Pocketfullof @pocketfullof1 - Tumblr Blog

The Michigan Urban Farming Initiative is debuting a sustainable urban agrihood in Detroit, and are transforming an abandoned building into a community center.

When you think of Detroit, ‘sustainable‘ and ‘agriculture‘ may not be the first two words that you think of. But a new urban agrihood debuted by The Michigan Urban Farming Initiative (MUFI) might change your mind. The three-acre development boasts a two-acre garden, a fruit orchard with 200 trees, and a sensory garden for kids.

If you need a refresher on the definition of agrihood, MUFI describes it as an alternative neighborhood growth model. An agrihood centers around urban agriculture, and MUFI offers fresh, local produce to around 2,000 households for free.

In a statement, MUFI co-founder and president Tyson Gersh said, “Over the last four years, we’ve grown from an urban garden that provides fresh produce for our residents to a diverse, agricultural campus that has helped sustain the neighborhood, attracted new residents and area investment.” Through urban agriculture, MUFI aims to solve problems Detroit residents face such as nutritional illiteracy and food insecurity.

Now in the works at the agrihood is a 3,200 square foot Community Resource Center. Once a vacant building, the center will become a colorful headquarters and education center. As MUFI is a non-profit operated by volunteers, they’ll receive a little help to restore the building from chemistry company BASF and global community Sustainable Brands. Near the center, a health food cafe will sprout on empty land.

MUFI describes the agrihood as America’s first sustainable urban agrihood. There are other agrihoods around the United States, such as this one Inhabitat covered earlier in 2016 in Davis, California. But the California agrihood is expensive; many people couldn’t afford to live there. The Michigan agrihood is far more accessible.

MUFI isn’t stopping with the community center. They’re also working on a shipping container home, and plan to restore another vacant home to house interns. A fire-damaged house near the agrihood will be deconstructed, but the basement will be turned into a water harvesting cistern to irrigate the farm.

art--woonz

Art By IG: @vskafandre

direk izle Instagram: @artwoonz

mxnrique

im literally not exaggerating when i tell you guys this video saved my life

rehfan

This is a damn MOOD FOR LIFE, I tell you what.

severeni

I FOUND IT AGAIN!!! YAAASSS!!! BLESSED!!!

that-fenian-fella

Always reblog

memorizingthedigitsofpi

Spot the Difference

Can you find all 7 differences between these two images?

stunningpicture

So proud of my mother for doing her own research after I sent her that meme. A sign she hung in her car window.

jettestblack-deactivated2017080

Stay woke

pual1010-deactivated20150723

Is this true?

mallninjacode-deactivated201812

Not only is it true, it gets worse. The Susan G Komen For The Cure Foundation has actually successfully sued “competing” charities, because (paraphrasing) their “message or branding was infringing.”

You read that correctly: they took money that people had donated to cure cancer, and hired attorneys with it, to sue ANOTHER group of people trying to find a cure for cancer, who, in turn, had to us their donated money to hire their own legal counsel to defend themselves.

redbloodedamerica

spacemohawks

Yeah signal boost because not enough people know about this and seriously FUCK SUSAN G. KOMEN THEY ARE THE ACTUAL WORST

beanmom

Some links…

http://thinkbeforeyoupink.org/

http://www.somethingawful.com/feature-articles/for-the-cure/

http://thestir.cafemom.com/in_the_news/132728/susan_g_komen_foundation_has

(reblogged in honor of my mother, who died of breast cancer, 11/13/97)

hello-missvixy-deactivated20160

Reblog every time I see it. Roughly once a month.

blockmind

Also please never forget the pink fracking drill bit

that’s right fracking you know, a process using chemicals known to cause cancer that leech into the water supply

http://www.triplepundit.com/2014/10/baker-hughes-fights-breast-cancer-pink-fracking-drill-bits/

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/cancer/pink-drill-bits-bring-complaints-komen-tie-fracking-n223166

alexithymia42

It’s that time of year again, please remember Komen is the actual worst

sofia-ciel

Komen For The Cure is pretty much awful.

