Show & Tell
One Nice Bug Per Day
Kiana Khansmith
Claire Keane
Sweet Seals For You, Always
hello vonnie
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
h
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
izzy's playlists!
AnasAbdin
No title available
tannertan36
ellievsbear
Love Begins
dirt enthusiast
No title available
No title available
Kaledo Art
Not today Justin
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Türkiye
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Indonesia
seen from Bangladesh
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
@whoneedstransitions
“Most of my fellow students had gone to private schools and had generational wealth, and I came from an Indian reservation. I did the best that I could do. I didn’t know then what I know now—which is that having a big vocabulary doesn’t mean you have a big intellect, it just means you’ve had opportunities that I haven’t had yet.”
Tommy Pico talks with Time Out New York about growing up, activism, the creative process, and his new poetry book Junk (coming soon from Tin House!).
tongue like a textbook
i give up. i am that kind of girl after all.
barre/bare/unbearable
why on earth would i believe in me, that sour- breathed sunflower turning always idiot-grin toward sun, fire, eclipse, obliteration?
débile. tu sais ce que ça veux dire?
c'est moi, le déluge. pas de sens, sans cesse, incessant (do you hear the word that echoes there, without being said? a flood runs over something, something washes away. not tabula rasa: razed terre. terrors erased) begin again, again, again: five-six-seven-eight
and one.
and one.
and one.
heavy dancer, turner of pages, spinner
of records, livestock and corn. somewhere
north of here they've already forgotten
(your name and how to pronounce it)
your past and how you renounced it, no one
smells the country on you now, imagines you twirling on mountaintops, milking cows, mud
on your heels. but they never knew it anyway:
flat dead grass for miles, the sky a low gray ceiling, air a cold fist.
and the shadow above you: that too a cold fist.
I'm pretty sure now the secrets I kept I shared
with half the class, imagine that
if only we spoke!
but what good would it do us now?
just throw your body hard as you can cross some makeshift dance floor; maybe that
will make you real.
the velveteen rabbit and Pinocchio had love to bring them to life,
and what of all the real children
loved less than toys?
do they turn plastic, metal, plush and wood,
marionette and string,
ground and silent stone?
The reasoning behind suppressing femininity in men’s skating was that if the sport looked like it was for sissies, no boys would sign up to do it. In retrospect, what a ludicrous proposition that was! Even the most masculine of skaters weren’t going to get fist bumps from the football team for doing “tough” skating to the Rocky soundtrack. Did they ever consider that a sport that leaned in to embracing femininity might actually attract the boys who don’t identify with traditionally masculine sports? Corner the market on those gentle boys! I’m certain that after seeing Rippon gyrate to club beats at the Olympics, a certain subset of boys are going to demand skates for Christmas, and they won’t know exactly why until years later. What a nice change of pace for queer kids to see a specific and joyful gay sensibility being celebrated rather than degraded!
Why Seeing Visible Queer Excellence At the Olympics is So Powerful | Chris Schleicher for Slate (via gaywrites)
morning knew me better then. when?
consider the cocktail party, he said.
(an event i never attended)
consider the blowhard, the seductress, the sleepy-eyed friend-of-a-friend in the corner,
consider the hostess (always glittering, have you noticed that also? as if hospitality comes in a package with sequins),
consider me: panic at being noticed, despair at being ignored.
consider the cocktail party. the tables and chandelier.
(do they exist in this moment? i always see them in the past, people laughing in outdated accents, somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Parker, is that even right?)
remember when i thought a hangover was a figure skater cringing down the corridor in sunglasses?
was the feeling of having said too much,
and trying to forget?
consider this child: a trophy in the making.
consider your eyes, which deceive you.
consider the country you let betray you,
consider your hands: idle, doing the devil's work (if you only hadn't sold the piano).
consider me: desperate to be forgotten, but remembered all the same.
consider my name - a contradiction in terms,
is it?
the airport, the officer, the sideways stamp.
collecting pennies from the countertop: leave the lint.
that's my gift to you, [redacted]! strange country that would embrace me for my past,
reject me for my present,
and rewrites reality just like mine.
and oh yes, cocktail parties. where we practice saying it all as pleasantly as possible, or not at all.
whispers in the clay. sculpture speaks to sculptor, says:
make me something else.
don't you know me already? from that other life.
the one you passed over so quickly, finding nothing there to your liking
and the costumes dreary.
remember it? the flickering fluorescence, the gray fabric on the cubicle walls,
the bureaucrats sighing at their children's photos
pinned like butterflies under thumbtacks.
make me something that flies, sweats, falls,
breaks, even.
not this nymph poised forever on a branch,
not this pupil-less god with frozen curls,
not this cruel swan.
exit, escape, or give you this: last look, a chance at regret. your body which is breaking beneath you. my body which I broke for you, and my mind, and my mind. do you not hear the spine crackling under you? like static? like needle meeting record?
it is not always possible to rebuild with clay.
the gifts slowly recede, detritus of an argument still unproven. washed away by tides.
in this world very little makes sense. it was a comfort to have answers, even the wrong ones. to hide in the cavern of your need.
now I am always alone on a clifftop, one step from the dizzy ascent, one step from the fall.
tumblr: on languages
The thai for “5″ is pronounced roughly “Ha”, and so where english internets would generally put “lol” or something, they put “555555555″.
