Author: Brin

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sigmaleph:

glumshoe:

“Ah, yes, the tropical rainforest planet.”

“By ‘tropical rainforest planet’, do you mean it’s got rainforest around the equator, or that it’s entirely covered in rainforest?“

“The whole thing is rainforest, yes.”

“Huh. Wild! Still, calling it all ‘tropical rainforest’ is misleading, as the tropics refer to the areas around a planet’s equator.”

“Oh, the jungle planet doesn’t have an equator.”

“It—what? Of course it does. It has to! All spheroid planets capable of sustaining life have equators, it just refers to the division between the poles along the axis of rotation.”

“No, no, you see, I know that. But the jungle planet doesn’t have a single axis of rotation. Instead, it wriggles around so that every part of it is equally heated.”

“That sounds fake, but I don’t know enough about planets to tell you how stupid that is.”

“The inhabitants call it Sous-vide.”

fun fact: the tropics are the area around the equator, but how much area around the equator depends on the planet’s axial tilt. a planet with a 90° axial tilt would be entirely tropical. in our solar system, Uranus is 99% tropics by surface

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #story ideas I will never write #overly literal interpretations #fun with loopholes

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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rustingbridges:

yesterdaysprint:

The Evening World, New York, March 24, 1904

Has anyone tried this? I feel compelled to at least take the idea seriously

The trouble with *holding* it upside-down is that gravity works against you, and some or all of the butter may fall off.

I generally compromise by holding it butter-side-up, then using my tongue to flip each bite over inside my mouth.

—

*looks up “voluble”* Wait, hang on, is this a joke about oiling your tongue in order to make your speech-producing mechanisms work better? I thought we were talking about how to best enjoy the flavour.

Tags:

#food #reply via reblog

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

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malformalady:

Approximately 90% of any iceberg is below the surface, making iceberg flips a rare occurrence. These photos were taken by the the U.S. Antarctic Program in Iceberg Alley, a region in the western Weddell Sea. Large old icebergs contain centuries of windblown sediment and minerals, visible as layers when they roll over as seen in the photo

Photo credit: Ethan Norris

Tags:

#pretty things

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

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yieldsfalsehoodwhenquined:

sindri42:

stljedi:

It’s going to be a bad night.

Look, if it’s a real ghost, the busters get custody. If it’s just a real estate developer in a costume it’s out of their jurisdiction so we gotta hand things off to these meddling kids and their dog.

i’d watch a case of the week PI procedural about a paranormal investigator and a paranormal debunker that have to work together to figure out if this week’s ghost is bullshit or not

Tags:

#Ghostbusters #Scooby Doo #crossovers #story ideas I will never write #(duelling genre conventions to create suspense is so neat) #(I read a novel once that was both ”sci-fi dystopia adventure” and ”erotic horror”) #(which have opposite conventions for which side wins) #(so you end up *genuinely uncertain* which side is going to win) #(unlike most sci-fi dystopia adventures the good guys *might actually lose*) #(because the audience wouldn’t feel betrayed by that and the author *knows* they wouldn’t)

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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sigmaleph:

@brin-bellway not reblogging the whole post but

The method of addition described in the OP [adding 7+6 by observing that 7+3=10, 6=3+3, so 7+3+3=10+3= 13] is implicitly being contrasted with some “normal” way, and I’m curious what that normal way actually is. Anyone know?

I don’t know if this is the “normal” way, but I do mental arithmetic by having all the single-digit additions cached (so 7+6=13 is a one-step result of the method), and doing stuff similar to the OP if I am unsure/forgot/dealing with longer numbers I don’t want to do digit-by-digit. Note that OP is implicitly doing some results caching of their own to remember that 7+3=10 and 3+3=6

[previously on]

—

I find 3+3=6 much more intuitive and cache-y than 7+6=13, because the first one isn’t overflowing into another digit.

The way you echo back the description of the method, while not wrong really, makes it sound a lot more abstract than it feels in my brain. It feels more like the numbers are made of something with the consistency of dough or soft clay, and I tear a chunk off of one number and stick it onto the other one, then look at the sizes of the resulting two piles of number. Or maybe pouring water from one jug to another until it’s full and then looking at the amount leftover in the first jug, kind of like that puzzle in Die Hard with a Vengeance†. (I always did like that movie as a child, though I would tend to forget that not all of the movie was puzzles and end up unpleasantly surprised by the beginning and end.)

—

Quite possibly caching everything is the normal way, yeah. I know it’s the normal way to do 1×1-digit multiplication. The kids in my Girl Scout troop made fun of me for not having the times tables memorised: I never bothered and just worked them out on the fly as needed. Some of them have ended up ingrained through sheer use, but I never did put any deliberate effort into ingraining them.

(ingrained-through-sheer-use rather than through any deliberate effort is also how I learned to touch-type [link])

—

†For those of you unfamiliar: you get a 3-gallon jug, a 5-gallon jug, and a fountain (from/to which you may both take and give water). Measure out 4 gallons. (also do it in two minutes or a bomb goes off, because supposedly this is an action movie and not edutainment)

Tags:

#my childhood #math #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #death mention #bullying mention

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

tidy-tidings:

missouri-nationalist:

Marriage is good and weddings are great but I hate modern wedding culture. You don’t need to bankrupt yourself to have a nice wedding. Stop supporting the wedding industry, stop buying outrageously priced engagement rings, stop spending 10k on a dress you’ll only ever wear once.

Coming from a professional event planner – weddings are egregiously expensive because companies openly raise prices at the word “wedding.” 

Pro Tip – Never drop the word wedding while planning if you don’t need to. Most things can be for “an event you’re planning.” This obviously doesn’t include things like the venue, DJ (who needs specific wedding songs), and the wedding dress company if you’re going that route versus just buying a dress.

For my wedding I got “discounted” cupcakes, flowers, decor, bridesmaids dresses, groomsman attire, and invitations. I did this by either searching for things that aren’t marketed for weddings or not telling the companies I was working with it was for a wedding. Because honestly, most of the time they don’t need to know why you’re ordering.

These companies target people planning their weddings and markup everything the second “wedding” is said. And it’s said often because people assume the services change exponentially for weddings. They absolutely do not. 

The best example are the cupcakes I had for my wedding. I used a designer cupcake store in town instead of spending $1000 on a wedding cake. If you place a large order of cupcakes with a cake tree for display – it costs about $150 for 100 (which is what I did). When you order their “wedding” package – the price raised to a $700 base for 100 cupcakes. The only other perk includes a “tasting.” Forget that. Our tasting was buying a few cupcakes in flavors we thought we’d like and picked three. It cost maybe $20. 

What these companies do is scummy and targets people who don’t have information about the event industry.

I will yell it from the rooftops until people realize there’s a better way.

Tags:

#PSA #adventures in human capitalism