the precedents that anything that puts other people at any increased risk is something you shouldn’t be able to do, and that wanting to be in the same room with people you like is something trivial that no one is willing to stand up for, then what? That sounds like a system of social norms where you let scrupulousity-brain write the rules. So if people don’t actually believe those two ideas (and I don’t think many do) I’d appreciate it if more were willing to say it out loud.

And the point is that I don’t know what an acceptable level of risk to put other people in is, I don’t have numbers, and I get why no one wants to have this conversation because admitting you accept risk to be higher than zero makes you sounds like a horrible person. But we have to acknowledge it some time, or I’m afraid we’ll end up in a situation where you’re expected to feel low-level guilty about any people you interact with the way you’re supposed to about unethical consumption under capitalism or not being sufficiently critical of the problematic media you enjoy. (Which is to say, people whose brains work a certain way will feel low-level guilty about it all the time and others will let it run off their backs and appear to have no comprehension of what the other group feels when they bring it up.)

…what does *the value of other people* have to do with anything? Anti-plague measures are taken for one’s *own* sake, directly and/or to protect [people such that it would suck for you if they got hurt].

The thing that horrifies me about people going “but social interaction” isn’t their self-centredness. I’m self-centred too! But I did the egoist moral calculations and came to the conclusion that the value of in-person social interaction outside my bubble was negligible next to the risk of catching COVID-19, and if other people’s calculations are coming out differently, that means they’re either very bad at moral calculus or (more likely) have very different values. Both of those things are scary! Who knows what these people will come up with next?!

—

(I guess maybe the main thing that makes this whole discourse feel weird to me is: I have never once been coerced into taking anti-plague measures I thought were overkill. I *have* *frequently* been coerced into taking *fewer* anti-plague measures than I wanted to.)

—

>>But I plan to someday inch back towards the old thing, and we’re all going to have to figure out how much and when.

This is my plan:

When everyone in my household has been vaccinated: cease wearing a respirator. Wear a cloth mask in indoor public spaces if official (read: presumably underestimated) local caseload is above 1/200k/day, to reduce the chances of becoming a carrier and reduce the chances of spreading it if I already am (spreading disease to people who aren’t lucky enough to be vaccinated yet is bad for the society in which I live (people can generally be assumed to be doing something useful, even if indirectly), and also sets a bad precedent (I expect to live through other plagues in the future, and quite likely I will be lower in the vaccine triage list for the next plague than I am now: someday it’ll be *me* who hasn’t been vaccinated yet, and I wish to do my part to encourage a norm I would one day benefit from)). Do not *offer* private social gatherings to unvaccinated people, but seriously consider accepting unvaccinated people’s social offers. Freely offer and accept social-gathering offers with vaccinated people: to us COVID-19 is somewhat less dangerous than a cold, and only baseline anti-cold measures [link] apply.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #covid19 #illness tw #discourse cw? #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

{{next post in sequence}}

oh my god i’m cleaning out my desk and i found my first phone

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

scotchtapeofficial:

tumblr_inline_oqoru7etay1rpryux_500

it was a fucking house phone that i was so stoked to have because it was mine that i kept in my own room and i cannot believe technology has progressed at the speed of FUCKING light to the point where this is a hilarious artifact to have had in like 6th grade and now theres kindergarteners with iphones

 

princess-peridot:

How did you know if you dialed the right number

 

scotchtapeofficial:

each button made a different tone so the numbers you dialed a lot became a subconscious melody in your head and if you hit the wrong button by accident it would sound like a wrong note in a song you know by heart

 

teaboot:

i can’t beleive that is a legitimate question in my lifetime

 

poipoipoi-2016:

It’s a legitimate question *now*.  

Because people don’t do this and this is terrible UX.  

Do you notice how the question says “how did you know if you dialed the right number” *full stop*, but the *answer* is specific to “numbers you dialed a lot”?

Yeah, dialing numbers you *didn’t* dial a lot–which was just about all of them if you were a kid! it’s not like kids have much reason to talk on house phones, not being in charge of coordinating any appointments and not having had much time to accumulate friends-no-longer-in-physical-proximity!–was *exactly* as anxiety-ridden as it sounds. It’s such a relief to have screens to double-check with. Even *dumbphones* like the phone at work have screens now.

(Plus phones with screens *also* make the button tones, as a second layer of defence. Do y’all not have the button tones on your smartphones? Did you turn them off?)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #history #proud citizen of The Future

{{next post in sequence}}

How We Decided

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

togglesbloggle:

The day after tomorrow- that is, February 18, 2021- the Perseverance rover will attempt to land on the surface of Mars.  It will enter the planetary atmosphere at an acute angle, giving it as much time as possible to experience drag and slow down from orbital velocities.  Because Mars’ air is so thin, and the rover is so heavy, this will fail- in the best case, Perseverance would still be going almost a thousand miles an hour when it impacts the surface.  To help save itself, the craft will deploy a parachute of advanced design, seventy feet across and able to withstand supersonic velocities.  This, too, will fail.  Even with a parachute, there is simply not enough air between Perseverance and the Martian surface to slow it down all the way.  So this is where the rockets kick in.  Once air resistance slows the rover to a bit less than two hundred miles per hour, the heavy heat shield will be jettisoned, and a system of secondary rockets will fire against the direction of motion until it slows to near-hovering.  In a final flourish, the rover will descend from the rocket-boosted frame on coiled springs, until it touches down in the western part of Jezero crater in the northern hemisphere of Mars.

