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Racing Turtles

@zenosanalytic / zenosanalytic.tumblr.com

"Why run, my little Phoenician?"
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roach-works
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doing-90mph-in-central-london

if he was still alive I know in my heart that Terry Pratchett would have done a bit about Igors and Igorinas doing gender confirmation surgery by now. going into a lab full of bubbling vials and picking out a penis from a tank the way you pick a lobster. that one, please. you gotta be careful though because they'll really try to upsell you into getting two or three installed. people going to the clinic as pairs and just having parts swapped out for a discounted rate. maybe you actually just trade brains, that's even easier. Igorth have already been doing that thurgery for thenturieth.

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heallbeecat
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pycnanthemum

Everyone knew it was best not to look too closely at Igor's jars.

Vimes was beginning to wish he had looked more closely at the most recent additions before Igor came lurching up the stairs to inform him:

"They have ethcaped, thir."

"Escaped. What has escaped, Igor."

"Thome of my.. appendageth, thir."

"Appendages."

"Yeth, thir. Of the... intimate variety."

"Of the intimate..." Vimes trailed off as the dawning horror overwhelmed his vocal cords.

He rallied. "Igor. HOW have they escaped? They are not known for their... perambulatory abilities."

"Really, thir? I've alwayth found them to have a mind of their own at timeth."

Vimes was staying calm. Yes. That was it. He was staying very calm. Definitely NOT thinking AT ALL about how Vetinari and... Good lord, The Times, would react to marauding pack of penises. Would it be a pack? Or would they go off on their own?

"I wath exthperimenting with cuthtom grown oneth, you know. For thothe who cannot grow their own."

"Err... what? Of course you were. I mean. Very good."

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jewishpangolin

Pictured: An Igor harvesting appendages

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carpe-mamilia

#[a loud crash is heard from the lab] #[another igor runs past with a giant butterfly net. stopping briefly at the door to shriek 'THE VULVATHS''] (via @the-wave-finally-broke)

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the-tao-of-fandom

It turns out to be a brilliant feat of advertisement, as the people too shy or uncertain to go visit Igor rightaway effectively get a chance to discretely window-shop in public.

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elodieunderglass

An unfortunate side effect being that a small girl, denied of her rightful need to be a Horse Girl by the limitations of being a native Ankh-Morpork child[1], would have adopted one of the larger Appendages of the pack and named it Free Willy. Her insistence that she could understand her pet through a bond of mutual sympathy was both touching and troubling, as was her announcement that Free Willy did not want to be attached to a governing body and forced into service, saddled with clothing, or made to perform tricks for audiences. With no Igor having the heart [2] to take it from her, the child was allowed to keep Free Willy, who lived for five healthy years in her family’s pigeon loft and eventually passed away from natural causes after a battle with another fighting cock. The child went on to write a well-acclaimed children’s book, The Willy that Would Be Free, which was, necessarily, a pop-up book.

[1] where an ordinary working class child CAN form a magical bond with a horse, in the form of a pie, labeled as beef.

[2] ha

#doing 9mph in central london#Classic#Followups#It Got Better#pycnanthemum#elodieunderglass#Terry Pratchett#Discworld#Igors#Genitalia#Gender Confirmation Surgery#appreciative reblogs#I'd imagine also there being allot of just chopping off heads and reattaching them to more appropriate bodies
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roach-works
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discoursedrome

they're always bringing experts or activists on the news to agitate about porn and there's a standard script for this that's like "I think sex education is important, I'm not anti-sex, but so much of this porn is violent and misogynistic if not outright illegal, and it's far too accessible to our children"

I want to see someone finally be brave enough to say that the government should just make its own porn for teenagers that accords with community values, so they don't have to go to these shady places to get it. I think the government porn would probably be pretty bad but I would be so eager to hear about the process of designing it. there would be so many stakeholders and consultations. in canada it would have to be bilingual

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dickgirlsdaily
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quendergeer

no-one would find it at all sexy at first but then in 20 years there'd be a thriving fetish scene where people develop elaborate codes and practices around culturally-embedded tropes from government porn

