George Budd @Gbudd@social.cleverlibre.org

Lately I've been reading about autocatalytic sets. Wait! Don't go away. Trust me, you want to read this!

One of they key requirements for life as we know it is metabolism. Debates about life often point to fire as "metabolizing," but that's too simplistic.

Metabolism for life can be broken down as anabolism and catabolism, or "constructive metabolism" and "destructive metabolism."

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20 years ago at Clarion West, my submission story was one of the first we critiqued. Our instructor Nancy Kress advised that I not use the pen name I was currently going by (Finley Larkin - a combo of family names).

She said something like: Don't use a name you wouldn't want etched into a Nebula Award.

At the time thought: If I win a Nebula, I won't care what name they put on it because I'll be a Nebula winner!

Well. Here we are today and there's a Nebula with my name on it! 😍

I’m gonna come out and say it again — if you feel the need to refuse standard of care medical treatment for religious or moral reasons, you don’t belong in medicine. Just fuck off and find a career where vulnerable people relying on you don’t suffer because of your selfishness. I treat nazis. I treat pedophiles. I treat people of all stripes. I’ve treated drunk drivers after I took the radio call to pronounce time of death for their victims.

We. Don’t. Refuse. Care.

Don't tell the kids, but sometimes mathematicians consider infinity as a number on the same footing as all the rest. This lets curl up the complex plane into a sphere with ∞ as its north pole. 0 is at the south pole. Around the equator we have 1, -1, i and -i. These 6 points are the corners of an octahedron!

Now we can can create cool stuff like the 'Bolza curve'. Make up a polynomial that vanishes at 0, 1, -1, i and -i:

x(x-1)(x+1)(x-i)(x+i) = x(x² - 1)(x² + 1) = x(x⁴ -1) = x⁵−x

The equation y² = x⁵−x defines the Bolza curve. You can draw its real solutions but the fun starts when you consider complex solutions, even allowing infinity as a number.

Say you try to solve it for y. To do this, you just take the square root of both sides. Since most numbers have two square roots, you usually get two solutions. The only numbers that don't have two square roots are 0 and ∞. So you get just one solution when x⁵−x = 0, and this happens at five points:

x = 0, 1, -1, i, -i

But you also get just one solution when x⁵−x = ∞, and this happens when x = ∞. (Honest.)

So, if I were better at drawing, I could draw all the solutions (x,y) of y² = x⁵−x, and you'd see a surface with two sheets sitting over each x point on the sphere - except at the six corners of the octahedron, where the two merge into one!

This is the Bolza curve in all its glory. Alas, so far it seems to be visible only by the 'inner eye' of mathematicians - I don't see a picture online anywhere. But I wrote more about it here:

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/diary/january_2022.html

The moral is: it's important to learn the rules in math, follow them carefully... and then very carefully BREAK them to discover new things.

Doggo though he was alone..

White supremacy is not a mental illness but the GQP is trying its best to trigger the gullibles into deplorable behavior.

This is probably the best thing I ever posted on Twitter. The memory is pretty dear to me; I'm sharing it here so it still exists somewhere if that place collapses.

Just had a guy and his two kids in the shop, the oldest was 4 1/2, she told me so proudly ... She had a beautiful lavender cardigan on and matching socks ... I told her I loved that colour, we had a little chat about purple and all the purple things we have ... Then she asked me "are you a girl?" ... I looked at her dad and said can I let her know, he said yes

I crouched down to her level and said "that's a nice question you asked" ... and then said "I was born a boy, yuck, and for many reasons I always felt like a girl" ... Her eyes lit up, and I got a huge hugz and she whispered in my ear, "you're a girl"

I am more than likely the first trans person she has met, I made her feel comfortable and listened to ... one at a time ... Her dad thanked me for being kind.

