radioactivemadamecurie

[thewave]

Dusk on the beach✨

Source

[loish]

Thinking about magical powers and snowy mountainscapes ~

[omgthatdress]

The industrial revolution brought in a sharp drop in the prices of consumer goods. Americans were buying their clothes rather than making them on their own. Advances in shipping also meant that goods could travel farther and faster.

In 1894, watch seller Richard Warren Sears began peddling the Sears catalogue. He'd previously been successful with a mail-order watch business, and he had a real knack for writing advertising copy. The Sears catalogue sold EVERYTHING, from farm equipment to clothes to furniture and guns, creating a single source for Americans to buy anything they might need. Most importantly, rural farmers who had previously had to travel miles to the nearest town to buy anything now were able to have the catalogue and its goods mailed to their house.

[omgthatdress]

While the Sears catalogue drastically changed the way of doing business in rural America, is was revolutionary in the Jim Crow South.

Previously, Black citizens were dependent on general stores where they would be forced to wait for White patrons to be served first. Often, their only option was to buy goods on credit, which perpetuated a cycle of debt that they couldn't escape. As scholar Louis Hyman said, "You would say, “I want to buy this,” and the storekeeper could say yes or no — and it would be different, what white people and black people were allowed to buy. That kind of system was part of the everyday reinforcement of difference, which was intended to create racial hierarchy and remind people of that basic power differential, whether it was political or economic."

The Sears catalogue, which completely cut the shopkeeper out of the question, gave Black consumers quality products at a fair price, delivered straight to their door.

While Richard Warren Sears wasn't a great social reformer, he was a businessman who saw an opportunity. Shopkeepers, land owners, and various racists burned Sears catalogues in giant bonfires. Sears and Roebuck both had to publish pictures of themselves to prove they weren't Black. In spite of the protests, the free market won out, fully bringing quality goods to Black consumers.

[hamsterobsessed]

[picsthatmakeyougohmm]

hmmm

[whizpurr]

[silvaris]

Springtime in Kyoto by David N Chang

[lcrdbyron]

After three years, she’s finally on display. Pallas Athena by Narcissus

[thegivenchythree]

Chanel Haute Couture spring 2021

[soufre-de-paris]

Some fairy tales may be 6000 years old

Study traces history of some of our favorite folk stories

GUYS THIS IS AMAZING

SERIOUSLY

6000 YEARS

STORIES THAT ARE OLDER THAN CIVILIZATIONS

STORIES THAT WERE TOLD BY PEOPLE SPEAKING LANGUAGES WE NO LONGER KNOW

STORIES TOLD BY PEOPLE LOST TO THE VOID OF TIME

STORIES

[soufre-de-paris]

GUYS LOOK AT THIS

OH MY GOD YOU GUYS

GUYYYYYSSSS

[dwarven-beard-spores]

“Here’s how it worked: Fairy tales are transmitted through language, and the shoots and branches of the Indo-European language tree are well-defined, so the scientists could trace a tale’s history back up the tree—and thus back in time. If both Slavic languages and Celtic languages had a version of Jack and the Beanstalk (and the analysis revealed they might), for example, chances are the story can be traced back to the “last common ancestor.” That would be the Proto-Western-Indo-Europeans from whom both lineages split at least 6800 years ago. The approach mirrors how an evolutionary biologist might conclude that two species came from a common ancestor if their genes both contain the same mutation not found in other modern animals.” 

[yuk-tepat]

How do they control for stories that were borrowed, which almost certainly happened?

[gacorley]

“ Unlike genes, which are almost exclusively transmitted “vertically”—from parent to offspring—fairy tales can also spread horizontally when one culture intermingles with another. Accordingly, much of the authors’ study focuses on recognizing and removing tales that seem to have spread horizontally. When the pruning was done, the team was left with a total of 76 fairy tales.”

This article doesn’t say how, but I bet those methods are in the paper.

[science-of-noise]

For this, they used a library of cultural traits for each culture a fairy tale occurred in, and then measured the likelihood that trait t occurs in culture c due to either phylogenetic proximity (inheritance) or spatial proximity (diffusion), using autologistic regression:

(Autologistic regression is a graphical model where connected nodes have dependencies on each other, except instead of an undirected graph, ALR is a special case that requires sequential binary data and assumes a spatial ordering.  In this case, the binary data are the cultural features).

Cultural traits states are generated using Monte-Carlo simulation and phylogenetic or spatial influence are fitted as local dependencies between the nodes in the graph representing cultural traits.  I can’t find this in the paper (though it may be mentioned in the citation of the method they used), but presumably if the spatial influence exceeds the phylogenetic influence by a certain threshold, the trait is removed.

The full paper is here.

[motleybits-deactivated20190306]

@the-forest-library You might be interested in this. :)

[the-forest-library]

Very much so! Thank you, @motleybits! This is fascinating.

[marchtwentynineth]

[marchtwentynineth]

[flex-yoga-girls]

Yoga Girl

[marchtwentynineth]

[tiralatele]

[wnq-anonymous]

Close your eyes and imagine the best version of you possible. That’s who you really are, let go of any part of you that doesn’t believe it.

(via marchtwentynineth)

[eco-socialism]

[bhrarchinerd]

My Mother’s Garden

The garden lasted a few months. Then, an agent of the town’s housing authority found out about it and told my mother it was against the rules. “But no one’s using the land,” I remember her arguing. “The kids in the neighborhood play there.” The response was clear: Get rid of the garden or be evicted. Here was another one of those impossible choices of poverty. This was what my classmates would never understand, as they earnestly debated welfare fraud and the grasping desperation of the undeserving poor.

My mother stopped tending the garden and the next weekend a maintenance worker came and poured something onto the soil that made all the plants die and turned the grass brown.