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"Rainbow River" 🎨 | calibreus

People who believe that small children are proof that gender roles are natural are really on a whole other level.

A young child, using words she learned purely by mimicking the way others speak: I want to be a mommy when I grow up.

Y’all absolute Mensa candidates: Wow. This child is a blank slate. Completely unaffected by society. Guess lady-brains truly are the only explanation here, science deniers.

discyours

Babies cry with an accent within a day of being born, and can even observe sounds while they’re still in the womb. There’s no stage of life where people aren’t already affected by socialisation, everyone who believes that nature can truly be separated from nurture is naive as fuck.

luminifera-archive

I absolutely love this post just because of the “y'all absolute mensa candidates” at the top.

crazy-pages

So there’s this part of the mammalian brain called the neocortex. It’s the part of the mammalian brain which is basically a blank slate that just process input, figures out and predicts patterns from that input, and suborns autonomic processes to higher-level abstract patterns it works out from all that data. (On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, excellent neuroscience book, I highly recommend it). And humanity’s whole Thing is that our neocortex has become massively oversized and completely taken over our brain, to the point where it directs the action of the rest of the brain rather than the other way around like in other mammals. That’s basically our whole schtick as a species, being run by this massive blank-slate pattern matching machine rather than preprogrammed instincts.

Other mammals are instincts with some learning thrown on top, but humans are basically only learning, with some residual instincts to make sure we don’t fuck up too bad. That’s one of the reasons why humans take so much longer to develop motor skills than other species, because our brain has usurped the typical mammalian in-born neural motor programming with a blank slate that has to just like … figure that shit out on it’s own. Human babies can’t even see properly when they’re first born, even though they have perfectly functioning eyes, because our brain replaced all that silly mammalian visual recognition software with the neurological equivalent of a blank sheet of paper, a pencil, a shrug, and “you’ll figure it out, go get ‘em tiger”.

And that’s a huge advantage! Evolution can only adapt a species really, really slowly, to changing conditions over millions of years. Typical mammalian neocortices are a fantastic patch on that which allow adaptation over the course of a creature’s lifetime, but they don’t allow for that adaptation to be passed on, and it’s still just a patch on the greater impetus of evolved instincts. But humans. Ohohohoh. Humans are nothing but adaptation. Our ability to mimic and pass on behavior means that we don’t need a lot of those built up evolutionary behaviors which change so slowly, because we just can figure that shit out by mimicry and raw learning anyway. So we just ditched most of it and a lot of what’s left now comes with a “you can learn to override this if you need to” feature. It’s a way, way more flexible and adaptable system than that old clunky “being a bunch of preprogrammed mental software” thing other mammals use.

So the idea that you can assume anything about humans’ intrinsic instincts by looking at their behavior when young is just ridiculous. From the moment we’re born we are tiny pattern matching machines, intaking and copying everything around us, because we literally do not have enough instinct left as a species to exist without pattern matching other’s behavior. We can’t even fucking see without having to learn it from scratch. But yeah, I’m sure intrinsic gendered social skills and housecare aptitude made the evolutionary cut when fucking sight and walking got the axe.

lierdumoa

You know I’ve always said “An instinct is just a habit you don’t remember learning” and it’s so reassuring to have neurobiology back me up.

sophia-helix

When my son was a baby I explained it to my brother as “other animals come equipped with an entire operating system, and we come with a couple lines of programming and a blinking cursor…but they’re stuck with Windows 10 forever and we each get to build a completely unique and personalized system.”

thesinisterspinster

The human brain is so strange. We really are just pattern recognition. And are brains are huge for our size. We are the strangest of natures creations.

snowthunder

I think we need to talk about the under appreciated Window Seat fandom

I mean really? With the book shelves?

It’s like an alcove of happiness.

You want a whole row of individual seats? Fine, here you go.

Or how about a whole window bed for those snugglers out there.

Curtains.. Guys this one has curtains.

Seriously? This is basically a glass cube of bliss.

You can even get them with corners! Not enough corners? Okay.

Ba-BAM!! Corners for cocooning.

There’s also the Roman-esque themed seat for the historians out there.

If you don’t want to snuggle up in blankets with hot cocoa in this then I don’t even know why you’re on this planet. I mean dat stonework.

This one’s an entire rectangle. Just imagine all the cuddling that could happen in there. It’s practically a fortress.

