Eye of the Storm @stormcrow42 - Tumblr Blog

kolo2020

anarchistmemedistro

blignick

pointless-letters

One of the best letters I’ve ever seen just popped up on my Facebook memories. Still makes me laugh.

pointless-letters

As today is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, it’s a great time to revisit Dinah from Devon’s memory of this historic event. And yes, still makes me laugh.

pointless-letters

Today is the 54th anniversary of the moon landing, but Dinah’s diary entry is still absolutely magnificent.

pointless-letters

57th anniversary of the moon landing and the best diary entry in the history of diary entries. Sit down Samuel Pepys, it’s over. UGH.

crap-userrname16

not-available-for-comment

Haven’t had a chance to watch the tutorial yet, but I’m seriously considering making this for my gf’s niece

ltwilliammowett

What is a Knot?

Knots are used to measure speed.

One knot is equivalent to one nautical mile per hour, or approximately 1.15 statute miles per hour.

The term ‘knot’ dates back to the 16th century, when dutch sailors measured their ship’s speed using a device called a ‘common log’. The common log was a rope with knots tied at regular intervals, attached to a piece of wood shaped like a slice of cake. The sailors would lower the piece of wood into the water and let it drift freely behind the ship for a set period of time (often measured using an hourglass).

Once the time had elapsed, they would count the knots between the ship and the piece of wood, and use this number to estimate their speed.

aorryn47

My wife, @foldingfittedsheets gave me my first present of Hanukkah.

foldingfittedsheets

The cost of being married to an artist.

foldingfittedsheets

I told my wife yesterday that I started with the snake. Then I did the rabbit. They were appalled.

“The rabbit was second?! You had other options, and you chose to make that rabbit?”

I nodded. Then I’d done the giraffe and couldn’t think of another long animal so I googled it and found weasels and went perfect! And drew my wiggly weasel.

spencerthespacer-deactivated202

fox-in-the-wheat-deactivated202

THIS IS THE HARDEST I HAVE LAUGHED IN SO LONG YOU HAVE CURED MY DEPRESSION

ywg

This is one of the greatest posts I’ve ever witnessed. The payoff was amazing.

randomslasher

My roommate heard it going and went “OH MY GOD is it EVER going to resolve?” then the payoff hit and she busted up laughing

blignick

myjetpack

I've added five new original drawings to the Art for Sale section of my website: www.tomgauld.com/art-for-sale

plaguedocboi

So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Conservation is so fucken sick

fuckyeahchinesefashion

OP: Why couldn’t traditional Chinese Yinpiao银票/silver drafts be forged if they were merely slips of paper? (cr大明宝钞，渐越)

Traditional Chinese yinpiao/silver drafts were paper vouchers issued by private banks starting from the Song Dynasty(960–1279). People could exchange these slips for physical silver at bank branches across the country.

Silver drafts were made in multiple copies with matching serrated seal edges. One copy went to the customer and others stayed at the bank. All edges had to fit perfectly together to withdraw silver. The unique split edge marks were almost impossible to copy.

This mechanism is known as qifeng骑缝 (split-joint seal) in China. It first originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). The Rites of Zhou records that contracts were written on bamboo or wooden slips in duplicate. Notches and marks were carved in the middle before splitting the slips, with each party keeping one half. The two halves would be matched by their notches for verification.

During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC), this idea evolved into hufu虎符/tiger tally tokens. A military tally was split into two pieces with identical inscriptions carved along the split edge. Troops could only be deployed if the patterns and characters on both halves perfectly aligned, serving as a metal version of the split-joint anti-counterfeiting system.

The technology matured in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Government documents and private contracts commonly used split-joint seals stamped across the dividing line. The Chinese character "hetong合同" (contract) was written across the middle before the paper was torn apart, so the complete characters would only appear when the two halves were put together. This split-coupon system was later adopted for Song Dynasty (960–1279) jiaozi paper money and yinpiao/silver drafts of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912).

Official Song dynasty paper money (Jiaozi交子) was abolished in 1107. Private silver drafts issued by Qing-era piaohao票行 (ancient exchange banks) vanished completely in 1951, hit hard by modern banks and currency reforms. Nowadays silver drafts no longer circulate as currency. Their collectible value depends on their rarity and physical condition.

Split-joint seals (骑缝章qifengzhang)are still widely used on important paper documents in modern China, an anti-tampering technique passed down from ancient times. They are applied across the edge of multi-page contracts, bidding documents and official archives. If any page is removed or replaced, the broken seal pattern can prove the file has been altered.

ariaste

OMG I got so excited about this because they used a really similar (though far less refined) version of this for contracts in the European medieval period!

First they were called "chirographs", but later the word "indenture" (in its earliest meaning as just a legal document of any kind between two people) came to be used, originating from the practice of a contract being written twice on a single piece of parchment and then cut in half with serrated edges (as in dent, "teeth" -> indents -> indenture) in order for each party to take one half, so they could later piece them together and verify that there had been no forgery -- same as the Chinese silver drafts!

(Charter of the Clerecía de Ledesma, 1252, showing the serrated indents at the top -- presumably they are cutting rather than tearing because they're using parchment, which I expect is much harder to tear than wood-pulp paper like the Chinese were using)

Delights me when human beings find similar ways to solve the same problem at two different ends of the world. <3