StringTheory

@[email protected]

Fun with strings! Ukulele, knitting, physics!

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StringTheory,

I got into a very strange argument with a relative (who doesn’t know any trans people -at least none they are aware of). They were absolutely convinced that ANY man is better than ALL women at all things. Athletic, intellectual, creative; men are inherently better at all of it.

Therefore, in their mind, anyone who was a man/boy at any point in their lives will be better at everything than a cis woman ever could be. So trans women will always dominate no matter what.

The profound misogyny at the base of their argument was flabbergasting.

StringTheory,

This same relative also argued that cis men would go through transition just so they could be at the top of their sport (because they’d beat all the women) or so that they could get scholarships ear-marked for women (because they would be smarter than all the women and would win the scholarships). Somehow that seemed reasonable to them? How on earth!?!?

StringTheory,

Good.

I worked in a fairly large clinic (office assistant type stuff) and always wondered why the top-surgery patients looked so much “better” than the mastectomy patients. Finally I asked one of the doctors, and he explained that top surgery is quite different than a mastectomy, with different protocols and goals and results.

Someone with training and experience performing mastectomies can’t just step in and do a top surgery.

StringTheory,

Bicycle. No gas expenses, no tabs, no loan, free parking. I understand how it works and can mostly fix it myself for very little money. I can take quiet side streets and arrive in a much better mood, plus my fat lazy ass gets some exercise.

StringTheory,

I’m finding the opposite. Books that I loved when younger are even better as I re-read them now. Ursula le Guin, Terry Pratchett (their YA and their adult books) have so much more nuance and subtlety than I was aware of when I just read them for the adventure and story. There are some profound bits of wisdom and wry observation tucked in those books.

StringTheory,

And I am very grateful for that. I deeply appreciate this policy.

Thanks, all you awesome admins!

StringTheory,

A “final solution”, as it were.

StringTheory,

I did a deep-dive reading and watching videos learning about sturdy and long-lasting fabrics and materials. Learned a bit about tailoring for durability, too. (For example, Duluth Trading shifted the inseams on their Firehose pants forward. The forward seams don’t rub on each other when you walk, and so the inner thighs don’t self-destruct as quickly.)

There are also a ton of excellent resources on how to mend clothing and properly care for it. And it doesn’t take much effort, really.

So now I have a bunch of older clothes, with subtle repairs, still in good shape. Sure, I’d like some sexy new trendy disposable stuff so I can be one of the cool kids - but that’s how fast fashion gets its claws into you. Preying on our magpie-like desires for shiny new things makes somebody big bucks. (And creates huge waste and exploits desperate workers.)

Buy sturdy “classic” clothes. Keep them in good repair. Fight the system.

StringTheory,

And “run” the heels and ball of the foot so they felt down and last longer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fKKLOUNOHU

StringTheory,

Here’s an excellent place to start: tincanknits.com/collection/the-simple-collection

StringTheory,

There is a generation of little old ladies who are passionate about sewing, but have no-one to sew for. Their kids are grown, and their grandkids don’t want handmade clothes. Ask at a senior center or at a local (not chain) fabric shop, seek out one of these ladies and hire her to sew for you. Or barter: help her around the house or garden or drive her to appointments or to get groceries, and in exchange she sews clothes from fabrics and patterns you choose. Or tailors used clothes to make them fit you better, or mends your worn clothes, etc.

StringTheory, (edited )

A good place to start on YouTube is Bernadette Banner’s channel. She is a clothing historian, so there’s a lot of historical and historical recreation stuff, but she also has a few basic repair and tailoring techniques videos. She wrote a mending book that I hear is much more in-depth than her videos (I haven’t read it). www.barnesandnoble.com/w/…/1139915226

Patagonia Wornwear has a lot of repair instructions for outdoor gear (you don’t have to buy their repair materials). wornwear.patagonia.com/repairs

Reddit “visiblemending” and “invisiblemending” are also very good resources.

