for anyone seeking help with paying for an abortion
I’ve seen a lot of posts going around lately of people who need help paying for an abortion procedure, and I know I’ve blogged about this before, but it bears repeating. The National Network of Abortion Funds has groups available all over the country to give grants to women in need of help. Please keep their information and pass it around to your friends so people know there are options.
(via 3dbabyfromallymcbeal)
Attention all broke people!
If you’re ever hungry and have no money, go to iHop and order a short stack of pancakes (I usually order as carryout). The receipt they print for you, has a URL and a phone number to a survey. Once you complete the survey, they’ll give you a code to get a free short stack of pancakes. You can apply it to your order.
It’s not much, but it’s free.
Booost
Field trip broke people.
(via vaultnumber713)
friendly reminder not to support lindt this easter season, or apparently ever again, because they support autism speaks.
Wowwwwwwww
SIGH.
can someone please explain why autism speaks is so bad?
because they’re adamant that autism is a disease that can be “cured”. They don’t have a single autistic person on their board. Autism Speaks produces advertisements, small films, ect. about what a burden autistic people are to a society. They only spend about 4% of their money on “family services.” They create a stereotype that makes it hard for actual autistic people, like myself, be heard and recognized as actually autistic. I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder before they realized that I actually showed signs of Asperger’s. They don’t actually help us.
That’s the problem with Autism Speaks.
(tw for violence, ableism, abuse, murder, and death)
It goes deeper than not having any autistic board members. Many of the allistics running the organization promote the horrific notion that you’re better off dead than autistic, and their influence and “activism” only supports the ideology resulting in the continued murder of autistic children and adults by their parents and caregivers.
Former Autism Speaks board member Harry Slatkin, whose wife, Laura, continues to serve on the Board of Directors, stated in an interview with Town and Country while still a board member that sometimes he hoped their autistic son David would drown in the backyard pond rather than “suffer like this all his life.” Evidencing a pattern of similarly violent rhetoric, Autism Speaks is also responsible for the 2006 PSA “Autism Every Day“ in which their then Vice President states on camera that she considered putting her autistic daughter in the car and driving off a bridge, and that the only reason she refrained from doing so was because her other, non-autistic daughter would have been waiting for her at home—her autistic daughter was in the room as she made these statements. Furthermore, the producer of this PSA explicitly admitted that the film was intentionally staged to portray negative images of autistic people and their families.
Only four days following the release of “Autism Every Day,” pathologist Karen McCarron smothered her autistic daughter with a garbage bag. McCarron stated that she murdered Katie because her “autism had not been improving,” had thought about killing Katie, that made an earlier brief attempt at suffocation, wanted to cure Katie, thought killing Katie would make her “complete” in heaven, and wanted to live without autism and thus had to kill Katie. Investigators found that McCarron was obsessed with different treatments for Katie. (See People v. FRANK-McCARRON, 934 NE 2d 76 - Ill: Appellate Court, 3rd Dist. 2010.) Though it is not presently possible to draw a direct connection between Autism Speaks’ PSA and Katie’s murder, this crime and dozens like it only underscore how the kind of rhetoric that Autism Speaks favors only serves to recklessly endanger the lives of autistic people.Autism Speaks also publicly supports the Judge Rotenberg Center, a group home for autistic and neurodivergent students that uses “treatments” like food and sleep deprivation and electric shock to try and train the residents into acting neurotypical. The center has changed states three times in an attempt to bypass regulation against abusive treatment, and their practices have resulted in the deaths of more than one student.
It’s not just an issue of Autism Speaks making it harder for us to get proper diagnoses and treatment. Autism Speaks is actively killing us.
(via plasticbile-moved)
In the early years of space flight, both Russians and Americans used pencils in space. Unfortunately, pencil lead is made of graphite, a highly conductive material. Snapped graphite leads and particles in zero gravity are hugely problematic, as they will get sucked into the air ventilation or electronic equipment, easily causing shorts or fires in the pure oxygen environment of a capsule.
After the fire in Apollo 1 which killed all the astronauts on board, NASA required a writing instrument that wasn’t a fire hazard. Fisher spent over a million dollars (of his own money) creating a pressurized ball point pen, which NASA bought at $2.95 each. The Russian space program also switched over from pencils shortly after.
40 years later snide morons on the internet still snigger about it, because snide morons on the internet never know what they are talking about.
(via degenerate-perturbation)
I want to assure everyone that just because we are overlooking all the fatal parts of being in space without a spacesuit (cold, heat, vacuum, radiation, etc.), we are still going to be scientific up in here.
You are absolutely right that energy can’t be destroyed, even if you’re really mad at it and hit it with a goblin sword. This is a fundamental Law of Physics™. And to review, the reason that sound doesn’t travel in space is because there is no medium with which to transmit it. We can take that one step further, though. Not only does sound not travel through space, there is literally no sound in space. And it doesn’t violate any laws of physics. Promise.
I think what you’re really wondering is “If my vocal cords vibrate, then where does that vibrational energy go?” Well, your vocal cords can’t vibrate in the vacuum of space. Making sound in our throats requires building up air pressure behind our larynx, bringing the vocal folds together like two blades of grass pressed between your thumbs, and then pushing that air upward in order to create a vibration. The oscillating folds of your vocal cords displace air in a repeating pattern, many times per second. Just like when you move your hand through water, it is the displacement of the air by the vocal folds that creates the wave, and the sound is simply the effect of that wave traveling through air. Make sense?
If there’s no air to be displaced, there’s no wave (and no sound). Also, even if you had a lungful of air before you took your space helmet off, you wouldn’t be able to hold the air back from rushing into the vacuum of space. “Woosh” is the sound the last breath in your lungs (doesn’t) make as it is sucked out into the vacuum. No breath control? No vibration.
But what about vibrations that don’t require a lungful of air? What about something like a tuning fork?
Well, a struck tuning fork would vibrate in space. And like the above case, it still wouldn’t make any sound, because no air, etc. Would a tuning fork vibrating in a vacuum vibrate forever? If you let it float away, with no air or other medium to vibrate in, would it still be buzzing a hundred thousand years from now, should aliens find it?
Nope.
Vibrating objects like tuning forks or space stations struck with large hammers will lose the vibration over time thanks to something called “thermoelastic damping”. A vibration is slowly converted to heat thanks to the atoms in the metal (or whatever’s vibrating) being compressed. And because of the very physics that we mentioned at the start of this question, the vibration dies away, the energy is converted to heat, and Newton is happy!
Of course, don’t try this at home.