RationalEidolon

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
softness-and-shattering
muse-meter:
“fittingoutjane:
“bulletstapes:
“fittingoutjane:
“bravadopinfire:
“ jessicalprice:
“ npr:
“ Back in the 1960s, the U.S. started vaccinating kids for measles. As expected, children stopped getting measles.
But something else...
npr

Back in the 1960s, the U.S. started vaccinating kids for measles. As expected, children stopped getting measles.

But something else happened.

Childhood deaths from all infectious diseases plummeted. Even deaths from diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea were cut by half.

“So it’s really been a mystery — why do children stop dying at such high rates from all these different infections following introduction of the measles vaccine,” says Michael Mina, a postdoc in biology at Princeton University and a medical student at Emory University.

Scientists Crack A 50-Year-Old Mystery About The Measles Vaccine

Photo credit: Photofusion/UIG via Getty Images

jessicalprice

Using computer models, they found that the number of measles cases in these countries predicted the number of deaths from other infections two to three years later.

“We found measles predisposes children to all other infectious diseases for up to a few years,” Mina says.

And the virus seems to do it in a sneaky way.

Like many viruses, measles is known to suppress the immune system for a few weeks after an infection. But previous studies in monkeys have suggested that measles takes this suppression to a whole new level: It erases immune protection to other diseases, Mina says.

VACCINATE. YOUR. DAMN. KIDS. 

bravadopinfire

Everyone please re-blog this. It’s very important.

@takashi0 You re-blogging things tends to get them spread far and wide. Please help us out on this one.

fittingoutjane

Fun and exciting news! COVID does the same thing, although in a different way. Had COVID a while ago and keep getting sick with everything else? This is why.

COVID weakens the immune system for several months. This is why we’re seeing outbreaks of weird fungal infections in adults, more TB worldwide, mycoplasmic pneumonia outbreaks filling hospitals, plus more children getting severely ill from RSV and strep.

Wear. A. Mask. If you haven’t had COVID, keep it that way. If you have, you are immune-compromised and you really want to avoid catching COVID again, or getting anything else.

bulletstapes

Since I’ve had COVID (multiple times, despite my best efforts), I’ve been getting colds rougly 2–3x more than before, some really nasty ones that knocked me down like a flu, and all my colds have taken twice as long as before. And I used to have a really good immune system before, rarely ever got sick.

And since I’ve been keeping up with the vax and wearing a mask everywhere and testing regularly, I’m reasonably certain those were really just colds that fucked over my COVID-weakened immune system, not additional COVID re-infections.

fittingoutjane

In 2022, I had my 11th surgery, which was less dangerous and less extensive than most of the others. It was healing quite well a couple weeks later, then I got COVID.

Then I got a wound infection. Never had a surgical infection before in my life, and it shouldn’t have happened that late in the healing process, but it did.

Now, these are anecdotes, but the data is there, basically every other kind of infection has grown more common and more serious since COVID started to spread out of control.

muse-meter

Huh, some things are making more sense.

Source: NPR
ruffboijuliaburnsides
furiousfinnstan

@stvksn on ig

krillbeans

I hope your god has asked for your mercy. I hope youve refused to forgive him.

qillermeme

i love this more and more every time i see it.

thiskindoflifeisalliknow

I have so much love for this person. The amount of empathy it takes to have these considerations about a person you will never meet, the eloquence and conviction with which they speak, the contempt for landlords. Sometimes I see something someone writes or creates and I wish with everything in me that I could meet and talk to that person for hours about what caused them to be this kind of light in the universe. This is one of those times.

ruffboijuliaburnsides
pezcautism

VERY IMPORTANT a dam in the Netherlands, the weerdsluis lock, is directly on a migratory path for spawning fish. They have a worker stationed there to open the door for the fish, but they can take a while to open it. So to keep the fish from getting preyed on by birds they installed a doorbell. Only, the fish don't have hands to ring the doorbell. If you go to their website, they have a LIVE CAMERA AND A DOORBELL that YOU RING FOR THE FISH when they're waiting, and then the dam worker opens the door for them! I can't express how obsessed I am with this. look at this shit. oh my god.

image

Please check on the fish doorbell once in a while :)

alex51324

I just looked, and there are 170 other people on there, also checking to see if there are fish waiting.

Please remember, if ever you are tempted to make a sweeping statement about human nature, that on this night in March, 2024, while war rages, there are 171 of us looking to see if a fish needs us to ring a doorbell.

Plenty else is going on, but also that.

