an experiment in the art of

This is an offshoot of my main blog at aejrogota.tumblr.com. I vaguely use it for posts relating to languages, culture, science, geography, hastily philosophized observations and silly pictures.

[chubachus]

American soldiers of the 6th US Cavalry Regiment training horses in Fort Bayard, New Mexico, c. 1885.

Source: National Archives and Records Administration.

[cali-cocaine]

this is good

[memecucker]

what if i told you that a lot of “Americanized” versions of foods were actually the product of immigrant experiences and are not “bastardized versions”

[ace-and-ranty]

That’s actually fascinating, does anyone have any examples?

[memecucker]

Chinese-American food is a really good example of this and this article provides a good intro to the history http://firstwefeast.com/eat/2015/03/illustrated-history-of-americanized-chinese-food

[voxiferous-deactivated20171119]

I took an entire class about Italian American immigrant cuisine and how it’s a product of their unique immigrant experience. The TL;DR is that many Italian immigrants came from the south (the poor) part of Italy, and were used to a mostly vegetable-based diet. However, when they came to the US they found foods that rich northern Italians were depicted as eating, such as sugar, coffee, wine, and meat. This is why Italian Americans were the first to combine meatballs with pasta, and why a lot of Italian American food is sugary and/or fattening. Italian American cuisine is a celebration of Italian immigrants’ newfound access to foods they hadn’t been able to access back home.

[songofages]

i think the halal snack pack is a good example of this in australia.

[thetasteoffire]

Corned beef & its presence in Irish-American immigrant diets (as a result of their close proximity to Jewish neighbors, esp in New York) is another good example. 

[dinosaurjam]

I actually didn’t know this stuff! Huzzah for learning.

[pluckyredhead]

Jewish-American cuisine as well! I highly recommend the book 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement if you’re interested in culinary history and the way immigrant cultures both change and assimilate into the culture of their new home.

[thebrainscoop]

FY 2018 BUDGET JUSTIFICATION

This is the U.S. Geological Survey’s budget justification for 2018. The USGS is a scientific, research-based organization within the Department of the Interior. Meaning, should congress vote to pass Trump’s proposed budget, these are the changes/eliminations/reductions that USGS would have to undertake. 

This cut in particular caught my eye (pg. 52): 

The Smithsonian is a federal agency that receives 60% of its funding from congress, federal grants and contracts. This is an instance where a portion of the funding for the curatorial research positions at the Smithsonian that are supported by the USGS would be eliminated. Not the entire curatorial or collections staff - that would be … insanity. But 11 full time employees (FTE) and $1.6million would be cut from the Smithsonian’s operating budget.

Take a look at the rest of the report. The budget request includes a 16% reduction of the USGS workforce. USGS currently employees 4,923 full time employees. This would be a reduction of more than 800 people - and, again, these are primarily scientific research positions. The federal government employs a lot of scientists (or, traditionally has in.. recent years). 

Pg. 54. 

pg. 57. 

I could go through the rest of the report but if you want to get a sense of which programs are being cut, just ctrl + F “eliminate” and scroll on through. 

What’s so disappointing to me is that the United States has been at the forefront for so many research areas in recent decades. We built an infrastructure that supported not just innovation in a variety of fields, but a system which allowed for long-term monitoring of our planet. Big, comprehensive datasets are invaluable for our understanding of change over time - how we come to know what a place used to be, or look like, and how that’s different from today. This information helps us mitigate problems and anticipate change. 

With the sudden halt of many of these programs, we would be creating gaps in our knowledge base. Like little moments of amnesia, our country’s scientists would be deprived of information which could further progress. And this goes well beyond our borders: the research conducted by USGS and other federal agencies benefits our global partners, our world’s citizens, and future science.

This is a tough road for so many young scientists here in the states; we’re going from a STEM-centric system that advocated for increasing scientific involvement and literacy in our country, to swiftly dumping them in a world where we have eliminated their jobs and have quickly undervalued their credentials. And that’s frightening because the world is not going to stop and wait for us to catch up - the changes happening around our planet necessitate immediate action. At a time when we need science and science literacy more than ever, opportunities for both are decreasing.

