I'm giving up smoking cigarettes, need encouragement
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By April Marie · Posted
Thank for the birthday wishes, everyone!!! It started great...and then I was rear-ended at a highway construction site this morning. I'm OK. The woman who hit me was shaken - was going fast enough to deploy her air bags. I was at dead stop. Her car had to be towed away. My truck too a hit to the tailgate and the bumper. It seems OK otherwise but I'll know tomorrow when they do the appraisal. UGH! Happy Birthday to Me!! :-) -
By Abigail Genevieve · Posted
"How did it go yesterday? Any trouble in Millville?" He shook his head. "Your biscuits and gravy are great." "Mama's recipe. She taught this girl to COOK." "Uh-huh. Well, it rained the whole time. We did the ground breaking in pouring rain. Your friend, the former head of manufacturing, is now on the Board. It looks like sunshine down there, he told me, with the missile plant starting up and they re-hired all the people they fired. Millville Products is as it was. And the Chinese money is still coming. That was just an ugly rumor. Gibson quit, but you knew that." "Missile plant, huh. Yeah. Gibson and I may go into business. But I have been thinking-" "Yeah. It's been declassified. I can tell you they made missiles for Navy ships and planes during World War 2. It was shut down after Vietnam. Several other supporting companies are moving in - paint, electronics assembly, a few others - that support missile production." "Okay." -
By Lydia_R · Posted
That is, it's a great document in that it seems to clearly define things, not that I'm in agreement with it. -
By Abigail Genevieve · Posted
https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/col/cj82k733h I am now dissatisfied with the thread title because it seems to exclude Catholics and maybe others . I am not sure what to change it to, so I will fuss over THAT now. -
By Lydia_R · Posted
I'm on the ballot being mailed tomorrow for an open US Rep seat. I have both an honorable discharge and an other than honorable discharge. I told the Navy that I was smoking pot every day right after Y2K. I told them that while I was in the Navy, I substituted alcohol for marijuana and that the alcohol was making me violently sick. After 5+ years of that, I said enough is enough and I went back to smoking pot. I got better and I felt like the quality of my work was improving. I certainly wasn't the perfect military member, but I excelled at my job and earned a promotion in boot camp. They drug tested our unit several times after I told them I was smoking pot and I may have never tested positive. I was opening smoking pot in the Navy for 3 or 4 months before they decided to kick me out. At my captain's mast, the captain tried to shame me by saying I looked bad in uniform and that I was a disgrace, but all my evaluations said that I looked great in uniform. I took great pride in looking good in my dress blues and whites. Sure, I had grown my hair out a little bit (you know, it's not like I became trans in my 50's all the sudden) and I was enjoying some green anodized eye glasses :) I think that people get very emotional about these kinds of issues when they should be concentrating more on engineering things and work performance. I think we should take the lead and talk about our professional lives more instead of focusing on this type of politics. That's a great document and I saved the PDF to my hard drive. I think we should have more respect for the production that China is doing instead of concentrating on raising a military defense against them. I personally disliked the hazing rituals in the Navy and think our military would be better off with being more accepting and intelligent. -
By Abigail Genevieve · Posted
My snarky comment of the morning is that Trump may be the first president sworn into office from a jail cell. He can't keep his mouth under control. It's likely he may be serving time for contempt for violating gag orders in January if he keeps it up, and the judges are more than happy to slap fines and imprisonment on him. -
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By Abigail Genevieve · Posted
For one thing, this is Rolling Stone, who is convinced that the right is evil and writes articles from that perspective. For another, he did not call out for eradication. His answer was lousy, I did not like it, it was ambiguous, but he denied being for eradication of transgender people. I still don't know what transgenderism is, but I see it as distinct from transgender people. Conservative TG people need to become politically active and actively dialog and engage with these people.. Dang it. -
By Vidanjali · Posted
Here's some inspiration. Wheels within wheels. -
By Lydia_R · Posted