(PS, the site says that the busiest times for fish are sunrise and sunset, which for now are at about 6:30, AM and PM, local time. Local time in Utrecht is 1 hour ahead of GMT, 5 hours ahead of EST, if that helps. I'm going to try to remember to check back again around 2 AM my time, when it will be morning for the fish!)

tanoraqui
nedlittle

it drives me bonkers the way people don't know how to read classic books in context anymore. i just read a review of the picture of dorian gray that said "it pains me that the homosexual subtext is just that, a subtext, rather than a fully explored part of the narrative." and now i fully want to put my head through a table. first of all, we are so lucky in the 21st century to have an entire category of books that are able to loudly and lovingly declare their queerness that we've become blind to the idea that queerness can exist in a different language than our contemporary mode of communication. second it IS a fully explored part of the narrative! dorian gray IS a textually queer story, even removed from the context of its writing. it's the story of toxic queer relationships and attraction and dangerous scandals and the intertwining of late 19th century "uranianism" and misogyny. second of all, i'm sorry that oscar wilde didn't include 15k words of graphic gay sex with ao3-style tags in his 1890 novel that was literally used to convict him of indecent behaviour. get well soon, i guess...

dancinggrimm

I saw a review of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that said 'I can't believe people think this was a feminist book'.

Like, do you know how swooningly, outrage-causingly shocking it was that the main character slammed her bedroom door in her abusive husband's face? Do you have any idea how unthinkable it was that she denied him access to her space and her person? She was supposed to submissively look away while he turned their son into an alcoholic for his own amusement and seduced innocent young women! It was revolutionary in 1848; when Bronte (Anne) wrote it, she had to do so under a male psuedonym because publishers wouldn't accept works by women unless they were harmless pap, which was all that was thought suitable for women to read lest their mild and gentle minds be corrupted.

The reason these groundbreaking books of history seem to tame and understated now is because they worked. They raised the bar, pushed the agenda forwards, cleared the path for the next writer. They did exactly what they were supposed to. Time is linear. History moves forward. We make progress.

When you are old, if things happen as they ought, a future generation of teenagers will read The Hate U Give and Simon and the Homo Sapiens' Agenda and Speak and think to themselves 'why did anybody ever think this was contraversial? Why did they ban them? These are just things we talk about, these are things we deal with like normal people. What was the past like, and how do we stop from backsliding into a place where these things are considered shocking again?"

I really hope that's how it goes.

svengooliecat

First rule of literary analysis: the analyst cannot judge a past work by modern standards or ethics. Doing so leads to faulty comprehension, straw man fallacies, and lazy logic and analysis. We must always consider the work within the broader frameworks of the history, culture, and events that shaped it.

profiction-anomalocaris

A really obnoxious meme to post those guys from Buzzfeed Unsolved going, "It's easy to condemn someone from another time by modern standards... and condemn away we shall!"

When I see that, what I see is, "I'm actively refusing to be media literate because it makes me feel good to call things from the past bad without thinking."

This makes you incredibly easy to manipulate when someone wants to engage in historical revisionism, call for book bans of books with 'offensive' content, make baseless callout posts, and otherwise lie to you, because you've trained yourself not to look at the context in which a statement was made and not think about anything but what's explicitly stated directly in front of you.

fennopunk
kickair8p

Also:

How to Download the Books That Just Entered the Public Domain

cyberpigeon-remade

not really secretly, it’s just that there’s no organised way to track what had its copyright sunset. partly because of the sheer volume of work, partly because the publishing industry would implode if people found out there were books published before 2012

andletforsakendidodie
geek-ramblings

Dude this is so f*cking briliant. 

To basically get Congress to realize how f*cked up data privacy laws are. He did data mining, targeted men over 45 that are within 5 miles of the US capital, and put ads out including “do you want to read Ted Cruise fanfiction”. it looks like 100s clicked it including 3 that seemed to be in the capital building while doing so, which then means he has their device info, ip address etc. which he can then mine even more. 


wisteria-wolf

How can you mention the ted cruz ad and not include what the ad they clicked on looks like? Anyways, here it is:

image
zz9pzza

https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Ted%20Cruz/works

shinelikethunder

“If you’re thinking, ‘How on Earth is any of this legal?’ I totally agree with you. It shouldn’t be,” he said. “And if you happen to be a legislator who is feeling a little nervous right now about whether your information is in this envelope, and if you’re terrified about what I might do with it, you might want to channel that worry into making sure that I can’t do anything.”

Then, he cheerfully concluded: “Anyway, sleep well!”
dduane

(laughter) That graphic just above really wasn’t on my bingo card for today. Yet here we are. :))))))

anexperimentallife
luxlightly

I don't know how to break it to you all but a bad parent will parent badly with books and a good parent will parent well with an iPad.

