The Blog Formerly Known as Gadoctopus

cool shit in progress to be announced soon Image taken from the Wikipedia for the 'Cueva de Las Manos'.

[gadoctopus]

linguists are crazy bro. found a 768 page PhD dissertation on an endangered sino-tibetan language. look into the writer and they are THE source about that literature. pages upon pages upon pages...all by one woman...terrifying...and inspirational....

[gadoctopus]

berserk rambling (spoilers for golden age)

i'm sure this is a well discussed topic, but i really wonder how berserk would've been different had casca been the one to survive through the eclipse sane. how does casca deal with what she's seen? how does casca deal with a guts that has become so different, so not the one she knew? from what we see, she's far more of a competent leader than guts is.

[twolawstofollow-yk]

mfw sanskrit grammarians invented a letter for a sound that did not and still does not exist bc idfk they wanted to?? (the canon reason is that pāṇini wanted to make all the vowels and semivowels have a long variant for his perfect grammar. how cute)

letter is "Ḹ" / "ḹ" (IAST), "L̥̄" / "l̥̄" (ISO 15919) or "ॡ" (Devanāgarī), pronounced /l̩ː/ (long retroflex "l" sound) or apparently (probably roughly) "/lrĭ/" (???alveolar l and trill and short i idk) conforming to modern vedic sanskrit pronunciation if you're wondering

Wikipedia: "The "Ḹ" sign was used to modify a consonant's value ×10^8" WHYY WHY DID ANCIENT INDIANS LOVE MATHS SO MUCH IT KILLS THE RELATABILITY i just want my 84,000s so i can go "haha it's like the word million in english" i don't need this shit

i want to share the linguistics hyperfixation guys not the maths one you really don't need to mix the two

[11thfempachi]

can someone translate for stupid people

[twolawstofollow-yk]

sanskrit grammarians invented a fake theoretical sanskrit vowel to make the list neat since l̥, a very rare vowel, would otherwise be the only short vowel missing a lengthened equivalent (a ā, i ī, u ū, r̥ r̥̄, l̥ ...)

then later they used the character (ॡ) for some stupid math purpose

this is like my worst post i've yet made, it isn't really that complicated but i had only just found out what it was and didn't really expect people to see it.

also i made the mistake of saying semivowels (y, r, l, v...) when i meant syllabic vowels (r̥, r̥̄, l̥)

[gadoctopus]

the milindapañha is an unintentional comedy

every single chapter in this book can be summarised as: menander: my homeslice nāgasena. how can one be reborn without a self. xoxo nāgasena: dw king. let me break it down for you menander:

“Acchariyaṁ, bhante nāgasena, abbhutaṁ, bhante nāgasena, aticitrāni pañhapaṭibhānāni visajjitāni, yadi buddho tiṭṭheyya sādhukāraṁ dadeyya, sādhu sādhu, nāgasena, aticitrāni pañhapaṭibhānāni visajjitānī”ti. “Wonderful, Venerable Nāgasena! Marvelous, Venerable Nāgasena! Your answers to the questions asked are very brilliant! If the Buddha were here, he would applaud them. Excellent, excellent, Venerable Nāgasena! Your answers to the questions asked are very brilliant!”

[lilgrumpiergay]

Fragrant Sumac (Rhus aromatica) forms a gentle heart

[gadoctopus]

evil wordle words

[cuunos]

jellyfish lifecycles piss me off a little bit

[cuunos]

you don't have to do that. you can just not do that

[eddieintheocean]

:D they can do more :D (x)

[gadoctopus]

big ups to worlds with multiple intersecting magic systems/ways of accessing power. i have no examples of this i just really would like to see more of them.

[xanaxfarts]

Moonbows

A moonbow, also known as a lunar rainbow or white rainbow, is a rainbow created by moonlight rather than sunlight. It's formed when light from the moon refracts and reflects off water droplets, like those in rain or mist, creating a visible arc of light in the sky. Moonbows are generally fainter and less colorful than regular rainbows, and they are much rarer due to the need for specific conditions like a full or near-full moon, clear skies, and dark skies.

[gadoctopus]

more natural phenomena i should put on my bucketlist to see

[blessphemy]

if you read about any biology you can quickly lose touch with what is astonishing and miraculous vs what is mundane, from animals that steal chloroplasts to become photosynthetic, to cloning technology being old hat, to trees that didn’t biodegrade for tens of millions of years, to naturally occurring lateral gene transfer between vastly different species, to the creation of gametes from adult cells, to the ability of some cancers to induce blood vessel growth, to desert shrimp that lie dormant for years, to the sensitivity of human touch receptors, to the fact that human hardware has a latent ability to see UV but their corneas block those wavelengths, to birds that echolocate and live in caves, to human skin being covered in enzymes that destroy RNA, to individual trees becoming genetic tapestries branch by branch, to life forms that gain energy from the electron potential of metals in their environments, to plants that recognize their siblings and adjust their behavior accordingly when growing next to them, to metamorphosis

which is to say. All of it is miraculous. and all of it is mundane. biology is Chaos vs. Order locking horns forever

[gadoctopus]

to add, i think the sheer power of innovation capable through natural processes is astounding. one of the first and greatest inventions of nature – photosynthesis – is just an application of the photoelectric effect. birds and turtles migrate by using an extensively fine tuned manipulation of quantum spin. i almost disagree with that last set of sentences. that it is mundane is solely a failure of the human looking at it. neither is it chaos and order locking horns, but realising that those words fail to capture nature at all. chaos and order are not opposing, in fact they are not really real, but phantoms of the human mind grasping at a world that we can't ever perceive fully