Yes, totally. That's a great story about your math history @Vidanjali! Wow! People tend to forget or are not aware of grads instead of degrees and radians, but that is becoming a big deal to me in the idea of coding a trigonometric function. If you set your calculator to grads and then do the sin of 33.33, it comes up with .4999, you know, pi/6. The significance here is that by dividing pi/2 (radians) into 100 units (grads) instead of 90 units (degrees), you are now in a base 10 space. And when we are dealing with decimals (in base 10), and trying to convert them back to ratios, then notating our angles in the base 10 system of gradients seems like it is the key to coding the trigonometric function. Then again, this has all kind of been a revelation to me the last couple days. It's fun to combine math with code and I'm looking forward to writing some algorithms around this. My last job was coding software for a healthcare company and there was no math involved in that and that was a depressing part of that job. The long hours of that job kind of created a spiritual backlog of wanting to do some math work and I think that energy is busting out right now. -
By Abigail Genevieve · Posted
Went out to get the mail. I was thinking that I only have dysphoria when I am dressed like a guy as I walked out there, looselimbed and feeling femme. Get with the program, girl, says I. I am supposed to be dysphoric when I am wearing women's clothing, not the other way around. In the past I have worn women's clothing like this and after a while said I guess I really don't have GD, switched to male clothing until I gave it up, miserable, and went back. Dreaming of a nice skirt-suit set. Looked at them on Amazon. And a peasant skirt with a nice lacy top. And a denim skirt, worn with tights, boots and a turtleneck. A girl can dream. -
By Vidanjali · Posted
Yes, indeed. It's nice to think about. Calculus allows you to work with an infinitely-many-sided regular polygon which may as well be a circle. I worked with such ideas within my master's thesis which was a history of the Jordan Curve Theorem. Basically, the theorem states that if you draw a circle on a piece of paper, that the circle separates the paper into two distinct regions - the interior of the circle and the exterior of the circle. Turns out it's not so straightforward to prove rigorously, especially considering all they had to work with at the time the theorem was stated was Euclidean geometry. It took generations and the development of new fields of mathematics before any correct proof was established. -
By Vidanjali · Posted
Aw shucks :) I like your story and similar to you, I had dropped out of high school and was homeless before eventually applying for various aid which led me to taking classes as community college. I'd never completed a math class in high school, but turns out I'm good at it and loved it so much from the very first basic algebra class as community college that I decided I'd become a mathematics professor. And I did! I taught math at the higher ed level for 17 years before resigning due to disability. True as long as the radius is 1. Else it's a multiple of .524 which is an approximation of pi/6. The entire circumference of the unit circle is 2pi. And one full rotation about the circle is 2pi radian which is equivalent to 360 degrees. 30 degrees is 1/12 of one full rotation. Divide 2pi by 12 and you get approximately .524. You are correct. The circumference of any circle equals pi times the circle's diameter. Therefore one definition of pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Not totally sure what you mean. First note that irrational numbers have infinitely long nonrepeating expansion. And note that the measurements of the sides of right triangles and ratios of those numbers are in arbitrary units of length whereas angle measurements may be in degrees or radians. So, for example, if you ask a calculator what's tangent of 30, and its programmed for radian input, it'll read that as 30 radians which is about 1719 degrees or almost 5 complete rotations. -
By Abigail Genevieve · Posted
If you are not familiar with Project 2025 you should be. If the Republicans win in November it is very likely to be implemented. Thanks @MaeBe for bringing this to my attention. https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHAPTER-04.pdf "Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service," Therefore it is reasonable to ask our veterans here whether they received an honorable discharge, whether they received medals of commendation, etc., that would serve to show that the second statement is simply not true. Let's document. We have a number of veterans here. Yeah, I am nosy. They would maintain ya'll got bad conduct discharges for conduct unbecoming. I suspect we have here mostly honorable discharges, perhaps medals for valor, combat ribbons, etc. This is information that might be used to refute the quote, so it would be good if you stood up and were recognized, for your service to this country and your courage in coming forward here and being recognized. -
By Lydia_R · Posted