imaginarycircus

My mother died in 1996 from breast cancer. Most cancer charities are scams, in that people throw fancy parties and get rich off them and very little money goes into research or support for patients. Here are some vetted cancer charities that get good scores on Charity Navigator and pay medical expenses or fund research:

Breast Cancer Research Foundation

Cancer Research Institute

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

63 four star rated cancer charities on charity navigator

spacey-sandwich

Signal boosting this

emmalily

Reblogging from myself because it’s October now

averagefairy

old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive

runawaymarbles

Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.

feynites

I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?

“Ha… right.”

Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.

Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.

So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:

“Yay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?”

My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:

‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”

And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.

On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master.

So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’

adora-korra

the linguistics of written languages in quick conversational format will never not be interesting to me like it’s fascinating how we’ve all just silently learned what an ellipsis or exclamation mark implies and it’s totally different in different communities or generations or whatever

refinery29

This is what a real, qualified OBGYN will tell you about what women feel when they get an abortion

Dr. Willie Parker, who is trained as a gynecologist and OBGYN, is a hero for the pro-choice movement because he’s honest about the undiscussed aspects of getting (or not getting) an abortion. Watch how he gives a consultation.

afunnyfeminist

That last statement about regret is so important, because so many people don’t understand what it is or what causes it. Anti-choicers exploit this by manipulating pregnant people and creating doubt, which only increases the likelihood of regret, no matter what decision the pregnant person makes. You know what is best for you, even if it takes some time to figure it out.

profeminist

More posts on Dr. Willie Parker

outforhealth

Willie Parker is a HERO among common people!

eclecticmuses

Dr. Parker is one of the few things I like about Alabama and we are so fortunate to have him here.

theglowpt2-deactivated20200101

if you’ve seen the breaking news that trump just signed an executive order today to end the family separation policy here’s some quick info to keep things in perspective

this doesn’t end the “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting anyone who crosses the border “illegally”

the only thing this changes is that going forward, entire families will be detained together while awaiting prosecution

this offers no solution for freeing the thousands of children currently held in ICE child prisons or any path to reuniting them with their families

children will still be detained and treated as criminals

this will likely lead to thousands of families being held in ICE facilities and tent cities that will face the exact same issues of overcrowding, abuse, and inhumane conditions that exist in the child prisons

this is not a victory or a solution. This is the administration trying to cover their asses and avoid any more public outrage. They want people to see this as the end of the news story and go back to their lives. They want people to forget the thousands of children they are still keeping in cages in ICE facilities across the nation. This issue is not over and we cannot stop being outraged until we are given proof that the thousands of kidnapped children are returned to their families, and that the policy of arresting and prosecuting people who cross the border is ended.

#this is important #we have work to do #resist

blancasplayground

AoS Fanfic: If I Know You, I Know What You’ll Do

So I wrote a little thing. This is me playing around with future tense and an idea I had that will never become canon but seems totally plausible to me. Thanks so much to @libbyweasley for her beta help, and being the first to volunteer! (Disney fans should get the title reference.)

Link to Ao3: If I Know You, I Know What You’ll Do

Summary: What if Jemma didn’t wake up Fitz from the cryo freeze? What will he find 74 years from now?

“In the future, the timer will count down to zero. It’s going to take a minute, but Fitz’s eyes will pop open and he’ll take his first breath in 74 years.”

medievalpoc

Growing Your Iceberg: Crafting a Secondary World That Feels Ancient in 60 Minutes (or less) By N.K. Jemisin

PDF on Worldbuilding 101 from N. K. Jemisin!

keltonwrites

Hey. I am a 29 yr old female who for a slew of reasons happens to be completely inexperienced in matters of love/sex. I only just started dating a month ago and while it's going well, I feel overwhelmed by a sense of inadequacy. Like even if something does pan out what could I possibly have to contribute to the relationship? Am I just chasing a pipe dream? Is it too late for me to start looking for love/ sex? Or do I just need to calm the fuck down?