c802a800c604822be5c59dd461905b841cc14f9d

As it happens, Perseverance’s destination was one of the very last things we decided about it- not until the craft itself was fairly thoroughly engineered and designed.  Formally, the decision was made by the mission directorate.  In practice, they follow the consensus of the scientific community, which in turn hashes things out at a series of open-invitation workshops.  Things began with a call for white papers- an open suggestion box, basically.  In 2015, the first workshop narrowed things down from thirty serious proposals to eight candidates.  In 2017, the second workshop further winnowed the list down to three.  And in October of 2018, after three days of presentation, debate, and discussion, the final workshop selected Jezero Crater from these final three candidates using a simple vote of all attendees, and passed on the recommendation to the mission leads.

I haven’t been in the business for very long, so the final workshop was the only one of these where I actually participated.  It wasn’t a close vote as such, and I didn’t break any ties, and technically we were just making a strongly worded suggestion.  Nonetheless, my vote is one of the reasons why the Rover will be going to Jezero Crater instead of Syrtis Major or Gusev, and I think I’m entitled to feel ownership of this mission choice, just a little bit.

(This is, of course, terrifying.)

Having gone through the experience, there were a few surprises worth noting.  The first was how small some of the numbers are here.  The conference was not very large: only thirty proposals, debated by just a few hundred attendees.  I’ve seen book review contests with more entries, and that are read by a wider audience.  Which is to say, this is a situation that was, and is, extremely responsive to individual effort.  In that small a room, populated by people that are philosophically committed to changing their minds when they see good evidence or a good argument, one person can stand up and change the future in a very real way.

The second surprise was the attendance requirements.  Or rather, the lack thereof.  The project is public, paid for by American taxpayers, to whom I am profoundly grateful.  And one way the process reflected that public-spiritedness is that this is not a walled garden.  A small attendance fee (iirc, $40?), and you’re in.  You get a vote, if you want to use it.  A few non-scientists even took us up on this; there’s one retiree (a former schoolteacher, I think) that’s attended every major conference I’ve been to in the last few years, and sets up a small table in the back with his home mineral collection just for fun.  In practice this open-door policy is limited by the obscurity of the event itself; if you don’t move in research circles, you have to be something of a space exploration superfan to hear about it.  Still, as symbols go, you could do worse.

And now that we’re coming up on the day itself, the same kind of public-facing mindset is making me think about why I was persuaded to vote for Jezero Crater, what it means to explore there, and how I’d justify that choice to those of you that made the ongoing discovery of Mars possible in the first place.

Keep reading

Tags:

#space #Mars #Perseverance #the power of science #the more you know #apocalypse cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

b1677d045a946e992397f75a0792b6f9c17c69b7

db2aebf3e700c2d2ea05ad65ba82c0fb26d6828d

4e4d18d31395ef8c282c176dada4ae2c33b5868b

whatsdifferentincanada:

Crumbs is a house hippo that lives somewhere in your house, likes to make nests out of discarded mittens, and sleeps for up to 16 hours a day. He is also What’s Different in Canada’s newest cartoon and clothing collection! To follow his adventures, catch up with him here:


Follow Crumbs the house hippo on Instagram

View all Crumbs shirts on Canada Threads

Tags:

#art #house hippos #food? #adorable #I especially like the first picture

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

seat-safety-switch:

One of the vanishingly few benefits you get from living in the frozen North of Canada is that it’s simply too cold for a lot of pesky things. Valley fever? Too damn cold. Poisonous scorpions? Need to be kept above zero at all times, the losers. Subway-sized rats that can take out a schoolyard in less than fifteen minutes? Won’t get fifteen feet before a Dire Owl chucks them into the air to be flash-frozen in the troposphere.

This means that when you buy something especially sketchy from a warmer place, you don’t have to worry too much about disinfecting it. Just leave it outside for a night, and then shake it and watch a cascade of dead roaches fall out. Their pleading eyes (burst from ice forming inside their optic nerves) will look at you guiltily, yes, but it’s not your fault. It’s Mother Nature’s, and if you can’t hang with her, then get out of the kitchen. Or something like that.

Now, this phenomenon hasn’t always worked in my favour. Last summer, I was besieged by an infinite wall of pesky mosquitos. The eggs from these annoying little shitheads can somehow survive the worst of winter, and it’s boring and time-consuming to kill all of them manually, like our ancestors used to.

In a warmer region, these pests are purged by dragonflies the size of an Eaton’s and/or eaten by lizards that sneak into your house and live there, like pets but not. This is simply not possible here, but I foolishly believed I could import a small box of praying mantises sometime around May, when the permafrost covering my driveway just started to break up.

Praying mantises are, in theory, the ultimate badasses, peak predators of nature, invulnerable to anything that the world can throw at them. However, it turns out the shipping company also uses the same technique as me to disinfect packages, making my own efforts largely superfluous. When they got here, all that remained was a box of dead bugs. They didn’t stand a chance. Up here, prayers don’t get answered, because the moisture in your words freezes them solid and they smash to bits on the sidewalk.

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #our home and cherished land #storytime #bugs #death tw? #unreality cw #that last line is a hell of a thing