tehkaki

stellar-indulgence: Case Studies: Metric/English Conversion...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:27:13 -0700

Case Studies: Metric/English Conversion Errors

The Mars Climate Orbiter: A Multimillion Dollar Mistake

Although NASA declared the metric system as its official unit system in the 1980s, conversion factors remain an issue. The Mars Climate Orbiter, meant to help relay information back to Earth, is one notable example of the unit system struggle. The orbiter was part of the Mars Surveyor ’98 program, which aimed to better understand the climate of Mars. As the spacecraft journeyed into space on September 1998, it should have entered orbit at an altitude of 140-150km above Mars, but instead went as close as 57km. This navigation error occurred because the software that controlled the rotation of the craft’s thrusters was not calibrated in SI units. The spacecraft expected newtons, while the computer, which was inadequately tested, worked in pound forces; one pound force is equal to about 4.45 newtons. Unfortunately, friction and other atmospheric forces destroyed the Mars Climate Orbiter. The project cost $327.6 million in total. Tom Gavin, an administrator for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, stated, “This is an end-to-end process problem. A single error like this should not have caused the loss of Climate Orbiter. Something went wrong in our system processes in checks and balances that we have that should have caught this and fixed it.”

Disneyland Tokyo: A Bumpy Blunder

Tokyo Disneyland’s Space Mountain roller coaster came to a sudden halt just before the end of a ride on December 5, 2003. This startling incident was due a broken axle. The axle in question fractured because it was smaller than the design’s requirement; because of the incorrect size, the gap between the bearing and the axle was over 1mm – when it should have been a mere 0.2mm (to picture this, imagine that the gap is the thickness of a dime, compared to what it’s supposed to be, the thickness of two sheets of common printer paper.) The accumulation of excess vibration and stress eventually caused it to break. Though the coaster derailed, there were no injuries. Once again, unit systems caused the accident. In September 1995, the specifications for the coaster’s axles and bearings were changed to metric units. In August 2002, however, the English unit plans prior to 1995 were used to order 44.14mm axels instead of the needed 45mm axels.

Air Canada Flight 143: Unit-Caused Fuel Shortage

A Boeing 767 airplane flying for Air Canada on July 23, 1983 diminished its fuel supply only an hour into its flight. It was headed to Edmonton from Montreal, but it received low fuel pressure warnings in both fuel pumps at an altitude of 41,000 feet; engine failures followed soon after. Fortunately, the captain was an experienced glider pilot and the first officer knew of an unused air force base about 20 kilometers away. Together, they landed the plan on the runway, and only a few passengers sustained minor injuries. This incident was due partially to the airplane’s fuel indication system, which had been malfunctioning. Maintenance workers resorted to manual calculations in order to fuel the craft. They knew that 22,300kg of fuel was needed, and they wanted to know how much in liters should be pumped. They used 1.77 as their density ratio in performing their calculations. However, 1.77 was given in pounds per liter, not kilograms per liter. The correct number should have been 0.80 kilograms/liter; thus, their final figure accounted for less than half of the necessary fuel.

Source: http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/

(NOTE: I am not hating on NASA for screwing up. Mistakes do happen. But think about how easier it could be to use an international unit system.)

it’s 20-fudging-13 and the english system is still being commonly used… WHY?
oh yeah… “english”:
a people who have somehow been getting away with introducing terrible systems into our society since ~who knows~

Photo

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:12:19 -0700

lonerwitch: Polychaete Worm

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:00:58 -0700

lonerwitch:

Polychaete Worm

ur porn blogs that feature 99+% white/light-skinned peoples don’t impress me, and in fact make...

Sun, 19 May 2013 06:48:38 -0700

ur porn blogs that feature 99+% white/light-skinned peoples don’t impress me, and in fact make me just a little suspicious of u.

