This place is so remote, the average bloke from WA doesn’t even know it exists.

I try this so often yet I remain terrible at these haha

I find it difficult to imagine a future in which humans aren’t making fun of impaired cognition.

I think the context is what’s most important, if anyone actually directs such language (be it retarded, idiot, etc) towards people with genuine mental impairment, that constitutes a slur. But the word ‘retarded’ literally means ‘slow’, and is still regularly used (including by myself) in scientific and technical contexts (compared to racist or homophobic slurs, which are only ever really used in a ‘slur’ kind of way).

I wouldn’t really have a problem with calling people ‘slow’ in jest, and I don’t think many would. Imo if not ‘retarded’, it’ll be something else with the same meaning.

Enjoy the ride 🤘

This man can’t be stopped!

Really loving the heavier direction on this album, but glad he’s keeping up the crazy instrumentation.

Genuinely I think the world would have much better scientific outcomes if a decent portion of grants were just straight-up randomly allocated (from a pool that meets a minimum standard I guess). Everyone wants to fund ‘almost complete’ research but there’s such little money for the early-stage ‘high risk high reward’ basic research, which is what basically all applied research is built upon.

10 minutes of sun per day is typically less likely to give you cancer than 0 minutes. Vitamin D (and other compounds involved in the synthesis from cholesterol that you won’t get in supplements) upregulate DNA repair polymerases that protect against carcinogens. Of course after a few minutes the costs of UV exposure outweight this benefit though.

We needed a negative control, dammit!

need crumb

I want to put Skype’s corpse on a banner and wave it around to all the software that’s currently undergoing enshittification.

I can almost hear it!

That’s gorgeous!! Great photo.

Fairly small, if you make a circle with your thumb and pointer that’s pretty spot on.

Crystallise it and show us the structure lol

Yep, I’m not a photographer by any means but I like recording all the different herps I find as best I can - cheers!

So, the government’s picking up the funding slack… right?

… right?

I don’t know what to think about housing anymore, I’m just so tired. The new builds around my parents house look shoddy and just plain ugly, not to mention first thing developers do is remove any and all trees and put concrete over the entire block. “Nimby” has become such a buzzword and a scapegoat but like, it’s hard not to have a bit of empathy, and anecdotally lots of people would be supportive of these new developments if they weren’t all shit. These concrete jungle suburbs will be around for decades at least. But also, the housing crisis is real and developers are saying that red tape around building quality is slowing them down. I desperately want a place to live, nothing fancy but at least safe and liveable. Is it genuinely impossible to have density and build quality?

Concert security is getting really stringent atm. With the government raising the terrorism threat to probable, large events are increasing security measures. Given how much publicity this has gotten, how controversial it is, plus how intensely passionate people are about the palestine/israel conflict, I can see why they wouldn’t want to go ahead with this. Someone was stabbed at a world music concert at the Perth concert hall last sunday too!

It does seem like whatever integrity there was in politics is quickly vanishing. I’m relieved we don’t have quite the same attitude towards religion compared to the US at least. I think Australia is a long way off being a theocracy, whereas the US could be one as soon as next year.

The two main reasons stopping me are lack of infrastructure (I haven’t ridden a bike in ages and there’s no way I’m going on a road with any traffic lol), and climate (Perth is often hot as hell, or rainy, neither of which is great unless you have a shower at work).