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quendergeer

guy who can only get off when his dom pretends to be badly dubbed into quebecois french

#yorickish#quendergeer#:D#It Got Better#discoursedrome#Government Porn#Porn#Classic#tumblr#appreciative reblogs
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perenial

love reading late 90s/early 2000s scholarship on the potential of the internet. "hey we shouldn't let venture capitalists get in on this" And Then They Did

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perenial

this was published in 2001

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scientia-rex

Oooooooof the crushing weight of people who were right but could not prevent the future they saw coming

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sashayed
#perenial#DiMaggio et al#The Internet#Classic#It Got Better#Cassandra#The Corporate Internet#Cookies#appreciative reblogs
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roach-works
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pregnantseinfeld

This probably sounds obvious, but I learned today that prisoners aren't protected by OSHA regulations, and that this is another reason why employers are so eager to utilize this modern slavery. It's only a couple cents an hour, less transportation costs than the overseas sweatshops, and if you want people to work with hazardous materials without proper training? That's fine too! Prison labor is the ultimate free market solution!

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anisetheapothecary

If you want to really change the world, prisoner rights and prison reform is the way to go. Removing the ability of the ruling class to effectively punish the population frees everyone to challenge them in meaningful ways. Arbitrary violence and incarceration is how they keep people scared and divided. There is no crime in our society that isn't generated by our society. Even the worst ones you can think of.

Prisoner rights are human rights. Prison abolition is mass freedom.

#pregnantseinfeld#elrondhubbardapothecary#US Politics#Prison Abolition#Prisoner Abuse#Slavery#US Police State#It got Better#appreciative reblogs
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roach-works
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haibane

so this fuckin samurai cut me in half a while ago but its like a really long delay so im still just going around doin my thing knowing that i might explode in a shower of blood at any moment

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goodest-bird

What if she didn’t. What if she missed for the first time in her entire career as a samurai and was too embarrassed to admit it. So much so that she sheathed her blade as regular and just walked away hoping that at some point you would die tragically and appoint that death to her. What if vauge posting was the only outlet she had for self expression.

#haibane#goodest bird#XD#The Maybe Sword#KILL SIX BILLION DEMONS#Shitposting#Samurai#Humor#Gr8 Art#it got Better#appreciative reblogs#uvu uvu
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a-book-of-creatures
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probablyasocialecologist
Spartans Were Losers
The U.S. military’s admiration of a proto-fascist city-state is based on bad history.
Foreign Policy
Despite Sparta’s reputation for superior fighting, Spartan armies were as likely to lose battles as to win them, especially against peer opponents such as other Greek city-states. Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War—but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed. Famous Spartan victories at Plataea and Mantinea were matched by consequential defeats at Pylos, Arginusae, and ultimately Leuctra. That last defeat at Leuctra, delivered by Thebes a mere 33 years after Sparta’s triumph over Athens, broke the back of Spartan power permanently, reducing Sparta to the status of a second-class power from which it never recovered. Sparta was one of the largest Greek city-states in the classical period, yet it struggled to achieve meaningful political objectives; the result of Spartan arms abroad was mostly failure. Sparta was particularly poor at logistics; while Athens could maintain armies across the Eastern Mediterranean, Sparta repeatedly struggled to keep an army in the field even within Greece. Indeed, Sparta spent the entirety of the initial phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Archidamian War (431-421 B.C.), failing to solve the basic logistical problem of operating long term in Attica, less than 150 miles overland from Sparta and just a few days on foot from the nearest friendly major port and market, Corinth. The Spartans were at best tactically and strategically uncreative. Tactically, Sparta employed the phalanx, a close-order shield and spear formation. But while elements of the hoplite phalanx are often presented in popular culture as uniquely Spartan, the formation and its equipment were common among the Greeks from at least the early fifth century, if not earlier. And beyond the phalanx, the Spartans were not innovators, slow to experiment with new tactics, combined arms, and naval operations. Instead, Spartan leaders consistently tried to solve their military problems with pitched hoplite battles. Spartan efforts to compel friendship by hoplite battle were particularly unsuccessful, as with the failed Spartan efforts to compel Corinth to rejoin the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League by force during the Corinthian War. Sparta’s military mediocrity seems inexplicable given the city-state’s popular reputation as a highly militarized society, but modern scholarship has shown that this, too, is mostly a mirage. The agoge, Sparta’s rearing system for citizen boys, frequently represented in popular culture as akin to an intense military bootcamp, in fact included no arms training or military drills and was primarily designed to instill obedience and conformity rather than skill at arms or tactics. In order to instill that obedience, the older boys were encouraged to police the younger boys with violence, with the result that even in adulthood Spartan citizens were liable to settle disputes with their fists, a tendency that predictably made them poor diplomats. But while Sparta’s military performance was merely mediocre, no better or worse than its Greek neighbors, Spartan politics makes it an exceptionally bad example for citizens or soldiers in a modern free society. Modern scholars continue to debate the degree to which ancient Sparta exercised a unique tyranny of the state over the lives of individual Spartan citizens. However, the Spartan citizenry represented only a tiny minority of people in Sparta, likely never more than 15 percent, including women of citizen status (who could not vote or hold office). Instead, the vast majority of people in Sparta, between 65 and 85 percent, were enslaved helots. (The remainder of the population was confined to Sparta’s bewildering array of noncitizen underclasses.) The figure is staggering, far higher than any other ancient Mediterranean state or, for instance, the antebellum American South, rightly termed a slave society with a third of its people enslaved.
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zenosanalytic

