Craters and Shadows at the Lunar Terminator : Why does the right part of this image of the Moon stand out? Shadows. The terminator line – the line between light and dark – occurs in the featured image so that just over half the Moon’s face is illuminated by sunlight. The lunar surface appears different nearer the terminator because there the Sun is nearer the horizon and therefore causes shadows to become increasingly long. These shadows make it easier for us to discern structure, giving us depth cues so that the two-dimensional image, when dominated by shadows, appears almost three-dimensional. Therefore, as the Moon fades from light to dark, shadows not only tell us the high from the low, but become noticeable for increasingly shorter structures. For example, many craters appear near the terminator because their height makes them easier to discern there. The image was taken two weeks ago when the lunar phase was waning gibbous. The next full moon, a Moon without shadows, will occur one week from today. via NASA
“I just finished medical school. Now I’m heading to residency, which is supposed to be even tougher. I’ve been working sixteen-hour days. Then I’m expected to study every night when I get home. Some of my classmates only sleep three hours per night. I tried that for a few months during my surgery rotation, but I ended up getting really depressed. I felt completely depersonalized. Everything seemed like a dream. To make matters worse, a lot of the instructors are jerks. I think they went through hell when they were students, so they feel like they should put us through hell. On the first day of rotations, my attending physician told me: ‘I’m an asshole, but I’ll make you a better doctor.’ He made fun of me in front of other students. He put me down in front of patients. He’d threaten to kick me out every day. I guess they’re trying to weed people out and make strong doctors. But they’re just traumatizing people. They’re making us apathetic. I got into medicine because I really wanted to make a difference in people’s lives. But after going through hell, I just don’t care anymore.”
It’s called the foot-in-the-door method. First, you propose something that is slightly outside of allowable norms: denying gay people wedding cakes on grounds of “religious freedom”. Then, you slowly ramp up how extreme your demands are, coercing the other side to giving a tiny bit of ground each time, until you’ve shifted the entire fucking playing field. Conservatives are also very fond of the door-to-face method, which is demanding something completely outlandish that you know will be refused, and then asking for something less ridiculous by way of compromise, again resulting in a gradual shift in norms until views that were once considered moderate or reasonable become unthinkably liberal by destroying people’s sense of standards. The combination of these methods is called the “foot-in-the-face” method, which sums up where this whole thing is headed quite nicely.
