Everyone’s already given great advice, being a person comes before being trans is the most important imo. I also think it’s worth considering how far along this character is in their transition, be that the physical, social, internal/mental etc. and how that interacts with the rest of their personal development.

The important thing is that zooming out, many of the challenges we face aren’t necessarily trans things: we all want to be liked, to be happy, to be able to express our genuine selves etc. For those of us who are trans, achieving those things might look different and come about in a different way, but it’s still a classic story of self discovery with the same goal of becoming a complete person. As long as their self actualisation is wholistic you’ll be okay.

I deleted a big ramble, but the important part is that it’s fantastic to explore their character arc from a trans perspective, but the arc itself should go beyond being transgender, real people have huge and complex worlds. Ultimately we’re all just people trying to get through life and gender isn’t a story on it’s own, but it is a part of every person.

If an example helps, becoming myself has been equal parts transitioning, finding my true community through activism and discovering the things I want to spend my whole life doing like making music and feeding people. All of those things are deeply connected: transitioning gave my licence to explore being outwardly punk, activism gave me the space to stop living as someone I wasn’t and my love of music changed the way I see the world so much that it stomped out my internalised transphobia, made me an objectively better person, and gave me a deeper and more solid connection to my new community, to my home. It’s all caught up in my being trans, but it could easily mirror a cis person’s story, even much of the dramatic external change.

I’d definitely get at least a couple of transpeople to bounce ideas of or to proof read your drafts for potentially harmful stereotypes and stuff, it’s a learning process but worth it. Including well written trans people in your work is valuable and I highly encourage it, inclusion can mean a lot to people and you’ve no idea who you might end up helping.

When I say the basics, I mean understanding logic and reasoning and what constitutes scientific evidence. Much of it is word association at best, the example that comes to mind is the claim that the pillars of creation prove that creationism is true.

In one example in my copy of the Qur’an, they point to a journalist using the word smoke to discuss the state of the early universe as proof that the Qur’an predicted modern cosmology because heaven was smoke before Allah commanded it to exist. It’s an unproven claim, they’ve just drawn a vague connection and decided that counts as evidence.

Trans nonby software dev who dated a furry artist, my disdain for AI knows no limits.

I use Nobara, btw. (Is Arch good I’ve never looked into it)

You know how you get COVID from being in the same room as someone who sneezes on you or something? It’s that.

Non locality is when you get COVID from someone the next state over.

Can’t say I’m aware of any examples of our modern scientific understanding being present in a religious text. I did a painfully in depth bible study class in highschool and we sometimes discussed that a lot of old testament (and thus the Torah) is very very old and likely comes from people doing their best to understand their world and merging it with myth over the ages. That’s probably the closest you’ll get, depending on what you consider “science.”

One other possibility is that stories like the flood could essentially be “recordings” of historical events. Someone correct me, it’s been yonks since I read into it, but as I recall there are a number of different flood stories that come from the same region (ancient Mesopotamia? if we’re talking Judaism), so it’s entirely possible that it’s based on a real one, perhaps even multiple.

I got a free copy of the Qur’an last year and it’s packed with stuff like this, it’s kinda annoying because I just wanted to understand the actual text. It’s all the same stuff I’ve seen Christian creationists talk about, obviously false if you understand the basics but it’ll probably deceive lots of people who don’t.

One of the most accurate and successful theories in physics contains the single worst prediction and isn’t mathematically rigorous at all.

Doing calculations with it feels like doing vibes based maths, and you spend a lot of time doing things like: “oops divided by zero guess I’ll cancel it out by multiplying by zero” and it works.

Going through the comment history tells a pretty clear story, what a twat

I work in IT and we have to go through a whole process to get a licence to use it, so I’ve just not done that. Other people on my team have, it’s a ticking time bomb and I’m just sitting here watching them all ignore the obvious signs.

Just last week someone was complaining about the AI randomly adding files to our code, and when I mentioned yeah these AI keep deleting customer data and stuff, they just brushed it off. We’re in an industry that’s super regulated so this is gonna end with legal action I’m sure. I’ve also watched people use AI to automate basic tasks, and when I’ve reviewed what they’ve done it’s all completely wrong, to that point that if the wrong person sees it, we get a full audit and the entire team is placed under constant supervision with a lot of our access heavily restricted for months.

