nowthatsanairship:

asdanders:

lllilililliliililiiiiiililili:

I can’t remember which class I heard it but I once heard a presentation that was so jarring at first and eventually became one of the most romantic stories I was ever told and one of the reasons why I take great offense to people who believe science is without romance or spirituality.

If I remember correctly the presentation started off with,  "What’s the most important thing in human biology? The ocean.“

Quite a hook. The lecturer went on to explain that early life was of course aquatic and once multicellularism arose eukaryotic life started evolving systems that were more and more complex. However at every stage chemical transport was still largely dependent on saltwater bathing the cells of the organism at all times. Additionally seawater is slightly alkaline so it acts as a buffer that maintains protein in a way that pure water cannot.

So how did we move to land and how could Homo sapiens have appeared? The evolution of circulatory systems and blood. You see, blood serves the purposes that the saltwater did when it came to supporting cellular transport and stability. The beautiful and romantic thing the lecturer suggested is that we carry our evolutionary history wherever we go.

The blood in your veins is your body’s remembrance of the sea from which we all came.

@avialae

“At the Edge

of the Ocean

I have heard this music before

saith the body.” –Mary Oliver

jumpingjacktrash:

idiopathicsmile:

one time i was hanging out with these two friends of mine, women i admire very much, and we reached this twilight zone moment where we realized that each of us had, at one point:

• dated a man who treated us very badly
  
• and for whom we made many sacrifices
  
• and who we defended to our friends
  
• because we needed to be supportive
  
• of his “genius”
  
• yes, he treated us badly but he was so smart and talented that maybe it was unfair to expect him to play by society’s rules, we told ourselves
  
• and it felt kind of embarrassing to demand something as gauche as kindness (ugh) or maturity
  
• from a “genius”
  
• we lived in fear of being The Nagging Girlfriend/Wife Who Doesn’t Understand Her Man’s Unique Vision. 
  
• you know, the woman from the first half of any biopic about a great man. the first wife, the one he divorces before act two.
  
• instead we dreamed of being The Good, Supportive Girlfriend/Wife Who Knows Sometimes You Must Make Compromises. 
  
• you know, the woman from the later half of any biopic about a great man. the second or sometimes third wife, depending on how long he lived or how many affairs he had.
  

it was genuinely chilling, because the longer we talked, the more it felt like all three of us had been handed the same invisible and very detailed script. we are all extremely liberal feminists and yet we’d still bought the whole narrative hook line and sinker, and i don’t think any of us fully realized how fucked up it was until we heard it from each other’s mouths. 

i should note, maybe, that these two friends of mine are two of the most brilliant, talented, competent people i know. they were, in both cases, just as brilliant as the boy they sacrificed for. also they were, in both cases, capable of maintaining this brilliance while still tending to their own needs like an adult and treating the people around them with a fundamental level of respect.

so in case it helps anyone out there right now, struggling white knuckled to last into the second half of an imagined Great Man biopic: there is no level of intelligence or skill high enough to exempt a man (or a woman or anyone anywhere else on the gender spectrum) from the basic requirements of human decency. i don’t care if he is moving shit around with the power of his mind like matilda, he still has to say “please” and “thank you” and consider the feelings of the people around him. if he cannot or will not do these things, he is not a genius, he is a baby. AT BEST.

also, you are not the love interest of this movie. you are the fucking protagonist.

you are not the love interest of this movie. you are the fucking protagonist.

kianahsaro:

yeahwrite:

erinburr:

soemily:

sofriel:

logicandgrace:

More tidbits I’ve found while researching

• tumblr has a sad-boner for the burning of the library of alexandria
• which was not actually one burning but several
• and while the Library of Alexandria was an immense historical and national treasure, a lot of ppl tend to forget about the other book and library burnings that occurred in antiquity
• Places like the library of Nalanda, in India, which contained an elaborate classification system to hold what was then seen as the largest collection of Buddhist literature
• and the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, which contained Greek and Arabic works on mathematics and astronomy to zoology and cartography
• and more recently, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (no, that does not mean sexual witchcraft) which was burned by the Nazis b/c the majority of tomes dealt with same sex relationships and gay rights and acceptance. 
• and omg, this makes me so mad. The Libraries of Fisheries and Oceans in Canada has all its collection thrown away in an attempt to save taxpayer money and on the hope that all of its material was digitized. Only 5 to 6% was.
• and the Saeh library in Lebanon, which was burnt b/c of terrorism.
• Book burnings are happening right now, y'all.

Not to mention how the Spanish systematically destroyed the entire literary output of whole societies in Mesoamerica, to the point where we only have a handful of their codices today

We should talk, too, about the heroism of those trying to save books from violence, not least because the deliberate destruction of cultural artifacts is evidence of genocide. A few libraries not mentioned above:

• The National Library of Bosnia, located in Sarajevo, which was destroyed in August of 1992 by Serb forces. It was targeted with incendiary shells, and over a million books testifying to Bosnia’s multicultural history were lost in the resulting fire. Aida Buturović, a young librarian, was killed by sniper fire while trying to carry books from the burning building. The Oriental Institute, housing the majority of Sarajevo’s Islamic manuscripts, was destroyed that May, but it wasn’t the first library burnt in Sarajevo: during World War II, the Nazis decimated the collection of La Benevolencija, one of the oldest Jewish organizations in the city.
  
• The Ahmed Baba Institute in Timbuktu, which was burned in January 2013 by Tuareg rebel forces fleeing the city, who had been using the library as a barracks. The fire destroyed 4,000 manuscripts - but Abdel Kader Haïdara, a librarian, saved 400,000 more from libraries all over the city by smuggling them out in the preceding months. He had help, and the ‘book rustlers’ of Mali - who risked their lives to do it - saved 800 years of West African history.

And let us not forget Alia Muhammad Baker, the head librarian of Al Basrah Central Library, who risked her life to save the books when no one else in the Iraqi government gave a damn.  By the time the invading US and UK forces had blown the building, she and her book-smuggling-food-service-cadre had taken almost ¾ of the books over the seven foot perimeter fence and into a nearby restaurant.  Except, of course, for the books about Saddam Hussein.  Those, they left.

“In the Koran, the first thing God said to Muhammad was ‘Read,’ ” she said.

:(

@anachronisticandimpulsive @edderkopper