the reason why people are so hard to read is because they are composed of the letters a, t, c, and g in random sequences and as im sure you know, that doesn’t spell anything
Which is to say that the internet is a fair representation of the human soul: a bunch of random gibberish and CATCATCATCATCAT
[A teenage girl identifies herself as as positron. A new girl, electron, joins her class, they become close friends and do cool stuff together. There is a song about how the ILC uses the meeting of an electron and positron to learn more about the universe, everyone loves electron and position and the ILC. Electron runs away because her parents are moving, electron chases her down and they hug, there is an explosion of love hearts]
pup:
OMG THIS VIDEO JUST PLAYED AS AN AD ON YOUTUBE AND I DONT KNOW IF YALL HAVE SEEN IT YET BUT IT IS THE CUTEST THING EVER???
I REALLY DONT UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY’RE TRYING TO ADVERTISE BUT ITS SOME TYPE OF A STORY ABOUT TWO CUTE GIRLS THAT SYMBOLIZE A PROTON AND AN ELECTRON AND I THINK THEY ARE IN LOVE????
There are English subtitles if you turn them on and refresh the page!! I’M PRETTY SURE THEY’RE BASICALLY ADVERTISING A NEW PARTICLE ACCELERATOR LIKE THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER, BUT IN THE CONTEXT OF HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS THAT REALLY LOVE EACH OTHER WHICH IS PRETTY MUCH THE BEST THING……
DEAD FROM CUTE
YOU AND ME BOTH, ANON. YOU AND ME BOTH.
[Landscape photographs with white glowing rings at different angles photoshopped in the background]
If Earth Had Rings
First off, they would be really pretty to look at. They would also dominate the sky in both night and day at exactly the same place as they would never rise nor set. And at night you would see the Earth’s shadow swing across the rings, like in the 4th photo here.
However, life would be very different on Earth if this were the case. Nocturnal animals would have a hard time being nocturnal, as the light reflecting from the rings would illuminate the night.
Because we are closer to the Sun than Saturn is, the rings would be more rocky than ice, making them less bright but still pretty bright. In fact, you would see far less stars at night (living anywhere other than the equator or the arctic circle) because of the light pollution and not to mention ruin most meteor showers because of that.
During the day the rings would block sunlight in certain regions of the planet creating wild weather cycles and effecting plant life as well. So basically, they would be definitely pretty to look at but they would also make a whole lot of things screwy.
Illustrations by Ron Miller // io9
— Click the photos for captionsCAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE THE KIND OF ANCIENT MYTHOLOGY THIS WOULD HAVE GENERATED
FUCK RAINBOWS MAN THIS WOULD LOOK LIKE THE FUCKING ARM OF GOD CIRCLING THE EARTH
Mineral Microscopy
Stephanie Bateman-Graham does mineral microscopy, or as she prefers to call it “using a low-powered digital toy microscope to take pictures of beautiful minerals”. In these works Bateman-Graham discovers the parts of nature that are weirdly similar to recognizable art styles — from Van Gogh impressionism to the fractured lines of Picasso. I’ve included her descriptions of the three works above:
Ecosystem (Moss Agate): Do you see a mixed population of microbes living together in a complete ecosystem? Actually it’s a microscope view of the mineral Stringy Moss Agate from Lake Bonneville. The material is translucent which gives a watery feel to the image, but it is entirely solid crystal.
Heart of Stony Glass (Opalite): Microscope view of the Australian mineral Rosella Opalite. The light bounces around this veined and fractured crystalline material to reveal a heart and vascular system inside the stone. The amazing brushstrokes and textures in this image are all natural.
Fire Mountain (Lace Agate): A mountain burns in this microscope view of the mineral Laguna Lace Agate from Mexico. Also known as Crazy Lace Agate.
To see more of Bateman-Graham’s works, click here.
[An animated gif of around 10 points coloured red, blue, and yellow chaotically generating a vaguely humanoid shape with red outline, yellow body, and blue edged empty white hexagon-ish shape in the middle]
A gingerbreadman drawn using chaos. Points are chosen at random, then repeatedly moved to new locations according to a simple rule [the new y coordinate is the old x one, and the new x is 1 - the old y + |the old x|]. This rule is called the gingerbreadman map, of course. The trajectories shown are chaotic, showing complex behaviour from such a simple rule. Hexagonal areas seem to build up the picture. [more] [code]
Dude that’s not a gingerbread man that’s Iron Man.
[A photo of tubes of product, each with little coloured squares on the crimped end. “Did you know squares on tubes mean something? Green: all natural, red: the blood of angry men some natural but mostly chemicals, black: only chemicals are used”]
Why has Tumblr taught me more about basic living than all of my previous schooling experiences combined
This is a myth! Those squares are used in the packaging process. And think about it: why would anyone use such an opaque labeling method when you can just write “ALL NATURAL” or whatever? Also: everything is made of chemicals! EVEN THE NATURAL THINGS.
[A venn diagram of “chemical elements” and “US States”. The intersection is Ne Al Ar Ca Sc Mn Co Ga Mo In Pa La Nd Mt Md Fl]
Things you contemplate while washing your hair when you own a periodic table shower curtain.
-elli m
I live in Indium.
What’s Mn? Because I live in that.
Managnese.
Unless I missed one the intersection of Australian states and chemical elements is the empty set :( But I live in the intersection of US states and Australian states, WA.
[Mary Anning 1799-1847: Palaentologist, researcher and discoverer of the icthyosaur. She is wearing a thick coat and bonnet, holding a pick, there is a dog at her feet. Another picture of her. Some icthyosaur bones. Her dog.]
