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Misplaced Lens Cap
One Nice Bug Per Day
Game of Thrones Daily
AnasAbdin
Monterey Bay Aquarium
izzy's playlists!
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Jules of Nature
pixel skylines
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
we're not kids anymore.
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occasionally subtle
YOU ARE THE REASON
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
wallacepolsom
Andulka
Love Begins
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@cakeducttape
The thing that sucks about gender is that society doesn't allow you to opt out. It's like one of those annoying pop-ups where the only options are 'yes' and 'ask me later'. You can't just unsubscribe forever. People will keep making it an issue it doesn't have to be.
my favorite thing right now is how mad the official french language people are that parts of african languages are getting mixed into french
a huge percentage of the world's french speakers are in africa, and language evolves, so there's a lot of african phrases and speech patterns being incoorperated into french. the french language academy is losing their shit because european french people pick up african french from social media and are ruining the fancy shmancy purity of the language. it's hilarious
the best part of this post is the french people responding with rants about how much they fucking loath l'académie française
personally I am of the opinion that vegans who are like “the way our food system currently works under capitalism on a large scale is exceptionally cruel to all animals including humans and is not sustainable, so I’m doing what I can to make the most ethical choices available to me about what I eat and encourage others to do the same” are generally very reasonable people who I agree with in spades. but vegans who seem to think human beings are not themselves animals who are ultimately also part of the food chain but instead some kind of other paternalistic higher entity that can never engage in ethical and sustainable hunting practices (and especially the fringe I’ve seen who think other carnivorous animal predators are also evil and need to be eliminated) are people I regard as foolish at best if not actively anti-indigenous and racist
hey can y’all maybe ask yourselves why when people of color say things like “this movement I generally agree with has a racism problem” your gut instinct is to downplay and dismiss and say it’s only a few bad apples and that we’re co-opting the larger conversation by talking about it? can y’all examine this instinct in yourselves for a second?
So! This is a perfect case study in situations where you should be wary of misinformation.
Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?
The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!
This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.
Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:
Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or
Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.
The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.
The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).
Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.
So yeah, there's actually quite a lot of places that would like these. Lots of people currently breathing in terrible quality air would much rather have their boring city benches replaced with really fucking cool algae tanks that clean the air and can be used to help create + sustain future green spaces in cities. I dunno about you, but I'd take that over a dumb metal bench any day. Put these at every bus stop and I'd be delighted.
can ppl pls reblog this version
Serbian here living in Belgrade! This is all true and I've actually seen some of these around the city a few times. They're amazing at what they do and really cool to watch up close because you can see pretty swirling inside them. It's not only functional but aesthetically pretty nice as well!
It's been a while since I said "this person wins the internet", but today it is merited.
(via bsky)
(The classic XKCD comic)
I wish people were as scared of getting into a car accident as they are of being true crime'd. Maybe then they wouldn't be on their phones while driving.
True crime girlies will be like "wtf I would never go for a walk at night, what if the hash slinging slasher gets me" and then use their knees to merge with no turn signal in front of a semi while applying makeup with both hands
I'm just going to say it - body hair (and beauty standards in general) is truly one of the final frontiers of women's issues in the West. Too many women just love their gilded cage too much. It shocks me how virulently women will defend it. I barely open my mouth and the "well I like how it feels. it just makes me feel cleaner. sensory issues. I do it for me. feminism is about choosing (to conform)." brigade come rushing in by the dozens.
Well I don't like how it feels. I don't feel cleaner without body hair. I don't prefer not having body hair. But who will advocate for women like me, but me? For women who do like hair removal, they are advocated for every time they step out of the house and see 99% of the female population also conforming to that standard, or when they watch a movie and see all the shaved actresses, or view an advertisment, or open a magazine, or watch a music video, or scroll through social media, or walk down the streets without receiving insults and glares for having a completely normal bodily feature.
You genuinely can't even point out that hairlessness is a man-made standard without women losing their shit and acting like they are totally immune to propaganda they've been exposed to from birth. I'm so tired.
Every time an author reassures readers that the smut is skippable I sigh a disappointed sigh. This is not a reassurance. Why would anybody who likes smut want to read smut that was only included as an afterthought and has no impact on the narrative? Insulting. Just don't write it at all if you're not going to make it matter.
#on the one hand I understand that some people don’t want to read smut
Like 85% of tumblr users hate and loathe embarrassment based comedy with every fiber of their beings, but never in my life have I ever seen an author reassure their audience that the embarrassing scenes are skippable.
Lots of people dislike tragedy but never in my life have I ever seen an author reassure the audience that the death and grieving scenes are skippable.
Stop trying to pass off self-censorship as “accommodation.” Stop trying to pass off pandering as “inclusivity.”
