Greaseheel Ragemutt

You see, tumblr doesn’t work in-browser on my tablet, and all the apps are made for tiny lil phone screens.  Is a tumblr app that takes advantage of all my delicious screen size really so much to ask? 

I mean, I have no idea how to write it, and it would probably suck, but I feel the need to make one. 

For a handful of specific applications, bondage tape is the shit.  It’s basically thin pvc.  Like a window cling, except tape, really. 

It’s fantastic for cables.  While normal tape will leave a sticky residue over time, this stuff stays on using friction.  It’s like magic.  You can leave it wrapped around your coiled cables to keep them together for as long as you want, then take it off and there’s no residue at all. 

Downsides are that it’s sort of reusable, but not really, it works best when cut to 1/2 width, and that you have to buy it in a sex shop, as far as I’m aware.  Also, it’s called bondage tape.  Might be awkward to recommend to somebody in person. 

Depending on the somebody, I suppose. 

hidden-agender:

dumbthingswhitepplsay:

scorpysue:

keshawithasharktiedtoherface:

methlabrador:

what if one day for 24 hours everyone with a tumblr turned into whatever their url is 

that would be terrifying

THAT WOULD BE AWESOME.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOo

i don’t want to be that :(

No thanks. I like being loud and visible and don’t want to have to sacrifice that for the sake of a cheap pun.

That would be…strange.  Because there’s no such thing as a scarbunkle, in the same sense that Simon Carbunkle, a young banker with a penchant for free software trials, does not live at 123 Main St New York, NY.  Because scarbunkle was originally a gmail address used to get a trial of CAD software, until I realized it had a nice ring to it. 

If you’re a decent person your answer is probably “I dunno, bleach things?”  Unfortunately there are terrible people out there.  “Tell people it’s medicine and encourage them to drink it.” is a regrettably common response.  Branded as Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS), industrial bleach is the latest and greatest alternative medicine ‘cure’ for everything under the sun. 

Needless to say, it doesn’t work, and tends to do serious harm to people.  It actually seems to be sold quite a bit in developing nations, in addition to the US and Europe.  And now, it’s being pushed as a treatment for autistic children. 

Honestly, the only thing more disgusting than persuading adults to drink bleach themselves, is persuading them to make their children, even their nonverbal children, drink, bathe in, and receive enemas containing the stuff. 

This sort of thing makes me wish people would just stick to homeopathy, or other useless-but-mostly-harmless things.  Because somewhere along the way, alternative medicine practitioners stopped administering placebos that largely caused harm by keeping people away from real treatments (even if the ‘treatment’ is something like accepting the reality of the situation and getting some adaptive technology), and started getting paid to torture kids. 

So, I’ve tried drafting this one a few times, once with shit-tons of violent metaphors, once without but still very general.  But I think specifics will work better. 

I’m done with blood draws.  Since my blood clot in March, I’ve needed blood draws once every week or two, in order to check the levels on my warfarin. 

Warfarin sodium is basically rat poison.  That is to say, before they realized it had medical uses, it was used to kill rats.  As a medicine, it has two distinctive qualities: it interacts with pretty much everything on the planet, and it has a very narrow range of efficacy.  This means that having a salad will, unless your dosage accounts for eating a salad every day, drop the warfarin out of the acceptable range.  Taking ibuprofen will raise your risk of bleeding.  And in order to check the dosage, which is highly individualized, partially because of the food interactions, you need blood draws. 

I have a very particular fear of needles going into flesh.  Especially into me.  Needles in general, I don’t care.  They’re pretty boring really.  It’s when they start doing poking things that I have this gut reaction. 

I pretty much deal with it by having someone hold my arm down, and talking about how I don’t want to die.  The experience ranges from horrible to Not Fun.  And then it’s over.  There’s no residual fear, it’s just over and done. 

But now my three months on warfarin is almost up.  I’ll be free again.  I’ll get to eat salad (I never, ever imagined I would want a salad this much), and I won’t need another blood draw. 

