Procrastinating on Wikipedia and found this…

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

thousandmaths:

So there’s a pretty long tradition in math of people coming up with problems they can’t solve, and talking to their friends, and realizing that nobody they know can solve them either, and then announcing to the world that you would get some sort of prize if someone could solve them. 

Usually the prize is a small amount of money.

Sometimes, if someone is really cocky, or the problem is known to be really hard, it’s a lot of money. 

And sometimes there’s Stanisław Mazur, who offered a live goose as a prize for finding a particularly pathological object (a Banach space for which some compact operator is not the limit of finite-rank operators). 

And then, Per Enflo did manage to find such an object. Today, there is photographic evidence that he did, in fact, receive his prize. Go look at that picture, and tell me that Enflo is not 100% pumped about his goose. The older Mazur, on the other hand, looks mostly like “WTF, this fool actually called my bluff”.

Tags:

#math #oh my god that picture

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

felixdawkins:

for science, if u could reblog this and put in the tags

  • where you live
  • your first/primary language
  • what you call these:
image

Tags:

#meme #(close enough) #I technically live in Ontario but I learned my word for these in New Jersey #English #scrunchies

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ilzolende:

ilzolende:

If I am a fictional character I exist in about 20 incomplete first drafts. Stuff keeps happening that pattern-matches to “plot hook” but for any of these

Gah, how did this get published in the middle of a sentence I clicked save as draft.

…for any of these to actually turn into a coherent plot at this point would require a massively oversized conspiracy theory.

I assumed you’d done it on purpose, so that the post would itself be an incomplete first draft.

Tags:

#reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

greenbergsays:

Okay but.

Steve needs to have a Swear Jar and every time someone says a profanity in front of him, he just holds it out. The especially bad ones cost two dollars, don’t think Steve will let you get away with that. And this goes on for months and months and when Bucky starts coming around, he notices it. And he also notices how Steve doesn’t swear in front of any of the Avengers.

And when he gets Steve alone, he’s like, “what gives, you’ve got the worst mouth out of anyone I know.”

And Steve, with a perfectly innocent expression, says, “they made assumptions, Buck. I think those assumptions should at least buy a new bike, don’t you?”

And Bucky just stares at him, awed, like, “I forgot how fucking devious you are.”

Tags:

#Avengers #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

feltknickers:

npr:

Back in the 1960s, the U.S. started vaccinating kids for measles. As expected, children stopped getting measles.

But something else happened.

Childhood deaths from all infectious diseases plummeted. Even deaths from diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea were cut by half.

“So it’s really been a mystery — why do children stop dying at such high rates from all these different infections following introduction of the measles vaccine,” says Michael Mina, a postdoc in biology at Princeton University and a medical student at Emory University.

Scientists Crack A 50-Year-Old Mystery About The Measles Vaccine

Photo credit: Photofusion/UIG via Getty Images

Like many viruses, measles is known to suppress the immune system for a few weeks after an infection. But previous studies in monkeys have suggested that measles takes this suppression to a whole new level: It erases immune protection to other diseases, Mina says.

Tags:

#illness tw #needle tw #biology #the more you know

ilzolende asked: hate meme: anti-transhumanist pro-mortality bioethicists

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

comparativelysuperlative:

the-nth-angel:

chroniclesofrettek:

ozymandias271:

It never fails to amaze me how bioethicists manage to be wrong about everything, like, I would expect that there would be a point where I would agree with bioethicists out of sheer reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence AND YET every time I see a viewpoint attributed to a bioethicist it is inevitably fucking stupid

bioethicists: wrong on death, wrong on suicide, wrong on augmentation, wrong on cures, wrong on ice cream cones, wrong for America

Yeah … the ice cream cone thing surprised me when I heard about it.

Wait, what. I thought Ozy was just throwing out a random joke to further take the piss out of bioethicists. I just googled and… wow. I’m irl laughing really hard. This is The Onion-grade material right here, except it actually happened.

I KNOW, RIGHT? I Googled it and got halfway through an incredulous response with a lot of ellipses in sheer astonishment that a human being said that while being serious and is still taken seriously when using that argument about non-ice cream subject matter.

Unrelatedly, I walked down the street eating ice cream today. It was great.

Transhumanists: Because they think ice cream is morally OK.

Tags:

#transhumanism #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #oh my god #I assumed it was a random joke too

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

*watches person I blocked for kink-shaming make small talk with kink blogger*

…????

Tags:

#for a moment I thought it might be because of the person’s ‘moderate’ stance on kinks #except said stance is that it’s okay to *have* kinks as long as you never talk about them or consider them important to who you are #which rather seems to preclude kink bloggers #(*and* last night I ventured into the person’s blog archives looking for a poem about gender I saw a while back) #(the one written by a medieval Jew who would probably have considered themself a trans woman if their culture had had the concept) #(I promised my mother I would look for it) #(and of the blogs I was following at the time that were most likely to have reblogged it) #(one of them was them) #(I didn’t even *find* the damned thing) #(point being I have had too many reminders that this person exists for one day) #((also if you’ve read this far and know where to find that poem let me know)) #tag rambles #oh look an original post #vagueblogging #this post has been delayed by an unspecified amount of time for enhanced vagueness

{{next post in sequence}}

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ilzolende:

rageofthedogstar:

Today’s a good day for sharing one of my favorite essays:

It was in Ancient Egypt, where it attacked slave and pharaoh alike. In Rome, it effortlessly decimated armies. It killed in Syria. It killed in Moscow. In India, five million dead. It killed a thousand Europeans every day in the 18th century. It killed more than fifty million Native Americans. From the Peloponnesian War to the Civil War, it slew more soldiers and civilians than any weapon, any soldier, any army (Not that this stopped the most foolish and empty souls from attempting to harness the demon as a weapon against their enemies).

Cultures grew and faltered, and it remained. Empires rose and fell, and it thrived. Ideologies waxed and waned, but it did not care. Kill. Maim. Spread. An ancient, mad god, hidden from view, that could not be fought, could not be confronted, could not even be comprehended.

…

35 years ago, on December 9th, 1979, humanity declared victory.

This one evil, the horror from beyond memory, the monster that took 500 million people from this world – was destroyed.

You are a member of the species that did that. Never forget what we are capable of, when we band together and declare battle on what is broken in the world.

December 9th was when it was first declared eradicated by a group of scientists. Their conclusion was endorsed by the WHO on May 8th, 35 years ago today.

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day, everyone! [stims excitedly]

Tags:

#smallpox #history #the power of science #proud citizen of The Future