You Bored, Or Feeling Artsy But Don’t Have Any Inspiration...? *updated!*

A pot-in-pot refrigerator, clay pot cooler is an evaporative cooling refrigeration device which does not use electricity. It uses a porous outer earthenware pot, lined with wet sand, contains an inner pot (which can be glazed to prevent penetration by the liquid) within which the food is placed - the evaporation of the outer liquid draws heat from the inner pot. The device can be used to cool any substance. This simple technology requires only a flow of relatively dry air and a source of water.

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So this just showed up as an ad for me. Don't know what algorithm put it there, but wtf.

Doxycycline?!?!?! To treat acne?!?!

Buckle up, because a member of the microbiology side of Tumblr is about to go off.

Do yall know what this stuff is. It's an antibiotic. I (and many others) was prescribed this for the first 90 days I was in Afghanistan to prevent malaria. Other times I've seen it used was for when people were exposed to highly pathogenic bacteria while necropsying sick animals. Other uses, to treat venereal diseases caused by bacteria.

What I'm saying is, this stuff will mess you up. It doesn't target a specific single bacteria, it indiscriminately wipes out many bacteria it comes in contact with.

Now, that may seem good right, kill the bacteria causing whatever, but there's a reason antibiotics are for a relatively short term and require a prescription. Not only will it kill the "bad" bacteria, but it will also kill off a lot of your "good" gut microbes, which is really bad in the long-term. We're in a pretty symbiotic relationship with our own microbiota. If you've ever been prescribed antibiotics, you've probably experienced the effects of killing off all the bacteria in your GI tract i.e. diarrhea, malaise, maybe some depression, and a whole host of other side effects. That's because you don't have the "good" bacteria helping you with your digesta. You're not getting all of the nutrients you'd normally get because your ingesta isn't getting fully broken down before passing through you.

Another downside of killing off all of these bacteria, they provide provide an immunologic barrier for you, meaning they have established populations that require resources to sustain themselves. Having an established microbiota makes it harder for a new "bad" bacteria to establish itself before the immune system can mount a strong response because they have to compete for limited resources with a strong well-established gut population. This is one of the main reasons yogurt is a suggested post antibiotic food, it has those good bacteria in it and it helps to reestablish a good gut microbiota. If you wipe everything out though, this provides the bad bacteria with a chance to take up residence and potentially make you VERY sick or even kill you.

Finally, this seems like it'd be a pretty unsupervised deal. We already have a problem with antibiotic resistance from people not following through with a complete antibiotic regiment. Can you imagine what can happen if a bunch of people are taking this, experience the side effects, and then stop taking it. It'll make stronger, more pathogenic bacteria that will cause a lot of harm.

What I'm saying with this is, the purported benefit of getting rid of "acne causing bacteria" (I honestly don't know the validity of this claim, but I am going to be in the literature after I make this post to followup) is definitely not worth the side effects of taking this.

TL;DR version: doxycycline is a strong antibiotic that's used for a lot more than just acne.

Taking it without first consulting a doctor can and will lead to much more harmful effects than clearing up acne.

I'm begging anyone who follows me to please reblog this because word needs to be spread about why this is a REALLY BAD IDEA.

people agree with like every criticism of capitalism until you actually use the word "capitalism"

Somewhere in my notes in the last few days I saw someone add some tags that I’ve been thinking about ever since. I wish I could find them again (or that I’d just saved their post at the time) because I think they made a lot of sense.

They were talking about how fanfic is becoming more and more mainstream while still remaining largely transgressive. It’s such an interesting dichotomy to think about!

On the one hand, you have sites like AO3 and realities like widespread high speed internet access being more and more accessible to larger and larger groups of people. This makes it incredibly easy for anyone at all to find and read fanfic.

On the other hand, you have the roots of fanfic. It was born out of marginalized groups such as women, people of colour, and members of the queer community deciding to take the stories that had been aimed at a largely male, white, heterosexual audience and inverting them into something they could enjoy and relate to. To this day, fanfic is a place where people write the kinds of stories that don’t get made into movies and TV shows. The kinds of stories that don’t get published or end up on the New York Times bestseller list.

Fanfic used to be written and shared in secret. People used to hide it. People still do hide the fact that they read or write it. But it’s becoming something that more and more people are becoming more and more aware of.

So now there’s a spotlight starting to shine on fanfic. People who aren’t looking for transgressive works are finding them where they always were. People who think the status quo is fine are getting upset when they enter a place where the status quo is constantly being upended.

The tags on that post that I can’t find made the point that popular media is curated and sanitized and stripped of most of its controversy in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. But that also makes that audience expect all media to be curated and sanitized in the same way. When they encounter the messy, controversial, ugly, radical, difficult things that people write in fanfic, they’re unprepared.

Fanfic isn’t big media. Fanfic authors aren’t being edited and filtered and polished - and nor are their works. The clash between the expectations of people new to fanfic and accustomed to popular media and the realities of what fanfic is and what it’s being written for - that’s part of this struggle that fandom is going through right now. It’s been going on since the beginning of course, but it’s getting louder every year.

I’m still thinking my way through this, but it really does make a lot of sense to me. If those were your tags, please let me know so I can credit you with the ideas at the core of this post.

And if you have any ideas for how we as fans can better introduce the newbies to the culture and expectations in fandom, I’d love to hear it. The better we can guide people into our space, the better they’ll fit in when they join it.

My mother didn’t believe me when I said the reason her phone keeps displaying ads for dog car harnesses is because it eavesdrops on her spoken conversations.

“Watch this,” I said. “I want to buy a wetsuit. I need a wetsuit. Where can I get a wetsuit? Bring me a wetsuit. Wetsuit size small. Women’s wetsuits. Wetsuits for children. Wetsuits for dogs. Discount wetsuits. Hot single wetsuits in my area? Sexy wetsuits. Wetsuits for sale. Purchase me a wetsuit. We need to get a wetsuit. Spend money on a wetsuit! I want to get a wetsuit. Where did you get that wetsuit?”

Her phone is now advertising wetsuits.

AMAZING NEWS!!!

At its 35th special session, the UN Human Rights Council voted to create a new fact-finding mission to investigate human rights violations in the Islamic Republic of Iran related to the protests that began on 16 September 2022.

Proof that our activism has worked. Let’s keep the pressure on and hold the Islamic Republic accountable for crimes against humanity. 

Thank you 💙❤️

NBC News

This 33-year-old made more than 1,000 Wikipedia bios for unknown female scientists

Jessica Wade began writing Wikipedia biographies about women and minority scientists who never got their due — from employers, from other sc