THIS!! Also, Not Demonizing Sharks Doesn’t Mean We Should Demonize Dolphins Instead. All Wild Animals

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

idk. too many people drive like they don’t realize (or care) that they could die and/or kill someone. as a result of the way they are driving. sorry if i sound lame or ancient i just feel insane witnessing the lack of concern on a regular basis. The vehicle you are in is thousands of pounds going many miles an hour. do you know this

lets play a game

what comes up in your tags when you types

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when talking about AI remember the different versions:

Analytical AI, is the one that can detect cancer and save lives

Generative AI is the one that steals art to make it worse, and gives you a wrong answer every time you google something

Weird Al is the one who got his ponysona to canonically have children with a pony from my little pony

I do something similar where I pretend I’m an alien researcher and look at everything with wonder and curiosity and it has unironically helped my mood and worldview so do with this information what you will

one of me and my brothers favourite bits to do is pretend we're cavemen seeing modern things for the first time. like an airplane passes overhead and i go 'caveman' and we both point and stare at it pass with gazes of abject horror and disbelief like we're about to experience the rapture and have seen the closest thing to god we ever will

People loooove complex characters until they’re women

the action this person took is bad because it's directly harmful and exploits and leverages their social capital "also they're cringe" not what I said "adults who like cartoons are always shitty" no they aren't "their artistic tastes reflect their bad morals" I don't believe that is the case "typical tenderqueer" I honestly just think you're being homophobic "mid 30s polyamorous neurospicy kinky asexual picrew icon fanfic writer" do you even care about the bad thing they did or are you just using this as an excuse to make fun of people you don't like

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

if this gets 100,000 notes then i, the worlds greatest space agency will personally shoot donald trump into the sun

There's this sort of anthropomorphizing that inherently happens in language that really gets me sometimes. I'm still not over the terminology of "gravity assist," the technique where we launch satellites into the orbit of other planets so that we can build momentum via the astounding and literally astronomical strength of their gravitational forces, to "slingshot" them into the direction we need with a speed that we could never, ever, ever create ourselves. I mean, some of these slingshots easily get probes hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Wikipedia has a handy diagram of the Voyager 1 satellite doing such a thing.

"Gravity assist." "Slingshot." Of course, on a very basic and objective level, yes, we are taking advantage of forces generated by outside objects to specifically help in our goals. We're getting help from objects in the same way a river can power a mill. And of course we call it a "slingshot," because the motion is very similar (mentally at least; I can't be sure about the exact physics).

Plus, especially compared to the other sciences, the terminology for astrophysics is like, really straightforward. "Black hole?" Damn yeah it sure is. "Big bang?" It sure was. "Galactic cluster?" Buddy you're never gonna guess what this is. I think it's an effect of the fact that language is generally developed for life on earth and all the strange variances that happen on its surface, that applying it to something as alien and vast as space, general terms tend to suffice very well in a lot more places than, like... idk, botany.

But, like. "Gravity assist." I still can't get the notion out of my head that such language implies us receiving active help from our celestial neighbors. They come to our aid. We are working together. We are assisted. Jupiter and the other planets saw our little messengers coming from its pale blue molecular cousin, and we set up the physics just right, so that they could help us send them out to far stranger places than this, to tell us all about what they find out there.

We are assisted.

And there is no better way to illustrate my feelings on the matter than to just show you guys one of my favorite paintings, this 1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice to show the Pioneer probe doing this exact thing:

"... You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. ..."

Gravity assist.