ultralaser

see here’s the thing: units of time can in fact be converted to units of distance.  According to general relativity, time is not a distinct entity from space, but rather another dimension in space, so they can be measured in the same units.  

the problem, though, is that the conversion factor between distance and time is the speed of light.  So 12 minutes works out to about 133,920,000 miles.  In other words, these dogs are about 150 times bigger than the sun.   

Good.

I don’t know enough about relativity OR dogs to dispute this

US Elevation.

by @cstats1

man the Appalachian mountains really aren’t shit huh

The Rockies are new, young and virile and fresh from the Laramide orogeny, tall and lanky teenagers on the geological scale. the Appalachian mountains are old, formed hundreds of millions of years ago before dinosaurs walked the Earth. They are ancients, elders, witnesses to half a billion years of life coming and going. To be tall is not a virtue. To be small is not a sin. The Appalachians are eroding under the weight of time, slowly shrinking and returning to the Earth from which they sprang. Appreciate them while they are still here.

I do want to say real quick again about the age of the Appalachians…

They said “before dinosaurs,” but we have a cave here that began forming between 450 million to 550 million years ago.

There are no bones in that cave. No fossils. No nothing.

That’s because this cave began forming before bones existed on land, and had only just started to exist in the ocean. Shellfish hadn’t evolved yet. Limestone, which forms many caves, was just starting to become a more prevalent rock.

The mountains aren’t older than dinosaurs. They are older than bones.

see that little lump up at the top of minnesota? the sawtooth mountains? so small most places would just call them hills?

those are over a billion years old.

that’s why they’re so small. they’re the last ancient remnants of a lava flow 5 miles thick. the lava didn’t kill any dinosaurs. or any fish. or any animals at all. because there were no animals. you know what there was?

algae.

those mountains were 5 miles tall when the most advanced life on earth was algae.

so i’m just gonna go ahead and keep calling them mountains, even though all you need to climb them is hiking shoes and a nice afternoon. because a place where you can crouch down and touch basalt that was lava before leaves were invented deserves some respect.

The earth is unfathomably ancient, and you garner no love from her when you insult her eldest children.

not only that, the Appalachians predate the Atlantic Ocean and were fragmented. they stretch across three continents, as Atlas in Africa and Caledonians in Europe as you can see here:

the Appalachians are way way old. the fossils that ARE found in these ranges are ancient marine beings, whose fossil remains predate the anatomical structures of beings migrating to land for the first time. THAT’S how old the Appalachians are.

show the elders some respect, they have witnessed eons and are returning to the land from which they grew, it’s the kind of the passage of time on a scale that our human lives could not even begin to comprehend.

*deep breath in*

So are you telling me that… life is old there?

Younger than the m–

Fun little thing about medieval medicine.

So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.

It’s easy to take the magic words as superstition, but they’re important.

The length of time it takes to say a paternoster was a typical method of reckoning time in the Middle Ages. It’s likely that whoever wrote this remedy down was thinking of it both as a prayer and a timespan and that whoever read it would have understood it the same way.

I wonder if this shows up in other historical areas besides medicine?

I ask because I have a very Italian, very Catholic friend who was once describing how she makes pizzelles. They’re cooked in a specific press, similar to a waffle iron, long enough to get light and crispy but not burnt, and in her own words: “I don’t know the exact time it takes to cook them in seconds, but I usually do either two Hail Mary’s or an Our Father and a Glory Be.”

I would be extremely surprised if medieval people didn’t use prayers while cooking. You don’t want to roast an egg for too long, have it explode, and get hot yolk in your eye. :P 

I know that church bells were definitely used as timekeepers. 

Before oven thermometers existed, one way to check the temperature of your oven was to stick your hand inside and recite an Our Father. The length of time before you snatch your hand out was timed by how far you’d gotten in the prayer. The shorter the time, the hotter the oven. So you knew that if you wanted a hot oven to bake bread, you wanted your hand out by “kingdom” (for example) but to slow cook a stew, you might want the oven cool enough to get to “trespasses”.

This popped up in “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook” as well, though there the timing method wasn’t prayer but X verses of “Where Has All The Custard Gone?”

Other timing methods are “a while” (approx. 35 mins) and “a good while” (variable, up to 10 years, which the book suggests is a bit long to let batter rest before making pancakes…)

All absolutely standard, and also varied from region to region. The use of prayer was more common than most, since the Catholic church had a monopoly on… well, pretty much everything. And all the prayers were in Latin, and at a specific cadence, so the effect is similar to watching the second hand on a clock today.

god i miss that stupid, brilliant show

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

via 10/10

#hey real quick #what the fuck

[x]

OH NO TIME KEEPS HAPPENING! [ via vihart - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc8sWN_jNF4 ] #vihart #maths #time #existentialism https://www.instagram.com/p/BsFIrQVH4rD/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=11ci3cilwhdqm

oh no time keeps happening!

via dragon scales by vihart [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc8sWN_jNF4&feature=youtube_gdata_player ]

this is the only relevant way to look in 2019

I’m not sure if Calvinists fall into the realm of Methodist, but I’ve seen a lot of overlapping writing that discusses their role in shaping the idea of [capitalist] production (and consequently including *some* form of suffering) as we now have it. What I’ve seen dovetails quite neatly with this

^^

THEY WERE MISSING FOR FUCKING YEARS OMG, THIS ALWAYS UPSETS ME SO MUCH

I always see the discussion that many days, months, years have passed during this story. 

I present to you a different idea.

There’s several themes behind Spirited Away: Capitalism’s effect on Japan, Environmental issues, and notably, Chihiro’s coming of age story.

From what I know, the idea of time passing differently in spirit worlds, is more based on western stories of the fae. 

But something more common in Japanese folklore is spirit trickery/deception. Or more accurately. What you see, isn’t always what’s actually there.  Chihiro starts this story as a young child, before her coming-of-age arc, that more or less forces her to become ‘an adult’. More accurately. The challenges she faces makes her mature as a person. What’s the most common thing in folklore? Children see what’s actually there.

Keep reading

A great example of why you don’t have any idea what is happening in the world around you. I don’t generally blog this stuff but, you Should know Time Magazine is not the only media to do this. .

I HAD NO CLUE THIS WAS HAPPENING AND I AM SO ANGRY

american schools teach about other countries’ propaganda, but look at this shit.

Did you guys know that the first Canadian deaths in the war in Afghanistan happened in 2002 when an American pilot dropped a bomb on some Canadian soldiers doing training exercises

killed 4 people and injured 8

Did you know this? Probably not because boy does your country like to brainwash about their fucking military being the greatest and most important and amazing fucking thing

Americans, we get more news about your country than you do, because gosh diddly darn does your country ever like to hide things from you and keep you stupid.

The misinformation and ignorance of the American public is manufactured and deliberate as a means of social control