Freaking Mind Blowing

Outrageously cool explorations of your mind, brain, and world.

[thewriterkb]

Spurious Correlations by Tyler Vigen.

These charts were made to depict that correlation does not always equal causation, showing that although statistics always arise, they aren’t always necessarily useful. 

[nevver]

Fight or flight, Visarute Angkatavanich (because)

[nevver]

Knock loud, I’m home - Eric Ward

[bigblueboo]

44. 4. (line-square-cube-tesseract via folding)

[drxgonfly]

Shanghai Botanical Garden, China (by Ren Ran)

[weavemama]

y'all hurricane irma IS the most powerful storm scientists have seen in over a decade and it’s already tearing through the carribean islands. they don’t have as much money and government help as the U.S does so Americans have to donate like hell to these islands. the islands that are currently being hit haven’t even responded to media outlets/ radios because that’s how fucking powerful it is. we already know the government is gonna do more to help the U.S but not so much with these islands. Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, the Bahamas and other carribeans islands are going to get hit the worse. we need to stand by them, pray for them, and donate as soon as we get information about donation organizations that will help the carribean islands. they need this.

[weavemama]

after 12 hours of no response, the Prime Minister of Barbuda has announced almost 100% of the island is destroyed. A lot of the other islands have yet to make a statement but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same way for them too. 3 people are already dead and the death toll is expected to rise. don’t just care about these Caribbean islands when they’re good vacation spots and travel aesthetics. people LIVE on these islands, people go to school on these islands, people had futures on these islands and we should care about the destruction that is going on there like we would if it happened in the U.S 

[androidgynous]

Okay so one place I’d recommend donating is Direct Relief, an organization that helps underserved communities and emergencies gain access to health care. They’ve already deployed preparedness medicine packs to several Caribbean islands and are working with local hospitals to capitalize on resources and people already on the ground. (Source: https://www.directrelief.org/2017/09/as-hurricane-irma-approaches-life-saving-medicine-staged-across-florida-caribbean/ )

I’ve read about Direct Relief for a while and their work and core values are dedicated to transparency, non-discrimination, and fast response. If I have the wrong understanding of their organization please lmk but afaik their work is honest and helpful.

You can donate here: https://secure.directrelief.org/site/Donation2?df_id=2105&2105.donation=form1

You can select which effort your donation goes to using the drop down menu, which I recommend as this post states, relief efforts to those affected by Irma are not going to get the same kind of resources as the areas of the US affected by Harvey

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

Substances don’t have to be a liquid or a gas to behave like a fluid. Swarms of fire ants display viscoelastic properties, meaning they can act like both a liquid and a solid. Like a spring, a ball of fire ants is elastic, bouncing back after being squished (top image). But the group can also act like a viscous liquid. A ball of ants can flow and diffuse outward (middle image). The ants are excellent at linking with one another, which allows them to survive floods by forming rafts and to escape containers by building towers. 

Researchers found the key characteristic is that ants will only maintain links with nearby ants as long as they themselves experience no more than 3 times their own weight in load. In practice, the ants can easily withstand 100 times that load without injury, but that lower threshold describes the transition point between ants as a solid and ants as a fluid. If an ant in a structure is loaded with more force, he’ll let go of his neighbors and start moving around.

When they’re linked, the fire ants are close enough together to be water-repellent. Even if an ant raft gets submerged (bottom image), the space between ants is small enough that water can’t get in and the air around them can’t get out. This coats the submerged ants in their own little bubble, which the ants use to breathe while they float out a flood. For more, check out the video below and the full (fun and readable!) research paper linked in the credits. (Video and image credits: Vox/Georgia Tech; research credit: S. Phonekeo et al., pdf; submitted by Joyce S., Rebecca S., and possibly others)

[nevver]

Fungi, Jill Bliss

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

How spheres impact water has been studied for more than a century. The typical impact for a rigid sphere creates a cavity like the one on the upper left - relatively narrow and prone to pinching off at its skinny waist. If the sphere is elastic –squishy – instead, the cavity ends up looking much different. This is shown in the upper right image, taken with an elastic ball and otherwise identical conditions to the upper left image. The elastic ball deforms; it flattens as it hits the surface, creating a wider cavity. If you watch the animations in the bottom row, you can see the sphere oscillating after impact. Those changes in shape form a second cavity inside the first one. It’s this smaller second cavity that pinches off and sends a liquid jet back up to the collapsing splash curtain. 

