Hey @ Wikipedia, if you could not list a trans person’s deadname right after their name that would be great.
Hey @ literally every piece of media in the universe you too
Excellent news! Editors who retain deadnames in articles are violating Wikipedia’s Gender Identity guidelines, at least implicitly. You are fully empowered to, and absolutely should, remove any deadname you find on Wikipedia. Editors who tell you otherwise are simply incorrect, and you should refer them to the relevant entry in the Wikipedia Manual of Style.
Professor McGonagall couldn’t deny that she had been worried when the Marauders showed up for their third year. After all, it wasn’t everyday that three twelve/thirteen year olds had discovered that their best friend was secretly a werewolf. She only hoped that it wouldn’t affect their behavior.
For the most part, she got her wish.
And then, on a warm Autumn evening towards the end of September, complete havoc swept the castle. She was a strong Scottish woman, a hardened professor, a rising soldier for an underground army. And even she stood, baffled beyond words, as James and Sirius ran through Hogwarts, ripping apart the tapestries, breaking the vases, smashing the windows. Peter reluctantly followed them, tipping over suits of armor. She finally got them into her office, staring down a smirking James. At last, Professor McGonagall threw her hands into the air and cried a simple: “What?”
“It’s quite simple, Professor.”
“It never is with you, Potter.”
“Every time we try to talk to Remus about his—erm—furry little problem, he keeps telling us that he’s a monster,” James cheerfully said. “Sirius tried telling him that he’s only a monster once a month. Remus wasn’t hearing it. So we thought that if we acted like monsters once a month and still got up and ate breakfast the next day, it would let Remus know that life goes on.”
Professor McGonagall stared at him for a solid fifteen seconds of silence before massaging her aching head. “Potter, there—there are so many ways that you could convey that message.”
“Oh, I know,” he said. “We’re planning them all.”
Sirius nodded and said, “You know how stubborn Remus can be. We’re planning at least a dozen different tactics here. This just happens to be one of them and, this meeting of ours aside, I have a good feeling about it.”
“And anyway, it’s not like we broke a lot of school rules,” Peter piped up. “We just broke the same anti-vandalism rule eighty times.”
“Exactly!” James cried. “So, you see, Professor, this whole thing is really a matter of perspective.”
Me consuming media dealing with werewolves: “okay but if you’re gonna lock yourself in that basement during your transformation have you thought of including some enrichment?? How about a treat ball or a frozen Kong?? What are your thoughts on sniffing out treats”
Good god the rampant destruction makes so much more sense now! The wolf has no mental stimulation so its starts destroying things because its BORED.
Only way this shit gonna top marvel is if I get my own 8 foot tall genetically engineered avatar with some timbs and a long ass usb weave I can connect to trees and horses too the fuck
Avatar holds 2nd for the most money *ever* in the box office, when adjusted for inflation. Avengers is 13th. Avatar is the all-time worldwide highest grossing movie of all time too. Like Marvel is good at making movies but probably not gonna do better than Avatar. There’s some hefty competition
Remember today when you see 100+ articles about how ‘civil’ and ‘noble’ H.W. Bush was that today is World AIDS Day. That 100,000 people, many LGBT+ individuals, especially gay men, died under his and Reagan’s watch. That he banned HIV+ people from entering the US, reduced research funding, and prevented educators from speaking about safe sex in favor of abstinence only education.
In base 10, it’s easy to tell if things are multiples of 2 or 5. You just, look at the last digit, and if that’s a multiple of 2 (or 5) then the whole number is a multiple of 2 (or 5). There’s similarly easy ways to tell for any product of a power of 2 and a power of 5.
People sometimes argue that base 12 would be better than base 10 because in base 12, it’s easy to tell when things are divisible by 2 or 3 (or products of powers thereof) and multiples of 3 are more common than multiples of 5.
Ignoring briefly that you could say the same thing about base 6 this is all completely reasonable. It’s just that it misses something.
See, in base 10, there’s this trick that you can use to tell if something is a multiple of 3; what you do is you add up the digits, and if the thing at the end is a multiple of 3, then the whole thing was a multiple of 3 all along.
Is 2018 a multiple of 3? Well, 2+0+1+8 = 11, which isn’t a multiple of 3, so it isn’t. What about 20181201, today’s date but written as a big number? well, we have 2+0+1+8+1+2+0+1 = 15, which is a multiple of 3, so we indeed have that 20181201 is a multiple of 3.
There’s a more obscure trick to tell if a number is a multiple of 11. What you do is you alternatingly add and subtract the digits and check whether the thing at the end is a multiple of 11.
Is 2018 a multiple of 11? Well, 2-0+1-8 = -5 isn’t, so it isn’t. What about, 2321, the time that it is right now? well, 2-3+2-1 = 0 is, so it is.
