Feral corner of the world.

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

attonitos-gloria asked:

Thank you for sharing, I haven't finished Babel yet, but the telling not showing/preachy bits up until now bothered me a little too, so I guess I know what you mean. And your novella sounds very interesting!! I would read it. Good luck with that :)

Thanks so much! I’m glad I’m not alone in my feelings—I do hope you enjoy it more than I did!

salamencerobot

I got a Geiger counter!

reddpenn

Let’s look through my collection for some Spicy Rocks!  I’ve never deliberately collected radioactive specimens, so I have no idea what I’m going to find.

First, though, let’s test the baseline level of radiation in my house.

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It’s fun to hear the Geiger counter click as it detects radiation.  20 counts per minute.  Nice!  You’re unlikely to ever see a count of zero, as pretty much everything in the world, including the human body, gives off a little bit of radiation. 

20 is a normal baseline, nothing to be concerned about.  Standing in my house, I’m getting a radiation dose of about 0.00013 milliseieverts per hour - or a little over one mSv a year.  This is an average yearly dosage of radiation for people in my country, and is something my body can easily process.  For context, a dosage of 100 mSv would slightly increase my risk of cancer, and a dosage of 1000 mSv would immediately give me radiation sickness.

But enough about these boring, safe amounts of radiation.  I want to see some spice!  Let’s check over by the Rock Wall!

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Hm, I’d expected the CPM to be noticeably higher around my rock collection, but I’m getting nothing!  Even testing each individual rock, nothing’s more than a few ticks above the baseline.  So far, my fancy new toy is looking like wasted money.  :c

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WAIT!  THERE!!  62 CPM!  That’s three times higher than the base reading in the rest of my house!!!  YESSS!!  THIS ROCK IS SPICY!!!!

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Here’s the rock that’s setting off my Geiger counter.  (Yes I’m touching the spicy rock with my bare hands, don’t worry about it.) 

This fossil, which is as big as my head, is part of the femur bone of a Megalonyx, a North American giant ground sloth!

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These huge animals could grow as big as ten feet tall.  They lived alongside humans during the last ice age, and it’s theorized that humans may have hunted them to extinction.  This particular fossil was found in a phosphate mine!

Why is it radioactive?  Because… sometimes fossils are just radioactive!  They spend a lot of time in the ground, which is full of radioactive minerals, and often radiation just gets all up in there.  There are some fossils on display in museums which are so radioactive that they have to be coated with lead paint for the safety of curators and museum-goers!  Compared to those, this femur bone is barely radioactive at all.

So is it really safe for me to have this in my house, much less handle it with my bare hands?  Well, yeah!  Remember, despite having this spicy rock in my collection, the radiation baseline in my house is completely normal.  Here’s why.

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Even just a few centimeters away from this specimen, the Geiger counter’s reading is halved.  A few inches away, and it can’t detect any radiation at all.  It basically has to be directly touching the rock to get an abnormal reading.  Which means I also have to be touching the rock to receive a meaningful amount of radiation exposure.

But even holding this rock in my hands, I’m only getting a dosage of about 0.0004 mSv per hour.  If I never let go of this rock for an entire year, I would get a dose of about 3.5 mSv.  Which is… still completely within the safe threshold for my body to process.  Nothing to worry about!

Man, I gotta start collecting some spicier rocks.

reddpenn

Good news!!  Further testing has revealed yet another spicy rock in my collection!

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This little fellow is apatite.  He is mildly radioactive because, like most apatite, he contains traces of thorium and uranium!

Hovering at 54-55 CPM, he is very mild indeed for an apatite specimen.  Just today I had the opportunity to test someone else’s collection for radiation, and discovered a piece of apatite that clocked in at 250 CPM!  That’s “maybe don’t touch this rock with your bare hands” territory!  Ah, I’m jealous…

ineffable-writer

attonitos-gloria asked:

Ahh hello! I would love to hear more about your criticism of Babel and your experience in the field, if you're comfortable sharing <3

ineffable-writer answered:

Ah gods, this is gonna get me crucified but sure. For some background, I’m a writer (working on historical sci-fi) and academic myself, and I’ve done a lot of academic work with language, so I’ve got some experience here.

First—it’s just not well written. It has a lot of other sins, but the characters use a lot of modern phrasing (“Nice comes from the Latin word for ‘stupid’”? Really? In 1828?) and even ignoring that the prose is so… on the nose. Footnotes which explain the obvious. Characters explaining their political beliefs at length. Lots of telling without showing.The whole thing’s written in exactly the patronizing tone the author seems to want to criticize.

The fucking footnotes, man.

