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noise dept.
Today's Document
Origami Around
#extradirty
h
sheepfilms
Claire Keane
wallacepolsom
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
occasionally subtle
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Product Placement
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
RMH
titsay
Cosmic Funnies
$LAYYYTER
Sweet Seals For You, Always
seen from Australia
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seen from United Kingdom
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seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany
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seen from Netherlands
seen from Lithuania
seen from United States
seen from New Zealand
seen from Israel
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@shannoneichorn
‘capitalism works’ factoid actually untrue. the 62 people who own half the world’s wealth are outliers and should be eaten.
Absolutely nuts how they made up a number for this satire post and the correction is that reality is *more absurd* than the number they chose
no i’m afraid it’s even worse than that. 62 was correct in 2016 when the original post was made.
It's not 8 anymore, is it?
I do love how the reader gets a WILDLY different first impression of Cordelia's career based on what books you start with. If you start with Shards of Honor, you get her as a narrator and she portrays her role in the Astronomical Survey so matter-of-factly that you go okay. this is just a job people have in this sci-fi universe, exploring unknown planets. clearly it has its dangers even when hostile Barrayarans aren't involved, and she's in charge of people and obviously good at it, but she doesn't really act like it's anything remarkable.
If you start with a book that has literally any other character's perspective when talking about Cordelia's career, you get the additional context that the Astronomical Survey is insanely dangerous, involves jumping blind through wormholes, has a highly prestigious reputation, and being a genius daredevil is pretty much a requirement to get in.
no wonder Miles describes her fearlessness as "terrifying"
yk at the beginning of this book i wasn't super sold on tej/ivan but the further i go the more it's growing on me. sometimes it really is about someone being nice and making you laugh considering The Context!!!! take my hand lets disqualify ourselves from familial-dynastic powergrubbing to live a life of mutual competency together... desperately romantic, frankly.
the United States government, which absolutely does not have a history of shooting, bombing, drugging and poisoning its citizens and definitely reflects the will of the people-
“you voted for this” wait until you hear about gerrymandering and all the forms of voter suppression the state and federal government has tried
Analysis so bad you don't even know what it's talking about anymore.
What??
Sarcasm.
This is hopeless.
IT WAS FUCKING
HORRIBLE
lol I love how some churches have pride flags
Cause there was a church I just passed that had an electric sign that was rainbow and said 'love is love, no exceptions'
And mind you its 12 days after pride ehehe
W CHURCH WE LOVE YOU
on the one hand
what is the fucking point of flipping it you pulled it out of the sheath by the handle there’s no goddamn need for that
why even bother having a special spot easiy to reach in your black leather suit for knives if you’re just going to play with them when you take them out
but on the other hand
hnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng
(He’s switching grips, largely because someone like Steve ain’t gonna give you an easy target for a straight thrust, especially if he’s got his shield, which makes for a lot of over and underhand stuff. But god yess hnnnnnnnnng.)
Also he LOOKS like he’s pulling it out normally, then flips it around—if you don’t have the advantage of a specific close-up you’d easily miss the little flip and think his blade was pointing toward his thumb. Then when he pulls his arm back across his body you think he’s pointing the knife over to his left, when in reality it is pointing straight at you and he’s about to slam it in your face. The arm movement to pull it out of the sheath that other way is super awkward and telegraphs the fact that your blade’s going to be reversed from the very beginning. But the Winter Soldier is a tricksy bastard. And IIRC, it works—Steve isn’t aware until his arm comes down to strike that he’s about to get hit. Otherwise he’d find a better way to block it.
</fencer>
Now with additional commentary from a fencer. My “hnnnnnnnng” is only exponentially increased.
Tl;dr knife flips are a useful, brutal, excellent tool. When the Winter Soldier is coming after you with a knife you’d better have superhuman reflexes, because he is going to attack you from every possible avenue. If I only hold my blade like a screwdriver, there are a limited number of physical movements I can make, and they are relatively predictable. If I hold it like an icepick, the repetoire changes but is likewise limited. If I can flip it around with absolutely no notice, I’ve effectively doubled how difficult I am to defend against.
Reblogging for commentary, and also because I could watch that gif all day.
All of this, and also, even if he WAS just playing with it, fucking around with a weapon is one of the ways that you get really good with it. With knives specifically, for a guy like Bucky — in both his lives — you’d pretty much have one on you at all times, and a lot of the military life (and probably the assassin life too) involves sitting around being bored as shit waiting for the death and terror to start. You end up playing with your weapons, because they’re there, and that’s one of the primary ways you really learn that weapon inside and out. You might play around, switching your grip, flipping it over and over, learning to catch it by the handle, by the point, learning to throw it, learning the exact weight and the center of its balance and all the other things that make handling it so effortless… it’s all just repetition and asking yourself “I wonder if I can….” and doing it until yes, indeed, you can stab some guy in the face before he can even see you coming.
oh wow.
#i love this weapons meta shit
^ Agreed. Weapons meta is meta i need to see more often
Is That Allowed
okay so i'm about a quarter of the way through the curse of chalion and so far i'm really enjoying it!!!! some of the relationships between people are a bit hard to keep track of, but it's already gotten easier to keep it all straight in my head. i really like cazaril as the protagonist, and my favorite character so far is probably iselle. i'm also fascinated by ista, and i really want to see more of her in the future and really get into her character. i also really enjoy the setup of the five gods themselves as a family unit even including a bastard. overall i'm very intrigued and i can't wait to keep reading
a couple months ago someone sent me an ask asking if I’d ever heard of Boquila trifoliolata and I was like ‘no way. this can’t be real’ and i looked it up and it was and I forgot about it until just now when my supervisor and I got sidetracked and I looked it up again to prove to her that it’s real and found out that not only does this plant vaguely mimic the leaves of whatever plant it’s vining on, it does it when it climbs on fake plants too so any theories about how it does it that include gene transfer or chemicals or touching it in any way are just out the window and those were like, the only theories the original researchers had about how it might be doing it. so anyway I am screaming and crying and whatnot
The more you read the better this gets – from Krulwich, Nat Geo 2016:
Boquila feels more like a cuttlefish or an octopus; it can morph into at least eight basic shapes. When it glides up a bush or tree that it’s never encountered before, it can still mimic what’s near. And that’s the wildest part: It doesn’t have to touch what it copies. It only has to be nearby. Most mimicry in the animal kingdom involves physical contact. But this plant can hang—literally hang—alongside a host tree, with empty space between it and its model, and, with no eyes, nose, mouth, or brain, it can “see” its neighbor and copy what it has “seen.”
