greatbeholderbrooke

Latest Posts by greatbeholderbrooke

early gnostic theologian: material existence is a form of torture thrusted upon humanity by the treacherous demiurge.

the same theologian eleven months on estrogen: well maybe actually it not so bad.

All eyes on you

Our local newspaper ran a story about the legendary graffiti artist who recently passed away and. Literally everything about it is fucking insane. I'm insane about it.

So this guy has been extremely active for around fifteen years, during which he spread these beautiful, high quality pieces all over the country, way over a thousand of his standard signature, and probably thousands more. He did completely batshit stuff like literally spray painting an entire train from top to bottom or leaving his signature at the top of a 600ft tall overpass and this whole time, only five people from his crew know who he really is. To everyone else it's a complete mystery.

And then he dies at the age of 35. A few weeks after his death, his crew shows up at his completely unassuming parents' doorstep, reveals who they are and asks if they can host a memorial exhibition of his art.

Turns out, this dude has been leading an insane double life. In the daytime he was a meek little office worker with a partially paralyzed arm and no social life to speak of. In the nighttime he was a fucking legend. Not only did he climb that fucking 600ft overpass, he did it WITH A PHYSICAL DISABILITY. THE MADLAD. And throughout the entire time, fifteen years, he got caught once. ONCE. HE DID ALL THAT UNNOTICED. THAT'S INSANE.

You might be frustrated by the library never having a complete manga collection on its shelves at any given time, but the 12 year old checking out 14 volumes of One Piece at once is vital to the library ecosystem. He's like the sea otter keeping the kelp forest from being devastated by an excess of sea urchins.

i'm 23 today!! 💪

i will be happy to get a reblog as a birthday present c:

i hauve a cold

distant past

It takes a village! 🧑‍🤝‍🧑💪🦈

Our Animal Care team recently completed annual exams on all seven leopard sharks in our Kelp Forest exhibit. From aquarists to veterinarians and volunteers, it takes a small community of shark afishionados to get this important job done!

Each shark was brought up individually by the dive team, anesthetized, and given a full workup. Vet services drew blood, inspected gills for parasites, checked eyes, and examined the elasmobranchs via ultrasound. Meanwhile, aquarists recorded measurements as the sharks woke up.

These annual checkups are critical to the ongoing care of these amazing animals—and it wouldn’t be possible without the collaborative work of our dedicated Aquarium community! 💙

📸 Thanks to staffers Mary and Tiffany for the fintastic photos!

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

Just started differential geometry, I'm starting to understand the appeal

THE TRIANGLE-INEQUALITY APPRECIATION SOCIETY

Hello fellow travelers & ponderers on this planet we call home.

Having recently been freed from a truly miserable coursework project, I am happy to announce my new project: The triangle-inequality appreciation society (TIAS).

Our goals are to:

Appreciate the triangle inequality

Create an irregular newsletter about the triangle inequality

Have semi-regular meetups to discuss our appreciation of the triangle inequality

From the poster above I've removed the phone number and email, but you can just respond to this post or message me and I'll hook you up.

The truth is that for all the love famous results in maths like the hairy ball theorem or Fermat's last theorem get, one of the most frequently used results gets the least love. This is why we've started this society for the appreciation of the triangle inequality.

We're based in Exeter, but all are welcome. At the moment, most members are math students but everyone can join us there's no requirements other than to appreciate the triangle inequality.

Any contributions you would like to make to the newsletter are appreciated, it can be anything! A poem, a quiz, a comic strip, an article, a derivation, anyway you want to express your love is wanted.

Come and join us!

I have finally finished writing this long essay on solar winds. Good lord I forgot how much I hated writing these things. I got an extension and everything but I've still had to pull several all nighters just to get it finished on time.

I actually do love solar modelling, and especially the combination of fluid dynamics and magnetism. Solar wind especially is awesome, but at the moment I'm just exhausted from it. I'm just praying to the immortal soul of Eugene Parker that I'll be able to get the 70% I want on the paper.

If anyone wants to hear more about it I'll happily share, but you'll have to give me some time to find the enthusiasm again

Art by 土豆LCZ

My boyfriend is trying to explain cricket to me again. “He’s only got two balls to make 48 runs”, he says. The camera focuses on a man. Underneath him it says LEFT ARM FAST MEDIUM. A ball flies into the stands and presumably fractures someone’s skull. “There’s a free six”, my boyfriend says. 348 SIXES says the screen. A child in the audience waves a sign referencing Weet-Bix

you've been waiting a while for a new maths update - and it's finally here!

improvements include:

in gender selection screen, added "sumtraction" option

fixed bug where positive divergent sums evaluated to negative numbers

added new 2-dimensional version of off-by-1 errors - off-by-[1,1]

changed the discrete maths server to a PvP zone (note: computer science is still PvNP)

the category theory DLC is now (co)free!

