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Okay so a guy in my solid state physics class was telling us about this muon scanning startup he worked at, GScan, and I'm going insane. I don't work there and I have no stake in the company, financial or otherwise, I just need to tell you about it.

Muons are short-lived subatomic particles, same charge as an electron but ~200 times more massive. On Earth, they're produced by cosmic rays colliding with the upper atmosphere, and they hit the ground at a rate of about ten thousand per minute per square meter.

They're moving extremely fast at ground level, like 0.99 c. So they careen right through matter, deflecting only very slightly around heavy atomic nuclei – they'll penetrate like a hundred meters into solid rock.

What do you do with this continuous shower of deep-penetrating charged particles, constantly blanketing every square inch of the Earth's surface?

(source)

The classic thing is use them to image the inside of massive structures, like we use x-rays to look inside living tissue – except instead of generating them yourself, you just use atmospheric muons. Muon archeology is a whole thing, they've used it to find hidden chambers in pyramids and stuff. Neat!

But this one Estonian company is doing some crazy bullshit and I love it.

Sandwich anything between a pair of portable muon detectors and get full 3D imaging of the interior, with sub-millimeter accuracy, by tracking the minute deflection of muons between them. Samples that are WAY too thick for x-rays, made of literally anything. Just put some muon detectors on some two by fours in a warehouse and call it a day.

You can just. Image anything??? Anything you want?? Completely passively!! Just detectors! No particle source! Put them anywhere. The detectors themselves are a mature technology, the company's tech is in the algorithms they use to get this level of spatial and elemental resolution.

You can detect failures inside cable-reinforced concrete bridges without cutting open the bridges.

Decommissioned Soviet nuclear submarine filled with concrete, with no drawings or documentation, that may or may not have spent fuel canisters in it? And you need to cut it up for storage? Just look at the muons.

One of the wackiest ideas is to put one detector under your bed and one on the ceiling, so you get a full 3D scan of your body every night, passively. I want one.

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Theres a general frustration that the clothes thing is tapping into but it's so much bigger than just clothes. One sec gotta copy over

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hey, I was just at "things got better" island and everyone there is talking about how excited they are to meet you

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Someone hit me with their car and I got isekai'd to a world that's really similar to my old one except in this one my collarbone is mysteriously broken

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isn't 'not being the target of transmisogyny' a privilege? i agree that trans men don't magically get bestowed with male privilege when they transition but being TME is absolutely a privilege. there are some parts of transphobia that just do not apply to those of us who were afab. that's a privilege.

yeah, and for every "trans-misogyny excempt" person, there's a "TME" person who experiences shit that I, a trans woman, won't. this isn't like math or anything. Come on now. I'm not about to argue transphobia on a fucking Excel spreadsheet.

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becoming president just to put lumen, decibel, and size restrictions on vehicles.

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being perceived as a trans woman is not where most of the meat of transmisogyny actually happens, hence why trans women experience it before coming out. like come on people this is really easy to understand it’s basic institutional oppression dynamics

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My Doctor Emailed Me Back

This is the story of how the NHS asked me to be the face of their "new system" for trans health, and why I told them to shove it.

Exclusively on TransWrites:

Here's a quote:

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"Don't let the internet turn you into an asshole" didn't mean "find an acceptable minority of people to be mean to so you can continue being a bully" it meant. As a general rule of thumb. you should not be a dickhead to strangers on the internet

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the conclusion you draw from the existence of intersex people shouldn't be "oh, there are more than two sexes," it should be "oh, sex is socially constructed (and we should be calling into question its merit as a construct)"

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I think all dating norms need to get like 30% more aspec and polyamorous and everyone in the universe would be so much happier

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the moon is cool i think. big fan of the big rock.

photos all by me

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i am extremely picky abt cheese, and i wanna know something. personally i only like 4 cheeses

this poll is about all cheeses, vegan, dairy and otherwise. i'd also be interested in hearing how many cheeses you've eaten

notes:

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"Transfems are hypervisible and transmascs are hypovisible" - Too overgeneralized. Fine for speaking in general terms, but not for specifics. It creates a binary as well that ignores trans experiences outside of that.

The biggest problem I have with flattening visibility to "x is super visible and y is invisible" is that it isn't actually all that simple.

I'm a transfem. I'm erased because I'm intersex and nonbinary.

I am erased because it actively benefits transmeds and other transphobes/intersexists to uphold a sex and gender binary of "You are born a boy or girl and therefore must transition to the opposite or you're actually just cis and want to feel special, so you cannot ever have complex experiences outside my binary." The idea that all transfems and trans women are born (assumed perisex) male/masculine and must transition away from it is transmedicalism and transphobia. It doesn't even harm only people like me to have this kind of definition of transness- it harms perisex transfems and trans women who are butch or have gender experiences that have maleness or masculinity as part of it.

There are layers to visibility that make it multifaceted. Intersex transfems are often only visible when we can be called cis perisex women chasers to transfemininity, and those of us who cannot are often erased and assumed to be perisex.

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they call me the problem ignorer for reasons that i know but dont feel like addressing right now

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Sorry to be that person, but "girl math" doesn't mean "girls are bad at math". It's a way of saying "how many women use math irl"

Like "If I get hit with armor, it doesn't count because my health remains the same"

Or "I returned $30 and spent $5, that's a net positive, so I basically got this for free"

Not that girls literally don't understand math and don't get that things cost money. It's a simplification of thought processes and analysis, actually implying high-level thinking, not "girls are so bad at math we don't even try"

I know, it's not that serious, but taken out of context it sounds worse than it is.

ohhhhhhhh my god you cannot make“teehee girls just use a different kind of math around shopping to justify buying more stuff cause they’re girls using girl math” into a feminist statement it IS an actual problem to ascribe not only gender (woman) but childishness (girl) to poor financial literacy and say that the kind of math girls do is actually exclusively related to the domestic sphere when we talk about shopping or buying food or presents or little treats. Do you fucking hear yourself