I’m not proposing any sort of solution (I don’t have one) nor do I mean for this to feel like Dooms Day is upon us - but we have to keep paying attention, to stay engaged, and to continue dialogue. I don’t think it’s an overreach to say that our future depends upon our sustained engagement with the problems that face us today.

[shittyidea]

Base your education on Tumblr

[ktchan143]

Mitochondria is the powerhouse of a cell

[lagonegirl]

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/05/what_state_prisoners_get_to_wo.html

OMG 

[apairofsweatpants-deactivated20]

this is the most depressing thing i’ve seen all year

[amoisthobo]

Jesus

[sirjefetheboss-deactivated20210]

I was born in Baton Rouge, and while I don’t remember too much of it now, I never had heard of this level of inhumane behavior until this point.

[batboyblog]

I’m not the biggest Harry Potter fan but I have to give them credit for one thing, when time came for the movies they hired real life 11 year olds and stuck with them, there was no hiring older teenagers or 20 somethings to play kids, nope, they were kids.

Imagine other films had done that, like Percy Jackson for example, in the first book he’s 12 years old, but in the movie he’s played by Logan Lerman (who was 18 at the time)

um here’s a what a 12 year old Percy would have really looked like 

can we stop casting 20 and 30 year olds to play teenagers and 18 year olds to play middle schoolers? (both Annebeth and Glover were played by people in their 20s) kids deserve heroes as much (and maybe more) than any one, heroes who you know, look like them. 

[nerdswhoteach]

Yes!!! I think this is why children have such a critical eye on their own bodies and what they perceive as normal. They see themselves as what a 20 yr old looks like. I’m tired of older people playing children. It’s tiresome!

[laboradorescence]

i believe there is a tangible reason for this! i learned recently from my brother, who is an actor, that there are a LOT of complications associated with hiring someone who is younger than 18 yo to do work in hollywood. it never occurred to me that this would be a structural thing caused by american child labor laws, but…

minors are restricted in the number of hours they must work and the kind of work they can do, and when they DO work, the production firm must hire a tutor to make up for hours that they would miss from school (since acting hours are VERY irregular and can require many hours of dead time at apparently arbitrary times during the week). so near-of-age minors have to take a special test that allows them to waive those rights so they stop being so unpalatable to those filming companies. the terminology used in the industry is along the lines of “i am 17 years old, legal 18”, when these actors are advertising themselves.

so it should not be a surprise that production companies would try to minimize the constraints and costs on an already gargantuan project by merely hiring someone who LOOKS young enough, rather than by hiring someone who actually is.

[thoodleoo]

days of the week by what philosophical school i identify with on them

monday: existentialism. i feel the slightest sense of dread as i am confronted with an incomprehensible world. i question my being and the meaning of the universe around me. am i living authentically? have i given a purpose to an otherwise confused and structureless existence? i eat a bowl of frosted flakes and stare into the void.

tuesday: academic skepticism. none of my impressions in this world are true, though some of my early morning observations (whether or not it is a cold or warm morning; whether or not i will get stuck behind a school bus on my way to campus; whether or not the universe is comprehensible) have relatively high probabilities of being correct. i cannot obtain true knowledge but i can get close to it if the perceptions around me are convincing enough, i try to persuade myself as i read 50 pages on complexity of meaning in tibullan pastoral poetry.

wednesday: nihilism. nothing has meaning and my existence ultimately has no bearing upon this world. whether or not i write my papers will not alter the state of the universe. bolstered by my newfound lack of purpose, i escape yet another hump day mental breakdown.

thursday: absurdism. in a fit of misguided academic panic fueled by excessive caffeine consumption, i attempt once again to find meaning in my existence and the work that i do. when my caffeine rush comes down, i realize that such a task is futile and settle back down. i can grasp the meaning in human existence about as well as i can grasp the sense of an article i am attempting to read in german; which is to say, not at all, and i am okay with that.

