պանիր կռուասան

genderoutlaws:

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Lotte Hahm — famous lesbian transvestite, activist and organizer, and owner of several small bars in Berlin throughout the 1920s to 1940s — featured in the pages of a 1930 issue of trans magazine Das. 3 Geschlecht, holding up an advertisement for Die Freundin, the world’s first lesbian magazine on record.

Translation:

The sign reads “Hooray! The Girlfriend is here again!”

The caption below reads “The Girlfriend is the up-to-date magazine for women who love women as well as for transvestites. Price 20 pfennig, available everywhere.”

may12324:
“ “When I saw her face I decided I wanted to live. I decided to live forever just in case she ever woke up.”
Well guess what babe, shes awake and ohohohoh she is angry.
”

may12324:

“When I saw her face I decided I wanted to live. I decided to live forever just in case she ever woke up.”

Well guess what babe, shes awake and ohohohoh she is angry

thyrell:

thyrell:

god fucked up making komodo dragons super venomous aggressive and all around unsuitable for domestication. those beafts should be in our homes

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if i had this thing in my lap i think everything would be alright i bet it would love being scratched on the head if it wasnt already so fond of chewing me and empoisoning me and smacking me hard with its horrible tail

jadagul:

kata4a:

kwarrtz:

Huh, apparently the Latin alphabet is ultimately descended from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The evolution is Hieroglyphs -> Proto-Sinaitic -> Phoenician -> Euboean Greek -> Etruscan -> Latin. Delightfully, that means we actually know what pictograms the modern letters are derived from. A was an ox’s head, for instance, while N was a snake and K was a palm.

one of my favorite facts is that writing has been independently invented like, three times top

I think last time we talked about this, @necarion and I were debating whether it’s three or four. I wanna say Egypt, China, Mesopotamia, and Maya? Plus maybe a couple others that might have been independent but died off.


More interesting to me is that the alphabet has only been invented once. Anyone who grew up on civ 1 like I did, it lied to you: writing is a prereq for the alphabet, not the other way around!

great-and-small:

qwuilleran:

great-and-small:

Do y’all know about Frédéric Thomas? He is a French parasitologist who heard a story about crickets in New Zealand leaping into the water even though they can’t swim, and immediately speculated this suicidal behavior was related to behavior manipulation from an internal parasite. This is before neuro-parasitology was a field at all, and before people really put much stock into parasite’s ability to control animal behavior.

Thomas was certain that studying these crickets would be a huge priority for the scientific world given the implications of a parasite controlling an animal’s actions in such an insidious way. Unfortunately, absolutely nobody would fund Thomas’ expedition to study the crickets, and his grants were all declined. In a wild move that showcases the balls to the wall, near- insanity level passion of a biologist, Thomas declared a hunger strike and wrote a letter to the president of France saying he would not eat until someone took the matter seriously and funded his study on the suicidal crickets. I feel like those of us in research can at least a little bit understand this impulse.

Well the French government actually got Thomas’ message and freaked out a bit at the negative publicity that could arise from a crazy worm scientist starving to death. So they send some government bigwigs to the university to pressure Thomas and his department heads into calling an end to the hunger strike. In the flurry of attention that resulted from this, a Swiss billionaire heard about Thomas’ plight and offered to partially fund the study. The French government was happy to get rid of Thomas and contributed funding as well so that Thomas could head to New Zealand to study his suicidal crickets. He was right about the parasites causing the behavior!

The hunger strike debacle is not even the wildest part of this story. I love biology so much

What’s the wildest?? You can’t leave us hangin’ like this.

Okay so get this, after all that Frédéric Thomas gets everything together and flies halfway across the world to New Zealand and… he can’t find the crickets. I mean, he finds some but apparently this species of cricket is really hard to track and as a result Thomas’ team cannot capture enough to yield significant results for their study.

Thomas was forced to abandon the project and leave New Zealand, but before he did he sent a photo of a worm emerging from a cricket back to his colleagues in France. Naturally, the photo was posted in the university break room. While the photo was posted there, it was somehow seen by one of the scientists cousin who worked cleaning pools. In a bizarre twist, the cousin recognized the worm. He claimed to see them all the time in a pool that he cleaned for a local resort and also said that he had observed crickets jumping into the pool at night.

By this time Thomas was back in France but he was highly skeptical that the pool cleaner’s information was correct. He gave the guy a jar and asked him to bring some samples of the worms thinking he’d never hear from him again. Well sure enough about a week later Thomas received a jar that was chock full of worms. Specifically the species Paragordius tricuspidatus, which are parasitic horsehair worms and exactly what Thomas had desperately been trying to find inside of his crickets in New Zealand. He had travelled halfway across the world just to realize that the parasite he wished to study could be found at a hotel about an hour from his house.