Your audience can smell your fear, and it smells rancid.
it’s actually not misogynistic to say astrology is bogus, and it is indeed way way more misogynistic to believe that things that can’t be proven rationally through science are More Female.
people can be misogynistic when they do literally anything. stop muddying the waters -- astrology is total bullshit, it is completely fabricated, it has no basis in reality. it isn't misogynistic to say that. it is misogyny to associate astrology with womanhood innately.
it's a good thing mensah is already married with kids by the start of all systems red because can you imagine trying to make a new longterm relationship work when you have to explain to potential partners that murderbot will be there. no not romantically or sexually. but it is there.
next time you’re at the thrift store and find a nice solid thick pile area rug for a shockingly good price and you’ve been looking for an area rug for the office forever and the color goes really nicely with the office color scheme and you think this is it, this is what i’ve been waiting for, stop, and ask yourself: did i take the bus here?
next time you’re on the bus and see someone with an area rug and a look of deep disappointment in themself mind your own business
I know i've said it before, but if you are concerned it could be real and not a scam, the best way to avoid getting scammed is to return contact separately.
Here's how that works:
say you get a text from your internet provider, let's say it's Comcast (whom i hate). So you have this text that says it's from Comcast about your bill with a contact number and a clickable link -- could be real, could be a scam.
Don't touch anything about this text. Open a web browser and look up the customer service number for Comcast. Or get the number from the bill they send you. However you do it, get the contact info for Comcast from a trusted source, like an official phone directory or the Comcast website itself.
Get in touch with them using that information.
So. Let's run the example both ways it could go.
If it IS a scam: you reach out to Comcast and tell them you were contacted about a problem with your bill, they look you up in their customer database, and they tell you there is no problem with your bill.
If it's NOT a scam, you do the same thing, they look you up, and they explain the problem. In this case, neither Comcast nor the employees involved give a single shit whether or not you clicked the link in the text vs. going through their official website.
This works the same for the your bank, the IRS, Amazon, political causes, charities, everything.
By handling any questionable incoming calls to action this way, you significantly protect yourself from scams and malware and shit
You can do this with phone calls too!!! If a company calls you asking for some info or about a problem with you card/account/whatever you can ask them for a reference number for your case and call back later. You don't have to give a reason but if you feel awkward you can just say you have a meeting in 2 minutes but can call back another time to deal with it.
If it's not scam they'll be like sure, here's the reference number. Then you follow the instructions above, call the separate number you find yourself on a reputable website and give that person the reference number. And they'll help you resolve the issue.
Don't let scammers scare you over the phone into giving them sensitive information!!!!
great addition ^^^
there's actually a secret eighth deadly sin and it's exactly like gluttony except for textile projects
whenever I see archeological remains of a human who suffered from a terrible disease that couldn’t be treated in their lifetime but could be fixed now, this wave of sorrow and mourning washes over me. a woman in the 14th century who spent her 35 years of life bent at the waist because of congenital scoliosis. a man from the 18th century who died because of a non cancerous mass on his jaw that made eating progressively more difficult. remains of a woman from the Neolithic who died in childbirth having evidence of peri-mortem trepanation on her skull.
and yet she survived to 35. and yet the physicians in his time tried to strengthen his jaw. and yet someone 4,000 years ago tried to save someone they loved from dying of preeclampsia/increased cranial pressure. we tried. we tried and we tried and we tried. we failed and we learned but we tried. that’s what makes humans so beautiful.
My mom sometimes talks about a child in her neighborhood who was born with hydrocephaly and died of it. His parents strove to keep him alive for years, but he ultimately passed after a long decline. No treatment available. No hope at all, and the parents knew it from his birth.
Several decades later my sister had an MRI, as a long shot, to try to figure out why she was sick and deteriorating with a number of symptoms that were close to being written off as anxiety. She was sent straight to the hospital for adult onset hydrocephaly. Two days later she had brain surgery to put a shunt down her neck into her stomach and drain the fluid out. (No, you cannot usually get brain surgery that fast. Yes, it was that urgent.) Recovery was long and squiggly but it happened.
I think of that boy every once in a while. The one who died. I have no doubt that treatments developed for people like him, and tested on people like him, saved my sister's life.
He never knew he made the world better. His condition was severe, he never knew much of anything, I don't think. I think if I ever track down a God or something like one, that'll be somewhere on my List of Wishes. To make sure people like him know that they helped.
I think about this a lot.
I've been type 1 diabetic since I was about one and a half, and was incredibly sick. If my mother hadn't also been type 1 and recognized the signs I likely would have died.
I was born in 1982. Insulin was first given to a patient in 1922, and he survived. Before that, type 1 meant death, often very slow and agonizing. Before insulin, doctors advised a super strict "keto" diet to prolong life, and it could work for awhile - up to a year, I believe. But it was a miserable existence as the body was literally eating itself as the blood turned acidic until the patient eventually died.
60 years. Only 60 years before my birth did that procedure work for the first time. That's absolutely nothing given the span of human history and I think a lot about the people who died from it throughout time.
But yes, people tried. Healers and doctors of all sorts tried all manner of things to allow these (mostly!) kids to live. The fact that it was accomplished at all is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that I've been alive 42 years is fucking insane considering my body doesn't produce a hormone necessary for survival. If you think that doesn't blow me away on a regular basis you have another think coming. It's nothing short of a miracle.