And I’m not sure how I feel about that.  Sure, some parts of the experience will stick with me for life—there’s no unknowing I have a gene for excess clotting, and I do pretty much have the whole blood draw routine down pat.  But most of it’s gonna be over and done with.  And that’s this bizarre feeling.  You’d expect relief, but I’ve gotten pretty used to life on warfarin.  Going back to not needing to pressure bandage every cut and scan my food for anything green is gonna be weird.

So, I saw this image:

And I got to thinking.  When you see something like this, where the data seems to follow totally different shapes depending on a single factor, in linear regressions we start looking for an interaction term. 

What is an interaction term?  If y is predicted by x and z, we have a couple of possible equations.  We have y= x + z, we have y= x*z, and we have y= x + z + x*z.  x*z is an interaction term. 

And so this got me thinking.  Maybe fat is simply colinear with the real cause of health problems.  Or maybe it’s an interaction term that’s getting all the blame. 

Of course, first I needed to figure out if that was even possible in statistics.  So I fired up R, and generated some data:

data=data.frame(x=rep(0,50),z=rep(0,50),y=rep(0,50))
c=1
for (i in 1:50) {
   data$x[i] = c+rnorm(1,0,10)
   data$z[i]= 2*c-4+rnorm(1,0,50)
   data$y[i]= .1*data$x[i]*data$z[i]+rnorm(1,0,1) + data$x[i]
   c = c+1
   }

This is 50 points of random data, where y is predicted by an x*z interaction term, and by x alone.  But if circumstances are just right, z is gonna look guilty. 

I started out by measuring correlation:

> cor(data)   
        x               z                y
x 1.0000000 0.3797703 0.6577556
z 0.3797703 1.0000000 0.7615119
y 0.6577556 0.7615119 1.0000000

As you can see, z and y look a bit more related than x and y.  So I made up some linear models:

lmx= lm(y~x, data=data)
lmz=lm(y~z, data=data)
lmxz=lm(y~x+z, data=data)
lmxzi=lm(y~x+z+x:z, data=data)

I checked out their summaries.  In lmx, lmz, and lmxz, all the predictors were highly significant.  Then, on lmxzi, a miracle occurred.  The p-value on the stand-alone z-term was 0.898.  That’s very, very insignificant.  I just might have done it. 

So far, I’d shown half of my hypothesis.  You could make a highly significant term drop out by including an interaction term.  But was z alone a better predictor than x alone?  And was the interaction model better than a single-predictor model? 

To answer these questions, I calculated the Akaike Information Criterion on each model.  I won’t go into terribly much detail, but it’s a number to describe how good a model is.  The lower the number, the better the model.  The AIC on lmx was 646, and the AIC on lmz was 631. lmz was the best single-predictor model.  In comparison lmxz and lmxzi had AICs of 609 and 128 respectively.  

I did it.  The data I generated had z as the best single predictor, despite the fact that z showed up in the best model only as an interaction term.  And the best model? It blew the competition right out of the water. 

So watch out for interaction terms.  They’re tricky little devils.

They’re good people, decent people.  I like them a lot.  Or at least, Iusedto like them a lot.  But these days it’s hard to do so. 

I just—the best solution I’ve some up with around them is to literally pretend my SO doesn’t exist.  Purposely never mentioning them is literally the most ethical solution I’ve found that definitely keeps me my extended family.  I don’t have to misgender my SO (which I would do if they asked, but wouldneverask them permission to do so to make my own life easier.  That’s just a shitty thing to do.), and I don’t have to explain said pronouns to my extended family (trans* would be hard enough for them to grasp.  Gender-is-not-binary would make at least one head explode).  I don’t have to outright lie and pretend we’re just friends, that they’re just another one of my people.

So yeah.  Not looking forward to tomorrow.

Do you know what’s fairly minor, but nonetheless absurd, bullshit?  The whole love-your-womanly-earth-period-hippie-granola thing.  The kinds of women who treat their periods as some kind of divine expression of womanhood.  It’s twofold bullshit.  Periods aren’t divine, and they have jack shit to do with womanhood.