GEE, I wonder why our media, owned by rich aristocrats, would want us to think Sparta, an aristocratic oligarchy slave-state where only 15 out of 100 residents were considered human and only half of THOSE had political rights, was Awesome???

HMMMMMMMM

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pomrania

If you want to read more on why Sparta was just terrible on every conceivable level, I highly recommend the ‘This. Isn’t. Sparta’ series of posts by historian Bret Devereaux (also available in audio form). I’ll copy out here the conclusion:

When we started this series, we had two myths, the myth of Spartan equality and the myth of Spartan military excellence.  These two myths dominate the image of Sparta in the popular consciousness, permeating game, film and written representations and discussions of Sparta.  These myths, more than any real society, is what companies like Spartan Race, games like Halo, and – yes – films like 300 are tapping into.
But Sparta was not equal, in fact it was the least equal Greek polis we know of.  It was one of the least equal societies in the ancient Mediterranean, and one which treated its underclasses – who made up to within a rounding error of the entire society by the end – terribly.  You will occasionally see pat replies that Sparta was no more dependent on slave labor than the rest of Greece, but even a basic demographic look makes it clear this is not true.  Moreover our sources are clear that the helots were the worst treated slaves in Greece.  Even among the spartiates, Sparta was not equal and it never was.
And Sparta was not militarily excellent.  Its military was profoundly mediocre, depressingly average.  Even in battle, the one thing they were supposed to be good at, Sparta lost as much as it won.  Judging Sparta as we should – by how well it achieved strategic objects – Sparta’s armies are a comprehensive failure.  The Spartan was no super-soldier and Spartan training was not excellent.  Indeed, far from making him a super-soldier, the agoge made the Spartans inflexible, arrogant and uncreative, and those flaws led directly to Sparta’s decline in power.
And I want to stress this one last time, because I know there are so many people who would pardon all of Sparta’s ills if it meant that it created superlative soldiers: it did not.  Spartan soldiers were average.  The horror of the Spartan system, the nastiness of the agoge, the oppression of the helots, the regimentation of daily life, it was all for nothing.  Worse yet, it created a Spartan leadership class that seemed incapable of thinking its way around even basic problems.  All of that supposedly cool stuff made Sparta weaker, not stronger.
This would be bad enough, but the case for Sparta is worse because it – as a point of pride – provided nothing else.  No innovation in law or government came from Sparta (I hope I have shown, if nothing else, that the Spartan social system is unworthy of emulation).  After 550, Sparta produced no trade goods or material culture of note.  It produced no great art to raise up the human condition, no great literature to inspire.  Despite possessing fairly decent farmland, it was economically underdeveloped, underpopulated and unimportant.
Athens produced great literature and innovative political thinking.   Corinth was economically essential – a crucial port in the heart of Greece.  Thebes gave us Pindar and was in the early fourth century a hotbed of military innovation.  All three cities were adorned by magnificent architecture and supplied great art by great artists.  But Sparta, Sparta gives us almost nothing.
Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea.  An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience.  Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.
Sparta is not something to be emulated.  It is a cautionary tale.
Source: foreignpolicy.com
#pomrania#Bret Devereaux#Sparta#Classical Studies#History#Politics#Political Science#Authoritarianism#Aristocracy#informative reblogs#It got Better#Classic#Instant Classic
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a-book-of-creatures
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probablyasocialecologist
Spartans Were Losers
The U.S. military’s admiration of a proto-fascist city-state is based on bad history.