Every medical advancement is. The amount of work that goes into it and the vast amount of luck necessary to get it right even when all the research and information is sound is just astonishing.
Thank you, humanity. Thank you ingenuity and determination to save lives and make them better. Thank you to every medical practitioner and medical researcher in existence now and through all of time. Thank you to all the people who died so I could live.
Diabetes is one of these illnesses that really throws medical history into perspective. It's so common, everyone knows someone who has it, people live pretty normal lives with it. And yet, a hundred years ago, it was an instant death sentence. And then we were able to treat people with insulin and yet - it was extremely disabling. The insulin was extracted from animal pancreas had severe side effects, even with how similar the hormones are, there is always an averse reaction to proteins from foreign species, especially during long-term treatment. Injections had to be given every few hours, at-home-tests were only available from the 70s onwards. Insulin pumps entered the market in the 80s. Genetically produced insulin - humanized insulin - was first available in the US in 1982, in many countries only around the year 2000.
In 1930, having diabetes type I would basically mean being hospital bound, being woken every few hours for regular injections.
In 1965, you'd be able to live at home and get by with a very strict diet and a few timed injections. You'd struggle with chronical side effects. Having children wasn't done - passing on your genes would be immoral, and it might not even be legal for you to marry.
In the year 2000, you'd have a device clipped to your belt that would measure your blood sugar and distribute insulin, you only need to change the needle a few times a day. You might even be allowed to join in P.E. class
In 2025, you stick on two patches that do the same thing. They're synchronized through your phone.
That wasn't fate. It's not natural development that made diabetes a common chronic illness. It was hundreds of people who cared. It was the people who created the keto diet. It was the people who came up with tests. The ones who went through different species, trying to figure out the closest analogon to human insulin. It was the people who fought in court to get genetically produced insulin approved for medical use. It was people who looked at a rare, incurable disease and said "but what if it wasn't?"
Back in the 1960s, my dad was one of the first 100 successful open-heart surgeries in the world. He needed it to fix a hole in his heart, a condition that up until then was basically "take him home and make him comfortable."
He's lived long enough that three of his grandkids have been born with the same condition, and he's been there to assist with the recovery after the laparoscopic version of the same surgery he had.
He has a scar from collarbone to waist that's as thick as my finger--thicker, in some places. My nieces and nephews have scars so tiny you could mistake them for being from a particularly bad cat scratch. And their recovery was measured in weeks, instead of months.
Medicine has improved so much, so fast, that he's lived to see the research done on him save his grandchildren.
Every time I inject my insulin, I think about the doctors that developed it, and every dog that died in that process.
There were a lot of them. Yes, it gets to me every time. I don't die in agony because of determined scientists and some unspeakably good dogs.
If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading
spoilers for the murderbot diaries network effect but i don't think im ever going to get over this one bc what if you spent every moment of your existence knowing you were statistically going to die in a self sacrificial way except it wouldnt be by choice. and then you free yourself from that system except you never even thought about placing value on your own life so you continue being sure that one day you'll die for someone elses sake except now you get to choose who. and so you keep going on these self appointed extremely dangerous missions with a passively suicidal belief that it should end successfully even if you have to die for that outcome bc thats what you were built for and its fine bc hey at least you chose to go out in a heroic blaze of glory! (and nevermind the fact that two books ago a bot did actually go out willfully protecting humans and died a hero and it wasn't you, and it kinda mega fucked you up but you refuse to process that)
and then you finally run into a scenario that is so serindipitously fucked that you have to make a copy of yourself to go die heroically. and everyone hates this plan, which you find stupid and frustrating, because they want to stop you from doing the thing you were MADE to do, the ending you've KNOWN ABOUT and CHOSEN NOT TO AVOID, the heroic sacrifice you had always planned for yourself and clearly your copy (as a copy of you) feels the same way.
but then you're not the self sacrificing hero. your copy is. You're the one behind the trigger. in the position of the humans, the ones who get to live as a result. and suddenly you have to stare your desire for self sacrifice in the face and realize that you don't want to kill yourself. that, being able to see yourself from the outside, you have to assign your own life some value because if you didn't you wouldn't hesitate to kill your copy. and if you dont want to give it the hero's ending it's INSISTING on, if it feels like it's not okay-- well shit maybe it wasn't okay every time you did the very same thing. maybe you never should have been fine with it. but youre realizing that maybe you don't want to die in self sacrifice in the same moment you have to enable that very thing for a version of yourself, and time is running out, and this is what you both had always planned for. you go through with it.
So a version of you gets the heroic ending it always expected. but it wasn't you. and you have to live with that.
You have to live.
Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real: Nature.com
I'm a bit frightened for the time when someone less ethical than the person that did this decides to repeat the experiment but leave out the part where they come in later and announce that it was fake and people wind up diagnosed with the fake condition and all kinds of wacky hi jinks ensues.
