Modern Native

Living more closely to the Earth and learning how to love nature back. Also remote scenery from mountains everywhere, natural remedies, disappearing arts, historic coolness, cultural intrigues, art, and anything else I love. About me: My name is Kate. I love anything cultural or outdoorsy. I have worked on both fossils and artifacts, in the field and the lab professionally. I am a blacksmith, bellydancer, subsistence farmer, naturalist, musician, and artist. I love to cook! I am studying for my masters degree in history, so some historical stuff is likely to come up. Feel free to ask me a question or leave a comment. Keep it classy and enjoy my blog!

[micdotcom]

Watch: Their interaction is enough to turn even the grinchiest Grinch into a total holiday believer.

[dark-jeanmarco]

im gonna cry

[ancientpanoply-blog]

The Suontaka sword was found in Finland in a woman’s grave. It is dated around 1100ad

[ponnusblog]

Pink # Victorian House n Cherry Blossom

[sixpenceee]

A sandfall! This is amazing. What might be going on is when it rains in the desert the water isn’t absorbed quickly and mixes with the top layer of wet sand which can form moving sand rivers and waterfalls. (Source)

[90s90s90s]

[pinstripehourglass]

shadows of a lost empire

[aleyma]

Pectoral and neckalace of Sithathoryunet with the name of Senwosret II, made in Egypt, c.1887-1878 BC (source).

[unbfacts]

In 1898 Nikola Tesla once tricked an entire crowd into believing they could control a toy boat by shouting commands - he had in fact invented Radio Control and was piloting the boat himself.

[loremerchant]

Man invents something incredible and immediately uses it to screw with people.

[xxxtictacion]

Chaotic neutral

[ryanmaherfaith]

Follow @instagodministries

[spyadults]

the scariest president had to be Rushmore because he had four heads

[a-big-furry-rat]

it’s a good thing we captured him in that mountain even if we have to live in fear of the spell wearing off :/

[jankybones]

Am I glad he’s frozen in there and that we’re out here, and that he’s the president, and that we’re frozen out here, and that we’re in there and I just remembered we’re out here. What I wanna know is where’s the politics?

[ladygolem]

he’s back

[bigbadkingboomboo]

He’s come to fight Donald Trump.

thank you president rushmore

[jheselbraum]

They always said he’d return when we needed him most

[irisharchaeology]

The Orkney Hood. Made of wool, it dates from 250 - 615 AD. It was found in a bog on the Scottish island of Orkney (image National Museums of Scotland)

[abibleverseforeachday]

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.

1 Peter 4:8 (via buhaybabae)

[gagarin-smiles-anyway]

The Massandra Palace, residence of Emperor Alexander III of Russia, Massandra, Crimea

[sixpenceee]

WW-I battlefields remain uninhabitable for 300-900 years. iI’s because of the unrecovered human remains, chemical contamination, plus unexploded artillery shells, all lost in the soil which at the time was churned into mud by the sheer volume of artillery used. (Source)

[ifididntlaughiwouldcry]

Your hourly reminder

To. Let. That. Shit. Go.

[buckwoodsmith]

what she says: i'm fine

what she means: it's 2 am and I can't stop thinking about the Pied Piper. Initially i thought it was just an old faerie tale but i've been reading up on it and it turns out that at some point in the town of Hamelin, a bunch of children really did go missing all at once in fact a stained glass window in the local church in 1300 was made to tell the story AND Hamelin's written history literally BEGINS in 1384 with the sentence "it is 100 years since our children left." There are a ton of theories about what the piper could actually represent but historians are pretty much convinced that something did take away children en masse in the 1200s in Hamelin and to this day we still use the phrase "it's time to pay the piper." When will we pay him? Who was he???? Like okay I see the theories but what if some flute paying faerie really just led a bunch of kids away in 1284 I cannot get over this.

[imustnotfearfearisthemindkiller]

[skunkbear]

I was reminded by @explore-blog that Beatrix Potter (born 150 years and one day ago) wasn’t just a beloved children’s author and illustrator - she was an enthusiastic amateur mycologist. Before she drew Peter Rabbit, she drew mushrooms!

These beautiful illustrations were shared with Skunk Bear by The Armitt, a charming museum/library/gallery nestled in Lake District Natural Park in Northern England.

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

Not only did she draw exquisite portraits of fungi, she studied them under the microscope in her kitchen, and was the first person in Britain to recognize that lichen are a symbiotic life form between fungi and algae.

Source.

It is, frankly, one of my pet peeves that she’s still called an “amateur”. Because the only thing that kept her from being “professional” was institutional sexism.

[skunkbear]

It is infuriating that misogyny in science discouraged and still discourages great minds. The treatment of Potter as she attempted to enter the scientific dialogue disgusts me!

However, the source you cited (the very @explore-blog article I saw yesterday) is incorrect on a couple points. Potter didn’t actually think that lichen was an example of symbiosis - she thought it was a single organism (the belief of old-fashioned lichenologists). The claim that Potter was ahead of her time was popularized in Linda Lear’s nice biography “Beatrix Potter: A Life In Nature” (upon which the article you shared is based) and some other books.

However, since then, Lear has said, “My claims for Potter’s acceptance of symbiosis are both overstated and incorrect … We went back to the sources and I realized it was she who was an old fashioned lichenologist.”

The article also incorrectly implies that the paper she submitted to London’s Linnean Society was about the symbiosis question - it wasn’t.

I think it’s accurate to refer to Potter as an amateur mycologist because fungi wasn’t her main pursuit or focus or business. Lear told the BBC, “I don’t think she had any ambition to be a mycologist. She’s already been successful in selling some of her art work and when the research paper she wrote needed more work, she lost interest in favour of something that was more suited to what she was after.”

But that’s not to say that she wasn’t engaged in the scientific conversation - or that amateurs can’t contribute novel information to the collection of human knowledge. Or that the dudes at London’s Linnean Society weren’t a bunch of jerks.