From the top image, we can also see that the elastic sphere slows down more quickly after impact. This makes sense because part of its kinetic energy at impact has gone into the sphere’s shape changes and their interaction with the surrounding water. 

If you’d like to see more splashy stuff, be sure to check out my webcast with a couple of this paper’s authors. (Image credits: top row - C. Mabey; bottom row - R. Hurd et al., source; research credit: R. Hurd et al.)

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

Drop some hydrogel beads in a hot frying pan and they’ll bounce, hiss, and screech. Normally, if you drop a ball, it bounces to ever smaller heights until it comes to rest. In contrast, on a hot surface the hydrogel can bounce to a steady height for minutes at a time, raising a question: where does it get the energy for its incessant bounce? 

Upon close examination of the impact, researchers found the hydrogel beads are actually slapping the surface over and over on each bounce. The frequency of the slapping exactly matches that of the audible screech, so what you’re actually hearing is this bounce-slap. Now what causes the slapping?

Contact with the hot surface vaporizes some of the water inside the hydrogel. If it were a droplet, this vapor would form a thin, almost frictionless layer the droplet could glide on; that’s the classic Leidenfrost effect. Here the shell of the bead prevents that until the pressure really builds up. When the pressure gets high enough, the vapor finally escapes, opening up a gap. As the gap reaches its largest point, the bead rebounds elastically, bringing it back in contact with the surface and starting the process again. Each of these cycles acts like a tiny engine, harvesting energy that drives the larger bounce. This elastic Leidenfrost effect may be particularly helpful in soft robotics, providing robots with a new mechanism for movement. (Image and video credit: S. Waitukaitis et al.,arXiv)

[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, available for prices they could afford for the very first time. 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.

(Source: Cinotto, Simone. The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City. Chicago: U of Illinois, 2013. Print.)

[emphasisonthehomo]

Stuff you Missed in History Class has a really good podcast overview of “Foreign Food” in the US.

[nordic-at-heart]

Today on “rules of English language I didn’t realise were a thing until someone pointed it out”

[spookysouthwest]

The Frog Rock of Congress, Arizona. This unusual collection of rocks was painted to resemble an angry frog in 1928, and has remained this way ever since.

[nevver]

Accidental Wes Anderson, because.

[medievalpoc]

White supremacists love Vikings. But they’ve got history all wrong.

The whole notion of a pure white medieval Europe, so important to white supremacists today, is false. By David M. Perry, professor of history at Dominican University.

[@Lollardfish on Twitter]

Stories of the Vikings, both in Scandinavia and in North America, have long contained the potential to feed inventions of an imaginary racist past. European racists have long wanted to believe in a pure-white, hermetically sealed Middle Ages.

Today, anti-refugee protesters in Europe dress up as Vikings and Crusaders. North American hate groups invoke the Norse god Odin and Vinland. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported on the rise of Odinism in 2009, including the founding of the Vinland Folk Resistance. In the Pacific Northwest, the Wolves of Vinland and the allegedly affiliated Operation Werewolf present white supremacists with a combination biker gang, weightlifting club and militia. 

[…]

In fact, the whole notion of a pure white medieval Europe, so important to white supremacists today, is false. The fixation on skin color is largely a modern phenomenon, alien to a Europe dependent on a Mediterranean world composed of people with varying shades of brown skin. It’s not that medievals lacked prejudice or hate, but our hang-ups and divisions were not theirs. Medieval Europe was not isolated from the broader world, but rather participated in a “Global Middle Ages” that linked great Eurasian and African cultures through the movement of things and people (sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not). One of the vectors of those connections was, of course, the very same Vikings now serving as fodder for American hate.

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[sasj]

Geometric Animations / 170702

[lagonegirl]

The story of American wars in The Middle East makes me feel sick. I am so ashamed of my country right now.