Foreign Policy
Despite Sparta’s reputation for superior fighting, Spartan armies were as likely to lose battles as to win them, especially against peer opponents such as other Greek city-states. Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War—but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed. Famous Spartan victories at Plataea and Mantinea were matched by consequential defeats at Pylos, Arginusae, and ultimately Leuctra. That last defeat at Leuctra, delivered by Thebes a mere 33 years after Sparta’s triumph over Athens, broke the back of Spartan power permanently, reducing Sparta to the status of a second-class power from which it never recovered. Sparta was one of the largest Greek city-states in the classical period, yet it struggled to achieve meaningful political objectives; the result of Spartan arms abroad was mostly failure. Sparta was particularly poor at logistics; while Athens could maintain armies across the Eastern Mediterranean, Sparta repeatedly struggled to keep an army in the field even within Greece. Indeed, Sparta spent the entirety of the initial phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Archidamian War (431-421 B.C.), failing to solve the basic logistical problem of operating long term in Attica, less than 150 miles overland from Sparta and just a few days on foot from the nearest friendly major port and market, Corinth. The Spartans were at best tactically and strategically uncreative. Tactically, Sparta employed the phalanx, a close-order shield and spear formation. But while elements of the hoplite phalanx are often presented in popular culture as uniquely Spartan, the formation and its equipment were common among the Greeks from at least the early fifth century, if not earlier. And beyond the phalanx, the Spartans were not innovators, slow to experiment with new tactics, combined arms, and naval operations. Instead, Spartan leaders consistently tried to solve their military problems with pitched hoplite battles. Spartan efforts to compel friendship by hoplite battle were particularly unsuccessful, as with the failed Spartan efforts to compel Corinth to rejoin the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League by force during the Corinthian War. Sparta’s military mediocrity seems inexplicable given the city-state’s popular reputation as a highly militarized society, but modern scholarship has shown that this, too, is mostly a mirage. The agoge, Sparta’s rearing system for citizen boys, frequently represented in popular culture as akin to an intense military bootcamp, in fact included no arms training or military drills and was primarily designed to instill obedience and conformity rather than skill at arms or tactics. In order to instill that obedience, the older boys were encouraged to police the younger boys with violence, with the result that even in adulthood Spartan citizens were liable to settle disputes with their fists, a tendency that predictably made them poor diplomats. But while Sparta’s military performance was merely mediocre, no better or worse than its Greek neighbors, Spartan politics makes it an exceptionally bad example for citizens or soldiers in a modern free society. Modern scholars continue to debate the degree to which ancient Sparta exercised a unique tyranny of the state over the lives of individual Spartan citizens. However, the Spartan citizenry represented only a tiny minority of people in Sparta, likely never more than 15 percent, including women of citizen status (who could not vote or hold office). Instead, the vast majority of people in Sparta, between 65 and 85 percent, were enslaved helots. (The remainder of the population was confined to Sparta’s bewildering array of noncitizen underclasses.) The figure is staggering, far higher than any other ancient Mediterranean state or, for instance, the antebellum American South, rightly termed a slave society with a third of its people enslaved.
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zenosanalytic

GEE, I wonder why our media, owned by rich aristocrats, would want us to think Sparta, an aristocratic oligarchy slave-state where only 15 out of 100 residents were considered human and only half of THOSE had political rights, was Awesome???

