The Berry Blog

The Berry Blog

liifeintechniicolour:

soulsistrin:

heatandapathy:

This is an absolute religious experience that I was not prepared for

Whoever did the caps for this deserves an award

Can never not reblog this, a Scottish national treasure 😂

(via ladyshinga)

sirfrogsworth:

sirfrogsworth:

sirfrogsworth:

I found the thing to dunk on Elon for regarding the rocket launch.

A lot of experts in the rocket community were questioning Elon’s decision not to create a flame diverter.

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For those unaware, huge rockets like this usually have giant trenches underneath to channel the flames, exhaust, and debris safely.

NASA’s Kennedy Space Center has a flame trench that is 571 feet long, 58 feet wide, and 42 feet high and is built with concrete and refractory brick and bisects the pad at ground level.

But giant trenches are costly and can make working on the rocket on the launch pad inconvenient. So Elon wanted to try forgoing the flame diverter even though he was launching the largest rocket ever built with the most exhaust ever output.

And now he covered an entire town with a layer of rocket dust.

Exploding the rocket was normal and expected.

Not giving a shit about the town around the launch site… fucking infuriating.

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I’m having trouble finding information on this water cooled plate he is talking about.

It sounds to me like he is only concerned about protecting the launch pad from damage, as they pretty much vaporized it yesterday.

I don’t see how they can protect the town without proper flame trenches. And it sounds like he has no intention of building them.

I found this quote on Reddit that made me chuckle…

Even Soyuz has a flame trench. A general rule in aviation is don’t be less safe than Russia but time will tell.

Time told.

I have seen a few people repeat the trope that Elon doesn’t know what he is doing. That he isn’t a real rocket engineer. That he just pays engineers to make him look good.

A few comments I saw…

“I’m pretty sure he isn’t an astrophysicist or an engineer specialized in rockets. Why did they let him do this?”

“this is the man the spacex fanboys think is an engineering genius #and he failed to understand what is very literally rocket science #selling ‘the most powerful rocket ever built’ while not considering where all that power is actually directed”

I have done the research. I have seen the quotes directly from some of the most renowned rocket specialists in the world. They all say Elon is a talented rocket engineer and that he knows every aspect of his rockets, top to bottom. You can even watch videos of him giving tours of SpaceX and see he is quite knowledgeable.

Elon has a reputation for spouting off opinions on things with only a cursory knowledge of the subject matter. He quite often makes himself look like a buffoon. And it is easy to assume he is a buffoon in all areas. But if you look into his history, he is *obsessed* with getting to Mars. It is the passion that fuels all of his grifting. He even cares more about going to Mars than people liking him on Twitter.

Apparently, he does have a good memory and he studied and nearly memorized several advanced rocketry textbooks. It’s probably the only thing he put the effort into actually learning.

His cars have horrible fit and finish and catch fire from time to time. His tunnels are idiotic fire hazards. His robot prototype is laughable. His Hyperloop is nonexistent.

But his rockets are the cheapest and best option currently available.

The reason I bring this up is because I think we are letting him off the hook when we chalk this up to incompetence or ignorance.

Elon *knew* he should have put in a flame diverter. That little, “Oh, maybe this is a mistake” is him covering his ass by showing doubt in his decision–as if he didn’t know what was going to happen. His engineers advised him to build a flame diverter. They told him to spend a little extra time and money. And Elon went against it. He is trying to develop these rockets as fast as possible, as cheap as possible, so he has a chance of getting to Mars in his lifetime. He doesn’t care about regulations. He doesn’t care about proper procedure. This Boca launch site is only for testing anyway, so he sees it as expendable.

By saying he isn’t a real engineer and that he doesn’t know anything about rocket science, you are giving him the excuse of ignorance.

But this is the one area he actually has expertise in. Which means his actions are done with intention and malice and apathy.

He knew the world’s most powerful rocket would spew dust and concrete chunks everywhere. That’s exactly why he raised the rocket off the ground. He was hoping the kickback of debris wouldn’t do very much damage to the engines. It’s why he was worried the rocket might blow up on the launch pad.

He just wanted the launch data so he could move on to the next iteration of his rocket to Mars.

Elon is trying to speedrun rocket development and he doesn’t care if his cutting corners causes collateral damage. And he probably justifies it because he thinks colonizing Mars will save humanity.

That is his ignorance.

Mars is a hellhole, not salvation.

(via prismatic-bell)

labelleizzy:

tiktoksformyfriends:

[video by lpkchang808, duet with pink.williams]

LOVE IT

(via vaspider)

radiofreederry:

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(via thebibliosphere)

bemusedlybespectacled:

penrosesun:

You know, it occurs to me that the known internet phenomenon of Reddit “am I the asshole?” posts having completely misleading headers is actually a really great example of a far less known but far more common practice of extreme journalistic spin in cases where there are large monetary incentives to diminish the story in question.

