The 4am Story

Starting the path to telling my truth

[rejectedprincesses]

Raye Montague, the Navy’s ‘Hidden Figure’ Ship Designer, Dies at 83

Despite facing racism and sexism, she became the first person to design a Navy ship using a computer program. She was recognized nationally only later in life.

“It would have normally taken two years to produce a rough design of a ship on paper, but during the heat of the Vietnam War Ms. Montague was given one month to design the specifications for a frigate. She did it in 18 hours and 26 minutes.”

[holepsi]

Kassandra! 😍🙏💪🦅

[the4amstory]

I rejoice

I rejoice in the stillness of my mind. It settles into murmurs. The subtle waves and ripples of memories, thoughts and ideas making friends without interference. Without the interference of other.

I am the softest piece of silk wound around my arms. 

I am the tower of light. 

I am thought draped around the universe. 

I am long and small, ripping over forest and stream. The coolness of dew and leaves and soil.

Outstretched. My body turned outwards to accept the light that comes back. The gentle waves of the universe of memories intertwine with my own singular experience. 

I am large and small. I am thread and blanket. I’m loose and drape. No one can keep me from exploring this, feeling this. 

There is not a force that can contain my mind. That requires me welcoming other ripples and waves. It means accepting threads of a wrong texture into my soul.

This cannot be, for I am the universe. I am the stream. I am the silk ribbon across my arms. 

I am the cool breeze of my life.

[valarhalla]

Dr Maru’s notes, translated

As an Assyriologist-in-training, I was pretty excited about cuneiform’s little cameo in Wonder Woman- there are no films at all about Mesopotamia, so even three seconds of flipping through a notebook of the languages I study was pretty exciting to see on the big screen. Now, I assumed at first that the writing in Dr Maru’s notebook, would simply be gibberish, but one thing about it stuck with me: how well copied the letters were. Now, Cuneiform writing was designed for clay and stylus, and it is BRUTALLY hard to write cuneiform symbols with pen and paper. You’d think you could just draw a bunch of triangles, but nope; the system was so clearly designed to use nuances only possible with stylus and clay, they’re nigh on impossible to accurately reproduce using pen. And whoever wrote that piece of paper did a damn good job of it. So, I remained convinced the text might actually have some meaning, and when I got home I started tinkering with it.

First things first: though the notes were described in the film as “Sumerian and Ottoman”, they’re not Sumerian. Dr Maru’s notes are very clearly written in the quite distinctive script of Neo-Assyrian Cuneiform, which was used on official inscriptions of the Assyrian Empire from around 1000- 700 BC. Sumerian died out as a spoken language in around 2000 BC and though it continued to be used in writing long after that in the same way Latin was in Europe, it was probably never written in the formal Assyrian script.

I’m going to safely assume the man who mistakenly called the page “Sumerian and Ottoman” got it wrong, but the fact that Diana doesn’t correct this, despite her vastly superior knowledge of ancient languages is interesting. Consider this though: historians estimate the destruction of the site of Hissarlik, which is thought MIGHT be the inspiration for the Troy legends to around 1300 BC, around the time of the Bronze Age collapse and dawn of the Greek Dark Ages. If we take this as the end of the Greek Mythic age and the hiding of Themiscyra in the DC Universe, Diana would only have been able to study Cuneiform scripts written before this period so she would know only Old Babylonian Cursive, or possibly even only Old Babylonian Lapidary. Neo-Assyrian script would be just legible with effort, but difficult for her to read.

Now, the way cuneiform works is that any one cuneiform symbol can represent one or more alphabetic sounds, OR syllables, OR entire words. Most stand for a number of those things, but some represent only one. The symbols that represent entire words are called Logograms, and they remained largely consistent through all the changes of the cuneiform writing system. If Dr Maru’s notes were primarily written in Logograms (which they turned out to be), it would make sense for Diana to still be able to read them despite the considerable changes between Old Babylonian Lapidary and Neo-Assyrian script, and also that she wouldn’t have to know Assyrian-era Akkadian to understand the logographic signs (because they represent whole words at once rather than spell them out alphabetically, they can be understood by speakers of multiple languages who know the signs).

