Snowflake's Forum

  Adam Somerton on the Anime series Attack on Titan , and whether we should view it as politically toxic. Adam Somerton Attack on Titan is a rather ugly manga and anime storytelling effort from a country with some ugly chapters in its history.  Among the adults and parents of our first fully Net-connected generations (the Millennials and older Zoomers) there has been a bit of controversy on whether Isayama Hajime is trying to promote race-hatred or fascism, and what should be done about that.  Some critics on YouTube are calling it fascist, and demanding that their viewers stop watching and reading it.  Somerton has a rather more nuanced take on what Isayama is shooting for. "In this world good and evil rarely exist as absolutes; a world of absolutes can't really exist.   The only truly absolute thing is death itself -- which  [is] a component of fascist ideology.  In this Cult of Death, how one dies is more significant than how one lives.  Perhaps all these characters are m

An article in ars Technica describes an improvement in single atom imaging. In 2013, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, a newly developed quantum microscope was able to look inside a hydrogen atom to visualize its electron orbital or density cloud. That was pretty cool. Now, an X-ray microscope has been developed that allows detection of what kind of atom is there and measurement of its chemical state. In this instance, an iron atom with the chemical symbol Fe is visualized when nestled inside a larger molecular structure. The image detector is shown as the tip and the X-rays shining on the Fe atom shown in red.    The image shows the Fe atom in center of the ring-like molecular structure it is setting in. ars Technica comments: Physicists can now routinely image atoms with scanning-probe microscopes. These work by running a very sharp tip over a surface and forming the image of the surface from a signal read from the tip—akin to a record player reading the grooves on a record to

  P reeeeee--senting!    The one!  The only!  The true and beloved Emperor Joshua Abraham Norton! No, seriously. Who is this guy?  Joshua Norton was born in England, educated in south Africa, and immigrated to San Francisco.  He was ungodly rich.  A brilliant investor.  Until he tried to corner the rice market right before a price collapse and was reduced to penury. Nine years later, in 1859, after people had largely forgotten him, he re-emerged with the following notice in a San Francisco paper: At the peremptory request and desire of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last 9 years and 10 months past of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these United States; and in virtue of the authority thereby in me vested, do hereby order and direct the representatives of the different States of the Union to assemble in Musical Hall, of this city, on the 1st day of Febru

  "This "they/them" business is a no-go. I think it's perfectly easy to accept that Caitlin Jenner is no longer "Bruce," and Chazz Bono isn't "Chastity" anymore. But fitting gender-non-bindaries into our picture 📸 of what the human race is will take some doing, even for many open-minded Millennials. I wonder if some of us could try a less common pronoun, "thon," which was used in Ireland in the '60's. "But defensiveness on the part of aging cisgender heteros will not provoke gracious conduct from the young non-bindary, no matter how good that would be for those family relations." So I wrote on Miss Manners on uexpress, on May 9th. Does anyone have any ideas on how to solve this pronoun issue? Posted by Jennifer A. Nolan

No, not your specific street address.  Just your state or country, if outside the U.S.  It seems most of us on this forum are Californians.  Do you want to represent your state here?  Speak up! Me, I'm in "Ohio, Ohio, Ohio," a la Drew Carey. (Below are some IDs/Locs I've saved in my Blog Dossier.  Yes, big sister is watching!) Any updates? (by PrimalSoup)

  "Something occurred to me... You don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about... you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine.  And you ripped my f**kin' life apart. You're an orphan, right?  Do you think I'd  know how hard your life has been  because I read Oliver Twist ?" We white people react to accusations of racial discrimination a lot like Will to Sean's efforts at therapeutic inquiry: by being defensive, closed off, and just a little abusive.  We throw the self-protective tactics of minority communities back at them as signs of moral failure, much the way a few British Conservatives still do to Northern Irish Catholics.  But minority B.S. is just reacting to white abuse and humiliation, and, although they can clean up their act as much as they want... they can't clean up ours. Only we can do that.  And for this to happen, just like Will in the movie, we will have to open our minds up to our own bad