Just enough of a bastard to be worth liking

If the devils want to dance then the piper wants his pay

[reactionimagesdaily]

[busket]

important that you never forgive ice agents, ever. even years after all this is over (and I do believe we will make it out on the other side, alive and for the better,) they live in shame and disgrace forever. no excuses, no forgiveness. they ruined their own lives when they decided that human freedom and liberty was an acceptable sacrifice for a paycheck

[brightlotusmoon]

[assumptionprime]

[depsidase]

[banchie]

i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges

[lamignonette]

[suddenlyprompts]

I fell for her like Troy fell to the Greeks; quickly, and in the most embarrassing way imaginable.

[poniatowskaja]

I’m guessing you’re referring to the incident with the horse, but that came at the end of a war that lasted 10 years. Speed is relative, but if it takes you ten years to fall for someone, I would not call that ‘quickly’.

[rareandradiant-maiden]

I fell for her like Troy fell to the Greeks: slowly, then all at once, and with the aid of a giant livestock model

[basingstokemercury]

"character deserved better" (but they were never going to get it that's the stuff great tragedies are made of) vs "character deserved better" (but the writers really blew it)

[dragon-in-a-fez]

there's a group of high school boys in this McDonald's and I just heard one of them say "I bet you you cannae break your own arm" so something interesting might happen shortly

[dragon-in-a-fez]

update: they are settling the bet by googling whether or not it's possible for a person to deliberately break their own arm. narratively this is a letdown but I suppose in other ways it's for the best

[technofinch]

I have GOT to stop spending $30

[rainformation]

formative years? aren’t they all?

[absolutejamer]

show me a permanent self and i will show you a facade or a corpse

[tanadrin]

'should a pure utilitarian kill innocent people apparently causally remote from others to save their lives, if it saves lives on net' is i think an example of a thought experiment that is on the one hand kind of useful for exposing the way pure utilitarianism stresses our moral intuitions, but also where IMO starting from the abstract idea and moving toward real-world applicability illuminates useful ideas.

like if it were true that by committing one act of wanton murder in Spokane you could save the life of everyone in India, i would say you should at least consider it. but the less uneven you make the tradeoff, and the more you try to find real-world situations that look like this, the more you approach the naive utilitarian's fail states like "we should choose random citizens by lottery and harvest their organs to save lives on net."

and that's a situation where like. suddenly you have an in-theory implementable policy, and also a lot of obvious practical objections like "this would destroy the legitimacy of any government that tried it, if it didn't it would be intensely socially corrosive and everyone involved would have massive incentives to rig the system to protect their loved ones, and there would be huge political incentives to turn this into a weapon against socially disfavored groups." and i think this in turn tells you something useful: that naive utilitarian reasoning is really good at tricking you into believing stupid shit, and any decent moral philosophy has to be pretty engaged with how the world actually works to produce useful policy prescriptions.

and that's not an indictment of utilitarianism at the end of the day! in fact, i think the intelligent utilitarian would happily acknowledge "yeah ok this policy saves lives on net if you ignore how it would work in practice, but we don't live in a bad 1960s sci fi short story, we live in a society and the best outcome here is that before you can ever implement it every member of the Utilitarian Health Ministry gets dragged out in the street and beaten to death." non-stupid utilitarianism is pretty capable of reasoning its way out of those kinds of traps. ergo, the no galaxy brain shit rule, which is really just a heuristic to remind you not to get so far up your own ass you decide moral intuitions have nothing useful to say or that the absurdity heuristic is never useful. that you do live in the world, and not in Gedankensburg, and you have to account for the difference.

[agentark]

you guys need to go look up HelloFresh's Pride Month post

[agentark]

x

[afurioushawk]

[afurioushawk]

[frustratedasatruar]

Real and growing possibility of him dying live on tv and nobody in the room noticing for minutes on end.

Likes charge, reblogs cast.

[raginrayguns]

These three versions of the same image taken by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity illustrate different choices that scientists can make in presenting the colors recorded by the camera. The left image is the raw, unprocessed color, as it is received directly from Mars (and as available on the MSL Raw Images Web site: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/). The center rendering was produced after calibration of the image to show an estimate of "natural" color, or approximately what the colors would look like if we were to view the scene ourselves on Mars. The right image shows the result of then applying a processing method called white-balancing, which shows an estimate of the colors of the terrain as if illuminated under Earth-like, rather than Martian, lighting.

(nasa.gov)

[fragariavescana]

Here's the swatch they have on the rover for calibration

[glumshoe]

Villain: “You and I are very much alike, you know.”

Hero: “I realize that.”

Villain: “Doesn’t that trouble you?”

Hero: “Why would it? I share most of my genome with sewer rats.”

[glumshoe]

Villain: “But our similarities mean that, deep down, you’re a bad person. There’s nothing stopping you from being just as evil as I am!”

Hero: “Sure there is. I’m stopping me.”

Villain: “But in your heart you crave—”

Hero: “Sometimes when I’m in a crowded building I get the sudden urge to just boop a stranger right on the nose. But I don’t do it, because that would be super rude and weird. Does having that compulsion in the first place make me just as much of a weirdo as if I had acted on it? Maybe it does in your eyes, but to the would-be boopee, it makes all the difference in the world.”

Villain: “We’re not talking about booping noses, we’re talking about killing peop—”

Me: “Look, dude, I’m sure murder can be really satisfying. But I’ve decided that I don’t want to murder people, and I think that’s very sexy of me. Look at me. With a little self-restraint, you might have had what I have.”

[victusinveritas]

[naughtypiggy]

Scientists uncovered the nutrients bees were missing — Colonies surged 15-fold

Scientists have developed a breakthrough “superfood” for honeybees by engineering yeast to produce the essential nutrients normally found in

TLDR- Modern agriculture pollen is low in nutrients, and there aren’t enough wildflowers. Science has to develop vitamins to supplement the diets of agricultural bees. So plant some wildflowers for the wild bees near you.

[heydocverdant]

you’ve heard of vitamin B, now get ready for bee vitamins

[lucylehane]

"The sex tells the story, so it never felt gratuitous to me. The sex is character development. The sex is what is moving this relationship forward, and watching it change over time."

Jacob Tierney on It's Open With Ilana Glazer