to prevent confusion with function graphs, all voiced lines pronounce "graph theory" with a soft g

fixed "vacuously true" glitch

integrals can now disobey fundamental theorem of calculus when unhappy. they become happy again if fed logarithmic functions

hyperbolic geometry no longer exaggerates as a rhetorical device (note: spherical geometry left the same as before)

rebalanced primes so that 4k+1's and 4k+3's alternate in Thue-Morse pattern. added an uncomputable 4k+2 prime

hot combinatorial games now distribute their temperature according to the laws of thermodynamics; cold games are now superconductive

added demo of "finitist hardcore" gamemode. as of now only two levels are available

subtraction is now associative

recursion is now recursive

added a nontrivial linear, associative, commutative binary operation on the positive reals, over which addition is distributive

exponentiated liner logic, so that additive logic is multiplicative and multiplicative logic is exponential

fixed "negative probability" glitch

redesigned the Tits Building and the Cox-Zucker Machine

fixed trigonometry

increased hitboxes for infinitesimals

added lootboxes

"Do you ever dream of land?" The whale asks the tuna.

"No." Says the tuna, "Do you?"

"I have never seen it." Says the whale, "but deep in my body, I remember it."

"Why do you care," says the tuna, "if you will never see it."

"There are bones in my body built to walk through the forests and the mountains." Says the whale.

"They will disappear." Says the tuna, "one day, your body will forget the forests and the mountains."

"Maybe I don't want to forget," Says the whale, "The forests were once my home."

"I have seen the forests." Whispers the salmon, almost to itself.

"Tell me what you have seen," says the whale.

"The forests spawned me." Says the salmon. "They sent me to the ocean to grow. When I am fat with the bounty of the ocean, I will bring it home."

"Why would the forests seek the bounty of the oceans?" Asks the whale. "They have bounty of their own."

"You forget," says the salmon, "That the oceans were once their home."

nobody understands my craft

I've recently been seeing this article making rounds around this website and particularly people misusing this very cool advancement to imply that modern nuclear reactors are "unsafe" or "dangerous", which is partially due to the just blatantly bad journalism on display here.

The accomplishment of this new reactor is definitely exceptionally impressive but I think that news websites (Even ones specializing in science) have been mischaracterizing the reactor as "meltdown-proof" which is just - wrong? and implies that current reactors are just begging to meltdown.

The cool thing about this new reactor is that its passively cooled, but that doesn't mean its INVULNERABLE to nuclear meltdowns, for example the Chernobyl meltdown happened completely independently of whether it was cooled passively or not.

In fact, passive cooling would only pose an advantage in situations where ALL pumps and backup pumps break and the core doesn't get coolant pumped to it. That's happened exactly once: in Fukushima and only after a literal tsunami hit it, and there's no reason to think that the passive Helium coolant in this new reactor wouldn't also just break. Fukushima happened because of corruption in regulation, preventing suitable defenses against this exact thing from getting built, not because of unsafe reactor design.

There's also some articles like this one which talk about the new reactor being "self-regulating" which is true, but misses the point that the vast majority of nuclear reactors in service today are also stable in the exact same way. Negative feedback loops are a HUGE part of reactor design, the most popular reactor design today is the Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) which is incredibly stable - PWRs just truly hate increasing (or decreasing) energy output.

Most nuclear reactors today are already incredibly safe, even if you had complete control over a nuclear reactor it would be effectively impossible to cause a meltdown on purpose - both the physics of the system and the thousands of automated components would beat the ever loving shit out of any hope of trying to do so.

Articles like these just turn this impressive achievements into a kind of fearmongering over the "dangerous" nuclear reactors currently being used. The fact is that nuclear reactors are incredibly safe, PWRs are an incredible feat of engineering genius and its a genuine shame that the general public isn't aware of how much care goes into their design and safety, let alone how useful and essential they are in our electrical systems.

Modern nuclear reactors are clean, they are safe, and they are vital to a healthy energy grid in the post-fossil-fuel future.

A really good read I highly recommend is Colin Tucker's How To Drive A Nuclear Reactor. He's very clear and very frank with the workings and reality of nuclear power today.

Something about having an universal translator, and learning to understand without it

me when i recommend something to someone and they end up not liking it

mormons undoubtedly in the top 5 worst things the united states has ever invented which is really saying something

not even JRR Tolkien, who famously developed the concept of the Secondary World and firmly believed that no trace of the Real World should be evoked in the fictional world, was able to remove potatoes from his literature. this is a man who developed whole languages and mythologies for his literary world, who justified its existence in English as a translation* simply because he was so miffed he couldn't get away with making the story fully alien to the real world. and not even he, in extremis, was so cruel as to deny his characters the heavenly potato. could not even conceive a universe devoid of the potato. such is its impact. everyone please take a moment to say thank you to South Americans for developing and cultivating one of earth's finest vegetables. the potato IS all that. literally world-changing food. bless.

theres a popular brand in canada called no name brand and it manufactures everything you can imagine in a grocery store and it kind of makes me feel like im in a world no one bothered to do much world building for

A portrait of an Alexander horned sphere I drew for a professor’s birthday

Flat asked someone to redraw it with V1 so I did

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