سأكتب بلغني الثالثة
حتى ابعد عني
اختار مصطلحات تقنية
كأني اشرح لك حركات مكينة معقدة
ستقول لي: مش فاهم. انتي من فين-
صفحات كتاب؟
نعم. ولا اعرف كيف أخرج منه.
While many of us have thought of being a good listener being like a sponge that accurately absorbs what the other person is saying, instead, what these findings show is that good listeners are like trampolines. They are someone you can bounce ideas off of — and rather than absorbing your ideas and energy, they amplify, energize, and clarify your thinking. They make you feel better not merely passively absorbing, but by actively supporting. This lets you gain energy and height, just like someone jumping on a trampoline.
What Great Listeners Actually Do (via brutereason)
Yaasss
(via oceanheartgirl)
Fuuuuuuuuuuck thank you I’m just gonna put this in my pocket to use for the rest of my life.
The entirely unnecessary demise of Barnes & Noble
“Whether the Andrea Gail rolls, pitch-poles, or gets driven down, she winds up, one way or another, in a position from which she cannot recover. Among marine architects this is known as the zero-moment point – the point of no return.” –Sebastian Junger, “The Perfect Storm”
Posts like this aren’t my usual fare, but there’s a lot of readers on Tumblr. So y’all might be interested – or, if not, you really should be.
On Monday, this went down:
That’s the bloodless, matter-of-fact, ho-hum business event way of describing it. Let me paint you a different picture.
On Monday morning, every single Barnes & Noble location – that’s 781 stores – told their full-time employees to pack up and leave. The eliminated positions were as follows: the head cashiers (those are the people responsible for handling the money), the receiving managers (the people responsible for bringing in product and making sure it goes where it should), the digital leads (the people responsible for solving Nook problems), the newsstand leads (the people responsible for distributing the magazines), and the bargain leads (the people responsible for keeping up the massive discount sections). A few of the larger stores were able to spare their head cashiers and their receiving managers, but not many.
Just about everyone lost between 3 and 7 employees. The unofficial numbers put the total around 1,800 people.
People.
We’re not talking post-holiday culling of seasonal workers. This was the Red Wedding. Every person laid off was a full-time employee. These were people for whom Barnes & Noble was a career. Most of them had given 5, 10, 20 years to the company. In most cases it was their sole source of income.
There was no warning.
But it gets worse.
Keep reading
pilgrimage, parenthood, paranoia.
(remember when we had persimmons?)
planes depart, plans fail, a cabal of women offer sweets, a new coat no one really needs.
(when therapy is not enough,
try stuff!)
the forgotten child comforts the raging mother. the anxious mother beseeches the silent child.
(have we gotten it all backwards? Or is this the alchemy we need?)
a body flung onto piano, screeching tangle of notes.
(want to tell you it gets better; know that it gets worse, too)
mais qu'est-ce que je fais ici? avec ces trois langues inutiles, ma voix faible, mes jambes tremblantes.
روحي وإرجعي. واحنا في بلد الخطيئة هندعيلك.
dont you just love capitalism..
Black Mirror predicted this we are all goona die
my god but I get mad when someone flippantly dismisses important scientific progress because you can make it sound dumb by framing it the right way.
For a start, of course a lot of science sounds dumb. Science is all in the slogging through the minutiae, the failures, the tedious process of filling in the blank spaces on the map because it ain’t ’t glamorous, but if someone doesn’t do it, no one gets to know for sure what’s there.
Someone’s gotta spend their career measuring fly genitalia under a microscope. Frankly, I’m grateful to the person who is tackling that tedium, because if they didn’t, I might have to, and I don’t wanna.
But let’s talk about why we should care about this particular science and spend money on it. (And I’ll even answer without even glancing at the article.)
Off the top of my head?
-advances in robotics
-advances in miniature robotics
-advances in flight technology
-advantages in simulating and understanding the mechanics and programming of small intelligences
-ability to grow crops in places uninhabitable by insects (space? cold/hot? places where honeybees are non-native and detrimental to the ecosystem?)
-ability to improve productivity density of crops and feed more people
-less strain on bees, who do poorly when forced to pollinate monocultures of low nutrition plants
-ability to run tightly controlled experiments on pollination, on the effects of bees on plant physiology, on ecosystem dynamics, etc
-fucking robot bees, my friend
-hahaha think how confused those flowers must be
Also worth keeping in mind? People love, love, love framing science in condescending and silly sounding terms as an excuse to cut funding to vital programs. *Especially* if it’s also associated with something (gasp) ‘inappropriate’, like sex or ladyparts. This is why research for a lot of women’s issues, lgbtq+ issues, minorities’ issues, and vulnerable groups in general’s issues tends to lag so far behind the times. This is why some groups are pushing so hard to cut funding for climate change research these days.