There are approximately 290,000 active commercial airline pilots in the world. Every day, they wake up to whiney kids, sick dogs, aging parents, annoying coworkers, and shitty commutes. Of course they also wake up to great runs, pretty sunrises, home-cooked meals, exotic locations, and trips home. Because they’re people. Normal people, in the grind of life, going to work and going home. And at work, they get to their gate, tick all the boxes, say their polite hellos to their passengers, and move a giant metal fuselage full of strangers 30,000 feet into the air going 500 mph across unexplored oceans of unsurvivable depth.

If someone made you pilot a commercial flight tomorrow, you would have reason to feel overwhelmed by a sense of inadequacy because you would literally be inadequate. You would have nothing to contribute to flying because you would have no idea how to fly a plane.

But you do have something to contribute to a relationship, because you do, in fact, know how to be in them. You, despite your not knowing it, have plenty of training. Right now, you’re in a small but very real relationship with me. You’ve come to me with curiosity, vulnerability, and even a dash of humor. I see that vulnerability and am coming back to you with what I hope is kindness and realism. But I don’t know for sure. I can’t know how you’ll receive this message, how you’ll relate to what I’m saying, or what you’ll think of me after. And that, really, is being in a relationship. Putting yourself out there, trying to be your best self, trying to help people, trying to know someone, and knowing that, sometimes despite all of this, sometimes the relationship you’re trying to forge will fail. That is true when we’re 6 on the playground on the monkey bars, it’s true when we’re 16 negotiating curfews and grades, it’s true when we’re 29 interviewing and flirting, it’s true when we’re 43 reassessing our marriages, it’s true forever.

I get that everyone else feels like an airline pilot, navigating skies out of your reach with flexibility and wisdom. But you don’t have to fly a plane to date. You answer a message. You make a joke. You send a text. You get ignored. You turn someone down. You ask someone out. And at whatever speed you’re comfortable with, you remove whatever literal and figurative layers you’re comfortable with.

You are allowed to feel overwhelmed. Everyone feels overwhelmed when approaching something they literally have no idea how to do. That’s OK. But that’s why we learn. That’s why we take our time but also take chances. That’s why flight school exists. That’s why dating blogs and books and movies and websites and everything else exists. So you can learn to date. Because the truth is, even people who’ve been holding hands on the playground since they were 9 can feel overwhelmed by the world of love. We’ve only written an infinite amount of story around the subject. You could say almost every single human is undone, overcome, and indeed overwhelmed by love and all its facets. And that’s OK. But inadequate? A pipe dream? Too late?

No. Too late is when you’re dead. Show yourself a little forgiveness. Because what you’ve shown me isn’t inadequacy, it’s hope. And really, that’s all you need.

donatellotmnt

What's your best example of correlation not equaling causation?

fuckthisbloganditscurses

Happiness Will Come To You.

12goblins

when tho

fuckthisbloganditscurses

When You Least Expect It. Probably Late March

wizardshark

reblog for happiness to come for you in late march!

zigxortega

zac--efren

I reblogged this last year and I hung out with blink-182 backstage on March 30. Reblogging again because it worked the first time.

scientiablr

honestly, last year one of the best days of my life happened in late March

mnsreetusa

I have my interview with Disney this week…

tardisandtiaras

I reblogged this a couple weeks ago, and then found out I finally got approved for a house and i move in at the end of March!

