give the enbys blades

Julian 🗡️ 20s 🗡️ they/them plagued by visions nightly

[jimenezknife]

listen to my espooky 🦇 playlist it’s my greatest accomplishment

[lunanier]

I'm making memes again

[memories-of-ancients]

Faience figurine, Egypt, Ptolemaic Period, 332-30 BC

from The MET

[beesmygod]

Ghost don’t masturbate

what are you, a scientist. the hell do you know

[importantpics]

[pastel-lavender]

Under my tired look, I was wearing a second, smaller tired look

[contemptible-scoundrel]

had to swag walkin on em

[oysters-aint-for-me]

please do yourself a favor & watch this rock climbing–themed drag king/burlesque performance set to “roxanne” by the police with all the lyrics but “rox” edited out

via @edithwigglesandgiggles on instagram

[png-archive-chaos]

I roll up

[bisexuel]

[oogie]

I have terrible news

[oogie]

I keep trying to post a picture of fig. A really bad one. But tumblr keeps giving me an error message. Maybe the world isnt ready

[oogie]

Im going to split it into 4ths and see if that works

[oogie]

FUCK YEAAAAAHHH

[magicratfingers]

pardon me sire, it is time for your meoiwsturising regimen

[quixoticclown]

Yes, these Muppets have taken Manhattan. The question now is can they HOLD it

[youforgivehowgodforgives]

we need to normalize two little kittens going on a walk no bib no crib no problem

[youforgivehowgodforgives]

we need to normalize this right now

[tulipseason]

my beautiful perfect our flag means death breakfast tray title card

[tulipseason]

she’s glowing

[arahir]

so i'm in this backyard chickens group on reddit and someone just discovered their hen is transitioning and everyone is stoked

anyway in case you didn't know chickens will sometimes spontaneously f2m and it's pretty cool

[whatwrithesinside]

these absolutely cannot stay in the tags

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

This is extremely common among chickens because a) like most birds, they only have one functioning ovary and b) their ovary does a LOT of hormonal heavy lifting in the sex department. So they're one ovary malfunction away from their body going "guess we're doin' rooster now" and growing different feathers and having them start crowing.

[rlyehtaxidermist]

one of the best academic paper titles

[rlyehtaxidermist]

for those who don't speak academia: "according to our MRI machine, dead fish can recognise human emotions. this suggests we probably should look at the results of our MRI machine a bit more carefully"

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I hope everyone realises how incredibly important this dead fish study is. This was SO fucking important.

[imightbeobsessedwithsocks]

I still don’t understand

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

So basically, in the psych and social science fields, researchers would (I don't know if they still do this, I've been out of science for awhile) sling around MRIs like microbiolosts sling around metagenomic analyses. MRIs can measure a lot but people would use them to measure 'activity' in the brain which is like... it's basically the machine doing a fuckload of statistics on brain images of your blood vessels while you do or think about stuff. So you throw a dude in the machine and take a scan, then give him a piece of chocolate cake and throw him back in and the pleasure centres light up. Bam! Eating chocolate makes you happy, proven with MRI! Simple!

These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"

There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:

Dead salmon can recognise human facial expressions. OR

Everyone else's results are garbage also, none of you have data for any of this junk.

I cannot overstate just how many papers were completely fucking destroyed by this experiment. Entire careers of particularly lazy scientists were built on these sorts of experiments. A decent chunk of modern experimental neuropsychology was resting on it. Which shows that science is like everything else -- the best advances are motivated by spite.

[catfindr]

[importantpics]