ultralaser

Tiny furry philosopher

found it

Some of those drafted in have been threatened with a court martial for leaving

welp

new lock screen

A new University of Calgary study is predicting Russian interference in the federal election campaign to serve what it describes as the Kremlin’s long-term interest of competing against Canada in the Arctic.

The study’s author, Sergey Sukhankin, said in an interview that Moscow’s ability to inflict serious damage is relatively low because Canadian society is not as divided as countries targeted in past elections, including the United States presidential ballot and Britain’s Brexit referendum in 2016, as well as various attacks on Ukraine and the Baltic states.

“The Kremlin has a growing interest in dominating the Arctic, where it sees Russia as in competition with Canada. This means Canada can anticipate escalations in information warfare, particularly from hacktivists fomenting cyber-attacks,” writes Sukhankin, a senior fellow with the Jamestown Foundation, a U.S. think-tank, who is teaching at the University of Calgary.

cyberpunk is canada and russia having an information war over shipping and mining rights in the arctic ocean because climate change melts all the sea ice every summer

Can we talk about this?!

HEY remember in WWII when Jewish people were fleeing Germany and the USA put a quota on how many Jewish immigrants they would accept because they were worried there were too many Jewish people coming over to the USA???

Reminder that the USA has always been fucking garbage to immigrants and basic humanity

Here’s how you can help:

Please reblog this. There’s a lot of arguing in the reblogs/replies, but no links to actual concrete ways to become of help to these people. 

The photo above is the closest humanity has ever come to creating Medusa. If you were to look at this, you would die instantly. 

The image is of a reactor core lava formation in the basement of the Chernobyl nuclear plant. It’s called the Elephant’s Foot and weighs hundreds of tons, but is only a couple meters across.

Oh, and regarding the Medusa thing, this picture was taken through a mirror around the corner of the hallway. Because the wheeled camera they sent up to take pictures of it was destroyed by the radiation. The Elephant’s Foot is almost as if it is a living creature.

Friendly reminder that this blob of core material was so hot and dense, it melted/burned through three floors of the building before coming to rest in the lowest basement.

And there’s now a unique species of black mold that feeds off the gamma radiation it produces.

Is no one else seriously freaked out by that mold? No? Just me, then?

wiki article about the mold

LOVE that mold!

okay but

wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwhy was someone shooting it with a kalashnikov

dps check

I mean, the Elephant’s Foot is very very dangerous, but it wouldn’t kill you instantly. When it was first created about a minute of exposure would give you a fatal dose (x, x). That number is now around one hour. And yes, that photo was taken with mirrors, but you know which one wasn’t?

Yeah, this is a selfie. The guy set the timer on the camera and went and stood by it, and it produced this horrifying image that now haunts my dreams. The reason all the photos from Chernobyl are grainy and poor-quality, by the way, is due to radiation. The cameras were fine; radiation just… does that.

Anyway, that guy’s name is Artur Korneyev- and I use ‘is’ because he’s still alive! He helped to build the original sarcophagus which encased reactor 4 after the meltdown, and kept going back inside with reporters to be like ‘look how fuckin weird this is’. He helped plan the New Safe Confinement which now surrounds the sarcophagus, and would probably have helped build it too if they didn’t full-on ban him.

A quote:

Possibly the coolest guy alive? I’m tempted to think so.

Honestly, I feel like Chernobyl has been shunted into this category of like, ‘a lot of innocent and naive people died horribly’, when in reality a lot of tough as fuck people saved everybody else. The oft-told story of the ‘suicide mission’ to dive into the reactor and open the valves of the pool? Yeah, all three of the men who dove lived. One died in 2005 of heart failure; the other two are still alive.

A total of 31 direct and 15 indirect deaths are thought to have occurred from the Chernobyl disaster. Long-term deaths are… difficult to measure. Oh, and there’s a few hundred people still living in the exclusion zone.

If you’re at all interested, I really recommend reading up about Chernobyl- and, in particular, what was done to contain it and deal with the radiation. This is a beautiful write-up, and the wiki page is also worth checking out.  A lot of people did absolutely incredible work and it goes unrecognised most of the time.

And yeah, fungus is always the fucking weirdest.

I know very little about the Chernobyl incident beyond the basics, but finding out that they built a sarcophagus to contain part of it is metal as fuck and I’m into it

“In Russian, Baba Yaga’s name is not capitalized. Indeed, it is not a name at all, but a description—“old lady yaga” or perhaps “scary old woman.”  ere is often more than one Baba Yaga in a story, and thus we should really say “a Baba Yaga,” “the Baba Yaga.” We do so in these tales when a story would otherwise be confusing. We have continued the western tradition of capitalizing Baba Yaga, since the words cannot be translated and have no other meaning in English (aside perhaps from the pleasant associations of a rum baba).  ere is no graceful way to put the name in the plural in English, and in Russian tales multiple iterations of Baba Yaga never appear at the same time, only in sequence: Baba Yaga sisters or cousins talk about one another, or send travelers along to one another, but they do not live together.  e first-person pronoun “I” in Russian, ‘ia,’ is also uncapitalized. In some tales our witch is called only “Yaga.” A few tales refer to her as “Yagishna,” a patronymic form suggesting that she is Yaga’s daughter rather than Yaga herself. (That in turn suggests that Baba Yaga reproduces parthenogenetically, and some scholars agree that she does.)  The lack of capitalization in every published Russian folktale also hints at Baba Yaga’s status as a type rather than an individual, a paradigmatic mean or frightening old woman.  This description in place of a name, too, could suggest that it was once a euphemism for another name or term, too holy or frightening to be spoken, and therefore now long forgotten.”

— Sibelan Forrester, from her introduction to Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales

# WHOEVER MADE THIS IS GOING TO BE FUCKING TAKEN OUT BY THE GODDAMN KGB

This is it. The video that made memes illegal in Russia. Reblog it every day to piss Sadimir Putin off.

guys this is part of history now. legislative and cultural history. there will be law students and cultural anthropologists alike debating this video and it’s aftereffects in the future and that is fucking wild

It’s a pine fall day today in Russia.

Things just happen in Russia in a unique way that I’m not sure can ever be explained. Like how a fucking meteor landed in the middle of the Russian wilderness and resulted in the equivalent of a nuclear bomb going off but no one really even noticed.

russia requiring drivers to have dashcams for insurance purposes is literally the best law ever enacted bc we get to see shit like this

The fact that they try to run the windshield wipers

Capitalism.webm

I’ve been trying to find this clip for a long time now.

Nicholas Roerich Kalmakov (Russian, 1873 - 1955)