friday: epicureanism. the future looks bright. i realize that i am confined to but a brief pinprick of life in the vast timeline of existence and that once i die, i will dissolve back into the world, so i might as well enjoy the time that i have. for a good epicurean, this would mean the quiet contemplation of nature and the charming conversation of friends. as i am not a good epicurean, i spend my time drinking cheap gin and getting into arguments on tumblr dot com.

saturday: neoplatonism. i am one with the world, and this is the good. within each of us is a universe, and i am at peace with mine. i drink four coffees and project onto the astral plane.

sunday: stoicism. i am faced with the knowledge that tomorrow begins yet again the cycle of misery and dread which permeates each weekday. valiantly, i summon my will to continue on with as sunny of a disposition as i can. i convince myself that knowledge can perhaps be obtained through a virtuous life and an acceptance of suffering. i check my grades and weep only once.

[aheartofgold]

This is unbelievably strategic timing for May, Labour aren’t going to be able to pull together with an unpopular leader and an unprepared party. 

[swan2swan]

Me @ the world’s democracies:

[returnofthejudai]

I don’t care if you’re Jewish or not. If you act like commemorating the deaths of 6 million of our number is somehow a privilege and that we are not allowed to mourn our own dead or speak out against the hatred that caused such horrors without ALSO simultaneously talking about other genocides, you are being antisemitic. I spent a lot of time, effort and ink fighting the Darfur Genocide along with a large number of other Jewish activists and so many of the people criticizing how Jews talk about genocide weren’t there. In fact, many of them criticized us for not focusing our activism on Palestine. I won’t be lectured by these kinds of people. The number one cause of death in my family over the past century has been murder by Nazi. I have spoken to every living member of my father’s family out to my third cousins. I have been told that I should thank Hitler for being alive because my grandparents met at a DP camp and wouldn’t have met were their entire families not murdered. I’ve been told that the “real Holocaust” was of Ukrainians (many of whom were collaborators and whose descendants are trying to deny Babi Yar), or that the Holocaust targeted people who had brown hair (like Hitler himself), or that it wasn’t antisemitic because of other victims, as if “Mein Kampf” didn’t have numerous explicit passages targeting Jews specifically, as if there weren’t boycotts of Jewish families specifically, as if the Yellow Stars were universally applied.

If I take these things personally it’s because they are personal. I am labelled as a “Third Generation Survivor” at the US Holocaust Museum. I have a 90 year old grandmother who survived Bergen-Belsen and the Warsaw Ghetto and there are people who are telling that narrowly avoiding being murdered alongside the rest of her family is somehow a privilege. Or that I somehow “celebrate” the Holocaust. What the hell kind of word choice is that? 

Howard Jacobson is right. We will never be forgiven for the Holocaust. They wish we had the good sense to die out so as not to plague their consciences.

[fromchaostocosmos]

Please reblog this if not Jewish so it doesn’t just circulate around Jumblr only because this is so important and so true.

[jedusaur]

why you should not dismiss research unless you rly truly mean it

Internet, I am a queer researcher of queer health and I have something to say.

A few weeks back, a study went viral about the relationship between marriage equality policy and queer teen suicide rates, and a lot of people reacted thusly: “queer mental health is better when we’re not discriminated against! BREAKING: SKY IS BLUE, WATER IS WET”

This happens a lot. People see research about a thing ~Everyone Already Knows~ and they mock it. Now I want to make two things really clear:

1. Everyone does not already know.

2. This shit can lose these projects their funding.

Did you know that media coverage is a crucial factor in funding allocation? When we submit our application for grant renewal, we have to provide a list of news articles about our research so they can decide whether the public cares enough about us to let us keep doing our work. And most research doesn’t get all that much coverage, so individual reactions can really matter. If the primary reaction to our publications is eyerolling, we legitimately might not be able to continue.

I’ve seen some frustration from people who believe this research funding would be better put to use “actually helping” the affected populations instead of–I don’t know, pinning them under microscopes or whatever it is they think we do. But funding for policy initiatives is driven by research. I know you wish politicians would listen to individual voices telling them where the problems are, but that’s honestly not a smart way to direct limited resources. We need solid evidence. And a lot of the areas that need the most attention aren’t obvious–who knew bisexual people are at a much higher risk for physical and mental health disparities than gay and lesbian people? Who would have guessed that transgender folks are more likely than any other group (including straight people) to be military veterans, but overwhelmingly don’t claim their benefits? I’m sure some people noticed these patterns, but they definitely weren’t common knowledge within the queer communities I’ve grown up around, and those findings are leading to direct action as we speak.