Like, if you see a Reddit post titled “Am I the asshole for buying my wife a new dress?”, the post is pretty much always something totally deranged like: “I (48) really dislike the way my wife (20) dresses, because I think it’s too revealing and makes her look slutty, which was fine when we started dating five years ago, but it makes me feel like she’s going to cheat on me now that we’re married. I’ve politely asked her to get new clothes multiple times, and every time she refused because she said she liked her clothes, and didn’t want to waste money buying new ones. Yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore so I threw out a bunch of her old dresses and bought her a new one that was more modest looking. She started crying because one of the dresses I threw out had been left to her by her mom who died when she was a teen, but I couldn’t have known that it had sentimental value. She said that I should have asked, but obviously if I asked she’d have just told me not to throw out any of her clothes, including the ones that weren’t sentimental. Also, the more modest dress I bought was pretty expensive, and she never thanked me for it. Am I the asshole here, or is she being unreasonable?”

Similarly, whenever you see a headline like “Woman Wins Millions From McDonald’s Because Her Hot Coffee Was Too Hot”, if you dig a bit, you’ll almost always quickly find out that what actually happened was: A 79-year-old ordered coffee which, unbeknownst to her, was being served extremely dangerously hot, because McDonald’s was trying to have coffee that stayed warm over a long commute without spending any extra money on cups with better insulation. The coffee spilled on the old woman’s lap, giving her severe third degree burns over a huge portion of her body, including her genitals. She got to a hospital and they managed to save her life with skin grafting, but she became disabled from the accident, and her genitals and thighs were permanently disfigured. She tried to settle with McDonald’s for her medical costs, and McDonald’s refused to cover any portion of her medical expenses at all, and so she sued. At trial, the jury discovered that this same exact thing had happened seven hundred times before, and McDonald’s had still decided not to change their policy because paying out individual suits was cheaper than moderately reducing their coffee profits. As a result, the jury awarded punitive damages designed to penalize McDonald’s two days worth of their coffee profits, in addition to the woman’s medical costs.

I think it’s largely the same phenomenon, but I know a lot of people who are familiar with the first case, but don’t know to look for the second. If you see some totally outrageous “how could a person ever sue over this stupid thing?” case, you should immediately be incredibly suspicious that that’s all that actually happened, because a lot of the time, it absolutely isn’t. The people who have the most incentive to make their opponent look not only wrong, but completely crazy for having any sort of grievance at all, are often the actually unreasonable ones. 

Anyway this is all to say that if I see ANY of y’all automatically siding with McDonald’s over the recent case where 4-year-old girl was severely burned by their chicken nuggets because “hurr durr dumb kid didn’t know that chicken nuggets were hot, people sue over anything lol”, I will grab that McBoot you’re licking and shove it all the way up your McFuckingAss.

lawyer fun fact! sometimes you need to sue someone before your insurance will pay for your medical bills (because your insurance would rather the other person pay for your medical bills so they don’t have to)! sometimes you need to sue because what you’d get from insurance isn’t enough to pay for all of your medical bills! sometimes you want to change a specific thing, like a dangerous practice or defective part, and that’s not going to happen if you just ask nicely!

most truly ridiculous lawsuits get screened before they’re even filed (because someone goes to an attorney and that attorney is like “yeah you don’t have a case here”) or very shortly after they’re filed (because judges can toss out cases that have zero merit). 99% of the time, if it sounds ridiculous but somehow it went all the way to someone suing and winning in a jury trial, it probably wasn’t actually as absurd as it sounds.

(via seananmcguire)

dashlit:

in sixth grade my homeroom teacher caught this kid stephen saying,
“that’s so gay.”

so he told the class that for the rest of the week, anytime you wanted to express something negatively, you could say,
“that’s so stephen.”

and it started out as a joke, where even this stephen kid was going around using it, laughing at it, not really caring. it was funny, i guess.

but then one of his friends got a bad mark on a test and said,
“that’s so stephen.”

we had a blacktop recess and everyone kept saying,
“that’s so stephen.”

and when we got too loud doing groupwork and had to separate and work silently, everyone in the class kept muttering,
“that’s so stephen.”

and the weirdest part was that even though it was just a word we were using, even though it had nothing to do with stephen,
we all sort of blamed stephen.

and as everyone kept using “that’s so stephen,” all week, you could see stephen himself finding it less and less funny.
we played a game called “pamplemousse” in french class and everyone got stephen out right away if they could.
someone literally went and found one of stephen’s art projects when nobody else was around and ruined it so he had to start over.

and when my homeroom teacher found out about it, he sat everyone down and told us that it wasn’t okay to say “that’s so stephen” anymore. that the things we’d been blaming him for weren’t his fault and the things we’d been doing to him weren’t fair.

he told us that stephen couldn’t help it that he was stephen. he didn’t choose to be stephen. he was born stephen.

and that’s when it clicked.

we all felt pretty stupid, i think, for sort of falling for it, but i’ll be damned if i’ve ever had a teacher get a lesson across so utterly and completely as mr. bernard did.

it hadn’t even been the full week.