Andy and I just had another discussion on this which turned to how pi is computed. I kept on pressing for the measuring a big wheel method and he kept driving this idea home that measuring like that is inaccurate. We agreed to disagree on that, but then he googled how pi was originally computed. I have never looked this up because I tend to not want to get an answer out of a book like that because I enjoy the challenge of working things out on my own. The answer he found said that Archimedes did it by crunching the math of a 96 side polygon. And then I immediately thought, YES! When I was on the streets of Seattle in January of 2004 and got interested in studying trigonometry, I went to the library and there as a little green book called Plane Trigonometry with a canvas cover and then next to it or nearby was a slightly bigger blue book with a canvas cover on Calculus. I opened the calculus book and it said that calculus is the study of two different things. One of them is the measurement of an irregular area through methods of exhaustion. So that is definitely what Archimedes was doing there. And it makes sense that you can do that and wind up with an answer that it is within the range which you can call the tolerance. I got interested in coding the math of a pinball machine in 2013, so I thought about it for a few minutes and decided that I needed to know the intersection of two lines. So I Googled that and it came back with a small linear algebra equation which I was then able to code into a computer pinball machine in about 300 hours. The idea of this type of collision detection is that there are only points and the lines between them. There are no true curves in the game. I was using this process of taking an artist's drawing of a maze and using Adobe Illustrator to turn it into vector graphics (SVG) and then they had some special function that would reduce all the curves in the SVG data to a series of straight lines. Then I would consume the SVG data in my code and display the raster image. It worked great and of course I was using a polygon for the ball. With that huge amount of vector data, I wound up having to write special code to break that vector data into buckets within an array so that the collision detection wasn't working on all the lines at the same time because that would just bog the computer down. I had to write and inRange() function to determine what sector(s) the ball was in and then grab the vector data for what could possibly be a collision. I would compile those buckets (array) at runtime when the maze was opened. The dependency on Adobe Illustrator was the death of the project. The conversion process was tedious and the artist wasn't up to doing that work. I researched other code to do it and never got anything that worked. I dated a transwoman last year who did engineering work for a machine vision company and that sparked some new ideas. The subject of machine vision has been on my mind for 20 years, but I hadn't quite figured out how to start coding it. Then I realized last year that the way to do it would be to make a QR code reader. You could start out with just like a 4x4 QR code pattern. You take an image of it. Or, you know, I guess those registration points in the corner are important, but to start coding, you could start with a perfect image of a 4x4. Then you would lay a theoretical grid on top of it. Then you would iterate over the grid and find out whether the pixel dead center in each square is black or white. Then you would look at all the pixels around it and then average them and compare them to the one pixel in the center. If the average of the outer pixels matches the center pixel, then you have a good estimate going. So it would be that sort of thing. But then to actually extend that to interpret lines at any angle... Well, that would be very challenging work. It's all very interesting stuff and if I live long enough, I'd like to start working on that. I'm 53yo and this is kind of a hobby at this point. I did good with going from having absolutely nothing on the streets to making all this happen and buying a house 10 years after I got off the streets in 2014. I've been able to pay for 100% of my gender out of pocket so far, so I get a kick out of the fact that writing math on paper on the streets allowed me to do that. I've made just over $1 million in my life, so it's not like I got rich off of that at all. Over the span of my 35 year career, I've averaged about $35,000/year. I live an excellent life though and all I really care about is having good food and time to cook it. And having some time to play some nice piano. Anyway. I put this in the story section. It's an autobiographical math story. I've written all kinds of stuff about my life, but I tend to draw it back to a math education lesson. Perhaps that turns some people away. I always wish that our politics would focus more on engineering and less on the social issues. I think we really take engineering for granted in our modern societies.
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