I get that it can be frustrating to feel like your identity is being reduced to facts and figures for the benefit of red tape. But trust me, the researchers aren’t your enemy here. Most of us are queer too. All of us are just as frustrated by this crap as you are. We are doing our best, and I swear to you this work really is making a difference. Please don’t sabotage it.

[tvatemybrain]

I’m reblogging this because it only has 9 notes, and it should really, REALLY have a lot more.

[sidereanuncia-blog-deactivated2]

Also, given the current US administration’s plan to stop collecting data on LGBTQ identities as part of the census, we are in need of accurate, useful data now more than ever.

[downtroddendeity]

Plus the ability to cite peer-reviewed evidence of these sorts of things and quantify the extent of “obvious” effects can be pretty important to researchers who are working in adjacent fields that don’t produce the sorts of headline soundbites that get mocked on social media.

And often headlines and summaries are misleading and reductive- a study about wage gaps across a variety of demographics might get headlined “Women Still Make Less Than Men, New Study Shows” when the bulk of the paper is about the intersection of race and gender identity, and I’ve seen people on Tumblr mocking a study about the flavor compounds in food across the Indian subcontinent, conducted by Indian scientists at an Indian university, as “LOL white people don’t know how to cook.”

[sciencefriday]

NASA engineers want to design a rover wheel that can take on any terrain on Mars.

The sound of a rover riding over a jagged Martian rock is similar to the racket of slowly crunching soda cans. How do we know? NASA engineers have rolled wheels across terrains similar to those that have been found on Mars.

At NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, engineers have constructed an elaborate arena called the Mars Yard, a 21 by 22 meter sand lot filled with obstacles that simulate the Red Planet. This is all to test what makes the rover on the Mars2020 mission physically rove: the wheels.

JPL engineers Patrick DeGrosse and Chris Salvo are working to create rover wheels that can endure the diverse range of terrain on the Red Planet. SciFri visited JPL and witnessed the sights and sounds of rover wheel destruction. Learn more here.

[Pictures by Xochitl Garcia]

[americangeophysicalunion]

Researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research have succeeded in modeling how Antarctic icebergs drift through the Southern Ocean, and in identifying the physical factors behind their movement and their melting. Which factors are most important tends to depend on the size of the iceberg in question. Their findings were recently published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. 

Read more here: http://blogs.agu.org/geospace/2017/04/13/researchers-unravel-drivers-large-iceberg-movement/

Photos of Antarctic icebergs courtesy of the Alfred Wegener Institute. 

[mayahan]

Elaborate Salt Labyrinths by Japanese Artist Motoi Yamamoto

[casualtimetravel]

In case you missed the opening of the Man Made show, this Saturday, April 15, 2017, Brand Library & Art Center will be hosting a panel discussion about Shifting Hierarchies in Galleries at 3pm. Come early and join us at 2:00pm for an exhibition tour of Man Made conducted by the curator and the artists of the show (including myself). 

Man Made is on view through May 6 and features artwork by Jacqueline Bell Johnson, Anita Bunn, Chelsea Dean, Jennifer Gunlock, Jenene Nagy, Michelle Robinson, and Sinziana Velicescu. More info about the show here.

Brand Library & Art Center  is located at 1601 West Mountain St, Glendale, CA 91201.

[aejrogota-dvagunda]

@oxredox if you are in town??

[sixpenceee]

The women of NASA

[madness-is-my-life]

Very important to see and share…

[paradiseairways-deactivated2021]

Respect

[greek-halfdemigod]

First of all, I’ve been to JPL before and it’s awesome​! Went there a couple months before Juno reached Jupiter. Second of all, hopefully I’ll be one of them in the future!

[aejrogota-dvagunda]

Wish you the best!!