Rho-of-cabbage - Rho Of Cabbage

“Dogs don’t know what they look like. Dogs don’t even know what size they are. No doubt it’s our fault, for breeding them into such weird shapes and sizes. My brother’s dachshund, standing tall at eight inches, would attack a Great Dane in the full conviction that she could tear it apart. When a little dog is assaulting its ankles the big dog often stands there looking confused — “Should I eat it? Will it eat me? I am bigger than it, aren’t I?” But then the Great Dane will come and try to sit in your lap and mash you flat, under the impression that it is a Peke-a-poo… Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat’s way of maintaining a relationship. Housecats know that they are small, and that it matters. When a cat meets a threatening dog and can’t make either a horizontal or a vertical escape, it’ll suddenly triple its size, inflating itself into a sort of weird fur blowfish, and it may work, because the dog gets confused again — “I thought that was a cat. Aren’t I bigger than cats? Will it eat me?” … A lot of us humans are like dogs: we really don’t know what size we are, how we’re shaped, what we look like. The most extreme example of this ignorance must be the people who design the seats on airplanes. At the other extreme, the people who have the most accurate, vivid sense of their own appearance may be dancers. What dancers look like is, after all, what they do.”

— Ursula Le Guin, in The Wave in the Mind (via fortooate)

I keep hearing this; is there somewhere I should look for a proof?

Thank you for adding to my infinity post, and for doing it kindly! My mutual asked me for a fun fact about infinity, so I do the same to you!

One of my favourite things involving infinity is the construction of some interesting topological spaces!

You can construct the Long Line using the first uncountable cardinal, which is an example of a sequentially compact space that isn't compact!

Sometimes it's also possible to make "infinite dimensional" versions of some common topological spaces! This can be done if there is an inductive way of defining those spaces. For example, we can construct Sⁿ by gluing two copies of Dⁿ to Sⁿ along their boundaries. For S² this is exactly the construction of taking the equator (S¹) and gluing each hemisphere to the equator. Because this is inductive, we can define S^∞ to be the space we get at "the end" of the process. The formal way of doing this is with a categorical limit!

One fun fact about S^∞ is that it is contractible, that is we can deform it into a point (formally, S^∞ is homotopy equivalent to the one point space). But none of the finite spheres are!

friendly reminder that you can (hopefully) choose at least some of the things that you allow in your life and “because I really don’t want to latch onto that as a special interest/hyperfixation” is a valid reason to not want something in your life.

Linux thinkpad / math / transfem

these things coincide oddly often (it’s me I’m the coincidence)

Anyone have any recommendations for laptops? My plan is to install Linux on it, and my budget is ~$500

My cousin

You are trapped in an elevator with the person on your lockscreen. Who is it?

Reblog with who you get stuck with~