StringTheory,

Side note about pockets: Duluth Trading women’s pants have multiple ginormous pockets, and about half have crotch gussets or anterior inseams to avoid chub-rub destroying the pants.

StringTheory,

For t shirts I always sing the praises of Gettees. Tiny “factory” of half a dozen people making extraordinarily high quality and durable shirts in Detroit. Most of the people doing the sewing are former auto upholstery stitchers from the car factories. The quality is truly the best I’ve ever encountered. gettees.us

StringTheory,

You can add pockets to the pants you buy, too. This video by Morgan Donner is adding several examples of types of pockets to skirts, but the process is the same. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pE_nrHKd58

And there’s this one by Bernadette Banner www.youtube.com/watch?v=thlzJj1EHiY

Thigh pockets are really great for phones. You can make visible patch pockets or subtle welt pockets and you can customize to the size of your phone.

Higher point of impact makes SUV crashes more dangerous for cyclists (www.iihs.org)

Ground-impact injuries — a frequent cause of head injuries — were more than twice as common in SUV crashes than those involving cars, the study showed. The findings follow earlier IIHS research that showed SUVs are more lethal than cars to pedestrians despite design changes that have made them less dangerous to other...

StringTheory,

My old Honda has a low and slanted front end (kind of like a wedge). At the time, Honda was crowing about enhanced pedestrian safety and how the wedge would scoop the pedestrian (or cyclist) up onto the hood rather than tossing them under the car.

Dunno about that, but I can say it is far easier to see over the nose of that old Honda than over the damn nose of newer cars I’ve driven.

StringTheory,

And even when “right on red” is allowed, they will still lay on the horn when you stop. As if they don’t know you have to stop at the red and only proceed with your turn after a full stop and if the way is clear.

Actually, maybe they don’t know you have to come to a full stop before turning?

How do FOSS enthusiasts sew? What hardware do they buy?

I think I need a sewing machine that can do a variety of different kinds of stitches. One use case is to repair holey socks by cannabalizing fabric from other holey socks. Thus the stitch needs to be the kind that can stretch and ideally not create an awkward feeling on the foot....

StringTheory,

You could learn to darn socks by hand. Adults and children have been doing it for thousands of years, and it’s very low impact. It’s not really feasible to patch socks with fabric from other socks - think of socks as a dynamic 3-D knit construct, patching disrupts that.

“A stitch in time saves nine.” If you know you wear out particular areas of your socks, you can reinforce them when they are new by “running” them. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fKKLOUNOHU

All you need to darn or run is yarn and a darning needle.

Your brain finds it easy to size up four objects but not five — here’s why (www.nature.com)

An experiment found that the brain uses one set of neural circuits to identify the numbers 1–4; these circuits are very specific to their own numbers. A separate set of circuits respond to the numbers 5–9; these are less precise, and are activated by adjacent numbers....

StringTheory, (edited )

This is cool. I always wondered why I can instantly grasp 1 through 4, but 5 and up become abstract. Thank you for posting this!

StringTheory,

pv-magazine-usa.com/…/california-senate-transport…

Speaking of shade… This is pretty cool.

StringTheory,

What’s a carnist?

StringTheory,

Thanks, I hadn’t seen that word before and had assumed it had something to do with cars (car-nist).

StringTheory,

At least, not yet…

StringTheory,

“The universe danced towards life. Life was a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seemed to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough got a generous helping of gravity. The universe had a definite tendency towards awareness. This suggested a certain subtle cruelty woven into the very fabric of space-time.”

  • Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
StringTheory,

Dusting cloths: tear old cotton flannel sheets into squares. You can do this to sheets in your own rag-bag, or buy sheets at the charity shop. Old towels work well, too. They can be washed and re-used for quite a while. Old cotton knits work fine, if you don’t mind waving your dingy old tightie-whities and sweat stained tees around.