I love linguistics! I should be enchanted by the footnotes! But it’s just a bunch of notes on etymology with little nuance. Again—the thing I quoted above—that’s 2000s-era-Republican-talk-show-host levels of reaching. How can a book about language, written by someone who should know better, have such shallow insights?

Etymology is great, but ultimately you can’t derive meaning from it, you know?

Second—the villains are caricatures. I don’t have an issue with every white guy in the book being a villain, but making them into caricatures actually does the patriarchy more good than harm. For such a tome, Kuang had room to make them so fucking insidious and didn’t take any of those opportunities. They’re just bad and racist.

Which—yes, some people are bad and racist. But the portrayal perpetuates the idea that racism is obvious and blatant. It’s not. I wanted to see some subtle racism—not just evil white men and a whiny, barely-tolerated white girl. (Why were they even friends with her? She felt like she was just there to prove a point.)

This is speaking as a Jew who is constantly frustrated by portrayals of antisemitism as obvious: if you want to engage with racism, engage with the insidiousness of it, you know? Mustache-twirling villains are a symptom! If you’re gonna write 500 pages about the evils of colonialism, engage with what it actually looks like.

The protagonists giving soapbox speeches don’t help the matter. I agree with them! I should be happy to listen to them! But I’m not. They’re literally preaching to the choir. Hell, it’s annoying when IRL friends speak that way—and again, who talks like that in 1828?

Third—(actually I’m gonna remove this point—I don’t feel like I can comment.)

Fourth—oh my god that tagline. “Every act of translation is an act of betrayal” are you KIDDING me. I know it’s just the tagline. I know it’s not the book. But it’s just so exemplary of this anti-academia mindset that drives me up a fucking wall. There are huge swaths of academia dedicated to language preservation, and translation is so huge for accessibility to other cultural worldviews! That line just fucking GETS me. It reeks of isolationism.

Like do you KNOW what translation can do for erased languages? I just. Ugh. It makes me so mad. I get what she was going for. I know that’s not the point. I just hate that tagline.

This whole book is anti-academic in all the wrong ways, I guess. It rages against the wrong people. I’ve spent so much time working with people on language preservation—there are SO many dying languages due to colonialism!—and nearly every young academic in the soft sciences is trying to do something revolutionary. It feels… I don’t know, it just reduces the whole environment into something that’s Twitter-levels of two-dimensional.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with academia, don’t get me wrong—I’m currently seeing some of the worst of it IRL—but she just didn’t hit it right. The whole book felt like she was fighting with a straw man when the real bad guy was like, right there.

I don’t know, I have a hard time explaining my feelings here. They’re very dense and complicated. I’m working on a response novella, actually, about the last three speakers of a dying language. It’ll explore my feelings better than I can do it here. I don’t think a direct analysis will do it justice anyway.

I think I hate it so much because I really, really wanted to love it. It had SO many things I was thrilled to see, and it just… failed. The whole thing feels immensely shallow. I haven’t even mentioned how lame the magic is, because the magic isn’t even worth mentioning. I was so looking forward to a really good take on colonialism and language magic, and instead I got something that’s well-educated but not insightful.

So—yeah. My slightly-fevery thoughts on Babel. There you go. I’m sure fans will pick this the hell apart, so please know that this has NOT been written at maximum capacity lol. I’m sure I’ve made some bad word choices.

Take this as good faith, y’all. I really wanted to like it.

ineffable-writer

This turned into a rant and I didn’t actually talk about my experience in the field!

So-I think the most concrete example was when I was working with the language preservation people at a well-known institution a couple years ago. My job was really boring: I was putting together databases of language materials. Interviews, journals, anthropologist notes, etc. But there was some really cool work going on.

This was mostly working with dying native languages in Mesoamerica, and the end goal was to create Spanish-[dying language] dictionaries for new learners. It couldn’t necessarily save the culture, but it could give grandkids a way to talk with their grandparents-and it meant that the lanquage may survive in a changed form.

The novella I’m working on draws from that a little. It’s about three speakers of a dead language: a great grandmother, a father, and his daughter. The great-grandmother’s native language was erased by the local majority due to its relationship to magic-any believable story told in the language comes true-and the culture was battled with propaganda that ended in genocide.

The father is a professor who wants to save the language by teaching it at his university, now that the genocide is “over" His daughter barely speaks it at all. His grandmother thinks they should let it die peacefully.

It’s complicated, and the opinions they hold come from interviews I’ve held with speakers of real-world dying languages. The story presents no answers, just courses of action. I’m pretty sure the main character ends up setting the university on fire at some point, though.

attonitos-gloria asked:

Ahh hello! I would love to hear more about your criticism of Babel and your experience in the field, if you're comfortable sharing <3

Ah gods, this is gonna get me crucified but sure. For some background, I’m a writer (working on historical sci-fi) and academic myself, and I’ve done a lot of academic work with language, so I’ve got some experience here.

