Anatolian-crystal-figurine-Hittite-1500-BCE
h
tumblr dot com

@theartofmadeline
AnasAbdin
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

No title available
art blog(derogatory)

No title available

Andulka
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
cherry valley forever
ojovivo
Not today Justin

blake kathryn
🪼

oozey mess

⁂
Keni
$LAYYYTER
Today's Document

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Bangladesh

seen from Mexico
seen from Bangladesh

seen from United States
seen from Israel

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Indonesia

seen from Austria

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from Portugal

seen from Malaysia

seen from Germany
seen from United States
@superstitious-scientist
Anatolian-crystal-figurine-Hittite-1500-BCE
Some astrophysicists now theorize that our Milky Way galaxy is spiraling through space at 600 kilometers per second while also wobbling on its axis, as if it's flapping its wings like a butterfly through the cosmos.
We busy ourselves with trivialities as our galaxy flutters in the void, its spiraling destiny hinting at forces far more ancient than our own consciousness. We ride its majestic wings like flecks of stardust, uncertain if the abyss ahead is revelation or ruin.
ASTRONOMY PICTURE OF THE DAY December 12, 2025 Northern Fox Fires In a Finnish myth, when an arctic fox runs so fast that its bushy tail brushes the mountains, flaming sparks are cast into the heavens creating the northern lights. In fact the Finnish word "revontulet", a name for the aurora borealis or northern lights, can be translated as fire fox. So that evocative myth took on a special significance for the photographer of this northern night skyscape from Finnish Lapland near Kilpisjarvi Lake. The snowy scene is illuminated by moonlight. Saana, an iconic fell or mountain of Lapland, rises at the right in the background. But as the beautiful nothern lights danced overhead, the wild fire fox in the foreground enthusiastically ran around the photographer and his equipment, making it difficult to capture in this lucky single shot. Image: https://ift.tt/gpc0XKA via NASA https://ift.tt/VHXE9iu APOD --> https://ift.tt/dwBM5VP
We have this interesting situation where we basically no longer have privacy nor the expectation of privacy, but we also don't have community or meaningful connection with others, so we're all simultaneously both completely exposed and absolutely alone, and please understand that when I say this situation is "interesting", what I in fact mean is that it's "nightmarish and I wish I could wake up"
Snow leopards seem to treat gravity with a certain amount of disdain, but this is ridiculous.
"Their tops are made out of rubber, their bottoms are made out of springs."
Most of the rest has to be airbags, a high-tensile steel chassis and armour plate.
I will never again think that shopping for dinner is a chore.
@thedreadpiratecam The photos that were featured on your blog earlier depicting some gruesome animal deaths made my heart feel a little funny— because I remembered watching this video
Jupiter is so beautiful
Leafcutter ant nests in South America, excavated by Luiz Forti and colleagues.
WHEN THE ODDS ARE LOW
BUT NEVER ZERO.......
Seeing the Invisible Universe
This computer-simulated image shows a supermassive black hole at the core of a galaxy. The black region in the center represents the black hole’s event horizon, beyond which no light can escape the massive object’s gravitational grip. The black hole’s powerful gravity distorts space around it like a funhouse mirror. Light from background stars is stretched and smeared as it skims by the black hole. You might wonder — if this Tumblr post is about invisible things, what’s with all the pictures? Even though we can’t see these things with our eyes or even our telescopes, we can still learn about them by studying how they affect their surroundings. Then, we can use what we know to make visualizations that represent our understanding.
When you think of the invisible, you might first picture something fantastical like a magic Ring or Wonder Woman’s airplane, but invisible things surround us every day. Read on to learn about seven of our favorite invisible things in the universe!
2025 September 27
A Rocket in the Sun Image Credit & Copyright: Pascal Fouquet
Explanation: On the morning of September 24 a rocket crosses the bright solar disk in this long range telescopic snapshot captured from Orlando, Florida. That’s about 50 miles north of its Kennedy Space Center launch site. This rocket carried three new space weather missions to space. Signals have now been successfully acquired from all three - NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Follow-On Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) - as they begin their journey to L1, an Earth-Sun lagrange point. L1 is about 1.5 million kilometers in the sunward direction from planet Earth. Appropriately, major space weather influencers, aka dark sunspots in active regions across the Sun, are posing with the transiting rocket. In fact, large active region AR4225 is just right of the rocket’s nose.
∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250927.html
Eight Planets : Tilts and Spins l NASA APOD
Argyle Lake State Park Encounter in Illinois
In August 2012, a camper at Argyle Lake State Park, Illinois, reported a daylight sighting of what appeared to be a juvenile sasquatch near campsite #54. While eating at a picnic table, the witness observed a group of children running along a trail, followed by a 3.5 to 4-foot-tall, reddish-brown, stocky creature with visible tan skin beneath its hair. The creature moved stealthily along the trail, seemingly playing hide-and-seek with the children, who were unaware of its presence. The sasquatch later crouched in brush and disappeared. Despite the clear weather and proximity, no tracks were found due to drought conditions. Separately, a couple fishing nearby at night had reported seeing an adult sasquatch along the shoreline.
Anything there in the past 13 years..?
Rare chocolate opal specimen from Ethiopia.
Video: Uamineral
generative AI literally makes me feel like a boomer. people start talking about how it can be good to help you brainstorm ideas and i’m like oh you’re letting a computer do the hard work and thinking for you???
There are many difficult things that were replaced with technology, and it wasn't a bad thing. Washing machine replaces washing clothes by hand. Nothing wrong with that. Spinning wheel replaces drop spindle. Nothing wrong with that.
Generative AI replaces thinking. The ability to think for yourself will always be important. People that want to control and oppress you want to limit your ability to think for yourself as much as possible, but continuing to practice it allows you to resist them.