Anything soft and slightly fuzzy, and if the cloth alone doesn’t do the trick all you have to do is get it damp with plain water.

I know this isn't fuck bad parking...

…but surely this is something most of us hate to see. I walk on this street near where I work a couple times per day. Granted, the sidewalk isn’t much to speak of, but cars park like this all the time. Sometimes people park utility trailers or campers covering the entire sidewalk. If I see someone doing it I will let them...

StringTheory,

Can you document this and present it to your town council? Give them your pictures and a brief write-up, and suggest a solution.

It looks like this is a pretty ambiguous sidewalk and could easily appear to be the verge of the street (rather than a sidewalk). A defined pavement with curbs would be a far more effective sidewalk, with the added benefit that anyone parking on it would clearly be in the wrong and could be ticketed or towed.

StringTheory,

Darn Tough makes a black calf length “dress” sock, a bit thicker than regular dress socks. It has minimal logo stuff going on, the only visible one will be a small one up at the very top of the cuff.

Almost all my socks are Darn Tough now. They do tend to run slightly small, so if you are between sizes I would recommend choosing the larger size.

darntough.com

Why are you still wearing a mask...wrong?

All the time I have people come in to work wearing a mask, which is fine normally, good for them, but they are wearing them on their chin, chin diaper style. Not covering up anything. Or at best just their mouth, sometimes. Nobody is making these people wear a mask anymore, so why are they doing it at all if they are just going...

StringTheory,

Yesterday while grocery shopping two men walked by as I was contemplating bread choices. One of them was saying, “yeah, it’s ok, I’ve got the sore throat but I don’t have the rest of the Covid symptoms yet.”

At that moment I really wished both he and I (and everyone else in the store) were wearing masks.

StringTheory,

That makes it better, but I don’t want his normal cold, either. We all have a few masks lying around and tucked into pockets here and there these days. If one feels a cold coming on, toss a mask over your pie hole in public!

StringTheory,

Aunts and Uncles (genetic or not) are of huge benefit to children. maybe you don’t have kids. But if your best friend has a kid and you become Uncle Meow for that kid, you’ve just increased the security and stability of that kid’s life. You now are another adult in their life who can protect that kid from social and financial disasters.

Maybe the way to look at it is “we all have fewer kids, and invest ourselves in the welfare of the kids around us.”

Insiders Reveal Major Problems at Lab-Grown-Meat Startup Upside Foods (www.wired.com)

Billion-dollar cultivated-meat startup Upside Foods wants you to think the breakthrough chicken fillets it sells are made in a futuristic factory. A WIRED investigation tells a different story. On July 1, five diners sat down at the counter of the Michelin-starred Bar Crenn in San Francisco for an unusual meal. They had won a...

StringTheory,

Hmmmmm… processed slurry of animal cells grown in a chemical bath vs tasty plate of beans and rice from the neighborhood taco truck.

Which is more affordable?

Which has less environmental impact?

(Something about lab-grown meat gets up my nose, and I can’t quite articulate why.)

StringTheory,

There are several options on the west coast and southwest that won’t worsen your SAD. Yes, cost of living is high… but that’s because they are good places to live. You may not be able to afford a nice big house like you’d find in Minnesota, but you’d have a trade-off in weather and surroundings.

What would you like to see in art of a Solarpunk city

I’m planning out a photobash (hopefully part of a set) showcasing options and possibilities for a more solarpunk world. My goal for these is for them to be a more practical and actionable view of a solarpunk society, more than just green skyscrapers or super scifi-looking places. I’m mostly setting these in a post-crumbles...

StringTheory, (edited )

I wish I could find a piece I saw once, I think you would like it. It was a woman in a Pacific Northwest rainforest, dressed in vaguely sci-fi Salish clothing, on a path with subtle down-lights. There was a scene in the background of solar-punk techishness. I can’t remember all the details (which is why I’m having no luck finding it). It might have been on Reddit.