Kropotkinskaya Station: Why we hate Wall Street and Capitalism

Sun, 19 May 2013 06:00:29 -0700

Kropotkinskaya Station: Why we hate Wall Street and Capitalism:

kropotkinskaya-station:

The powers that be just can’t leave people alone. They always have to go to where something wonderful is happening and interfere as a way to make money. They have to “finance” it. Yahoo is just a pet project of the big banks. It’s a shell game really. Yahoo purchases Tumblr so that all of the…

charlie is so adorable

Sun, 19 May 2013 03:41:17 -0700

charlie is so adorable

ON THE RADIO

Sun, 19 May 2013 02:01:21 -0700

ON THE RADIO:

4 hours of indie, punk, metal & garage rock are flyin in on punk ducks, STARTING RIGHT NOW! :DDD 90.5 FM KSJS in san josé!

Photo

Sun, 19 May 2013 00:30:08 -0700

OMG!

Sun, 19 May 2013 00:23:34 -0700

OMG!

u have disturbed the gooby

Sat, 18 May 2013 23:55:08 -0700

u have disturbed the gooby

damn i love judge judy. literally used to watch her every day,...

Sat, 18 May 2013 20:11:17 -0700

damn i love judge judy. literally used to watch her every day, and before her i used to watch the people’s court w koch and then milian. courtroom reality tv is literally some of the best shit on tv i tell u what

anarcho-queer: Police Raid CNT Centre in Spain, Arrests 5...

Sat, 18 May 2013 19:40:12 -0700

anarcho-queer:

Police Raid CNT Centre in Spain, Arrests 5 “Black Flag” Anarchists

From comrades in Barcelona we have been informed that five members of ‘Black Flag’ have been detained in dawn raids on the anarchist-syndicalist CNT centre in Sabadell near Barcelona, Spain. They are accused of belonging to a terrorist group. The Police broke into and searched the Anarchist Workers Centre (Ateneo Libertari) in Sabadell. The operations included another raid and search in Sabadell and two more in other municipalities in Catalonia, one of them in Avignon (Bages County). On the same day police evicted the Can Piella ‘Land and Liberty’ squat. International solidarity is requested.

Thirty Mossos police have now taken over the anarchist centre in Sabadell, after smashing down the door down before 9.00 a.m. according to a member of the CNT union that occupies part of the premises with Bandera Negra (‘Black Flag’). The ‘Mossos’ – whose origins are military – have a long history of carrying out beatings in police stations and it is hoped comrades will not be harmed.

The Ateneo de Sabadell, which is owned by the CNT, is a space open to all working people of Sabadell, which many groups and people from Sabadell and elsewhere have used for recreational, cultural and social events over many years. Other citizens of the city, including the 15M Take The Streets movement and Occupy, make use of the building and have begun demonstrations in support of the five arrested. The premises at Sabadell have now been sealed off.

The five arrested people are scheduled to appear before the Audiencia Nacional in Madrid on Friday. In addition to Sabadell, sources close to the anarchist movement say that Catalonian regional police are launching further raids at the behest of the Audiencia Nacional in other towns in Catalonia.

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Sat, 18 May 2013 19:14:25 -0700

thepeoplesrecord: Going beyond the Western gender binary -...

Sat, 18 May 2013 17:12:36 -0700

thepeoplesrecord:

Going beyond the Western gender binary - unlearning our backward cultural conditioning

In Western colonial society (which dominates many aspects of the globalized, capitalist world today) we operate under the presumption that there are only two genders, male and female. But gender is a social construction. One’s options for what gender they identify with are shaped by the culture they are born into. Biological factors are most-often the primary driving forces that choose among the available socially-constructed gender categories.

Cultures around the world have different ways of talking about, thinking about, and identifying gender. It’s often a challenge for (particularly cis-sexual) Westerns to think about other ways gender can be socially constructed. Westerns have the false equivalency of gender and sex drilled into their eternal psyche from the time they are very young, and re-enforced through examples in popular culture. There is no biological reality to gender. Many Westerners have the bizarre belief that one’s XY-sex-determination should also inform one’s gender identity, a socially constructed role in society.

In some cultures, there is no distinction made between gender and sexual orientation and the same can be said for sexual orientation - our culture socially-constructs the options and our biology helps us identify which socially-constructed option feels most ‘right’ and best resonates with us.