HMMMMMMMM

Avatar
zenosanalytic

#also fuck you Frank Miller(via@a-book-of-creatures) An Invaluable Addition ^v^ Thank you @a-book-of-creatures; Thank You uvu uvu

Source: foreignpolicy.com
#a book of creatures#Peer Review#Followups#It got Better#Mutual Appreciation#Frank Miller#Sparta#300(Graphic Novel)#appreciative reblogs
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arrows-for-pens
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stenchkow

Reminder that capitalism is the death of art

are you whiny bitches seriously acting like faster and more affordable and more accessible translation is bad? it’s a bad thing? it’s a thing we should be against now? is that seriously where we’ve arrived? can you people think for ten fucking seconds just ONCE?

machine translation is really good for many languages - esp the romance ones - and while its not perfect or anything, like.. i don’t know how to tell you it’s a good thing we’re able to instantly speak to people, 80% accurately, from anywhere in the world

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theothersarshi

I went through the notes on this post specifically to find this reply - or one like it. Because it has a point, and it’s a decent point for you, the person. But it’s also missing the info of the larger scale problem.

(Or it isn’t; as you rightly point out in the tags, it’s a capitalism problem. But I’ll expand on this point of “capitalism”. I need to rant. I need to scream.)

I’m a professional translator. I work in video games and software, with an occasional dash of literary translation. I’ve worked in translation proper, I’ve worked on editing other people’s work, I’ve led a couple of translator teams. I’ve worked the occasional miracle, working around some Really Dumb Choices the developers made.

(Spoiler alert: other languages have different syntax and grammar, if you give me a list of nouns to translate, and then give me the plural “s” to translate separately, this is not good. Even in English, woman -> womans is dumb.)

I am a fan of making things affordable and accessible. I am really happy that Google Translate and similar things can tell me the gist of what people are saying in conversations I only half care about. As the poster above says, it’s great! Not perfect, but ok!

Do you know what’s not great? Do you know what the OP in the original image means?

The client the original image is talking about isn’t you. It’s not some person on the internet trying to find out what someone said in a Post. The client they’re talking about is, essentially, the corporation: the translation agency, the publishing house, the IT giant.

You, the individual, do not have the power to demand how I do my job. If you come to me and say, “Sarshi, I want you to take this 300-word post, run it through Google Translate, and then charge me half of what you usually do for translating it”, I can take it or leave it.

But I get contacted by agencies - half of them want this. “We have a game, Sarshi! Just post-edit the results of a machine translation!” “We have support articles, Sarshi! We’re paying you a lot less to post-edit the results of machine translation!”

You say it’s ok to have 80% accuracy, and I feel you! Yes, sometimes it is! But companies are like “lol, this works”, too!

It’s happening over and over. And these aren’t… they’re not people, you know? They’re not Auntie May trying to figure out what the dough recipe she got from her niece in Indonesia says. They’re agencies, trying to increase their earnings by promising top quality to companies, then going, “gosh, we said we’d do it for cheap, how can we manage that?”

Or they can even be large companies themselves. Oh, you’ve spent a bajillion trillion dollars trying to create the CryptoNFTVirtualRealityAI hybrid that everybody knew wouldn’t work and now you panic because your earnings are lower than usual? Oh, and you want to “cut costs” by screwing over every contractor you have? Great. Just great.

This is going to screw you over - you, the individual. Not my client, not the translator’s client in general - the company’s client. The corporation is too big to really care about how you feel about their product - the employees individually might, but the company’s only metric is if you buy it or not. And the company makes decisions based on what brings the most money for the least cost.

So your hardware manuals might be crap and you might be in tears because you have no idea how to make your new appliance do the thing. You’ll go on YouTube and you’ll find a solution, and you’ll eventually figure it out. And maybe you’ll forget about the crap manual in time. So next time, they still won’t get a good translator, because they already have a cheaper solution that seems to work.

So your game looks like it was translated by a bunch of rats in a bunker and you can barely understand what anyone’s saying? Well, maybe they got a bottom-feeding agency overpromise that they totally have legit translators working for $1/hour. Pinky swear! Did you buy the game? You did. So… the system worked! They’ll hire the same agency again!