swompwolf-deactivated20200619

antibutch-deactivated20180507

this post literally got me my new job

madmaudlingoes

I ain’t saying this worked but my husband got a phone call from a total stranger Thursday asking if he wanted to interview for a job so…

conflictingheart

coquelicoq

#every time I see this picture I am briefly overwhelmed#this piece of art outlived its context and milieu#but. but. in reality there is no such thing#because art is made anew with every glance. it comes to life. awakens laughing#and time compresses. softens. the past is not so much a mystery if we remember we weren’t the first to dance.#this is what art is for#this is what it can do#it doesn’t only speak to us of our own humanity#it reminds us that humanity is shared. this girl isn’t dancing in a mirror. she is dancing with a friend.#paintings don’t simply show us the world. they help teach us how to live in it. (via @robotmango)

sourdoughsweethearts

handletheheat.com

tat-buns-deactivated20181211

This is SO important.

note-a-bear

this is on my obligatory reblog list

khealywu

THIS IS VERY COOL FOODY AND SCIENCEY

katistrophe

(The recipes in question:

chocolate chip cookies (part 2 3 4)

pie crust

cupcakes

brownies

dinner rolls)

thetrippytrip

dont you just love capitalism..

artemistylunalia

Black Mirror predicted this we are all goona die

curlicuecal

my god but I get mad when someone flippantly dismisses important scientific progress because you can make it sound dumb by framing it the right way.

For a start, of course a lot of science sounds dumb. Science is all in the slogging through the minutiae, the failures, the tedious process of filling in the blank spaces on the map because it ain’t ’t glamorous, but if someone doesn’t do it, no one gets to know for sure what’s there.

Someone’s gotta spend their career measuring fly genitalia under a microscope. Frankly, I’m grateful to the person who is tackling that tedium, because if they didn’t, I might have to, and I don’t wanna.

But let’s talk about why we should care about this particular science and spend money on it. (And I’ll even answer without even glancing at the article.)

Off the top of my head?

-advances in robotics

-advances in miniature robotics

-advances in flight technology

-advantages in simulating and understanding the mechanics and programming of small intelligences

-ability to grow crops in places uninhabitable by insects (space? cold/hot? places where honeybees are non-native and detrimental to the ecosystem?)

-ability to improve productivity density of crops and feed more people

-less strain on bees, who do poorly when forced to pollinate monocultures of low nutrition plants

-ability to run tightly controlled experiments on pollination, on the effects of bees on plant physiology, on ecosystem dynamics, etc

-fucking robot bees, my friend

-hahaha think how confused those flowers must be

Also worth keeping in mind? People love, love, love framing science in condescending and silly sounding terms as an excuse to cut funding to vital programs. *Especially* if it’s also associated with something (gasp) ‘inappropriate’, like sex or ladyparts. This is why research for a lot of women’s issues, lgbtq+ issues, minorities’ issues, and vulnerable groups in general’s issues tends to lag so far behind the times. This is why some groups are pushing so hard to cut funding for climate change research these days.

Anything that’s acquired governmental funding has been through and intensely competitive, months-to-years long screening by EXPERTS IN THE FIELD who have a very good idea what research is likely to be most beneficial to that field and fill a needed gap.

Trust me. The paperwork haunts my nightmares.

So, we had a joke in my lab: “Nice work, college boy.” It was the phrase for any project that you could spend years and years working on and end up with results that could be summed up on a single, pretty slide with an apparently obvious graph. The phrase was taken from something a grower said at a talk my advisor gave as a graduate student: “So you proved that plants grow better when they’re watered? Nice work, college boy.”

But like, the thing is? There’s always more details than that. And a lot of times it’s important that somebody questions our assumptions.

A labmate of mine doing very similar research demonstrated that our assumptions about the effect of water stress on plant fitness have been wrong for years because *nobody had thought to separate out the different WAYS a plant can be water stressed.* (Continuously, in bursts, etc.). And it turns out these ways have *drastically different effects* with drastically different measures required for response to them to keep from losing lots of money and resources in agriculture.

Nice work, college boy. :p

Point the second: surprise! Anna Haldewang is an industrial design student. She developed this in her product design class. And, as far as I can tell, she has had no particular funding at all for this project, much less billions of dollars.