I’ve attached some photos to offer some examples of non-colonial, non-Western construction of gender. They’ve all been uploaded onto our Facebook page photostream in case you’d like to ‘like’ or ‘share’ them there. There are literally hundreds of ‘third-gender’ identifying peoples around the world. The eight I’ve chosen are mostly examples I remember from some of my anthropology courses but if you google ‘third genders’ you can find many lists and examples.

Who cares? Why it matters.

The most obvious reason to care about the way our culture has constructed gender and sexual orientation is to deepen one’s capacity for solidarity with people who identify as transgender, transsexual, and others whose gender or sexual identity exists outside of binary Western culture.

But there are other reasons as well. Western culture’s binary nature often creates non-sensical, problematic binary identity constructions that are inherently problematic. For example, I believe that Western masculinity (dominance, aggression, lack of communication, lack of emotional expression, etc) is inherently problematic. I believe that to be the reason why most acts of large-scale-violence and terror are committed by men (see: 100% of the mass school shootings in the United States), and I believe it fosters a degree of internal misery within people who heavily adopt these particular ‘masculine’ traits.

In the age of information, and the age of global connectivity, there is no longer any reason (particularly for young people) to feel isolated or restricted to Western definitions of gender, sexual orientation and identity in general. I think the social ramifications of a generation where more and more people begin to identify outside of the gender binary would be tremendous, and I think we should all consider how we can unlearn our cultural conditioning to embrace other, perhaps less exploitative and dominating identities.

Background information on the identities depicted in the above images:

Hijras
Hijras are male-body-born, feminine-gender-identifying people who live in South Asia (mostly in India & Nepal). Many Hijras live in well-defined, organized, all-Hijra communities, led by a guru.

Although many Hijras identify as Muslim, many practice a form of syncretism that draws on multiple religions; seeing themselves to be neither men nor women, Hijras practice rituals for both men and women.

Hijras belong to a special caste. They are usually devotees of the mother goddess Bahuchara Mata, Lord Shiva, or both.

Nandi female husbands
Among the Nandi in Western Kenya, one social identity option for women is to become a female husband, and thus a man in society’s eyes. Female husbands are expected to become men and take on all of the social and cultural responsibilities of a man, including finding a wife to marry and passing on property to the next generation through marriage. Female husbands may have lived their lives as women and may even be married to a man, but once she becomes a female-husband, she is expected to be a man. Women married to female-husbands may have sex with single men uninterested in commitment in order to become pregnant, but the female-husband (who is often an older woman, often a widow) will father the child of said pregnancy and treat the child like her own.

Two-spirited people
Two-Spirit is an umbrella term sometimes used for what was once commonly known as ‘berdaches’, Indigenous North Americans who fulfill one of many mixed gender roles found traditionally among many Native Americans and Canadian First Nations communities. The term usually indicates a person whose body simultaneously manifests both a masculine and a feminine spirit. Male and female two-spirits have been “documented in over 130 tribes, in every region of North America.”

Travesti
In South America (with a large presence in Brazil), a travesti is a person who was assigned male at birth who has a feminine gender identity and is primarily sexually attracted to masculine men. Therefore, sometimes the distinction between gender identity and sexual orientation is not made. Travestis have been described as a third gender, but not all see themselves this way. Travestis often will begin taking female hormones and injecting silicone to enlargen their backsides as boys and continue the process into womanhood.

The work of cultural Anthropologist Don Kulick (a gay male by Western definitions) in Brazil demonstrated that gender construction in Brazil is binary (like Western gender construction), but unlike Western gender construction, instead of having a male-female binary, there is a male-notmale binary.

In this particular construction of gender:

Males include: men who have sex with women, men who have sex with Travestis but are never on the receiving end of anal sex, men who have sex with men but are never on the receiving end of anal sex.

Not-males include: women, men who receive anal sex from ‘male’ gay men or from Travestis.