But, like I said, that’s obscure, and the reason it’s obscure is that no one cares about 11. multiples of 11 are only 1/11ths of all the numbers, while multiples of 3 are 1/3rd, so obviously, people care more about the first than the second. The value of easily telling if a thing is divisible by 3 is 1/3, which is much larger than the value of being able to tell if a thing is divisible by 11, which is only 1/11.
But, ok, so it turns out that in general, in any base b, the 3s trick will work to tell when things are divisible by any factor of b-1, while the 11s trick will work to tell when things are divisible by any factor of b+1.
In fact, this allows us to do another trick: we can group digits! Basically, we take our number (let’s say 12345) in some base b, and then we can pretend that we’re in base b² by just… mushing the numbers together and thinking of it as 1′23′45, if you follow.
So, how do we tell if 34542 is a multiple of 101? well, we notice that 3 – 45 + 42 = 0, and thus we know that it is. (Frankly doing this with groups of digits or more is a pain so let’s just stay with groups of 2 digits)
So, to find the best base b, what we want is to have as large a sum of the reciprocals of the distinct prime divisors of b, b-1, b+1, b²-1 and b²+1. But, also, since we don’t want to memorize multiplication and addition tables that are too large, let’s say that we don’t want any base that is larger than 20. So, with all that in mind, which is the best base? And the answer is…
13
we get 2 and 3 from 13-1 = 12, we get 7 from 13+1 = 14, we get 13 from 13 itself and we get 5 and 17 from 13²+1 = 170. This is better than any other base under 20.
strictly 21 is slightly better, since you get all those and also 11 from 21+1 = 22, but after that it doesn’t get any better until 34 (which only adds 89 from 34²+1 = 1157 = 13*89) but, I set the rules, so I’ll abide by them.
“[Dr. Mathilde Krim] called a number of her colleagues to request KS [Kaposi’s sarcoma] samples to study, but Memorial Sloan Kettering, she was told, had instituted a formal ban on treating victims of the gay cancer. That the city’s preeminent cancer hospital was turning away people with cancer made no sense to her. The hospital administration told her the directive came from the president and CEO, Paul Marks. “It was not to be encouraged for people with GRID [Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, an early name for AIDS] to come to Sloan Kettering,” she was told. The cold cruelty of her hospital’s GRID policy was to her a scandal, and not an isolated one. Forced to look elsewhere for tissue samples to study, she soon discovered that other New York–area hospitals had also begun to refuse GRID patients. Only the NYU Medical Center, where Friedman-Kien and Linda Laubenstein had dived headlong into Kaposi’s sarcoma, was openly taking patients. But even there, tensions arose. When Friedman-Kien presented his earliest case at grand rounds, Dr. Saul Farber, the bombastic head of internal medicine, had his retinue of residents and interns wear head-to-foot protective gear, and he himself wore the unnecessary garb. They looked like an expedition of space explorers, and gave the sick patient a fright. “This,” Friedman-Kien said of his patient, “is just the beginning of a disaster. This is going to be a pandemic.” To which Farber replied, still in earshot, “But why does NYU have to be the Titanic?” Farber later adopted his own anti-GRID policy, ruling that those patients could not be admitted to shared rooms, and consequently had to be held in the ER when the limited number of isolation rooms filled up. He knew that GRID patients posed no risk to roommates. But Farber considered the containment policy necessary because applications for residencies at NYU from top medical schools had lagged, either from fear of GRID or because a hospital overwhelmed with the disease presumably lacked the diversity of illnesses that ambitious physicians sought. The effect was to keep sick patients on temporary gurneys lining the first-floor hallways, held there for days or weeks, sometimes breathing their last breaths without ever having been admitted. Next Krim reached out to Craig Metroka, a young, unimposing oncologist who was seeing KS patients at another hospital[. …] He admitted to wishing he could treat all the patients referred to him, but as the clinic allotted space to him just one day a week, he was forced to turn away many. With all the GRID and suffering around her […] she joined the resistance. She invited Metroka to turn her lab into an underground center for GRID patients. Krim knew they had to carry out this operation without detection or they would be shut down. “Tell your patients to come to my office after six o’clock,” she said, and he gratefully agreed to do so. Thereafter, she convened an informal group of researchers, including scientists in San Francisco and Los Angeles, to begin collecting blood and tissue for future examination. […] Every night, on her way home, she secretly greeted Metroka and his furtive KS patients as they snuck past security. Those young men, wasting away with disease, had the same hollowed gaze she had first seen in that 1945 film clip [of liberated Nazi concentration camps], some so weak they gripped the wall for support.”
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David France, How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS (2016), Pt. 1, Ch. 3 (via enoughtohold)
Activist Peter Staley, known for his work with ACT UP, wrote on Facebook:
My greatest AIDS hero died a few hours ago. Dr. Mathilde Krim, founder of amfAR [one of the earliest AIDS research foundations], warrior against homophobia and AIDS-related stigma, dedicated defender of science and public health, and mother-figure and mentor to countless activists, will leave a deep hole in the continued fight against AIDS — a fight she dedicated her life to. She was 91.
Iron in the Sand 