22. Mary Anning
If you went down to the blue lias cliffs at Lyme Regis in Dorset on a freezing winter day in the 1820s or 1830s, you might have seen a thoroughly bundled-up figure scratching in the shale and examining the stones. A scientific gentleman of the Royal Society, making important discoveries about fossils that would later lead to, among other things, the development of the theory of evolution?
Well, almost.
You’d actually be looking at Mary Anning, a working-class woman from a religiously-dissenting family who wouldn’t have been allowed to scrub the front steps of the Royal Society — and a damn fine scientist nonetheless.
Anning’s family were Congregationalists, members of an unpopular religious minority. They lived in the village of Lyme, so close to the sea that their house flooded in bad weather, and they were pretty damn poor. Her father, Richard Anning, was a carpenter who supplemented his income by picking up and mining interesting stones — then called ‘curios’, later to be known as ‘fossils’ — from the beach and selling them to tourists (who initially bought them because they were weird or pretty, not for any scientific interest).
Anning and her brother Joseph (the only two of the family’s ten children to live to adulthood) helped their father at this work. After he died in 1810, 11-year-old Mary and 14-year-old Joseph (and their mother, Molly) all continued to work at fossil-collecting in order to keep their family afloat. In 1811, when Anning was twelve years old, they discovered what would later be identified as the first complete icthyosaur skeleton — Joseph dug up the skull, and a few months later, Mary found the rest of the skeleton. They sold the find to Henry Henley, a local aristocrat, who sold it on to collector William Bullock who displayed it in London — causing people to begin to ask serious questions about the Biblical account of Creation.
Anning continued to work as a fossil-hunter into adulthood, eventually opening her own shop in Lyme in 1826, ‘Anning’s Fossil Depot’. It wasn’t particularly safe or easy work, either - in 1833, Anning was caught in a landslide that nearly killed her (and did, unfortunately, kill her dog Tray, pictured in a sketch above).
Despite the fact that she had had limited access to schooling (she learned basic reading and writing at Congregationalist Sunday School), Anning was deadly serious about educating herself as a scientist. She read as many scientific journals and publications as she could get hold of. She conducted dissections of modern animals in order to better understand the fossil ones she was researching, and made careful copies of diagrams and illustrations that she found in books. Among many other discoveries, she also uncovered the first plesiosaur and the first British example of a pterosaur: her notes were also key to the discovery that coprolite stones were in fact fossilized animal dung (a discovery for which scientist William Buckland ended up getting most of the credit).
As interest in the new sciences of geology and palaeontology grew, Anning was not permitted to join the Royal Society, nor the Royal Geological Society. This effectively meant that she could not be recognised as the maker of any scientific discoveries, as she had no means to publish her work. Many of the wealthy fossil collectors who bought items from her published Society papers on their purchases: some of them appear to have ripped off her descriptions of the fossils wholesale and passed them off as their own. A friend of Anning’s, Anna Pinney, wrote:
She says the world has used her ill … these men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a great deal of publishing works, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages.
And damn right, too! Although those ‘in the know’ do seem to have recognised the value of Anning’s work to some extent, collecting a subscription to pay her medical bills and making her a member of the new Dorset County Museum, she still doesn’t appear to have got anything near the scientific credit she deserved. In 1847, she died of breast cancer — and the President of the Geological Society spoke at her funeral (why yes, that was the same society that wouldn’t let her join while she was alive). The eulogy was published in the Society’s quarterly transactions, an honour that no other woman would receive until the Society began accepting female members in 1904.
Anning has received much greater recognition after her death, and is a relatively famous figure nowadays — there are a number of fictional novels and kids’ books about her, and her story is even reputed to be the basis for the tongue twister ‘She sells seashells…’. The third image above is a display that now hangs in the Natural History Museum in London showing information about her life beside a plesiosaur skeleton. However, I think it’s important to remember not only her discoveries, but the sheer effort of will that it must have required for a person of her gender and class and religious background to have been taken even as seriously as she was by the scientific community during her lifetime. Surviving and thriving as an academic from a working-class background isn’t all that easy in 2012… and yet nearly 200 years earlier, Anning was doing it despite some pretty terrifying odds. It’s also, of course, important to remember how little credit she got for it, and how her findings were misappropriated by her so-called superiors — which is, of course, what happens when some people are forcibly barred from taking part in academic discourse.
Somehow, a museum plaque and a tongue-twister still don’t seem like enough to make up for that.
More:
Bio at the Natural History Museum: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/science-of-natural-history/biographies/mary-anning/index.html
Bio at Lyme Regis Museum: http://www.lymeregismuseum.co.uk/in-the-museum/mary-anning
Essay by William Sargeant, ‘The Three Mary Annings’: http://www.whaton.uwaterloo.ca/waton/s008.html
BBC primary-school kids’ page with images and a game: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primaryhistory/famouspeople/mary_anning/
Bio from San Diego ‘Women in Science’ series: http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/anning.html
Wikipedia biography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Anning
Images from the ‘Literary Lyme’ walking tour: http://www.literarylyme.co.uk/maryanninggallery.html
[Man with pale skin and brown hair who has painted white and brown squares around his eyes and gelled his hair into downward pointing spikes in front of his face]
Make-up and hair styled to purposefully avoid facial recognition software. This is what CyberPunk fashion ACTUALLY looks like. Project and styling by Adam Harvey.
FUCK YEAH CYBERPUNK
Damn, I want to write a cyberpunk novel with this in it now.
always finding this fascinating. what’s the betting it’s included in cory doctorow’s new book?
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