Meanwhile I’m just sitting here doing more and doing it better without AI. It’s not worth pushing back because I already cop enough flak for stuff other people do or don’t do. I hope the company gets destroyed in a massive lawsuit, it won’t, but god it would be awesome.

Oh haha, cool I saw myself. Yeah I tried getting some photos when we went down Bourke St, but it was so massive that it actually looks small. The crowd disappeared over the hill heading west and went around the corner back up Swanston. In the photos the crowd just blurs and looks like part of the road or something, so you can’t get a good idea of the scale. I was really hoping for aerial footage, though tbf I haven’t gone looking.

I’ve been running from my problems by immersing myself in tech, I’m not sure if that makes me like it more or less but I’ve gotten very very good at what I do.

Last night I set up an event ticketing service so friends can come to an event I’m hosting without me having to schedule them or manage capacity. Then I cried myself to sleep. -2

But I also get to set up stuff for my collectives to use, like nextcloud and wordpress and it’s awesome to be able to turn a grassroots bunch of ratbags into a semi-professional looking bunch of ratbags. +10

I used to fry a pan of frozen veggies with salt and thyme, but these days I’m often lucky enough to be able to get a lot of rescued food for free.

Perhaps you’re referring to theory I haven’t read, but does anarchism really reject structure itself? Certainly hierarchical structures are rejected, but organisation requires structure, even if it’s a flat one.

I haven’t know anarchy any other way, so I’m a little confused about the distinction. Granted, there are many flavours of anarchy and I don’t know them well, but I thought they all accepted structure itself while rejecting the hierarchical.

I remember in one of his books, Dr Karl recalls knowing when winter started because the ER suddenly fills up with kids fighting for their lives.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/lesson

You can also be the “good at maths, bad at maths” kind

AC’s use electrical energy to take some heat energy, and move it outside. You can kinda reverse the process in certain types of heat pumps to generate power, but it’s not even close to worth it, the efficiency is horrible.

You need a temperature gradient to capture heat energy, basically a cold thing and a hot thing, you harvest the energy as it moves from hot to cold. You’ve cooled your house down, and want to use the waste heat to create power, you’ll either have to find a very cold place somewhere nearby (unlikely to be cold outside if you’re using AC) or you can use the fact that your house is cold. So now you’ve both lost energy and heated up your house, because that lost energy has been added to the heat you originally tried to remove.

The simplified but always true rule of thumb is that whenever you use energy to create something from which you can harvest energy, you’ll never be able to harvest more than what you spent. In reality you’ll pretty much always lose energy trying to do this, I’m not aware of anything that’s 100% efficient in both directions (or even one honestly).

I’m afraid I can’t answer your technical questions, I’m really not that knowledgeable about this. All I know is you ideally want the frequency curve to be flat, I don’t think it matters much where it sits relative to that line.

Honestly, that Danon dropping off at the low end is pretty typical though it’s one of the better ones. You’d really just have to test it I’m afraid, it might be totally fine to chop off the bottom for some things but maybe it’s necessary for certain heart conditions, I wouldn’t know. If it were an option I’d say the best bet is to always stick to the analogue, but I’m absolutely with you on hating traditional stethoscopes, they’re so painful…

You probably can just leave the crushers on your neck with the volume maxed out, but I’m really not sure if that’ll work. In all honesty the speaker might be worse due to the way the acoustics in the room can change what you hear, it’s really hard to say.

Rtings.com provides frequency response charts when they test speakers, let me see if I can find one that goes low enough for you.

As for the bonus question, absolutely love it. I love when people come up with cool solutions to life’s problems, and this lets me hear my own heartbeat? Hell yeah!

Here’s an easy way to check a bunch of them quicky, the Denon home was the best I found in terms of the very low end. I’m sure someone else can do better, I’m not that much of an audiophile and know very little about speakers.

Probably worth noting that they stretch out the low end of the chart so they tend to go lower than it seems (I assume it’s a logarithmic scale). You might be able to go to a store and ask to test them yourself.

Second edit: if headphones are at all a possibility (they might be better for patients who don’t want to hear their own heartbeat) then can I recommend Skullcandy crushers? They’re completely ridiculous as regular headphones, they basically just have a metal plate they vibrate for the bass, but it goes all the way down to 20Hz, and you can crank it waaaaay up with a slider on the side. (I use these daily for music because I’m a bad audiophile who wants to have fun sometimes, I have a proper wired setup if I want the audiophile experience.)