Hopefully someone will see this and remember it and be able to find the art for you!

Edit: found it! The artist is Coleen East pinterest.com/…/solarpunk-pacific-northwest--7764…

StringTheory, (edited )

I don’t understand how it is more ethical to create an embryo from a stem cell than to create one from a sperm and egg. Both are viable, neither is a person. How are they different?

(Keeping the stem cell version in vitro past the the age when it would need to implant isn’t really a solution/distinction because we can do the same thing with a sperm-and-egg version.)

StringTheory, (edited )

I hope you are doing better now.

StringTheory,

I’ve been wanting to do this ever since someone gave me one that said “You make a difference.” I treasured that card for years.

I don’t even remember what I did to help her at this point, it was something that seemed minor at the time, but she thanked me and gave me the card.

Do it! It can have quite an impact!

StringTheory,

You can buy card stock that has local wildflower seeds embedded in it. The idea is when the person is done with the card, they plant the whole thing so the card decomposes and the seeds sprout.

StringTheory,

70,000 people without toilets… eeek.

What's a skill that's taken for granted where you live, but is often missing in people moving there from abroad?

I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some...

StringTheory,

And petting wildlife. Or trying to take selfies with wildlife. Or feeding wildlife.

No, no, and no.

Even a cute lil’ chipmunk is a no-no. Bison, moose, and their sweet huggable calves are serious no-nos.

For the Love of Everything, Please Keep 3-6 Months Worth of Money for an Emergency Fund (If You Can)

I left my job about two months ago, and I applied for unemployment immediately. I got a new job today, but I STILL haven’t gotten my unemployment decision. Additionally, my food stamp application was delayed due to personal circumstances. In short, had I not had money saved for an emergency, I would have been mega-screwed....

StringTheory,

If you run into a financial ditch and don’t have emergency funds, contact the electric, water, medical, phone, credit card, etc. billing departments right away. Don’t wait until after you’ve already missed a payment or two! Jump right to it and set up payment plans. I helped a friend through a financial crash and was impressed how much leeway billing departments will give you if you reach out before you miss a payment.

StringTheory, (edited )

a shovel with a sense of purpose

You might like “A Different Aftermath” by Ursula Vernon. It’s a very quick comic book/graphic short-story imgur.com/a/tLZ5JFa

StringTheory,

The stories I need are adriot with tech and with the human side of the wrenching changes we face.

I assume you’ve read Ursula le Guin’s stuff? I’m drawn to her short stories and later novels in particular.

Edit: “Ursula” is becoming a theme among my favorite authors. Hmmm…

StringTheory,

The important thing is NOT to read the numbers and odds when/if it happens to you. Treatments are progressing rapidly, and odds are based on people receiving treatment 5+ years previously.

‘Life or Death:’ AI-Generated Mushroom Foraging Books Are All Over Amazon (www.404media.co)

Many mushroom identification and foraging books being sold on Amazon are likely generated by AI with no human authorship. These books could provide dangerous misinformation and potentially lead to deaths if people eat poisonous mushrooms based on the AI’s inaccurate descriptions. Two New York mushroom societies have warned...

StringTheory,

If you forget your glasses all ya gotta do is enlarge the text size. Digital is pretty groovy.

StringTheory,

Learned to drive stick when I was 12. You can get away with a lot when you live on a farm/ranch…

StringTheory,

If she won’t jump through that hoop, how many others will she refuse down the road?

“Taking this anti-rejection medication offends my conscience. These drugs are chemicals!”

“Getting an hour of cardio a day offends me, I should decide what activities I perform.”

“Being told to keep my BMI in the healthy range to keep my transplant healthy is offensive and is implying I’m fat.”

Transplant teams want compliant patients. Refusing a vaccine right off the bat means you are the non-compliant type who likely won’t be a success.

StringTheory,

More young women are getting colon cancer, as well.

It is worrisome seeing the climbing rates of young people getting “old person” cancers.

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