Anything that’s acquired governmental funding has been through and intensely competitive, months-to-years long screening by EXPERTS IN THE FIELD who have a very good idea what research is likely to be most beneficial to that field and fill a needed gap.
Trust me. The paperwork haunts my nightmares.
So, we had a joke in my lab: “Nice work, college boy.” It was the phrase for any project that you could spend years and years working on and end up with results that could be summed up on a single, pretty slide with an apparently obvious graph. The phrase was taken from something a grower said at a talk my advisor gave as a graduate student: “So you proved that plants grow better when they’re watered? Nice work, college boy.”
But like, the thing is? There’s always more details than that. And a lot of times it’s important that somebody questions our assumptions.
A labmate of mine doing very similar research demonstrated that our assumptions about the effect of water stress on plant fitness have been wrong for years because *nobody had thought to separate out the different WAYS a plant can be water stressed.* (Continuously, in bursts, etc.). And it turns out these ways have *drastically different effects* with drastically different measures required for response to them to keep from losing lots of money and resources in agriculture.
Nice work, college boy. :p
Point the second: surprise! Anna Haldewang is an industrial design student. She developed this in her product design class. And, as far as I can tell, she has had no particular funding at all for this project, much less billions of dollars.
‘grats, Anna, you FUCKING ROCK.
ps: On a lighter note, summarizing research to make it sound stupid is both easy AND fun. Check out @lolmythesis – I HIGHLY RECOMMEND. :33
@curlicuecal
I’d also like to chime in that a chunk of my family are apple farmers, and one thing I learned visiting them is that you can’t always let bees pollinate. With certain apple varieties, people have to go out with little paintbrushes to pollinate them by hand, because if they cross-pollinate with the wrong variety the apples won’t come out the same. Beebots could potentially be a huge time-saver at that task, because depending on how the algorithms work, you could just tell them “Don’t go into the Gala field next door” and let them do the job more efficiently than you without having to worry about getting weird mutant apples.
Also holy shit all science is not interchangeable. Nobody got up one morning and said “instead of saving the bees I’m going to build a bee robot.”
The only problem with those robots is a marketing one. Make ‘em anthropomorphic, like pixies, and people would be all over that shit and want them as pets.
I feel morally obligated to remind everyone, when I see discourse like this, that there are vested interests in destroying the public’s faith in
Evidence-based statements
Publicly-funded science
Critical examination of the media
Affection and investment for the natural world
And this is something I’ve been explaining for years.
And next thing you know it’s 2017 and everyone is surprised that the CDC has been told not to use the words “vulnerable” or “evidence-based” when writing their budgets. And the people running the world are able to deny the effects of climate change while the waters rise. This is how you get hurricanes while people tell you there aren’t any hurricanes. And how conspiracy theories are more attractive than the truth.
We got here on purpose because we wanted to be here. Because cynicism seemed cooler than wonder. Because of course the world is broken so why bother?
Because we didn’t want to be like those wide-eyed nerds and their silly robot bees.
I think I may have rebligged the root post before without particularly examining how counter to my values it is. Though, I do truly hope that scientific research can fix the woes of ailing bees before we have to implement any robot army based solutions.
every time i see this im reminded of the “shrimp on a treadmill” thing that people were lambasted for being a “waste of taxpayer money”. DESPITE the fact that it was like a few thousand dollars MAX and done by a student in university (with a grant provided BY THE UNIVERSITY) to study how the negative water quality in the gulf of mexico caused by the bp spill would affect oxygen processing in shrimp.
which is a SIGNIFICANT part of the fishing industry down there and how some folks literally make their living. it also ties into ecology and conservation since you don’t want to overfish shrimp populations that arent going able to bounce back from it. you also dont want to start resorting to fishing methods that will do more harm to to the environment to try to get bigger hauls to hit basic demand if theres nothing there to catch.
my own research was mostly done out of pocket w a few hundred dollars grant despite the fact that it involved potentially an entirely new mode of sensory input as of yet undiscovered by science that had LOADS of potential applications in biology and robotics. but boil it down to “put a scorpion in a maze in the dark to see if it bumps into walls” on paper and people just kinda roll your eyes at you. hell, i even built my own lab apparatuses and paid for the materials with money from my food budget. (bulk dry spaghetti saved my life)
anytime you see a “lol this science was a waste of money” it’s almost always blatant propaganda to encourage the cutting back of research and the justification of budget cuts. dig a little deeper into “dumb studies” and there’s usually some very nifty applications or hypotheses being tested that have real world applications concerning problems that exist RIGHT NOW.
not to say you shouldnt think critically about WHY something is being studied, but the studies you usually have to look out for are the ones privately funded by groups looking to push an agenda (ones from christian “family” groups on homosexuality/lgbt issues, stuff from people with connections to big oil/etc who do studies on global warming, or on the other end of the political spectrum something from pro-marijuana lobbyist about how marijuana will cure -insertailmenthere-). there could still be good raw data in these studies, assuming it hasnt been altered or data sets excluded, but it will be presented in such a way to make their point so you have to keep that in mind (as well as their methodology and things that could have been intentionally or unintentionally skewing the data, but that goes for any study)