This one’s fucking curved okay? it’s just chillin, up of the ground, and curved for your lounging convenience.

don’t like rectangles or square? Okay. Have a fucking trapezoid seat.

girlbr0thers

@succumbtoyourtendertone @onlytohisintimates y’all,,,,,,,,

peach--star-deactivated20190430

THESE ARE MY FAVORITE THING

ninafujisaki-deactivated2018112

This bay window, please???

phalloid-destroyer-deactivated2

i’ve been a fan of these ever since i saw one when i was like 5 or 6

wirbelwindria

same

frogribbit

random thing but i realized it might be helpful for some people so uh. theres this thingy where you can upload an image and it gives you a color palette based on it !

heres an example

and it also gives you the hex code values for them too its p neat !

here’s the link to the website !

schro-dingus-deactivated2023030

thegoodvybe

lordandgodoftheobvious

“The world is overpopulated.”

Nope.

“Well, that’s just carbon emissions. What about places for all those people to live?”

If the world’s population all lived in one city that was as densely populated as Manhattan, that city would be the size of Ecuador. The space taken up by ourselves and our toys is actually rather insignificant next to that taken up by our farmland.

“Ah-hah! Farmland! We’re not producing enough food for all those people!”

The problem here is we are insanely wasteful with our food.

Firstly, half of all food grown in the US goes straight into the dumpster.

Secondly, we grow it very inefficiently. We could very easily increase the food yield of a given area of land by building a greenhouse on it (which also reduces water loss) and using poly-cultures instead of mono-cultures; the reason our preferred method is open-air mono-culture farms, which are susceptible to erosion and blight and requires a god-awful amount of water to stay hydrated, is that labor is expensive and land is cheap.

In fact, if we took it even further–growing our food in carbon dioxide-rich environments lit with artificial lighting 24 hours a day (or at least at night)–you only need 1-2000 square feet of farmland per person. Admittedly, you pretty much have to have fusion power for this to be an environmentally and economically viable option, but still; the point is, we could easily condense our environmental footprint by a shit-ton (and even more options will be available in the future) without decreasing our population one iota.

“There is still a maximum carrying capacity the planet has.”

Indeed there is. And do you know what that carrying capacity is? It’s ten trillion. And the cut off isn’t space or resources–it’s waste heat. The things we’d have to do to get there aren’t exactly the sort of things we could do overnight–hell, we don’t actually know how to fusion yet–but they’re all well within the realm of the physically possible.

fleurjardin

The Ngorongoro Crater Lodge // Ngorongoro Crater, Arusha, Tanzania

wingstumpscars-deactivated20201

Akashinga, meaning ‘the Brave Ones’, is a conservation model powered a strong team of disadvantaged women. The aim is to restore and manage areas of wilderness, “working with rather than against the local population”, providing an alternative to poaching and, at the same time, benefiting local communities.

Armed with rifles suitable for close-quarter combat (yet with enough precision to bring down enemies at 500 meters), the group operate in Zimbabwe’s lower Zambezi Valley- Africa’s poaching frontline. The goal is to provide a “solution to the end of hunting”, as reported by the Guardian, as well as solving social problems on a local level. The Guardian explain that “these women are a growing squad of environmental shock troops for a new type of community development offensive”.

wow

Minty green

I vant.

Jupiter and 4 of her moons peaking out from behind our moon!

zooophagous

Cordial is so photogenic

ifenourish-blog

Aww

mjalti

View this post on Instagram

ifenourish-blog

😄🌞

cagaderamental

megheadmed

You need.. you need to unmute…

cobaltdays-deactivated20210208

I’ve waited too long to find this gem again!

ifenourish-blog

this is adorable

reasonandempathy

Millenials don’t believe in democracy because we have never experienced it. In the United States, Democracy was repealed in 1976 with the Buckley v. Valeo Supreme Court decision. This contended that giving money to political parties was “free speech” and could not be infringed. In the stroke of a pen, American Democracy was dead and replaced with plutocracy. The ability to vote can be powerful, but not nearly as powerful as the ability to bribe, and this decision legalized bribery and called it “campaign contributions”. Since then, virtually none of the after-inflation economic gains have been shared by Americans who are not high-earners and opinions of voters have had zero effect on policy. By contrast, opinions of donors have a very high correlation. Democracy has been dead since before any millennial was born, and every year the corpse that bears its name redistributes more wealth from the middle and lower classes to the corrupt. Can you blame us for disdaining a system that has done nothing but steal from us?

Justin Flynn (via sosungalittleclodofclay)