rehumanization

Cyril, 30, once and future small farmer and dog breeder. Queer. He pronouns. Oregon. Vulpine Spitz founder. An ape with angel glands

[justslowdown]

From a Portland OR Goodwill bin, dated 1963

[havingapoemwithyou]

To a stranger by Walt Whitman

[erick-the-hesychast]

Icon of The Woman Clothed In The Sun, Russian, 17th century

[floridensis]

in my last botany lab the professor had a prepared slide of diatoms set up for us to look at and i was not prepared for how delightful the slide looked

[youngerfrankenstein]

To put it very bluntly.

You will always make a better impact helping people who need it than trying to hurt people you think deserve it.

[gothredy]

Sirène” by Malene Laugesen

[ontologicalevil]

The trick is to be more curious than you're scared.

[omnia-mors-aequat-nstrwa]

Joseph Plateau — Phenakistoscope art (1887)

[charnel-grounds]

Nicola Samori, “Destino dell ‘occhio”

oil on wood, 2011

[charnel-grounds]

Eric O. W. Ehrström (1881–1934), “Bat”

linocut on paper, 1923 — source

[canvasoul]

our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting

/ original photography by Vijay Sarathy

[canvasoul]

a language we both share iv

[canvasoul]

it happens still, and always like the first time. I’m here on some half-dreamt whim and the sky is clear as death. when the early light rises over the slope and pools on my skin, I can feel my life beginning again;

[rosieandthemoon]

[kaygarde]

Dragon tiles

[acti-veg]

‘While bats can only sense the outer shapes and textures of their targets, dolphins can peer inside theirs. If a dolphin echolocates on you, it will perceive your lungs and your skeleton. It can likely sense shrapnel in war veterans and fetuses in pregnant women. It can pick out the air-filled swim bladders that allow fish, their main prey, to control their buoyancy.

It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and “they’ll know where the hook is inside that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. “They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”

This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.

Pavel Gol’din has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.’

-Ed Yong, An Immense World

[namu-the-orca]

Cetacean echolocation is one of those things that boggles your mind once you really start to think about the implications. They can see each others' hearts beating fast with fear or excitement. They can see if another dolphin is healthy, or pregnant; how the fetus is doing; if they have ingested debris. Their echolocation is also incredibly precise: a bottlenose dolphin could discriminate between cilinders differing in wall thickness by just 0.23 mm (0.009 inch) from 8 meters away!! And they certainly notice when something is off.

I'm not sure if I ever shared this story before here, but in Curacao, when I was allowed to assist in a guest interaction programme, there was suddenly consternation in the pool behind us. A guest had entered the water and the dolphins were going crazy, paying no heed to the trainers anymore. The lead trainer that was with me gave the dolphins to me to watch over while she went to help. When she came back she told me what had happened. The guest that had caused so much uproar had left the water again and was asked if he had done anything to upset the dolphins. He hadn't, and he couldn't imagine what was wrong... until he mentioned he had a pacemaker. The younger dolphins in the pool had never seen someone with a pacemaker before and apparently it rocked their world.

It was such a wild experience, and offered such a cool insight into how dolphins experience their world. I'll never forget it.

[memories-of-ancients]

Gilded bronze figurine of a dragon, China, Tang Dynasty, 618-907 AD

from Christies