Ipads don't make the "ipad kid". What upsets you is a child who is being given something distracting and potentially obnoxious to those around them so that the parent doesn't have to deal with engaging with their child. And it's not new.

I grew up before the invention of the ipad and the complaints were the same. It was "tv kids" and "Gameboy kids". And it was book kids too, though people rarely complained about those kids because it didn't make noise and bother them personally so they no longer cared. Because the "it's for the good of the child!" argument dried up real fast as soon as it was something that didn't affect them.

A good parent who is engaging with their child's interests can do so with an iPad or television. A bad parent can say "take this and leave me alone" with a book or a toy. The problem is that some kids were raised by objects. By whatever kept them busy and entertained and away from their parents. Sure, there are parents who need to realize that's what they're doing and would benefit from changing their parenting style by limiting electronics use, but "if you give your kid an electronic toy, it means you're a bad parent" is not the same thing and largely misses the actual source of the problem.

Your arbitrary standards of what "good children" doing "good child activities" is as restricting.

crashorpie

#it's exhausting to hear the same argument over and over your whole life#changed to meet the times#wherever was last demonized is now the good thing#and whatever's new is bad#and ten years from now that bad thing will be the wholesome old favorite from when times were simple (tags from OP)

twofingerswhiskey
magnusbae

To illustrate this post by @mayahawkse I would like to visualize to you the difference:

A post in 2023:

image

A post in 2014:

image

A zoom out of the same post:

image

This is what a community looks like.

See how in 2023 almost all of the reblogs come from the OP, from their few hours/days in the tag search. Meanwhile in 2014 the % of reblogs from OP is insignificant, because most of the reblogs come from the reblogs within the fandom, within the micro-communities formed there. You didn't need to rely on tags, or search, or being featured. Because the community took care of you, made sure to pass the work between themselves and onto their blog and exposed their followers to it. It kept works alive for years.

It's not JUST the reblog/like ratio that causing this issue, it's the type of interaction people have. They're content with scrolling and liking the search engine, instead of actually having a reblogging relationship with other blogs in their community.

Anyways, if you want to see more content you like, the only true way to make it happen is to reblog it. Likes do not forward content in no way but making OP feel nice. Reblogs on the other hand make content eternal. They make it relevant, they make it exist outside of a fickle tumblr search that hardly works on the best of days.

If you want more of something, reblog it.

augustdementhe
littleforestbat

this whole plagiarism discussion makes me feel genuinely insane. do these people not enjoy research? not enjoy developing arguments ? no. money and clout is the only thing real for them. hollow people

littleforestbat

image

gita jackson is - as per usual - on the fucking money too. these people are so scared of their mediocre commentary and/or analysis that they never risk anything to develop it and thus continue to stick themselves in the same awful cycle by just stealing other peoples works. write!! by doing so you're miles and miles ahead of anyone who ever plagiarises without thought.

leafcrunch
bidoof

what farming items in mmorpgs has taught me: i used to think using ice trays to make ice cubes was free but after thinking about it i have to pay the electric bill to power the freezer so every moment that i’m not freezing new trays of ice cubes is a moment that i’m underutilizing the freezer and increasing the cost of ice cubes. i have to constantly swap out ice trays for new ice cubes on an hourly rotation on a 24 hour basis or else i won’t produce the maximum amount of ice cubes possible and will underutilize the full potential of my electric bill. i need to stop using all other appliances and utilities in my home to make more ice cubes

saccharine-tar

image
wordswithkittywitch
werewolfetone

One fallacy, I think, of anti piracy arguments is that a lot of them seem to assume that if I'm unable to pirate something I'm going to pay for it instead rather than going "oh! that's a terrible shame" and then quickly forgetting about it

werewolfetone

"If you were not pirating [media] you'd be paying for it and therefore piracy is evil 😡" actually if I were not pirating that media I would be thinking about something else. I have made the decision to not spend any money on this and even god himself could not shake it

3liza

the research on this was already done decades ago and then quickly squashed because the record labels did not like the finding that people who pirated music were spending way more money on actually buying music legally than people who did not pirate music. it turns out people who care enough to pirate media are generally big fans of that media and willing to spend money on it if they have the money to spend

3liza

article is from 2009 so we have known this for a LONG time.

The Norwegian study looked at almost 2,000 online music users, all over the age of 15. Researchers found that those who downloaded "free" music – whether from lawful or seedy sources – were also 10 times more likely to pay for music. This would make music pirates the industry's largest audience for digital sales.

Wisely, the study did not rely on music pirates' honesty. Researchers asked music buyers to prove that they had proof of purchase.