HELL FUCKING YEAH

I hope this woman sues literally everyone who said anything about her and moves to a remote island where she never has to listen to any of them again.

Mary Jane Rathbun, Inventor of the Marijuana Brownie.

In the 1980s, Mary Jane was baking over 4,000 brownies a week for Californian AIDS patients after she realised it eased their suffering and depression. Despite multiple convictions, she remained an active marijuana advocate until the day she died.

I had to fact check this and her Wikipedia page made me like her even more:

“She was raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she attended Catholic school. At the age of 13, she was involved in an altercation with a nun who tried to cane her, but Rathbun fought back.”

“Social activism appealed to her from a young age; she traveled from Chicago to Wisconsin to campaign for the right of miners to form unions. In the late 1940s, she worked as an activist promoting abortion rights for women in Minneapolis.”

“Rathbun often appeared in public wearing polyester pantsuits, and she was said to have a ‘sailor’s mouth.’”

some heroes wear polyester pantsuits

This is one of the thai restaurants in my hometown and i can tell you first hand this lady is wonderful

little update bc someone from my hometown wrote an article about her and these are some highlights:

and my personal favorite:

Found the article.

Should’ve known it was Marquette.

this is such a fun article and also:

and bc it’s worth reiterating:

I would whole heartedly love this woman if she said, “what you want motherfucker?” as soon as I walked in the door. Just like home

I love her already

I want to go to this restaurant and put down a big tip.

Hey remember when US and Russia was all like “We’re the best!!! We’ve won the space race!!!!” But India sent a kick-ass space probe to Mars and the whole mission was fuel efficient, costed less and a roaring success in the first try and then they were like “…..wait no that can’t be true” and still have the audacity to call us “underdeveloped” or only view us as a ‘third world country’? :)

For anyone who needs more info, the probe was called Mangalyaan (which literally means space probe vehicle) or Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) and you can also get more information here and here

Remember when NYT mocked India for this very thing and an TOI (a major indian newspaper) responded with this? :)

They were being racist asf and we were till respectful literally fuck you if you think ‘third world counties’ can’t be better than you

white people can and should reblog this

and shout out to the women engineers integral to the launch

“Indian staff from the Indian Space Research Organisation celebrate after the Mars Orbiter Spacecraft entered Mars’s orbit.

On November 5, 2013, a rocket launched toward Mars. It was India’s first interplanetary mission, Mangalyaan, and a terrific gamble. Only 40 percent of missions sent to Mars by major space organizations—NASA, Russia’s, Japan’s, or China’s—had ever been a success. No space organization had succeeded on its first attempt. What’s more, India’s space organization, ISRO, had very little funding: while NASA’s Mars probe, Maven, cost $651 million, the budget for this mission was $74 million. 

This was not the only success of the mission. An image of the scientists celebrating in the mission control room went viral. Girls in India and beyond gained new heroes: the kind that wear sarees and tie flowers in their hair, and send rockets into space.”

x

there’s a movie adaptation of this! it’s obviously more dramatized/they use different names but i really really loved the movie! it’s called mission mangal and it was the first time i had heard of this and i was so surprised that literally? no one talked about it??? what they accomplished is incredible.

ALSO, Mangalyaan launched in 2013 and was meant to be a 6 month mission. It’s been in orbit around Mars now for more than 5 years and has enough propellant to keep going for even longer.

“The kind that wear sarees and tie flowers in their hair, and send rockets into space.”

FUCK YES. THIS IS THE TYPE OF REPRESENTATION I’VE BEEN HERE FOR!!

I love how the dudes at back are pure happy!!

Mathematician. Leader. Heroine. Remembering Hidden Figure Katherine Johnson

Tonight, count the stars and remember a trailblazer. 

We’re saddened by the passing of celebrated #HiddenFigures mathematician Katherine Johnson. She passed away at 101 years old. 

An America hero, Johnson’s legacy of excellence broke down racial and social barriers while helping get our space agency off the ground.