It’s like the clothing industry all over again. We could have better clothes, but it’s cheaper not to. They’re doing us a service by selling us shoes that won’t last a season, and T-shirts that will look like crap after washing them twice - they’re cheap, aren’t they? They’re affordable. Anyone can get clothes. (So you pay more in time are are more frustrated? Who’s counting!)

And meanwhile, it’s easy to forget things might be different. That we have the ability to create good things, pleasant things. That manuals can be easily readable, that games can sound great, that books can be awesome to read. It becomes harder to trust the market, harder to believe in quality, easier to say that this is normal, this is how things just are.

And if you speak English natively, well… You’re at a huge advantage. A lot of stuff is created by your people, for you. For countries like mine, that are small enough to import a lot, nearly everything is translated. I want you to imagine almost all movies subbed, every appliance made elsewhere (with menus needing translated and all), every app in a foreign language. And everybody who can cut costs will try to.

It’s not… it’s not great.

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repinipi
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tofucasserole

the left says recorder (the instrument) and the right says recorder (the sound recording machine) even though flauta dulce literally means sweet flute, so especially if you’re going from languages that aren’t English that’s another layer of mistakes to go through

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kaleidoscopicbullettrain

This isn’t to skim over the usage of AI translation in situations where the law is concerned. Companies are insisting that minor mistranslations are simple hiccups. Tiny things that humans can fix in post, rather than having present interpreters and translators.

A case where “I” is turned into “we” is the deciding factor of whether a case is treated fairly and accurately.

A machine cannot be held accountable for errors. They should not be used as replacements for human judgement and intelligence.

#kaleidoscopicbullettrain#^^^#~AI~#Translation#It got Better#appreciative reblogs
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some-triangles

The song that’s been in my head for the last month and change is Beeswing by the folk-rock legend Richard Thompson. It’s become kind of a modern folk standard - in Ireland, particularly, as far as I can tell. Richard Thompson is one of those people who you suspect of being a genius and also of being an asshole. He’s got a famous Bitter Divorce Record to his name but he may be the only person to have recorded one with the woman he was divorcing. He has never been as famous or as rich as his talent would suggest he should be and he seems very aware of it.  He’s one of my favorite guitarists.

Beeswing itself is your classic song about a girl which is actually about the guy singing, his regrets at the road not taken, growing old, etc.  Here’s Richard:

Man, I’d like to be able to play like that.

It isn’t the first result that comes up when you search for Beeswing on YouTube, though.  That one belongs to Christy Moore:

Christy is another folk-rock legend, but he’s even less rich and famous than Richard.  He’s a leftist and an Irish republican, also, whereas Richard is your standard liberal who wasn’t too proud to accept an OBE.  In this video Christy never mentions who wrote the song - he’s only singing it as a tribute to his dead friend, who liked it - and he also fixes it.  He removes Richard’s beautiful but showy guitarwork, rearranges the verses, snips little words here and adds them in there.  He streamlines it, clarifies it, takes out the weirdly violent part, and manages to make the song, in some way, about its putative subject.  I wonder if he did this pointedly or if he was just a craftsman at his work. 

In doing this he created a fork in the song’s history.  There are covers of both versions online - for the most part, the polished ones follow Richard’s, the raw ones follow Christy’s.   Some of the latter seem to be reaching for a third subject of the song, which isn’t wistfulness for a girl who symbolizes an imagined lost freedom or genuine tenderness for the actual woman but anger at the system that makes you pay such a steep price for the chains that you refuse.

So the Irish own this song now. 

This post doesn’t have a moral - it’s just me clearing out my latest mini-fixation to make room for the next one.  But it’s always good to remember that you lose ownership of your art the second you put it in front of other people, and that it doesn’t ultimately matter what you meant by it if someone looks at it and sees something better.

This is a lovely song and I went looking for more versions and found Grace Petrie’s, which re-interprets the song as being about the price of queer non-conformity:

Which I think is pretty neat.