So having sorted all that out, I began to translate. Virtually all the symbols were logograms standing for words like mountain, woman, king, builder etc, but a limited few stood for single syllables like “ru” or “ti”. This made no sense, because the signs used were consistent enough with the actual context in the film to make some sense and logically repetitive. Whoever wrote this knew what they were doing. Why intersperse them with random letters? I finally realised: Dr Maru is a chemist. The way her code works is that she uses mostly logograms, but uses signs for syllables when those syllables are our modern symbols for chemical elements. Every sign where a syllable-only translation was my only option, that syllable matched up with the abbreviation for a chemical element in the periodic table.

So, working with the assumption that Dr Poison’s code technique is using Logograms to represent whole words, and the symbols for sole syllables like ka, ga, la etc in their standard transcriptions from cuneiform to represent chemical elements, here it is at last, the first page of Dr Maru’s notebook:

 To divide the town, one unit of the weapon to the throne of the builder: to please the builder, in the company of the god: lithium, 1 grain/seed of europium. 1 daughter of gold woman -  yours. Country [given?] to god and then [to] lord/god/king. Ruthenium possibility, carbon disulfide*, and then rhenium. May it be pleasing to the country. Animal shoulder** Uunhexium*** . Lord/god and then gallium, and then radium. Weapon, iodine, administrator.

*This sign can mean “tree, wood” or, just stand for the sound “s”. So, i was left with a choice between carbon and sulfur, and settled on the compound

**I have no fricking idea why that’s in there, but it’s definitely that sign. Maybe she wants to make a pot roast and scribbled it down? Someone draw me happy dr maru and her pot roast pls

***This sign was VERY hard to identify, but i finally settled on the Old Babylonian Lapidary sign for “uuh”. Uuh also happens to be the chemical symbol for Ununhexium or Livermorium, a rare earth element not identified until the year 2000. This is strange, because this sign is CLEARLY Lapidary, while all the others are in the Neo-Assyrian script. So my conclusion is that Dr Poison isolated Uunhexium 92 years ahead of the game, it’s her big secret, and decided it needed a unique Logogram of its own, for which she adopted the sign for Uuh.

[the4amstory]

Every time I see someone post about supergirl I unfollow them. We know what’s coming and how CW treats the queer community. I don’t want that in my feed anymore.

I deserve better.

[havanasliu]

[lesly-oh]

Can you guys believe Korrasami is real and they’re cute and happy gays together?????? 😭😭😭😭😭💕💕💕

[thymoss]

my therapist says make friends with your monsters, josé olivarez

[thebeautyofbecoming]

[diananock]

Aw, yeah, that’s the good shit.

[midnightruin]

I love abandoned ruins so much

[signalrun-deactivated20190312]

the world taken back by nature is my aesthetic

[dobladim]

[okbjgm]

[bryankonietzko]

Wikipedia tells me the finale was a year ago today. I hope it was a good year for everyone! It was a weird one for me—but ultimately a good one, I think—full of new challenges and adjustments, and plenty of decompressing from the five intense years of making Korra. Thanks to everyone for the continued support of our/my work, old and new. Here is a sneak peek of a thing I drew for a thing. I hope you all have a safe and happy end of the year!

Love, Bryan

[gayfandomblog]

The Legend of Korra fans may enjoy the Korra & Asami in the Spirit World statue, which was designed by series co-creator Bryan Konietzko and sculpted by Joe Jung. Believe it or not, this statue is essentially a sequel to the series, in that it catches up with Korra and Asami a few days after they entered the Spirit World as a couple. This won’t be available to buy at SDCC, but pre-orders will begin soon.