"This tool replaces thinking," is a technology problem we (humans) have faced before. It's a snark that I've seen pro-AI contenders take as well: I bet these same people would have complained about calculators! And books!
Well. They did, at the time.
We have records from centuries -- even millennia back -- of scholars at the time complaining that these new-fangled "books" were turning their students lazy; why, they can barely recite any poems in their entirety any more! And there are people still alive today who remember life before widely available calculators, and some of them complained -- then and now -- that bringing them into schools dealt a ruinous blow to math education, and now these young people don't even know how to use a slide-rule.
And the thing is:
They weren't wrong.
The human brain can, when called on, perform incredible feats of memorization. Bards and skalds of old could memorize and recite poems and epics that were thousands of lines long. This is a skill that is largely lost to most of the population. It's not needed any more, and so it is not practiced.
There is a definite generational gap, between the people who were trained on slide-rules and reckoning and the generation that was taught on calculators. There came a year, when that first generation grew up and entered the workforce, when you suddenly started encountering grown adults who could not do math -- not even the very basic arithmetic needed to count down from one hundred. I would go into a shop, buy an item for sixteen dollars, give the cashier a twenty and a one because I want a fiver back, and have them stare at the money in incomprehension -- what do? They don't know how to subtract sixteen from twenty-one. They don't know how to calculate a fifteen-percent tip. They did not exercise the parts of their brain that handle this, because they always had a calculator to do it for them.
Nowadays, newer point-of-sale machines compensate for this; they will automatically calculate and dispense the change, no subtraction necessary on the part of the operator. Nowadays everyone carries a phone, and every phone carries a calculator, so if you need to do these calculations, the tool is right there. As more and more transactions go electronic and card, and cash fades further and further out of daily life, these situations happen less and less; it's not a problem that most people can't do math (until it is.)
The people who complained that these tools-that-replace-thinking would reduce the ability of the broad population to exercise these cognitive skills weren't wrong. It's simply that, as the pace of life changed, the environment changed so that in day-to-day life these skills were largely unnecessary.
So.
Isn't this, ChatGPT and Generative AI, just the latest in a long series of tool-replaces-thought that has, broadly, worked out well for us? What's different about this?
Well, two things are different.
1) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the cognitive skill that it replaced was a discrete and, on a day-to-day basis, unnecessary outlay of energy. Most people don't need to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, or anything else for that matter. Most people don't need to do more than cursory levels of math on a day to day basis.
This, however, is different. The cognitive skill that is being obsoleted here is more than "how to write essay" or "identify what is the capital of Rhode Island." It encompasses the entire field of being able to generate new thoughts; of being able to consider and analyze new information; of being able to follow logical trains to their conclusions; of being able to order your thoughts to construct rational arguments; or indeed of being able to express yourself in any structured way. These cognitive tools are not occasional use; they are every day, all the time.
2) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the tool was good at what it did.
Calculators may have replaced reckoning, but calculators are also pretty good at what they do. The calculator will, as long as you give the right input, give the right answer. ChatGPT cannot be relied on to do this. ChatGPT will tell you, confidently and unhesitantly and dangerously, that 2+2=5, and it will not care that it is wrong.
Books may have replaced memorization, and books certainly could be wrong; but a fact, once in a book, is pretty stable and steady. There is not a risk that the Guy Who Owns All The Encylopedias might wake up one day and decide -- to pick a purely hypothetical example -- that the Gulf of Mexico is called something else, and suddenly all the encyclopedias say that.
Generative AI fails on both these counts. It fails on every count. It's inaccurate, it's unethical, it's unreliable, it's wrong.
---
I remember some time ago seeing someone say (it was a video about medieval footwear, actually) that "humans have a great energy-saving system: if we can be lazy about something, we are."
This is not a ethical judgment about humans; this is how life works. Animals -- including humans -- will not do something the hard way if they can do it the easy way; this basic principle of conservation of resources is universal and morally neutral. Cognition is biologically expensive, and though our environment is not what it once was, every person still goes through every day choosing what is valuable enough to expend resources on and what is not.
Because of this, I don't know if there is any solution, here. I think pushing back against the downhill flush of the-easy-way-out is a battle both uphill and against the tide.
So I'll just close with this warning, instead:
Generative AI is a tool that cannot be trusted. Do not use it to replace thought.
Who or What ~Can~ You Trust??
If anyone wants to know what a leopard seal sounds like 🦷🩸
Leopard Seals are what happens when god needs a lizard and all he has is a mammal
leopard seal topic activated; i am so sorry to my long time followers who have seen me do this like ten times but i just can't help myself
OH MY GOD
That is a monster (respectful) If it was a lizard it would be a dragon.
They can be bigger than the biggest grizzly bears. They are about the size of a horse, just without the stilt legs. And their faces are hiding teeth like this (sorry it's kind of gross but it shows the teeth best)
Here's a leopard seal skull next to a horse skull
they can get as big as 12 feet and can weigh like 1,200 pounds. They can swim 35 miles an hour and eat only meat - regularly eating giant penguins that weigh more than 100 pounds each, and anything else they feel like they can kill. And they're pretty smart. Only an Orca is a more dangerous hunter in arctic waters, and even they usually leave a leopard seal alone.
A seal's closest land relative is a bear, and leopard seals will regularly hunt other seals, making this a bear that eats bears, but built for the ocean. You know, the terrifying ocean? A bear that lives there that eats the other bears that live there.