Thomas’ wife was delighted when he informed her he’d booked a surprise getaway at a luxury resort, but of course she didn’t know this trip was actually a brain parasite reconnaissance mission. Thomas spent time by the pool at night and sure enough he saw crickets crawling to the water’s edge and hopping in, one by one. Thomas and his colleagues were able to use this location to find a thriving population of horsehair worms to study. Their experiments confirmed that the worms were manipulating insect brains to further their life cycle, and the results of these studies were eventually published in the journal Nature!

goodlouse:

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how to solve a rubik’s cube
a gay valentine’s/anniversary comic about trying to impress a boy (my now boyfriend)
[rbs&follows>likes]

shrewreadings:

fullyfunctionalminiaturebeehive:

doctorslippery:

soberscientistlife:

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Not knowing that you have a villain inside you, a hero, and a bystander is a lesson that everyone should learn.

What is the quote from Jingo, by Sir Terry Pratchett, to the effect of “when someone does something terrible, we want it to be one of Them, because if it isn’t Them, then it is Us?”

“It was because he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.”

Jingo. 1997. Pratchett, Terry. NY, London, and Ankh-Morpork: Harper-Collins. p. 205

kiragecko:
“The Tiger Poem in Classical Maya!
“The Tiger
He has destroyed his cage
Yes
Yes
The tiger is out
By Nael, Age 6
”
Literal translation:
“he-destroyed his-captive-place
the-tiger yes-yes
he-came.out the-tiger
his-writing...

kiragecko:

The Tiger Poem in Classical Maya!

The Tiger
He has destroyed his cage
Yes
Yes
The tiger is out
By Nael, Age 6

Literal translation:

he-destroyed his-captive-place
the-tiger yes-yes
he-came.out the-tiger
his-writing master-Na'el
man[of]-6-years

Transliteration:

ʔu-jomow ʔu-baaknal
ʔu-balahm
xt
xt
Joyoy ʔu-balahm
ʔu-tz'ibaal Aj-Naʔel Aj-6-habiy

Character Transliteration (ALL CAPS are characters that stand for full words, lower case are syllabic):

ʔu-jo-mo-wa ʔu-ba-ki-NAL
ʔu-BALAM-la-ma xa-ta-xa-ta
jo-JOY-yi ʔu-BALAM-ma
ʔu-tz'i-ba-li AJ-na-ʔe-le
AJ-6-HAB-bi-ya

canmom:

niconulla:

si1kvoid:

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contemporary sculptures by japanese artist Odani Motohiko

that’s literally an atom bomb – the different lengths of wire are so the implosion crushing explosions will all happen at the exact same instant

idk the model number or anything but the experimental nightmare devices did look exactly that goofy

@youzicha​ wrote:

(specifically I think it’s meant to look like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test)#The_Gadget – basically the same design was used for the Trinity test and the bombing of Nagasaki, while the appearance of later bombs is I think not known in detail.)

yes, I think you’re right. that block with all the wires coming out of it is especially similar.

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on some research this sculpture was displayed in an exhibition called Modification in 2004. I can’t find much about this specific sculpture; it is similar to the artist’s other works in that it’s blank white, but most of them are more about bodies being transformed or organic shapes. Definitely a powerful sculpture. Odani’s site appears to be under construction but maybe one day it will have more info.

themodernmaccabee:

nightbringer24:

purlturtle:

khantoelessar:

brunhiddensmusings:

orwellsunderpants:

socialmaya:

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[image description: tweet by Netchimen’s Reverie that reads “Tolkien describing places that are evil: no trees grow there” /end description]

This is doubtless because of his experience of the trenches in the Great War.

Like, this is what things looked like to soldiers who fought in that war (image in black and white of a solitary soldier walking across a muddy wasteland pocked with puddles):

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Here’s Delville Wood, the site of a battle in 1916 (sepia image of a wasteland dotted with broken and dead trees):

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Here’s an image from the Battle of the Somme, in which Tolkien participated (image of soldiers standing above and inside a trench or earthwork in a grey wasteland; smoke from artillery is on the horizon)

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So yeah: no trees = evil was Tolkien’s own direct lived experience. It’s precisely why Mordor and the wastelands around it look like they do in his books.

the plateau of gorgoroth, the heartland of mordor, is described as being scarred by countless pits dug by orcs

the true seat of evil is full of foxholes and trenches

There’s a lesson to be learned here.

I hope Tolkien would be happy to learn that a hundred years on, trees grow again here:

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From The Atlantic.

I think that Tolkien would be very happy to see that.

The trees have reclaimed the land in which hell had been brought

c3rvida3:

“How to find the right glasses for your face shape”, oh, bullshit. You pick ones you think a hot scientist in a bad horror movie would wear and then you just go do whatever.

sesh:

babyfoxcollectionthings:

comfortable hole. bye

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aweega:

aweega:

rabbits know and resent their place on the food chain

mice and rats also know they’re prey animals, they just have such joy of living that it cancels out. guinea pigs have no concept of death but understand contextless fear. hamsters however do know the food chain, but they also know that attachment to the earth is the root of suffering and they wisely deny the faults of the ego