• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


I am extremely rusty on the subjects of electrical engineering and semiconductors, and I've always had a peculiar mental resistance to learning about semiconductors in the first place. It's a blind spot. There are many regions of science and engineering about which I'm still baffled and given to self-deprecating feelings of "oh it's all a mystery to me I'll never get it". I recognize such feelings to be self-defeating, and therefore one of the priorities of the Pnictogen Wing is identifying and clearing these obstacles to learning.

I know enough physical chemistry, however, not to feel excessively mystified by the inner workings of computers, even though my knowledge is sketchy. Computer "science" (which surely can't ever be a proper science but rather a branch of engineering when fully elaborated, in my opinion) has been so badly organized and badly taught that the current U.S. culture round computers and programming is riddled with irrationality and magical thinking. Computer geeks don't behave like professional scientists or engineers or technicians of any sort. They carry themselves more like artists or lone geniuses, or even mages. They freely blur the lines between their own sense of genius and the tremendous innate superiority (as they see it) of the silicon beasts they feel they've tamed. They imagine their own brains work the same way—but this paradoxically means that their own brains are an opaque mystery to them, a black box with only a few well-defined functions. They think of their computers the same way, in terms of broad abstractions.

I'm striving and struggling towards a better general understanding of computers and programming—we're all afflicted with very annoying traumatic obstructions to learning, but we try. As I do so, I'm fascinated by the notion, which is a logical consequence of the construction and operation of the personal computer, that computer programs do in fact have a physical existence—a rather tightly constrained one, at that. One can dimly envision the physical entities where a program lives on a computer, both in long-term storage and in volatile form. Even though one can't easily say exactly where on the semiconductors the particular electrical signals corresponding to a given program are located, one can say with certainty that there's a sharply defined region somewhere, for that's the nature of computer programs in volatile memory. They're all kept sharply distinct from one another, and it's BAD when things overlap. It's very bad indeed, unless you're playing Core War I suppose.

So there is a ghost in the machine! "Virtual", in this case, also means physical. The virtual worlds have a physical host. Simple, right? Well...I'm not sure that the venture capitalists understand that. And the terrifying thing is, I'm not sure any of the elite computer technicians understand that either. The physical world has vanished from their radar...they betray that fundamental disconnection in a hundred little ways. And honestly it scares the crap out of me.

~Chara of Pnictogen



cohostunionnews
@cohostunionnews

Yesterday the Pharmacy Guild, a "a union of health care professionals within the powerful International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM)," announced a significant milestone: it's unionized a Walgreens for the first time! The vote—taken at a Vancouver, Washington store—was apparently unanimous. It also comes on the heels of 6 CVS stores unionizing.

The reasons for unionizing are unsurprising given the crisis in pharmacies since COVID-19 began:

Pharmacy professionals at the Vancouver Walgreens cited excessive workloads, chronic short staffing, and the increasing pressures of handling high prescription volumes while also juggling vaccination appointments as key drivers behind their decision to unionize. The unanimous vote reflects a collective determination to ensure that patient safety and the well-being of pharmacy staff are prioritized over corporate profits.


StrawberryDaquiri
@StrawberryDaquiri
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It's slowly becoming plain to me just how much of the iconography and symbolism of magic reflects the simplicity of underlying symmetry and geometrical simplicity, breaking through the superficial confusion and chaos of the observable Universe for a moment, showing its power. The most convincingly magical-feeling scenes from popular entertainment tend to be those with an appealing plainness and directness of symbolism. Overcomplication and overelaboration (like you get with excessively lore-heavy depictions of magic) dissipate the magical sparkle. The best symbols are the most symmetrical ones: spheres, cylinders, lines and planes, orbs, discs, Platonic solids. Think of the octahedral Angel in Neon Genesis Evangelion, or the spheres of destruction that Tetsuo produces about himself in Akira.

There's a joke about Fate/ Heroic Servants, that if they're Saber-class they shoot lasers, rather like Sir Arturia Pendragon is doing there in that second picture. Yet the image makes sense. The sword is something like a half-line, with a fixed endpoint but pointing towards infinity. Hence the magically superpowered Excalibur projects a beam of damage, which can especially be seen in Fate/Zero, where I think she levels a hillside at one point. (Just what do the poor ordinary citizens of Fuyuki City think happened afterwards?!) In the same film, we see that Alexander the Great's Noble Phantasm is basically a sphere, a bubble Universe into which he can draw enemies. He does that to Gilgamesh, who deploys Enuma Elish—another directed weapon, like Excalibur, and thus he can easily pierce the sphere. The attacks easily yield to geometrical interpretation.

With this in mind...the seductive allure of nuclear science and weaponry to so many nerdy minds becomes much clearer. This, too, is a domain where everything's reduced to simple geometry. In processing nuclear materials, as with no others in industry, the exact shapes of containers and pipes and ingots of metal are of paramount, life-or-death importance. The bombs themselves are even simpler. One starts with a spherical explosion (the first phase in the Teller-Ulam design) and then shapes that round a cylindrical fission stage, and...one can take that further, as Tsar Bomba demonstrated. The Russians actually won the nuclear race, though nobody openly admitted it. They demonstrated that an arbitrarily large fusion bomb could be constructed. Tsar Bomba was so absurdly successful that the Russians knew ahead of time what they'd done, and mercifully encased their Doomsday Device in lead so that it wouldn't destroy the bomb crew. (Why do I have a feeling that if the U.S. had done it, they simply wouldn't have given a shit?) And after that there's a general sense they noped out of the nuclear pissing-match altogether. They'd hit the upper theoretical limit of nuclear deterrence, i.e. complete obliteration with one bomb, and that was it for the rational and practically-minded Russians.

The United States would not have done that. It's withering to my vestigial sense of American pride and patriotism to know down to the bottom of my soul that the U.S. would not have stopped, if they'd ever managed to figure out the arbitrarily cascaded fission bomb.

Heaven help us all. This danger has not ceased; it's never gone away. It's only quietly worsened. There hasn't been honest U.S. political discourse about nukes in many decades. The proxy war on nuclear power only made it worse of course.

May Allah have mercy on us all.

~Chara of Pnictogen