Once a “human computer”, she famously calculated the flight trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American in space.

And when we began to use electronic computers for calculations, astronaut John Glenn said that he’d trust the computers only after Johnson personally checked the math.

As a girl, Katherine Johnson counted everything. As a mathematician, her calculations proved critical to our early successes in space travel.

With slide rules and pencils, Katherine Johnson’s brilliant mind helped launch our nation into space. No longer a Hidden Figure, her bravery and commitment to excellence leaves an eternal legacy for us all.

“We will always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics.” - Katherine Johnson 1918 -2020 

May she rest in peace, and may her powerful legacy inspire generations to come! What does Katherine Johnson’s legacy mean to you? Share in the comments. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com 

One of my favorite stories:

My mom was working as a lawyer when she was pregnant with my twin siblings. Late in her third trimester she had a court date. She asked the judge if it could be postponed due to her pregnancy but he refused saying she was “making a ridiculous excuse.” So she squeezed into the biggest maternity suit she could find and went to the courthouse. When she stood up in front of the judge, 8 months pregnant with twins and clearly in no condition to be standing for an extended period, the blood drained from his face. He tried to backtrack saying she could sit down, but being my mom, she chose to stand and glare at him for the whole damn hearing. He found in her client’s favor.

They renovated the office bathroom to be ‘eco friendly’ and replaced paper towels with a blower.  And got rid of all trash cans and other receptacles.  Yup, even the little bins inside the stall.  I and other women complained loudly, and were told that there wasn’t anything they could do about it.

So I took my used pads and threw them in the trash in the kitchenette area without being shy about it.  The men were grossed out.  Other women in the office were shocked, and were like ‘aren’t you ashamed to do that?  I just smuggled them home in my purse”

And I was like “I’m not ashamed.  The company should be ashamed to make me do this.”

We had bins in all the stalls the next day.

Qiu Jin (1875-1907) is considered a national heroine in China, seen as a martyr of feminism and republicanism.

She was a dedicated proponent of women’s rights, speaking out for their freedom to marry who they wanted or to pursue education. Her manifesto, “A Respectful Proclamation to China’s 200 Million Women Comrades”, condemned oppressive practices such as foot binding and received overwhelming popular support. She was captured and beheaded for her anti-government activities, at the age of only 31.

So much of geek/nerd culture has been shaped by women over the years, and yet people often overlook it all. They’ve not part of some new “SJW agenda,” they’ve been there since the beginning.

Take up space and don’t apologize!

Okay kids today we’re gonna talk about Edmonia Lewis

Edmonia was a sculptor in the 19th century, and was half African-American and half Native American. She was one of the first people of colour from America to earn international fame and success for her artwork. She started sculpting during the civil war and trained under some of the most influential abolitionist sculptors of the time.

Not only was she a successful WOC artist, but she sculpted other people of colour in the neoclassical style:

Forever Free (1867)

Old Arrow-Maker and his Daughter (1866)

The Marriage of Hiawatha (1866)

Do you know how rare it was in the 19th century to have a piece of artwork show black people or Native Americans without them being ‘savages’ or half naked? Let me tell you, it’s pretty damn rare.

She would purposely leave her women more clothed than her male figures to desexualise them, and I probably don’t need to tell you why that was important at this time (if you really want to see how white artists saw black women, look up American Slave and The Virginian Slave).

Unfortunately she was made to make her female figures look more European as she got backlash accusing her of inserting herself into figures BUT they’re still hugely impressive given that most famous sculptors at this time had teams of people working on their work and adding all the details by hand, whereas Edmonia did absolutely everything herself.

Basically I think about Edmonia Lewis a lot and I think more people should know about her.

I posted this YESTERDAY holy shit I’m so happy that so many people are getting to hear about her this is magical

File this under: Things i need for my next Toni Morrison article

I also really love how softly rounded and chubby the lines are.

This s the obituary of Zura Karuhimbi, who may have been over 100 years old when she died and protected hundreds of people during the Rwandan genocide. 

