Wannabe Astronaut @space_cadet@aus.social

"Professional" isn't synonymous with "good".

I'm at the point where "you're at the age when the men in your family history dropped dead of heart attacks" is starting to sound like a welcome relief from this torturous endless work slavery lifestyle.

2/2

Take, for instance, the dual wave-particle nature of light - our brains are literally incapable of "fitting" such a concept inside our minds. We can visualise and understand a wave, we can visualise and understand a particle, but we cannot visualise and understand something that is BOTH. So we build mathematics that "works" with that thing that is both - and 'poof' it works, so now we can effectively understand it, but only by using and trusting the mathematics. Our understanding of light exists "outside" of our brains - it is partially detached from our brains - it exists on the paper of the pages of the textbook and there it must stay, because our primate lump of electric fat simply cannot grasp the concept of what light actually is.

1/2
OK, so Galileo wasn't omniscient. Big deal.
The phenomena of the universe are never going to be 100% comprehensible by the human brain, because the human brain is not able to cope with the required amount of complexity. The universe will always be partially ineffable to us. Our brain is only a small lump of electrified fat that evolved on the plains of the Serengeti to be good at a few things:
* identify visual patterns, in particular:
- human/primate faces
- predators with big teeth
- food
* judging how easy/hard it will be to leap to the nearest tree branch
* socially interact with other members of the troop/family/tribe, including:
- language,

and not much else.

It's a fluke that these brains grew so much in response to those things that it is also accidentally able to invent and appreciate art, mathematics and science.

But, that fluke isn't so infinite that it will enable us to comprehend all of the phenomena of the universe. But that's OK, we can still be immensely powerful, we just need to trust that our mathematics' conclusions can be trusted.

(cont'd.)

I'm a Granddad!

The grit in the bottom of your coffee cup is actually microplastics - tiny chunks of tyre rubber. Yummy!

There are some clever people here. Perhaps one of you might know the term for this.:

I have observed that bigotry is, at its essence, a desire for all people to be the same ... specifically, the bigot wants for all people to be the same as the bigot. The bigot wants for all people who are "different" from themselves, to disappear, to begone forever.
Conversely, there are other people who are very, very comfortable with diversity - indeed even welcoming, celebrating diversity.

One of these two types of people are typically found to be Conservative voters, and the other type are typically Progressive. Have a look at these two photos, one is the Front Bench of the LNP (the Australian conservative Party) and the other is the Front Bench of the ALP (the progressives).

I personally consider that if you boil down Conservative politics to its essence, at its core it is basically just Selfishness. In contrast, if you boil down Progressive politics, at its core it is essentially just Community/Selflessness.

What I'm searching for, is a term or a phrase that describes and characterises the direct, link/relationship between bigotry and selfishness. If I drew a Venn Diagram, Selfishness, Bigotry and Conservatism would be almost completely overlapping, would basically be almost the same circle. Whereas, Selflessness, Community, Diversity and Progressive politics would all be massively overlapping.

Is this pattern so well-known that there is a word for it, or a phrase, etc.?

I think I am starting to realise that I am genuinely bigoted toward Conservatives.

It's times like these when I wish that English had a proper word to say what we mean, when we would normally say "irony". Ironically, "irony" is not the correct word to use in this situation.

What would be the best word, here? Perhaps: "hypocrisy"? Not quite, because their Bigotry is only one of the things that I hate about Conservatives.

Why is USA's standard paper size still "Letter" when nobody sends fucking letters anymore

If anyone ever invents a Super A.I. they had better keep it away from Facebook or it will take one glance and immediately launch all the nukes.

Your cup of tea has the DNA of hundreds of insects in it.
Your cup of coffee is made from the tears of hundreds of human slaves.

The real Marvel "Love and Thunder" was Jessica Jones and Luke Cage doing the nasty

There are over 200 million businesses in the world and I'm supposed to have an account and a password for every single fucking one of them