#adreadfulidea#Grace Petrie#Beeswing(Song)#Queer as Folk#Music#Gr8 Art#appreciative reblogs#it got Better
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arrows-for-pens
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dreg-heap

God could you imagine how mad geologists must have been to slowly watch the "hey all the continents kinda fit like puzzle pieces :)" guy get proven right

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pickledfingers

Geologist here! forgive the spellling mistakes, I'm just excited because this is a really cool bit of geology history.

So Alfred Wegener first proposed his idea in 1912 in a paper and it was immediately slammed as being way too weird for geology. the arguments that Wegener brought up (similarities in species from different continents, and similar coast lines) were explained away in very hand-wavy terms.

similarities for species were explained by ocean levels falling and creating land bridges where these species would walk across and mingle with their bretheren from other continents, and continental coastlines were explained as "coincidental". He was panned fairly universally throughout geology, but he maintained some collegues who agreed with him.

One of these collegues was Arther Holmes, who wrote a geology text book in the 1930s that was so accurate, it was still being used as recently as the 1990s. (I found a second hand copy in a used bookstore and its one of my favourite books).

Plate tectonics as a theory started to gain more ground in the 40s and 50s but was still regarded as something of a fringe science. In the 1960s, one of these fringe scientists Rober Deitz (sp?) proposed a theory called Ocean floor spreading. Now, if the continents are moving away. then as the continents move, lava must be coming up through the crack and forming new ocean floor.

Some bright Canadian sparks called Frederick Vine, Drummond Matthews and Lawrence Morley saw this theory and decided to test it using paleomagnetism. in 1963 they released a paper where they coined the Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis. you see, their research has proven Alfred Wegener absolutely correct and they published this map to prove it

Not sure what those zebra stripes are? I will show you.

Every 100,000 years or so, the poles reverse. We are thought to be close to another pole reversal soon, in fact. As the new ocean mantle cools at the surface, the iron in the rock magnetizes to face north and stays magnetized in that direction afters it's cooled, even when the poles reverse again. the white zebra stripes are reversed polarity -the north pole is now the south pole- while the darker zones are magnetic poles as we know them -the north pole is in the north.

Electromagnetic readings of the rock show this zebra striping on either side of the pacific faults. The red in the map above is the youngest rock, 0-2 million years old. The darker green on the map is 8-10 million years old. This slow gradient stretching away on either side shows the slow consistent drift of the pacific plate.

The zebra striping also introduced the idea to us of pole reversals. I cannot express how revolutionary this paper was when it was released. these are ideas which are now considered basic building blocks of geological sciences.

Alfred Wegener died in 1930, so sadly he didn't live to see himself proven right, but his name lives on forever. He was one of the first geologists I learned about when I was starting learning about rocks. I have never heard the names of any of his critics.

And the best part is that there are STILL people who think plate tectonics is wrong. I had a collegue tell me to my face that vertical tectonics was the only thing that made sense. I have listened to a professor who supported the idea of expanding earth in the 70s (which attempts to explain away plate tectonics as growing pains as the earth gets larger), although this professor had since repented and seen the light.

The thing is though, is that science relies on these arguments to grow. Some arguments are stupid, and some arguments lead to whole new branches of science being created. Vera Rubin, the woman who came up with the idea of dark matter was laughed out of the room at the first conference she presented in. This was mostly sexism, but also partly because the hypothesis of an invisible universe-defining form of matter was definitely an off the wall theory at the time. I never learned about any of her critics, but I know her name.

TLDR: alfred wegener was awesome and he was proven right in the 60s, and science only works because everyone argues with everyone else

#pickledfingers#Geology#Alfred Wegener#Continental Drift#Plate Tectonics#Science#Followups#It got Better#informative reblogs#appreciative reblogs
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elbiotipo

Fuck that post going around saying "you can have coffee in your story without justifying it :) you don't need to explain everything :)" I want, no, I DEMAND a fully researched ethnobotanical paper on every single food item in your work, if you don't explain to me where did potatoes come from in your fantasy setting or don't explain how the industry of coffee works over interstellar distances with full detail you are doing things wrong and I personally hate you and I hate your stupid story, fuck you