(source)

this was the thing

[weavemama]

I feel bad but this is so fucking hilarious

[weavemama]

if anyone is lost, Donald trump jr literally just tweeted out evidence of him being involved with Russia. Something this journalist has been trying to find evidence of for months…… he is obviously in in shock 😂

[pixelghosts]

I’ve been getting a lot of gross messages lately and they all complain about my cosplays just because of my race. Instead of taking it to heart, I put together some pictures of some of my favorite cosplays that I’ve done. I’m not cosplaying for “accuracy,” I’m doing it because it fun and I enjoy it. And even if I was doing it for said accuracy, my being black doesn’t hold me back from that. I’ll never understand people’s need to “critique” someone else but base it on a factor that they cannot change. That goes for skin color, race, body type whatever! Next time any of you want to message giving your opinion on the way someone looks naturally, shut your mouth! :) 💕

[death-by-elocution]

[havanasliu]

[teded]

The Complex Geometry of Islamic Design

In Islamic culture, geometry is everywhere. You can find it in mosques, madrasas, palaces and private homes. This tradition began in the 8th century CE during the early history of Islam, when craftsman took preexisting motifs from Roman and Persian cultures and developed them into new forms of visual expression. 

This period of history was a golden age of Islamic culture, during which many achievements of previous civilizations were preserved and further developed, resulting in fundamental advancements in scientific study and mathematics. Accompanying this was an increasingly sophisticated use of abstraction and complex geometry in Islamic art, from intricate floral motifs adorning carpets and textiles, to patterns of tile work that seemed to repeat infinitely, inspiring wonder and contemplation of eternal order.

 Despite the remarkable complexity of these designs, they can be created with just a compass to draw circles and a ruler to make lines within them, and from these simple tools emerges a kaleidoscope multiplicity of patterns. So how does that work? Well, everything starts with a circle. The first major decision is how will you divide it up? Most patterns split the circle into four, five or six equal sections. And each division gives rise to distinctive patterns. 

There’s an easy way to determine whether any pattern is based on fourfold, fivefold, or sixfold symmetry. Most contain stars surrounded by petal shapes. Counting the number of rays on a starburst, or the number of petals around it, tells us what category the pattern falls into. A star with six rays, or surrounded by six petals, belongs in the sixfold category. One with eight petals is part of the fourfold category, and so on. 

There’s another secret ingredient in these designs: an underlying grid. Invisible, but essential to every pattern, the grid helps determine the scale of the composition before work begins, keeps the pattern accurate, and facilitates the invention of incredible new patterns. Let’s look at an example of how these elements come together. 

We’ll start with a circle within a square, and divide it into eight equal parts. We can then draw a pair of criss-crossing lines and overlay them with another two. These lines are called construction lines, and by choosing a set of their segments, we’ll form the basis of our repeating pattern. 

Many different designs are possible from the same construction lines just by picking different segments. And the full pattern finally emerges when we create a grid with many repetitions of this one tile in a process called tessellation.

By choosing a different set of construction lines, we might have created this any of the above patterns. The possibilities are virtually endless.  

We can follow the same steps to create sixfold patterns by drawing construction lines over a circle divided into six parts, and then tessellating it, we can make something like the above.

Here’s another sixfold pattern that has appeared across the centuries and all over the Islamic world, including Marrakesh, Agra, Konya and the Alhambra. 

Fourfold patterns fit in a square grid, and sixfold patterns in a hexagonal grid. 

Fivefold patterns, however, are more challenging to tessellate because pentagons don’t neatly fill a surface, so instead of just creating a pattern in a pentagon, other shapes have to be added to make something that is repeatable, resulting in patterns that may seem confoundingly complex, but are still relatively simple to create. 

This more than 1,000-year-old tradition has wielded basic geometry to produce works that are intricate, decorative and pleasing to the eye. And these craftsman prove just how much is possible with some artistic intuition, creativity, dedication along with a great compass and ruler.