(via vaspider)

wovesaxe:

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[image id: expanding brain meme with three levels. the first reads, “support the wga strike to get our shows back into production.” the second reads, “support the wga strike for the future health of the whole tv industry.” the third reads, “support the wga strike to fight corporate devaluation of art everywhere.” end id.]

solidarity with the writers guild of america! learn why the writers are striking in this npr interview and donate to the entertainment community fund here.

(via halohampster)

prismatic-bell:

headspace-hotel:

Actually, I bet a lot of rich people would be into something like planting and growing their own forest for posterity. Let them make a forest and name it after themselves

This but also with other native stuff. Like planting a forest in the desert is dumb but you know what grows really well here and is a staple food crop for many kinds of endangered wildlife, and is itself kind of rare? MOJAVE MILKWEED. Imagine getting to say “yeah, so this hundred acres of native plants heavily seeded toward Mojave milkweed is the Bill Gates Desert Ecosystem Restoration Wildland” and it’s like, triangle bursage (excellent for soil retention), Mojave milkweed (feeds many insects including queen and monarch butterflies, along with hares), and Saguaro cactus (you guys have no idea how much carbon these things trap, it’s INCREDIBLE). Like wow! You’re saving the monarchs! How sexy! You’re reducing carbon! How chic! Oh, and I guess that kind of dull plant filling a lot of this space is helping air quality by retaining soil and preventing runoff during winter rains. That’s nice. (You know full well that’s how most people would take it, but that’s really a major problem out here.)

….now I want to see about pestering my congresscritters to do this. Like find a fuckoff giant piece of land, buy it, and accept donations. $100 gets you a 1’x1’ square of land and you get your name on a fancy plaque or something and the land gets enriched and planted to encourage rewilding. So much of the land here is garbage because the resources have been stripped, so even “untouched” land is really depleted.

I bet it’d work.

digi-moe:
“arabian-batboy:
“whatwwwwwww:
“arabian-batboy:
“arabian-batboy:
“You must be fucking kidding me.
Anyways, if you’re not Palestinian/Arab and want to wear a keffiyeh in solidarity during a protest or something, then please do so by ordering...
digi-moe:
“arabian-batboy:
“whatwwwwwww:
“arabian-batboy:
“arabian-batboy:
“You must be fucking kidding me.
Anyways, if you’re not Palestinian/Arab and want to wear a keffiyeh in solidarity during a protest or something, then please do so by ordering...

digi-moe:

arabian-batboy:

whatwwwwwww:

arabian-batboy:

arabian-batboy:

You must be fucking kidding me.

Anyways, if you’re not Palestinian/Arab and want to wear a keffiyeh in solidarity during a protest or something, then please do so by ordering an actual authentic keffiyehs made by Hirbawi, the last original Palestinian keffiyeh factory in Palestine. 

Their beautiful keffiyehs come in so many colors/pattern and all of them are under 19 Euros (I ordered one and I can tell you that they’re very high quality and soft)

Home site: http://hirbawi.ps 

Europe: http://MADEinPALESTINE.de 

US: http://hirbawiusa.com 

Worldwide: https://www.kufiya.org/

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I’m glad someone said this, because till this day if you type “what do terrorist wear on their head” the first result will be the Palestinian keffiyeh (and not the LV version)

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Article talking about it: X

this co-op also sells thems! https://womeninhebron.com/scarves/kuffiyehs

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

womeninhebron.com is also another Palestinian-owned place you can buy from and they sell beautiful (handmade) embroidered dresses, scarves, rugs, pillowcases, handbags and wallets.

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(via deliriumcrow)

dduane:

bogleech:

The big discourse on twitter right now is that writers going on strike or cancelling their own series are breaking an invisible “contract” they made with their fans and all creators owe their fans a satisfying conclusion to their stories.

Actually all fans owe all creators for entertaining them and if a creator says “I don’t want to perform this labor anymore,” then regardless of the cliffhanger that leaves you with, your only response should be “take care! Thank you for all your hard work!!!” :)

Like it or not… this.

(via rafespeaks)