(Artifical plant modeling & c. discussed in White & Yamashita, Plant Signaling & Behavior, https://doi.org/10.1080/15592324.2021.1977530)
Don’t like this at all! Thank you!!
One theory from that above White & Yamashita paper is that Boquila does this using plant ocelli—a very basic type of eye! If you’re interested in a brief infodump about ocelli: Many animals have ocelli, like jellyfish and insects. Here’s a picture of a wasp head—you can see its two main eyes to the side, and those three dots in the middle are ocelli.
(Photo cred: Assafn, Wikipedia)
These ocelli don’t form sharp images, but instead probably detect light and shadow for sleep patterns, directionality, flight stability, etc.
Some reptiles and amphibians also have a light-sensitive third eye called a parietal or pineal eye! It’s similarly right on top of their heads. Again, they’re not forming complex images, but instead use general light information to regulate other things. It’s also why even tame reptiles may bolt if you reach at them from directly overhead, out of range of their normal eyes—that third eye sees an incoming shadow and goes HAWK, RUN.
So with that in mind, plant ocelli…Basically they think the upper epidermal cells have evolved to have a particular convex dome shape that focuses light. I don’t know what proportion of cells are ocelli, if it’s just some or all, but basically the leaf itself IS the “eye”.
Plant ocelli were first proposed over a century ago but they haven’t been well studied since then. Cyanobacteria (a photosynthetic bacteria) focus light. Arabidopsis thaliana has been documented to recognize other Arabidopsis plants…basically when competing for resources, if the Arabidopsis recognizes it’s competing with other Arabidopsis plants, they’ll cooperate and move leaves so that they don’t shade each other, ensuring each plant has access to nutrients. But if the competing plant isn’t Arabidopsis, screw ‘em, they’ll shade it. Crepy & Casal narrowed this down to a light-based response, not just chemical identification, so it’s possible Arabidopsis is visually identifying friend from foe. At any rate, that’s about the extent of plant ocelli research that I was able to find. So this Boquila thing is cool and weird.
What we don’t yet know is how precisely Boquila is seeing the world. Boquila is clearly getting some level of resolution in order to be able to copy shape, size, AND color. Unlike an insect’s 2-3 ocelli, it has tons, so even crude data over a lot of inputs might lead to a pretty good picture. The paper also says the mimicry gets more accurate over time, so there appears to be some learning involved. I would also love to know if it has some equivalent of depth perception! If the target plant is near vs. far, does Boquila produce the same appropriately sized mimic leaf? Does it adjust? They’re going to keep studying it so hopefully we have some answers in a few years!
Anyway here’s a picture of the variation of Boquila mimic leaves.
(Photo cred: Gianoli figure)
👁 🌱 👁
On the one hand, this is fascinating, on the other hand “some plants can see you” is a terrifying thought, thank you for this
She's being so big and brave.
If your business can only be reached and all info about it only be accessed via Facebook or Instagram, know that it isn’t reachable or accessible AT ALL.
The whole metaverse can no longer be properly viewed without an account and I am definitely not making one just to see your contact info or opening hours.
Get a fucking WEBSITE. It can be just a static landing page with the relevant information. But get off the metaverse!
Same thing for local clubs, like democratic clubs. When Facebook can kick off users at their discretion or users have extremely valid security comcerns about how Meta processes data, club and community info belongs on a real website.
This what I mean when I say science writing is terrible and you need to actually go back to the academic publications themselves to get what’s going on
Frequent enough issue that there's a greeting card about it...
If I tell you this is a horror dance number it still won't prepare you. That last move was so terrifying even the judge was like "Let go! Let go!" If you told me they're actually possessed I'd believe you.
The music is a remix of the song Mere Dholna from the Bollywood movie Bhool Bhulaiyya, a remake of the classic Malayalam horror-comedy Manichitrathazhu. It's about a young bride that seemingly becomes possessed of Manjulika, a dancer of the ancient royal court whose tragic death has turned her into a vengeful spirit, one who evokes the wrath of the goddess Durga Kali. In the iconic scene that is repeated across remakes, the groom and his family discover his bride dancing in the dead of night in a manic, disassociative fugue, wearing a moth-eaten dancer's costume and a face smeared in kohl, ash and vermilion. She's hallucinating that she's Manjulika dancing carefree for the court with her lover. The upbeat music is deliberately incongruous with the pathos and creepiness of the scene in reality, especially as it crescendos in the bride's head to the moment when the king decapitates Manjulika's beloved in a fit of jealous rage.
This specific number is by the all-male troupe B Unique, performed for the Indian reality talent contest Hunabaarz. It's a modern fusion based on Bharatnatyam that turns up the creep factor by 200% and is basically a showcase of contortionism and synchronicity. One of the most perfectly choreographed and executed dances I have ever seen. Truly incredible!
The group is still taking their work across the world's talent shows. And yes, that guy is hypermobile enough to do that with his neck. XD
