Renaissance Grrrl

Good old Woz. Good for him.

Violent 'storms' hidden under Antarctica's ice could be speeding its decline When sea ice melts and refreezes, it stirs vortices that pull warm deep water up, eroding Antarctica's shrinking ice shelves.

Fascinating read on the world beneath Antarctica's ice!

I've told this story before, but I'm going to tell it again, because I think it's important with all the copaganda floating around On Here.

Last year I was representing a marginalized client charged with a crime in a rural client who had been denied the public defender.

humiliation is temporary generational wealth is permanent

The data revealed a consistent pattern: People who learned about a topic through an LLM versus web search felt that they learned less, invested less effort in subsequently writing their advice, and ultimately wrote advice that was shorter, less factual and more generic. In turn, when this advice was presented to an independent sample of readers, who were unaware of which tool had been used to learn about the topic, they found the advice to be less informative, less helpful, and they were less likely to adopt it.

"Learning with AI falls short compared to old-fashioned web search": theconversation.com/learning-wit...

Not shocking. What was interesting, is this held over many studies and w/ a large pool of participants.

#ai

It's almost like there's a global shift towards right-wing authoritarian nationalism happening everywhere that manifests itself differently in different countries depending on their history and culture and no one country should be smug about another country's specific manifestation!

but the redemption period for mortgages is in months. There's a reason so many states, including Illinois, ban counterclaims for money in eviction cases but not foreclosures. The reason is racism.

We need a national ban on retaliatory eviction, a national ban on counterclaim restrictions,

If you want to end mass incarceration, it starts with ending no fault eviction, mandating a right to counsel in eviction cases, and passing the Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act nationwide.

There's a reason the redemption period for leases measures in days,

More Black women are evicted every year than Black men are incarcerated. For profit prisons are one of the leading funders of lobbying against tenants' rights ordinances and for strict no-fault eviction laws. The reason is simple: eviction feeds the carceral state.

It’s really one thing to watch racism happen and it’s another thing to watch the racism happen to your mother in public.

I don’t speak for her or my grandmother (one of the white women profiled in the book) but I am fucking sick of this shit from the almost exclusively white women reviewers

Bumping this thread bc there is yet another long form review out that purports to summarize the text and in the process gets it wrong, this time demoting my mom to a founding “member” of an organization she started. Founder. That’s the word!

Why is it so hard to tell women’s stories with respect

This classification will make it impossible for students to access federally-backed loans for their studies. Of note: most of these disciplines are pursued by women. This is an attempt to keep women out of the workforce. ALSO, many of these jobs require mandatory reporting of child abuse. Weird, no?

They aren’t professional .. and they are jobs most likely to be achieved by non white / non men as leaving poverty

And these are the professions that most aid people in changing their places in the social hierarchy

Core rope memory - Wikipedia

Core rope memory It's really fascinating stuff, a form of rom prior to microchips where the data was encoded by the magnetic disks at the intersections.

And like so much of the appolo computer equipment, primarily made by women.

Some of the programming for the Apollo guidance computers was done by literally weaving magnetic disks into copper wires by hand.

I’m sick of writing about dead trans people | Xtra Magazine For 15 years, I hoped my words would change something. Now I’m grieving the world that could’ve been

I wrote about the exhaustion and dissonance of writing about TDOR for the past 15 years

Black Trans Folks Have Been Here Before A timely interview with Chastity Bowick, the new Executive Director of the Marsha P. Johnson Institute. This interview has been edited for clarity and may differ slightly from the audio version. I've...

Or read this recent interview with the new executive director of the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, which none of the white leftists quoting me today either read or shared when it came out. It's the least read thing on my whole newsletter.

www.burnsnotice.com/black-trans-...

Rest in power So far in 2017, 21 trans people have been reported as murdered. These are their life stories.

Read this piece I contributed to in 2017. This piece, talking with the friends and families of murdered Black trans women, still haunts me to this day.

Pieces like this are just not printed anymore.

www.thefader.com/2017/10/15/t...

Observing Trans Day of Remembrance 2025 Remembering those we’ve lost over the past year.

Good evening all. For this year's Trans Day of Remembrance (TDOR), TFR remembers three transfeminine authors who passed away this year: Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (78), Valerie Amelia Thompson (38), and Michelle Duff (85) 🖤

We also remember 367+ victims of anti-trans violence and suicide 🕯️

#tdor

American Hippo In 2017 Sarah Gailey made her debut with River of Teeth and Taste of Marrow, two action-packed novellas that introduced readers to an alternate America in wh...

If you want more, you should read @sarahgailey.bsky.social's American Hippo, for queer hippo-riding cowboys in the almost post-apocalyptic mississippi of 1890.

River of Teeth - Wikipedia

Sarah Gailey's River Of Teeth

An alt history where the famous Hippo Deal went through, and invasive hippos have overtaken Louisiana.

It follows several hippo hunter mercs

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_o...

Daily Arizona silver belt. (Globe, Gila County, Ariz.) 1906-1929, March 31, 1910, Page Page Two, Image 2 Daily Arizona silver belt. (Globe, Gila County, Ariz.) 1906-1929, March 31, 1910, Page Page Two, Image 2, brought to you by Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records; Phoenix, AZ, and the Nat...

"Relief From Africa!"

RELIEF.

"All we have to do to be saved from vegetarianism is to cultivate a taste for hippopotamus, rhinoceros..."

Saved. From Vegetarianism. By eating these armored man-swallowing meat tanks. Again, their biggest problem is that they worry it won't taste good.

Also they sweat acid.

a close up of a hippopotamus in the water with a national geographic logo on the bottom Alt: A close image of one hippo among a herd in shoulder-deep water, looking surly.

Unlike deer, you can't just dart them with it from a distance, because their skin is TWO INCHES THICK, which is THREE TIMES THICKER THAN THAT OF ELEPHANTS OR RHINOS.

Which is NONSENSE.

WHY.

a large hippopotamus is standing in the water with its mouth open Alt: a large hippopotamus is standing in the water with its mouth open

So that means that any attempt to neuter a hippo is:

A) Exploratory Surgery
B) Done under "best guess" conditions
C) Where the drugs are *going* to wear off
D) On an animal that weighs more than a Ford F150
E) All of which is muscle
F) On testicles that are hiding from you
G) And it is mad about it

The big sleep: How do you anesthetize a hippopotamus? It may rank fairly low in most lists of pressing problems to be solved but an increasing number of zoos and wildlife collections as well as gamekeepers nevertheless need to come up with an answer:  Ho...

On the anesthetic point - immune is too strong a word, but 'anesthesia is only rarely sufficient to enable surgery to be undertaken' is close enough for me.

What's wild is that their response to anesthesia might be rooted in how they process oxygen when deprived for long periods underwater.

this is a deeply unsettling fact to have learned at 1am

Morning.

Some ppl have no understanding of what "consent" means. Albeit, our society works hard to ensure folks don't; but that's no excuse

One of the most insightful questions I've ever gotten while TAing was a student--who sometimes came off as a bit of a ditz--was "why isn't energy on the Periodic Table of Elements?"

Answering it required invoking a lot of fascinating science, including Einstein's work on energy-mass equivalence.