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elbiotipo

Why are your stupid little wizards and knights eating potato stew in your dumb European middle ages fantasy world. Where did they get potatoes from. Where is the center of domestication of potatoes, do you have a fantasy Andean civilization? What are the social and economic consequences of having such a calorie rich crop in cold climates. I don't care about "themes" or "enemies to lovers with found family", I didn't ask about that. Where does your idiot space captain gets their shitty coffee from. Is it imported from Earth? Are there coffee growing worlds? Is it an alien species replacement with the same name? What are the social consequences of that? Don't try to change the subject, I'll stop pointing the gun when I want, I'm trying to have a conversation here,

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ever-so-slightly-monstrous

gold in them there tags

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paradoxcase

Sort of ironically for this post, I don't think Tolkien ever did establish where potatoes came from in Middle Earth, or why there are potatoes there. LOTR was supposed to be a kind of ancient European fairy tale, his in-universe introduction to the Red Book claims that it is the story of a time long past, presumably in the past of modern-day Europe, and there's no land analogous to the Americas in it, unless you go with the fan theory that Aman is the Americas. He carefully does not include any New World crops in his story, except potatoes, which are mysteriously present in the now-famous Po-Ta-Toes scene with absolutely no explanation for their inclusion.

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zenosanalytic

Yeah! Tho isn't 'Pipeweed' Tobacco as well?

#paradoxcase#Followups#Tolkien#New World Crops#Worldbuilding#The Lord of The Rings#It got Better#appreciative reblogs#reblog replies
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roach-works

What’s the point of grinding to the bone your whole life for money if you aren’t even gonna be there to spend it…

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scotoplanes

"The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being." -Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

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nopenopenopenopeitynope

“The thing about money is, we can always make more, so let’s go out to eat tonight!” —My dad, after being laid-off, working odd and probably demeaning jobs so we could have dinner.

“Ah, baby, I want to buy this for you, it’s not like I can take the money with me when I go.” —My mom, when she bought me new clothes while I was between jobs.

“There’ll always be a job out there you can work, but we’d prefer you happy instead.” —Both my parents on jobs (“I can always get ya a job ditch diggin! They’ll always need ditch diggers. Hard work, but no college necessary. I can talk to the Hall.”—My proud, union dad, enthused, three seconds later.)

“It doesn’t matter what they do with the money after you give it to them. Drugs, beer, it doesn’t matter, maybe that’s what they need? How do you know?” —My dad on giving money to the homeless.

“Nah, we’ll never make any money, my husband has morals.” —My mom’s friend, fondly reflecting on the fact her lawyer husband isn’t working for a big money firm.

“Don’t worry! I’ve got this!” My equally poor friend buying me dinner when my debt card declined.

“I know we didn’t have furniture in the living room when you were growing up, but—ha!—remember Balloon Ball?” —My dad reflecting on the made up, mock-volleyball game we’d play in the open living room, using balloons. He had used electrical tape to make the court.

“I’m sorry we could never take you anywhere greater growing up,” —My mom, reflecting on our “stay-cations.” (“Why?” I asked, reflecting on all our trips to the park, zoo, public swimming pools, libraries, free theater, two dollar movie days, and her and my dad right there with me and my brothers.)

Bring poor is hard and it’s not right that it happens, but I prefer it to the hustle because at the very least, poor taught me what love is and I won’t let a shitty job deny me that.

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i-say-ok

ok!!!

#nopenopenopenopeitynope#Internet Stories#Work#Money#Life#reddit#appreciative reblogs#It got Better
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roach-works
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titkoks

sesame street tarot

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honexjams
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cryptotheism

I love this dude. This is a masterful demonstration of cartomancy, even from an anti-theist standpoint. This person is able to understand and apply esoteric meanings to the sesame street cards on the fly, and assemble their oddball symbology into a coherent method of magic that produces reasonable advice.

#zmannzilla#TikTok#Video#Tarot#Sesamarot#Seasame Street#Cartomancy#Humor#Gr8 Art#appreciative reblogs#It got Better#pretty sure I've rb'd this before but not gonna look#u_u
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