First—it’s just not well written. It has a lot of other sins, but the characters use a lot of modern phrasing (“Nice comes from the Latin word for ‘stupid’”? Really? In 1828?) and even ignoring that the prose is so… on the nose. Footnotes which explain the obvious. Characters explaining their political beliefs at length. Lots of telling without showing.The whole thing’s written in exactly the patronizing tone the author seems to want to criticize.

The fucking footnotes, man.

I love linguistics! I should be enchanted by the footnotes! But it’s just a bunch of notes on etymology with little nuance. Again—the thing I quoted above—that’s 2000s-era-Republican-talk-show-host levels of reaching. How can a book about language, written by someone who should know better, have such shallow insights?

Etymology is great, but ultimately you can’t derive meaning from it, you know?

Second—the villains are caricatures. I don’t have an issue with every white guy in the book being a villain, but making them into caricatures actually does the patriarchy more good than harm. For such a tome, Kuang had room to make them so fucking insidious and didn’t take any of those opportunities. They’re just bad and racist.

Which—yes, some people are bad and racist. But the portrayal perpetuates the idea that racism is obvious and blatant. It’s not. I wanted to see some subtle racism—not just evil white men and a whiny, barely-tolerated white girl. (Why were they even friends with her? She felt like she was just there to prove a point.)

This is speaking as a Jew who is constantly frustrated by portrayals of antisemitism as obvious: if you want to engage with racism, engage with the insidiousness of it, you know? Mustache-twirling villains are a symptom! If you’re gonna write 500 pages about the evils of colonialism, engage with what it actually looks like.

The protagonists giving soapbox speeches don’t help the matter. I agree with them! I should be happy to listen to them! But I’m not. They’re literally preaching to the choir. Hell, it’s annoying when IRL friends speak that way—and again, who talks like that in 1828?

Third—(actually I’m gonna remove this point—I don’t feel like I can comment.)

Fourth—oh my god that tagline. “Every act of translation is an act of betrayal” are you KIDDING me. I know it’s just the tagline. I know it’s not the book. But it’s just so exemplary of this anti-academia mindset that drives me up a fucking wall. There are huge swaths of academia dedicated to language preservation, and translation is so huge for accessibility to other cultural worldviews! That line just fucking GETS me. It reeks of isolationism.

Like do you KNOW what translation can do for erased languages? I just. Ugh. It makes me so mad. I get what she was going for. I know that’s not the point. I just hate that tagline.

This whole book is anti-academic in all the wrong ways, I guess. It rages against the wrong people. I’ve spent so much time working with people on language preservation—there are SO many dying languages due to colonialism!—and nearly every young academic in the soft sciences is trying to do something revolutionary. It feels… I don’t know, it just reduces the whole environment into something that’s Twitter-levels of two-dimensional.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with academia, don’t get me wrong—I’m currently seeing some of the worst of it IRL—but she just didn’t hit it right. The whole book felt like she was fighting with a straw man when the real bad guy was like, right there.

I don’t know, I have a hard time explaining my feelings here. They’re very dense and complicated. I’m working on a response novella, actually, about the last three speakers of a dying language. It’ll explore my feelings better than I can do it here. I don’t think a direct analysis will do it justice anyway.

I think I hate it so much because I really, really wanted to love it. It had SO many things I was thrilled to see, and it just… failed. The whole thing feels immensely shallow. I haven’t even mentioned how lame the magic is, because the magic isn’t even worth mentioning. I was so looking forward to a really good take on colonialism and language magic, and instead I got something that’s well-educated but not insightful.

So—yeah. My slightly-fevery thoughts on Babel. There you go. I’m sure fans will pick this the hell apart, so please know that this has NOT been written at maximum capacity lol. I’m sure I’ve made some bad word choices.

Take this as good faith, y’all. I really wanted to like it.

I can’t be the only one who doesn’t like Babel, can I? It’s just so fucking Anglocentric.

I worked in language recovery for a while and the message of the book is just so far from a nuanced look at the topic—and it’s not even well-written, it’s just wildly preachy! The author has benefitted wildly from all the structures she’s claiming to criticize, and as someone who grew up in those same structures there are so many GOOD criticisms to make that I’m shocked how invalid her criticisms are. It’s off-base as hell.

Idk I just feel like I’m going crazy sometimes. I’m not trying to dismiss the experiences of Asian-Americans, I just… know a lot about this topic and worked in language conservation for a while and the whole thing feels like it was tailored to make white people feel good about being anti-establishment.

this probably doesn’t make a lot of sense but I’m sick and annoyed at certain nebula results felt dumb might delete later