headspace-hotel:

oftengruntled:

headspace-hotel:

headspace-hotel:

oh yeah are we gonna talk about how the basic sand/silt/clay soil diagram is super misleading?

I feel like it’s got to be a relic of like, the 1940’s that has just stuck around in the same way other outdated models have.

Sand, silt and clay aren’t ingredients, they’re particle sizes, and no amount of combining them will make soil if there’s no organic matter.

I’m looking up soil types and finding websites full of the wrongest statements ever.

Could you explain what’s wrong with those statements?

Well, basically, clay, sand and silt refer to sizes of mineral particles.

Clay being the smallest, and sand being the largest. It keeps going—there’s gravels, and cobbles, even. (The definitions of these terms are actually very contentious in geology.)

Chalk is not a particle size at all, it’s a carbonate rock. Soils that form on top of carbonate rocks are generally pretty alkaline. Alkaline is a “type” of soil but it’s got fuck all to do with the previous three.

Peat is what forms when organic matter decays in anoxic conditions in a wetland. It stores carbon. It’s neat.

The crucial problem here is that soil is not minerals. It contains minerals, but no amount of combining sand, clay and silt will create soil, ever. Adding sand to a clayey and silty soil doesn’t make better soil, it makes some kind of evil, useless concrete.

The organic matter is the crucial component. Even that’s understating it. Healthy soil doesn’t just “contain” organic matter, it is Literally Alive, full of microbes, mycelium, roots, and bugs.

Soil isn’t a substance. You can’t create it by stirring up ingredients. It’s a living metropolis, almost an organism. It’s full of order and communication. Soil is the plants that grow in it and the fungi that breaks down the plants when they die. Ants are a type of fully autonomous soil particle

official-data:

marzipanandminutiae:

nemmica:

I met a baby the other day who taught me that kids aren’t learning the thumb-and-pinky-out gesture for “phone” anymore. She puts her flat, open palm up to her ear and babbles into it, simulating a flat and rectangular smartphone.

It’s so interesting that a lot of seemingly obsolete hand motions still exist, though

very few people wear wristwatches, but tapping one’s wrist is still a nearly universal gesture for “what time is it?” or “hurry up”

I used classic corded phones for only a very brief time in my life (before we got those more rectangular-shaped cordless ones for my parents’ landline) and first saw a car without power windows when I was in college, and yet I’ve always used the pinky-and-thumb gesture for “call me” and the circling-fist gesture for “roll down your window.” I’m 24, so my childhood was the late 90s and early 2000s, but I still use gestures that indicate technology either gone or on its way out when I began forming reliable memories

it also makes me wonder how people indicated time or hurrying before wristwatches. did they somehow pantomime a pocket watch? what gestures have we lost as technology marches on? and since video didn’t exist for most of human history, how might we learn what they were? like the contents of the third Georgian spice jar or the location of Punt, nobody would think to write any of it down

I just love history so much

The ASL sign for phone is based on the pinky-and-thumb gesture. Presumably that will continue on for a while, with future generations seeing it as an arbitrary sign.

And then there are words like “rewind” that no longer make literal sense. Filmmakers still use “cut” long after actual physical film that can be cut fell out of use. We talk about cutting and pasting on computers and use a floppy disc icon for “save”.

Fossilized metaphors are the best.