a-s-fischer:

I grew up in citrus farming country, and had orange and lemon trees. And I saw a post today about how people in the US have gotten so used to everything being always availible that when they walk into a grocery store in January to buy a lemon, they expect the lemon to be there, and they never even consider how unnatural it is that we have lemons in January.

And this is so completely not the point of that post, which is why I’m making my own post, but this example really really bothers me, because as I said I grew up in citrus country, and citrus are winter fruits, and January is lemon season.

Which ultimately goes to prove the point of that post, that we are so used to this kind of constant availability, that most people don’t even know what season is lemon season.

literallymechanical:

literallymechanical:

excalculus:

literallymechanical:

God is made out of boron nitride, I captured him in nanotube cobwebs and shoved him into a bunch of jars some time around 2017. Sorry.

You jest, but that’s exactly the goal. Spinning nanotubes into yarn.

I should elaborate.

This gossamer black lace is a mass of pure carbon nanotubes.  Maybe four of five minutes worth of production.  It pours out of the furnace tube (the hole on the left) as a sort of sheer “sock.”  This particular batch got all clumped up, rather than being drawn into the spindle.  Whoops.

Once that happens you’re kind of screwed.  CNT’s cling to themselves real hard, and it takes something like chlorosulfonic acid to break them apart.  It’s like crushing a ball of cotton candy.  If you want to spin them into yarn, you have to do it quickly, as soon as they come out the tube.

Here’s an early prototype spinning rig.  You can see the “sock” being spun down into a cone on the left, and then a thin fiber through the middle, before it’s wound up on a spool on the right.  This specific rig was a failure. It produced extremely loose, clumpy yarn, but good CNT yarn is extremely strong, as well as electrically conductive.  Tensile strength measured in tens or hundreds of gigapascals.

Boron nitride nanotubes are white, and much harder to produce – as you can see above, they tend to come out as dusty cobwebs, rather than a cohesive sock. But. BNNT yarn is even stronger than CNT.  As much as a terapascal, theoretically.  Also an electrical insulator, thermally stable up to a couple thousand °C, and a good neutron absorber to boot, given that it’s half boron.

So, what can you make with nanotube yarn?  That’s such a small question.  It’s like asking what you can make with iron.  Spin it into thread, into rope, into fabric.  Build a spacesuit or a space elevator, wrap it around a reactor core, transmission wires, ultra-strong cables.  Whatever you want.

I don’t work at this company anymore – I got extremely sick, and it was a bit of a nightmare workplace anyway – but I still dream of nanotubes.  Give me fifty thousand dollars and a garage, and I can start churning out decent CNT tape by the kilometer.  Yarn is trickier, I might need to finally do a PhD for that.

But CNT’s are so easy.  It’s like they want to exist.  We built a synthesis machine and it worked on the first try.  I need to try again.

a-captions-blog:

transracialqueer:

(Source in the notes)

ID start.

Tweet thread by Lydia X. Z. Brown @AutisticChoya [verified] that says:

[line in all caps] Shouting it louder for people in back:

#Transracial is a real thing.

It means adoptees of color into white families, often settlers + colonizers + white saviors.

Rachel Dolezal + her ilk [word in all caps] stole our word.

Educate yourselves before you keep on erasing people of color deprived of and stolen from our communities: goo.gl/yy/V3eT

(Note: I’m a nonbinary trans person and I’m a transracial person, Chinese/East Asian person of color adopted by white family in U.S.)

[Attached to this Tweet is a link to an article from Rewire News. The headline says: Being ‘Transracial’ Is Real—But It’s Not What Racism White People Claim It Is. The photo is of an Asian child hugging a plush. A white person’s hand is visible is the foreground.]

The Tweet thread continues:

ICYMI, this article is based on my older thread on what #transracial actually means, why/how you are erasing our actual experiences of personal + collective + historical trauma, and what those experiences are:

The Tweet quotes another Tweet that says:

Stop stealing our word to co-opt our identities + colonial trauma!
- Signed, a transracial adoptee

We transracial adoptees of color fucking [word in all caps] hate Rachel Dolezal because her co-optation and erasure has led to constant assaults from people we should be able to trust – fellow BIPOC + white accomplices – claiming our identities/experiences don’t even exist.

[line in all caps] She stole our word.

Rachel Dolezal stole + co-opted + erased the word #transracial just as settlers + colonizers + white saviors have stolen children of color for centuries from our families and put us in orphanages + residental schools + foster system for white people to “civilize” us + destroy our cultures.

Anytime you say “transracial isn’t a thing/doesn’t exist,” “take down transracial; support transgender people,”

You are actively erasing BIPOC stolen from/deprived of our communities + culture + ancestral wisdom for whom transracial had a meaning long before Delezal [phrase in all caps] stole our word.

And when you claim transracial isn’t a real thing but transgender people are, you are actively erasing [word in all caps] me and every other transracial adoptee (a person of color, by definition, adopted into white family) who is [word in all caps] also transgender.

Good. Fucking. Job.

Apparently there is no limit to the number of times I need to say this, because every single time Rachel Dolezal comes up in the news …

y’all start saying that I and thousands of other actually transracial people (people of color adopted into white families) do not exist.

[word in all caps] We started using “transracial” decades ago to describe our unique positionality + experiences with races + ethnicity + culture.

It is intentionally political + provocative.

It doesn’t mean we’re actually white. It means PoC displaced from our own communities by adoption by white people.

But as soon as a white person starts making sensationalist headlines for “identifying as black” in a disgusting amount of cultural appropriation + obliviousness to her harm, you accept the language she uses enquestioning.

Stop that.

“Transracial” was never her word. It’s ours.

ID End.

Source: Twitter