Never dismiss a childs question, you might feel they are abrupt, they are not, they just want to know

First impression are important

Hugz & xXx

On Mastodon we aren't just chasing away the fringe people or the vulnerable. We're chasing away a whole slice of society that "offends" the uptight white tech bloke.
I look through replies and I can show you this: any woman, but particularly a woman with an opinion, gets a whole lot more replies telling her she's wrong.

And an unhealthy number of the guys who randomly read this post are nodding. Of course she would. Women are stupid.
Fuck off and splutter your indignation elsewhere.

They won't come right out and say, I'm glad that (horrible thing) happened to that Black person/woman/man!

They will not do this.

What they *will* do is say 'He was no angel!' and scour our pasts to find that one time in 1st grade when we put gum under the table.

What they will do is talk, /to each other/, in coded language. To let the other racists, whether they know they are or not, that they are not alone in their beliefs.

That their beliefs, their uncomfortable beliefs that Black people are inhuman and subordinate and ghetto and violent savages, *are* actually valid. Their beliefs that White people are totally innocent and unbiased and the real victims, actually, of reverse-racism.

Their beliefs that their hatred of Black people is Black people's own fault.

It's our fault they hate us.

It's our fault they want to do to us the things they want to do.

They will argue with you until they are blue in the face without ever addressing anything you say because they also need to believe you are wrong about everything. Even more than that, they need to believe they are more right than you about everything.

Helped a mate out with some yardwork today, went inside for lunch, hey how long have you had that grandfather clock, oh yeah that hasn't worked in ages...

Made bedroom eyes at that damn thing all afternoon, finally turned to my mate and said CAN I HAVE A GO ON YER CLOCK and my god, working on clocks is So So Nice

Here’s one of mine:

I always hide my home address with black electrical tape on my ID cards. Because most of the time when I show my ID there is no need to reveal my home address.

Once at the liquor store the cashier noticed it and questioned me about it. After I explained, she said she thought that was smart and that she was going to start doing the same.

Completely unexpectedly, I felt I had indirectly helped someone improve their safety and privacy with something so simple to do. It warmed my heart and made my day 🥰

#Caturday #Coronation

On the BART this morning (6.30 am), Benson and I got on a car with a guy having some kind of mental break on it. He was loud, talking and shouting to himself. He made weird sounds. He was disruptive.

And you know what?

No one killed him.

Benson and I gave him a wide berth; I kept an eye on him in case he tried to approach my dog.

But he was alive as he rode the train.

The mentally ill, the indigent, the broke down folks - they all deserve to survive a train ride.

Jesus christ, America.

#blacklivesmatter

Look at the Homestead Act 1862—it gave white people lots of land and economic power.

Look: white enslavers of Black people in the US were paid COMPENSATION after enslavement *nominally* ended in the US

Look at the GI Bill—gave white military men $/jobs

In other words…LOOK.


#BlackMastodon #Mastodon #history #usa #reconstruction

I have to let you all in on something.

At this point in my career I’m privileged to mentor a lot of young people, especially veterans and college students. And every so often they’re like really excited to meet me and say they would like to be like me. This totally blows my mind because they go to like MIT, Stanford, or Purdue ….and they’re usually in the second year of a PHD and they run their cybersecurity competition team and speak 9 languages or something….

I was a TERRIBLE youth. Yea, I eventually went to DePaul which is respectable and I have three okay undergrad degrees - merely because I had no choice but to enlist at 17 and the military kicked the crap out of me. I went to community college first the hard way around. I almost didn’t graduate from high school. I was a miserable, unhappy, uncool gnc goth kid who hacked computers and swore a lot. Those schools would have .blown their noses at my application and probably banned me from the campus for being a delinquent.

What I want to say is if you’re one of those rock star young people, I’m super impressed by you, and you’ve picked one hell of a role model. Keep it up, and don’t burn out.

If you’re that totally screwed up teenager, though, I might not get to see you at awards ceremonies and touted by the top professors at cons, but you can make it too. Even if nobody is ever in your corner.