I Must Say. I've Been Feeling More Invisible Than Usual. I, Too, Am A Minority. I, Too, Have Been Harassed,

I must say. I've been feeling more invisible than usual. I, too, am a minority. I, too, have been harassed, assaulted, and sexually assaulted by cops. I, too, have been discriminated against. I wish there were a biracial, first gen, gay role model. Niche market, amirite? Oh, don't forget with mental health issues and an intellectual living in the shadow of a brother with MR. I'm half tempted to just grab my backpack and live in the forest somewhere. Or pull a Margaret Cho, and be my own relatable role model. But instead, I'm scared into shutting down and hiding in my hellscape of a mind.

I need to go to sleep, but I have new yarn.

If you knit or crochet, you can see where this is going…

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sordidsass-blog

8 years ago

One of the best examples of abled people taking it upon themselves to advocate for the disabled community while simultaneously ignoring the voices of people with disabilities until they’ve made things worse is the “new” international symbol of access.

The original, established, symbol is on the left and the “new” symbol is on the right.

So what’s the problem?

Well, the biggest problem is that the newest symbol wasn’t designed by someone in a wheelchair. It was designed by two artists who don’t use wheelchairs who thought that they could speak on behalf of people who do.

Who cares, it’s a good symbol, right?

Nope.

See the original symbol, the one that’s been around for decades and has been embraced by the disabled community, works for both people in manual wheelchairs and people in electric wheelchairs. The second one is obviously someone in a manual chair, excluding those who use electric ones.

There’s also ironically an ableist message behind their reasoning that the person on the right symbolizes an active member of society, whereas the non-moving person on the right can be depicted as lazy. This reasoning is extremely ableist and ignorant, artsy for the sake of being artsy without giving thought to what they’re actually implying.

The real kicker?

My college has the new signs everywhere. New York State as a whole adopted these new signs. A ton of different buildings around the nation are putting up these new signs because people are just sort of assuming that everyone with a disability approves, even though most people in wheelchairs are objecting to it and the people who are advocating for it aren’t in wheelchairs in the first place.

And guess whose voices are the ones being heard?

And guess whose voices are the ones being ignored?

‘Incomprehensible’ birth of supercrystal explained

Two years ago, a research team led by Utrecht University published an article in Science explaining how they had created a material with unique and extremely interesting electronic characteristics. In this 'supercrystal’, the electrons move almost with the speed of photons, and the electric current can be switched on and off. This makes it ideal for ultra-fast electronics. But at the time, the researchers were at a loss to explain how this 'supercrystal’ obtained its unique structure. Now they have unravelled the mystery, and it appears to involve a completely different mechanism for crystal formation. This is an important insight for research into new materials with unique electronic characteristics. The results of their research were published online in Nature Materials.

The 'supercrystal’ develops when tiny nanocrystals form a perfectly ordered surface one layer thick. In this super-matrix, the structure of the atoms – A, B, A, B – precisely follows that of the nanocrystals itself. “But how such a neatly ordered super-matrix could be born from all of those nanocrystals was incomprehensible to us,” says Prof. Daniël Vanmaekelbergh from Utrecht University. “Now that we have insight into how the matrix is formed, we can conduct much more focused research into how we can make the structures that we would like to have.”

I Must Say. I've Been Feeling More Invisible Than Usual. I, Too, Am A Minority. I, Too, Have Been Harassed,

More Posts from Sordidsass-blog and Others

I need to go to sleep, but I have new yarn.

One of the best examples of abled people taking it upon themselves to advocate for the disabled community while simultaneously ignoring the voices of people with disabilities until they’ve made things worse is the “new” international symbol of access.

‘Incomprehensible’ birth of supercrystal explained