Let’s just address that womanhood thing first.  Clear up any misconceptions.  Not all women can have periods.  Not all people who have periods are women.  Heck, not even all the people who have a uterus get periods.  Some bodies just aren’t made that way.  Women who call themselves women are women.  People who don’t call themselves women are (surprise!) Not Women.  Seeing as there’s no real causal link between declaring one’s womanhood and bloody mucus in your underpants, claiming that periods are something womanly is bullshit. 

And claiming periods are blessings, or in any way spiritual or divine, is equally bullshit.  When you think about it, the period is kinda like uterus poop—it’s just some waste your body’s getting rid of.  It’s a god damn natural process.  Most people who have a uterus do the same process, whether they want it to or not. (Well, there are chemical and surgical interventions, but the point is, you can’t just think I feel like having my period today.)  This lack of control may make it seem somehow special, but we know what causes periods.  It’s hormone fluctuations that result in shedding the lining of the uterus—in other words, like everything else we know, it is Not a Miracle.  

shakethecobwebs:

Because I’m fucking fat.

If you want to stop having self-doubt days, go right ahead. I will support you in any way that I can.

But fuck you for saying that the days you feel gross and lazy and unsuccessful are your “fat days.”

Because my fat days are full of love, and compassion, putting up a fight for those that I love, feeling beautiful, and fighting against those who would rather see me fail. 

Fat is not a bad word, and it’s not the reason for your shortcomings. So stop it.

Indeed. There are a number of things you can call days you feel gross, lazy and unsuccessful that aren’t offensive. Personally, I call them lazy days. Slack-off days is another good one. You could even spin it around and call it an unplanned staycation. Find one and use one, people.

So, I think I may have posted on this before, but I pretty much think GMOs are the shit.  They’re seriously kind of awesome.  They’re pretty heavily regulated, and I’m not sure how I feel about that, but as a result we do know the ones on the market are pretty safe. I just wish I could put some of that lovely GMO magic to work in my own backyard.  Specifically, with Roundup Ready yard plants. 

You see, flowerbeds are kinda okay.  Houses look weird with zero flowerbeds.  But I also have weeding.  It’s boring, there are sometimes scary bugs, it’s hell on my knees…the list goes on. 

But there’s already a gene stuck in crops that makes them resistant to Roundup.  Imagine how much time that would save to stick that in flowerbeds.  It would let me have them someday.  It would let other busy people have them.  It would even let people with arthritis or Parkinson’s have gardens.  The increased price would be cheaper than hiring someone to do weeding, and weeding would be replaced by spraying Roundup a few times a summer. 

And that, folks, is one small part of What Science Can Do For You.

Let it be noted that charred backpack does NOT dissolve in acetone. 

Like, today I actually sat there and talked like a normal person, and only briefly and quietly devolved into a stream of ‘I don’t want to die’s.  And then it was back to chatting like a normal person. 

I had to get stuck twice though, despite having had a shit-ton of water.  Sometimes I wish I had sticky-outy veins. 

It was on my table. My table is fairly undamaged, strangely enough, despite being very old, dry wood.

But it wasn’t in great shape before, and now has some backpack melted onto it. But I’m going to fix it up. A chisel and a sander, and it should be good as new. I may even repair the wobbly legs.

Because it’s my table, by god. I found it, and I had faith in it when no one else did, and eventually they came to appreciate it. And they will again. It’s my table, I found it, and no damn fool with a greasy dropcloth will take it away from me.

Because when we got home, my garage was ever-so-slightly on fire.  The only thing we lost, thanks to our timing, was some rags and a dropcloth, and half a cardboard box, but that was really timing. 

Procrastination saved my house.  And my father and a fire extinguisher. 

I also don’t really trust my house right now, so I’m holed up at a friend’s.  I have a very, very reasonable 24-hour waiting period between last known fire and when I will sleep in a building again.