It’s so weird to me. When I was in second grade, I started trying to read the Bible from cover to cover (made it until Numbers, then I had to start skipping around for my own sanity).

We keep hearing about how this is the most important book to this group of people. They demand it be taught in schools, they demand that we follow its precepts, but they can’t be arsed to read it themselves?

the educational parts were actually pretty good

It’s just workbooks that you do independently and grade yourself, right? All of that seems like it’s what we’d call low “depth of knowledge.” Multiple choice questions and just memorizing facts.

There is “old earth creationism” which works along those lines. But creationists are “literalists,” which actually means they believe a specific interpretation of the text taught to them by their pastor.

Really, you’d think that most anyone reading the texts would realize that Genesis 1 and 2 were mutually contradicting…

The creative justifications for creationism that try to approach something like science amuse me. Like Kents Hovind and Ham are both too stupid and incurious to be fun; a creationist who’s at least knowledgeable enough to look at “variable c” “”theories”” is entertaining to engage with. That’s part of how I’d justify calling this a “meme” anyway - it’s one of the brighter ones manufacturing a meme to sell to the stupid ones.

I collect that kind of stuff for fun + have some exposure to Christian education communities.

Were you doing ACE? Those workbooks should be illegal.

That’s Palahnuik’s Rant. His non-Fight Club stuff is pretty unhinged.

I read Haunted in middle school, and it fucked me up, although it was funny to read “Guts” out loud to everyone on the bus. (Be prepared if you are going to read this one - it’s pretty famous for people fainting during live readings.)

Warm Leatherette - The Normal

Everyone is bringing up Crash the novel/movie, but don’t forget this also a much weirder Palahnuik book where the erotic car crashes help a guy time travel and fuck/impregnate all of his female ancestors.

The physics of knitting is so complicated that SciShow fucked it up and had a bunch of people mad at them.

Textiles are complicated crazy wonderful things. The drape of a fabric is going to be related to the materials it’s made of (cotton, linen, wool, acrylics and polyesters, blends of all of the above and more to various percentages…) as well as just the process of making.

Woven is very sturdy and doesn’t stretch. You can’t unwind the whole thing by getting it caught on something. Your jeans and slacks are probably made of woven material, because otherwise you’d accidentally lose your pants to the bump of a nail in a chair or something.

Knit stretches, but accidentally bump into a door hinge and you’ve unraveled a good chunk of your sweater. It’s good at moving though. Most things are done on knitting machines in “stockinette” stitches - look for little ‘v’ shapes.

Gotta keep in mind that the upkeep of clothing was something people use to be spend several hours a week on - beyond just laundry. Weaving takes forever and it’s not particularly exciting. Just imagine how many outfits you’d have in 1600 BC or 1600 AD versus now.

It’s just really crazy that we are all surrounded by billions of tiny fibers that were twisted into single strands that then become fabrics that then become clothes. Each stage presents uniquely complex and beautiful physics problems.

Still interesting to ask about that dent’s shape. We could think about how the chemistry of the material composing it/the way it weathered, or approach it as a micro biome where an entire ecological niche is carved out around going from rain puddle to rain puddle. If the puddle is in concrete, we can talk about issues of equity - do some neighborhoods have different shapes of puddle (eg, how well does the city maintain different neighborhood’s infrastructure.)

We can accept that the outlines of our puddle are stochastic and arbitrary, but that doesn’t mean we can’t marvel at tracing out its shape.

Imagine modeling the components of a word mathematically. Each word has a value in some number of dimensions, like maybe how negative the word is, or how much it has to do with fruit or something.

You’d be able to calculate a set of eigenvectors to describe each dimension, basically unit vectors. You could have an eigen-name or eigen-compliment, basically just a word that other names or compliments could be expressed in units of that word.

I think 1984’s Newspeak shows some examples of what eigen-words could be. Stuff like “doublepluscold.”

I really don’t get why there’s never any effort when doing l this kind of “stock art” math/science.

So many fake chemicals, so many equations that are completely meaningless… all of those t-shirts that say “what part of [UNINTELLIGIBLE SCRIBBLING] do you not understand?”

Is it really that much effort to crack open a linear algebra textbook or look at an actual equation sheet? I always feel sniped by that shit, I tried to read it and figure out what it is but it’s always just a mix of completely random stuff, with half of it truncated to the point of meaninglessness.

Ikr? I can’t believe it was a woman!

The Oklahoma Commission on Children and Youth is supposed to oversee DHS, but there’s so much regulatory capture and incest that they don’t do their job.

DHS used to be under federal oversight, but they were released from the Pinnacle Plan earlier this year. There’s some movements to try to get a grand jury investigation opened, some other movements in court.

I’ve called senators and house reps over and over. There aren’t really any federal agencies that can help. They really seem to be a law unto themselves.

She ran away multiple times, and with those kinds of kids, they basically stop caring. Same with the ones who attempt to kill themselves multiple times - in the words of the director of Kiamachi Youth Services, they are “lemons.”

Never a consideration that death often would be preferable to the hell holes we call group homes. It’s fucking sick. I’ve been in the room and heard the complete callousness in the way they talk about these kids.

Country girls make do…

Are you ready? 💦

It was literally in retaliation for being smart enough to know that my mom was forgetting to pick me up from school because she was drunk/high.

The school told me to cover up my parents alcoholism. I got punish for mentioning how much they drank.

I couldn’t even get a lawyer in Oklahoma to help me after my ex husband tortured me and maxed out my credit cards lol. Oklahoma is a place where compassion does not exist.

I’ve also been turned down by at least 3 news agencies at this point. I’m starting to suspect there’s something more foul/corrupt at play.