Bardificer

"homosexuality is unnatural! there's only two genders! it's a sin-"

I'm sorry, have you seen NATURE???

ALSO THE ARTIST IS HUMON, FIND THEM AT HUMONCOMICS.COM!! was so sure I had included that but apparently I forgot, so sorry!

Mathematician Henry Segerman demonstrating how a linear third dimensional plane is only a projection of the curved fourth dimensional space time.

via 10/10

If y’all have ever shared memes n stuff about being a Weird Little Girl, I hope that includes support of autistic girls with “cringy” special interests, and loud, ‘annoying’ girls with adhd, and neurodivergent girls with ‘weird’ stims and who are socially awkward, because those girls are awesome and being a Weird Little Girl isn’t just about playing in the mud and having complex plotlines for your pretend games

Me: *sees weird little girl post that talks about making potions from backyard plants, and remembers that I did that*

Me: Ah!

Me: *remembers that I also meowed at people and had a period of like 2 years where Lewis and Clark was the only subject I ever talked about*

Me: Hmm...

Weird little girls and also weird kids in middle school and high school, who still wear cat ears at 16 and exclusively talk about the structural color of chameleons for too long

I aspire to one day wholeheartedly reject cringe culture

Also hey does anyone wanna hear about how chameleons change color??

Tell us about the chameleons 👀

Hi, yes, I am here for the chameleon colours please

Ok so chameleons are REALLY weird - if you zoom in on their skin, they don’t actually have any color, instead they have a grid of little reflector cells, spaced ~500 nm apart, like this:

When light comes in that has the same wavelength as that spacing (in this case blue light, with a wavelength of 500 nm), it bounces off these reflector cells at exactly the right distance to line up with all the other blue light coming in. This line-up is called constructive interference, and it means that we see this blue light very intensely!

All the other colors, however, with different wavelengths, don’t line up nicely and just end up mucking each other up (this is destructive interference), and so we don’t see these colors bouncing off the chameleon at all.

Because the chameleon is bouncing back blue light intensely and nothing else, it looks blue to us, even though it really isn’t.

But then the thing that blows my mind: When a chameleon wants to change color, it just... stretches its skin out? Kind of like flexing a muscle? And that changes the spacing of those little reflector cells, to maybe 700 nm apart. At this new distance, the blue light doesn’t line up nicely any more and gets mucked up, but red light (wavelength 700 nm) lines up perfectly, and suddenly the chameleons looks red to us.

Like??? Imagine you’re angry at someone so you flex all your muscles as hard as you can and turn a WHOLE NEW COLOR in the process. What the FUCK!!

Anyway blue eyes in humans work the same way, you don’t have any blue pigment in there, there are just reflectors spaced apart to reflect blue light!

This hurts my brain, but in a good way.

I’d just like to say that I have tutored science for 20 years, and I have never seen Constructive Interference of Waveforms described or illustrated so well as these diagrams