She did it by pretending to have magic powers. 

Picture with me for a moment the sheer gall necessary to do this. An old woman, living alone, stuffs her tiny house with people running from militias. And when the militias show up at her door covers herself with irritating plants, so that when the militia try to manhandle her it ‘burns’ and proves her powers. 

We’ve lost a legend.

This makes me so happy.

Hidden Figures (2016) dir. Theodore Melfi

This level of dedication

That’s a hugely important thing she did, but not all by a long shot! She was also an author, activist, and Black leader in Arkansas; she served as the president of the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP and even worked in the LBJ administration. In fact, Arkansas even has a Daisy Bates day - which was yesterday!

She and her husband also started the Arkansas State Press, a paper that highlighted civil rights news, way back in 1941, and it ran until a boycott by whites offended by the paper’s pro-integration stance shut it down in 1959. And when the Little Rock Nine needed a mentor and advisor, Bates was chosen - she not only walked them to school, she was the one who got them in in the first place:

Saudi Arabia gave women permission to drive and this is the first thing they do 😭

This shit’s harder than ANY post malone track

Somebody on twitter called her SaudiB

This track is hard

I saw that someone who speaks Arabic took a stab at translating it and it turns out she’s basically doing a PSA about safe driving rules and I fell in love

Lynne Cox is an accomplished American open water swimmer. Twice, she held the record for the fastest crossing of the English Channel. Cox was the first woman to swim the Cook Strait and the first to swim the Straits of Magellan and around the Cape of Good Hope. Cox swam the Bering Strait from American soil to Soviet soil in 1987, at the height of the Cold War. 

Look at her. 

I know open water swimming isn’t really glamorous, but Lynne Cox is arguably one of the greatest overlooked athletes of the 20th century. 

And quite possibly a mutant. 

She can withstand water temperatures that you or I would die from because of her training and her body’s unique reaction to cold (you know how the blood will leave your fingers and toes when it’s cold, to preserve heat? her whole body does that, pooling her blood in her core and insuring her body temperature stays toasty where it counts).

She funded the Bering Strait swim herself, clearing out her bank account when she couldn’t get corporate sponsors. After she succeeded (to almost everyone’s surprise: if you get in the Bering Sea without serious gear you generally just die) Gorbachev mentioned her during treaty talks with Nixon: “Last summer it took one brave American by the name of Lynne Cox just two hours to swim from one of our countries to the other. We saw on television how sincere and friendly the meeting was between our people and the Americans when she stepped onto the Soviet shore. She proved by her courage how close to each other our peoples live.“

She wasn’t just the first woman to swim the Strait of Magellan. She was the first person to make it across. 

On top of setting multiple world records, she swam a mile+ to the coast of Antarctica, in just a bathing suit, and did not die. 

She’s swum over 50,000 miles. 

And look at her. This is a photo from when she was young, at the peak of her career and setting records all over the world. She is a great athlete. She is a human who can do things most humans would die trying. I’m sitting here at 1 AM getting all teary eyed because this is the first time I’ve looked up a photo of her and I am so surprised, so gratified, so overwhelmed to find out that this world record setter, this literal superhuman, has nearly the same body type as me. 

Since they wouldn’t let her be a fantasy creature in a video game, she just did it in real life, I guess.

Anyone who thinks there is just one athletic body type isn’t paying attention during the Olympics opening ceremonies.

Her body type is optimized for her sport. The shape of her body and the presence of fat both provide insulation to keep her core warm while she swims.

A lot of open water swimmers aren’t this chunky, but that’s because most of them are actually triathletes, and their body type is a compromise between the ideals for the different sports.

There really is no one way to be fit and athletic. For some reason, we tend to get ourselves hung up on the body type of track and field athletes, especially that of marathon runners (who tend to carry almost no extra fat) as the ideal.

Dude HOLY FUCK she’s a badass.

She should have a statue. Not those confederate MFs.

Aug 24th, 2018: she turned 100! Congrats!!

She does have one. At WVSU.

That statue is amazing!