22 they/she. been on hrt for a couple years but still at the point where if i dress masc i pass as a man and sometimes I'll do that just to avoid dealing with the hassle of particularly being perceived as trans, but also being perceived as a woman in general. Particularly when going through airport security or talking to doctors besides my pcp, endocrinologist and psych, and for job interviews. I don't explicitly claim to be a man, I just let people see the M on my drivers license and let them see what they want to see/assume I'm cis. Is this unethical?

So it's pretty clear that the only supernatural entities in the Magnus archives are the ones that are related to human fears. But I'm curious what kind of entities would exist if that weren't the case? Humans have come up with many ways to manage and assuage, though not banish entirely, our fears, and I think it's interesting to explore the idea of what supernatural personifications of those things would be. Here's a couple I've come up with.

Stories: Some that allow us to picture a better world and inspire us to fight for it. Others that tell us how those that came before solved a particular problem so we can recreate it. Others that reinforce our compassion and empathy for our fellow humans, that demistify the "other". Even some that let us experience our fear safely and let it flow through us.

Light: from the warmth of a campfire to the cool buzzing of fluorescents to the sun itself to the tiny night light watching over you as you sleep, we have found out a way to not have to be in the dark anymore

Science: taking the complexity of our world and finding reliable ways to derive patterns from it. So much of fear follows from the unknown and science lets us turn more and more of the unknown into the known, driving away fear as we do.

Communication: language, writing, the printing press, the telephone, the internet. Communication means sharing. Sharing our hope to bolster it, sharing our fears to tame them. Sharing practical information to tackle the things we fear and the fears themselves.

Love: Caring about your fellow human being and holding them tight. Checking in on them. Remembering them when they're gone. Talking to them. This can be romantic, familial, platonic, or something else entirely

Ethics: making the conscious decision to make the conscious decision that when given a chance to either help someone or hurt them you will prefer the option that helps them. Every single time. Because it's the right thing to do.

Comfort objects. A particular object with sentimental value can become endowed with meaning in such a way that it becomes a force against fear on its own. Examples would be beloved stuffed animals, necklaces that remind people of their loved ones, etc.

Hope: the decision that even when things look bleak, to trust that things can and will get better, and then to use that trust is motivation to do everything you can to make it so.

Those were the only ones I can come up with but I'm curious if people can think of more

I'm working through the thermo section of "University Physics with Modern Physics by Young and Freedman", and on page 563 it says "The definition of heat Remember that dQ does not represent a change in the amount of heat contained in a body; this is a meaningless concept. Heat is always energy in transit as a result of a temperature difference. There is no such thing as “the amount of heat in a body.”"

But it seems to me there is a perfectly consistent and sensible definition of amount of heat contained --- simply say that an object at absolute zero contains no heat, and then the amount of heat contained in any body is the amount of heat required to raise its temperature from absolute zero to it's current temperature. This seems similar to gravitational and electric potential where despite energy being a relative quantity it can be treated as absolute by defining a reference point, with the notable change being that absolute zero is a real physical state where "points at infinity" as used in electrostatics and Newtonian gravity are mathematical abstracitons.

So why isn't this a useful definition of heat?

in eridian reproduction, each eridian lays eggs near each other and the eggs combine and meios and whatever. human reproduction involves one human putting a part of their body inside another human, with one of the organs involved also being used for excretion of waste and the other one being right next to waste excretion. I think rocky would be horrified by this, particularly the fact that it is exactly as much of a disease vector as it obviously would be.

Similarity to other instruments

Right now, the fingering for a written D5 on clarinet is roughly correspondent with a written D4 for flutes, saxes, oboes, recorders, etc, so the fingerings are almost the same but the different octaves create a gap. If clarinets transposed down then the first octave of the clarino register, which has the same fingerings as the first octave of other treble clef woodwinds, would also have the same written notes. Similarly, there is a correspondence between chalameau register fingerings and bassoon fingerings, which is obfuscated by the fact that bassoon is in bass clef and clarinet is in treble clef. If clarinets transposed the other direction, that correspondence would be 1-to-1

Correspondence between clef and register

If clarinets transposed down instead of up, then the chalameau register fits entirely in the bass clef, and the clarino register fits entirely in the treble clef, with altissimo existing at the top of the staff into the ledger lines. This means that crossing the break is represented by either ledger lines or a clef change, meaning that difficult break-crossing music looks difficult, which would encourage composers to take more care in writing it and give performers a trivial way to get an at-a-glance understanding of the difficulty of the piece. The same is true of altissimo, where the difficult-to-play notes exist above the staff. Not to mention the obvious benefits of the two ranges of the clarinet which sound different also looking different.

Fitting on the staff

With current transposition, the lowest notes require 3 ledger lines down, and altissimo starts at 2 ledger lines up and continues from there into stratospheric numbers of ledger lines. With the transposition i suggest, the range goes from one ledger line below the bass clef for the lowest, grossest tones up to two above the treble clef for the most stratospheric altissimos. Ledger lines would be basically unnecessary on clarinets unless you had rapid break crossing.

Feasibility

Unfortunately this is more of a "would have been nice" post then a "we should all do this" post. Sheet music has been codified pretty strongly now and there is so much of it in existence that actually making the swap is difficult. Horns made a similar swap, but the confusing horn notation was only in bass clef not treble, and it was much more confusing than modern clarinet notation, and it still caused problems. As cool as it would be if things worked this way it just wouldn't be feasible to switch everything over.

the inverse parsec (still meausres distance though)

the parsec is the distance at which an object precesses 1 arcsecond when you move 1 au

the inverse parsec is the distance you move for an object 1 au away to move 1 arcsecond

its (1 au)^2 / 1 pc, or about 725 kilometers