‘grats, Anna, you FUCKING ROCK.

ps: On a lighter note, summarizing research to make it sound stupid is both easy AND fun. Check out @lolmythesis – I HIGHLY RECOMMEND. :33

downtroddendeity

@curlicuecal

I’d also like to chime in that a chunk of my family are apple farmers, and one thing I learned visiting them is that you can’t always let bees pollinate. With certain apple varieties, people have to go out with little paintbrushes to pollinate them by hand, because if they cross-pollinate with the wrong variety the apples won’t come out the same. Beebots could potentially be a huge time-saver at that task, because depending on how the algorithms work, you could just tell them “Don’t go into the Gala field next door” and let them do the job more efficiently than you without having to worry about getting weird mutant apples.

andrusi

Also holy shit all science is not interchangeable. Nobody got up one morning and said “instead of saving the bees I’m going to build a bee robot.”

jenroses

The only problem with those robots is a marketing one. Make ‘em anthropomorphic, like pixies, and people would be all over that shit and want them as pets.

elodieunderglass

I feel morally obligated to remind everyone, when I see discourse like this, that there are vested interests in destroying the public’s faith in

Evidence-based statements

Publicly-funded science

Critical examination of the media

Affection and investment for the natural world

And this is something I’ve been explaining for years.

And next thing you know it’s 2017 and everyone is surprised that the CDC has been told not to use the words “vulnerable” or “evidence-based” when writing their budgets. And the people running the world are able to deny the effects of climate change while the waters rise. This is how you get hurricanes while people tell you there aren’t any hurricanes. And how conspiracy theories are more attractive than the truth.

We got here on purpose because we wanted to be here. Because cynicism seemed cooler than wonder. Because of course the world is broken so why bother?

Because we didn’t want to be like those wide-eyed nerds and their silly robot bees.

genatrius

I think I may have rebligged the root post before without particularly examining how counter to my values it is. Though, I do truly hope that scientific research can fix the woes of ailing bees before we have to implement any robot army based solutions.

waluwadjet2-deactivated20180727

every time i see this im reminded of the “shrimp on a treadmill” thing that people were lambasted for being a “waste of taxpayer money”. DESPITE the fact that it was like a few thousand dollars MAX and done by a student in university (with a grant provided BY THE UNIVERSITY) to study how the negative water quality in the gulf of mexico caused by the bp spill would affect oxygen processing in shrimp.

which is a SIGNIFICANT part of the fishing industry down there and how some folks literally make their living. it also ties into ecology and conservation since you don’t want to overfish shrimp populations that arent going able to bounce back from it. you also dont want to start resorting to fishing methods that will do more harm to to the environment to try to get bigger hauls to hit basic demand if theres nothing there to catch.

my own research was mostly done out of pocket w a few hundred dollars grant despite the fact that it involved potentially an entirely new mode of sensory input as of yet undiscovered by science that had LOADS of potential applications in biology and robotics. but boil it down to “put a scorpion in a maze in the dark to see if it bumps into walls” on paper and people just kinda roll your eyes at you. hell, i even built my own lab apparatuses and paid for the materials with money from my food budget. (bulk dry spaghetti saved my life)

anytime you see a “lol this science was a waste of money” it’s almost always blatant propaganda to encourage the cutting back of research and the justification of budget cuts. dig a little deeper into “dumb studies” and there’s usually some very nifty applications or hypotheses being tested that have real world applications concerning problems that exist RIGHT NOW.

not to say you shouldnt think critically about WHY something is being studied, but the studies you usually have to look out for are the ones privately funded by groups looking to push an agenda (ones from christian “family” groups on homosexuality/lgbt issues, stuff from people with connections to big oil/etc who do studies on global warming, or on the other end of the political spectrum something from pro-marijuana lobbyist about how marijuana will cure -insertailmenthere-). there could still be good raw data in these studies, assuming it hasnt been altered or data sets excluded, but it will be presented in such a way to make their point so you have to keep that in mind (as well as their methodology and things that could have been intentionally or unintentionally skewing the data, but that goes for any study)