Fa’afafine
Fa’afafine are the gender liminal, or third-gendered people of Samoa. A recognized and integral part of traditional Samoan culture, fa’afafine, born biologically male, embody both male and female gender traits. Their gendered behavior typically ranges from extravagantly feminine to mundanely masculine

Waria
Waria is a traditional third general role found in modern Indonesia. Additionally, the Bugis culture of Sulawesi (one of the four larger Sunda Islands of Indonesia) has been described as having three sexes (male, female and intersex) as well as five genders with distinct social roles.

Six Genders of old Israel
In the old Kingdom of Israel (1020–931 BCE) there were six officially recognized genders:

Zachar: male

Nekeveh: female

Androgynos: both male and female

Tumtum: gender neutral/without definite gender

Aylonit: female-to-male transgender people

Saris: male-to-female transgender people (often inaccurately translated as “eunuch”)

Kathoey
Australian scholar of sexual politics in Thailand Peter Jackson’s work indicates that the term “kathoey” was used in pre-modern times to refer to intersexual people, and that the usage changed in the middle of the twentieth century to cover cross-dressing males, to create what is now a gender identity unique to Thailand. Thailand also has three identities related to female-bodied people: Tom, Dee, and heterosexual woman.

-Robert

EDIT: So let me clearly say that in no way am I intentionally encouraging white people (or anyone else) to appropriate these identities. Rather, I hope that this post and conversations like this will lead to an understanding of cultural diversity and other gender constructions/identities and an understanding that there is no biological reality to gender, and that gender manifests itself in many beautiful ways across many cultures.

I AM encouraging people in colonial society to have a less-binary, more nuanced approach to gender that doesn’t lead to so much domination and exploitation.

I also understand that in order to talk about these things, words like ‘male-bodied’ or male are inherently western concepts. Each of these societies and cultures have other ways of talking about these identities. Although I wasn’t born in the U.S. I have spent most of my life and the entirety of my adult life in the United States. I speak no languages other than English. There are concepts that I can’t understand, that my language limits me from even talking about, and in order to communicate these ideas, I am restricted by the only language I have available to talk about these concepts with. My perspective is etic. I do not belong to the above cultures, so when I talk about these things and use the English language to describe them, I am limited in my options for describing a concept as abstract as gender. The very categories of gender and sexuality belong to the cultural lens through which I view the world and I could not possibly provide a comprehensive emic analysis of the way the things we call ‘gender and sexuality’ actually are understood (if at all) within these cultures. In that way, mine is a very limited perspective. But it is geared toward other people living in Western society and it is aimed at changing this culture, not to appropriate these others but to not be so terrible toward gender and sexual variant people in this culture and to begin to question the implications of how we define gender and sexuality both personally, and as a whole culture.

Also, there’s some problematic stuff in the way I framed this and some of these only have one source.

-Robert

a-paper-anchor: leeoonnn: Chemistry demos are the best. I...

Sat, 18 May 2013 13:41:17 -0700

a-paper-anchor:

leeoonnn:

Chemistry demos are the best.

I can see why religious fundamentalists would be so scared of science. That bottom left thing looks like a devil’s spawn.

vampirevoodoo: samleigh: ivegot9: the...

Sat, 18 May 2013 08:46:46 -0700

vampirevoodoo:

samleigh:

ivegot9:

the baaaaaabbbbbbbyyyyyy!

SO CUTEEEE

my heart

all i want is a montage daydream ohhhh yea

Sat, 18 May 2013 01:42:10 -0700

all i want is a montage daydream ohhhh yea

foegov me fahter for i. Drunk

Sat, 18 May 2013 01:41:14 -0700

foegov me fahter for i. Drunk

ghostblowjob: thelocalpaedo: lizlet: moderation: fatmanatee: ...

Sat, 18 May 2013 01:39:19 -0700

ghostblowjob:

thelocalpaedo:

lizlet:

moderation:

fatmanatee:

dream job

dream look

dream name

dream man

dream life

u need to not

Photo

Sat, 18 May 2013 01:35:51 -0700