chocosaurus-rex:

the-awkward-turt:

earthy-phoenix:

taigas-den:

anerdyfeminist:

shinxgazelling:

blogquantumreality:

superlology:

sportsgoth:

I know there’s a lot of like, younger teenagers that follow me so check this out, if this is your first time driving in winter, don’t just stamp on the brake pedal to stop, if you’re on ice you’ll continue to slide for quite some distance and could possibly hit something/someone

ease into it, like small pumps on the pedal. And brake earlier, like give yourself some room because even if you’re driving slow and braking correctly you’re still probably gonna slide a bit 

Remember the 3-second rule you learned in driver’s ed? Follow it. Give yourself AT LEAST 3 seconds. On slippery roads, give yourself five. Or (and this is one I learned from my mother), for every 10 miles you’re going, give yourself a car length. So if you’re going 25, give yourself 2.5 car lengths. If you’re doing 55, give yourself 5.5. This is crazy good at estimating how far you’ll need to stop on slippery roads if you absolutely must slam the brakes to avoid hitting a car or an animal. (Seriously. I was on I-66, hit a patch of black ice on a downhill, and the car in front of me was stopped. I hit the pavement doing close to 90 and barely managed to avoid a crash. If I was following the 3-second rule I would have totaled both of our cars.)

ALSO. If you hydroplane/skid on ice and end up spinning in circles, TURN YOUR STEERING WHEEL IN THE DIRECTION OF THE SKID AND SLOWLY STRAIGHTEN. Do not - DO NOT - turn your wheel the other way to try to correct, because it won’t work.

Be safe.

It’s also super important to know if your car has ABS or not, because this will change the required behavior to try and correct out of a skid. The owner’s manual for your car will indicate what the proper procedure is, because ABS will “pulse” the brakes to try and keep the wheels from locking up, so it will be ineffective if you use the older method of pumping the brakes to keep from locking the wheels up.

Also, Don’t jerk your wheel or over correct. If you slide, just turn your wheel a bit to straighten out. Ys, it will take time. But over correction is far more dangerous. 

If there’s a big, open parking lot you can access after a snow/ice storm drive your car in it. Try to spin out a little (the lot needs to not have tons of poles and cars in it. Let me reiterate that again.)

Get a feel for what it feels like to cause spinning out, prevent spinning out, and properly (not over!) correcting a spin. This is the best way to prepare. I heard and read advice like the above and that’s great but I had no idea how to really do it all correctly until my dad took me to our church lot and let me practice.

I found out all cars after the 80s have ABS automatically built in. I personally hate ABS. in my first car it would consistently make me slide out. Whether I pumped the brakes or slowly pushed them or hit them, my car would always skid. I also had shit tires and a lemon for a car but I hate ABS.

That’s another thing: tires. Make sure you have tread. If you’re not sure, have a place like AutoZone look for you.

In CO, a lot of us keep sand bags in our cars to keep the weight in the back so we have a lesser chance of fishtailing.

AVOID CURBS WHEN THERE’S SLUSH. As much as possible. That slush in the curb will grab your car and pull you in.

If you’re driving on the hiway, please go slower than the established speed limit in dangerous conditions.

And if you drive a manual: USE IT, THIS IS ITS TIME TO SHINE.

All this stuff! Also water tends to collect at the bottom of hills so those places (and shady spots) are more likely to be icy. Stay calm and go slow.

this is the time of year you will want to store a large candle, lighters, and some blankets in your car and also water and non-perishable snacks. You will also want cheap cat litter.

If you get stuck, dig out the snow and fill the space with cat litter. you should be able to get out. If you wreck and the cat litter does not free you, stay in your car and bundle up. Do not get out. If you wrecked, chances are someone else will too. Don’t get killed because you think standing outside is any better than sitting your happy ass in the back seat and chilling. 

Don’t waste your battery. If you can get to a convenience store, go there. Otherwise, light your candle, bundle up, and wait for your called help to arrive. If you need heat, turn your car on, blast it at full power for a few minutes and then shut your car off. 

Sometimes locals will be driving around in their 4WD vehicles helping people to get unstuck. Don’t decline the help, those are good people. If they get to you before the people you know, call your people and let them know help has arrived and you will call them once you are moving again.

If you drive stick, don’t drive in 1st gear unless you are moving at a literal crawl. It’s not smooth enough to make it safer than using 2nd gear. Just use 2nd gear, even when coasting down hills. Let your low gear maintain your speed. If you have 4WD, use the 4 lo setting, not 4 hi. 4 lo is what keeps the vehicle at a crawl and keeps you from losing it.

Do not under any circumstances try to pass anyone. just because you’re feeling confident doesn’t mean you can handle it. stay behind the fucker doing 5 mph all the way to your destination. They’re saving your ass by doing that. Always keep your tires driving in the tread marks on the road. Don’t drive on the snow, don’t drive on the slush. It will pull you off of the road faster than you can blink. watch the car in front of them, see what happens to them so you know what to anticipate. if you end up being point man (in front of a line of cars), ignore everyone behind you and focus strictly on the road. Everyone behind you is looking at you for guidance essentially.

If your car is front wheel drive, this will be easier for you, but don’t take that as a free pass. Take the long route if it means you avoid more hills. Drive slow even if it means you’re late. If it isn’t important as hell, do not go out, simple as that.

Take the interstate. People are driving slow enough that even the worst anxiety will be fine on the interstates. The interstates are what each state’s department of transportation works on clearing first, so it is your best bet. even if people are going 70 on the interstate, absolutely no one will judge you if you go slower than that in the snow.

If it starts to snow and you have somewhere to be in the morning, go cover your car in a fitted bed sheet or a tarp. Seriously. Shit is significantly easier when you can pull that off and your car is all not covered in ice and snow and you’re ready to go brave the roads. If you get ice on your windows/windshield/mirrors, under no circumstances should you use water to try and remove the ice. Turn your car on, turn the temperature to the mid setting, and set it on full blast on the windshield. Work away with an ice scraper and nothing more. You can crack the glass if you use water or straight hot air.

Also I was always told to turn into the skid? I’ve hydroplaned more than my fair share of times and that has always saved my ass, even with bald ass fucking tires. Basically if your front end goes to the right, turn your wheels to the left. Point them the direction you were initially going before you started turning. Pointing your wheels with the turn will land you in the ditch or will spin you worse. If you start sliding, turn into the skid, let off of the gas, and DO NOT TOUCH YOUR BRAKES. Coast until you correct or come to a stop.

When all is said and done and the snow and ice is gone, wash your car ASAP. The salt and brine on the roads (that white stuff that coats your car) will eat away at your paint.

why-animals-do-the-thing:

kaijutegu:

Really? You’re really going to say this? 

First off: see this? 

This is my masters’ degree in anthropology. I’d show you my BA, but it’s at my parents’ house. I’m three and a half years into a PhD in physical anthropology. I’ve been employed to do physical anthropology at one of the world’s best natural history museums. My area of study? Teeth and diets. I’m not here to argue veganism or vegetarianism, I’m here to tell you, point by point, why you’re devastatingly misinformed about our place in the primate family tree, along with my peer-reviewed sources behind the jump. I know we live in a “post-truth” society so maybe being presented with the overwhelming consensus of the scientists who currently work with this material is meaningless to you, and honestly, this probably isn’t going to make a bit of difference for you, but I can’t let this slide. Not in this house built on blood and honor. And teeth.  

1. The evidence for being closely related to chimpanzees is vast and well-understood thanks to advances in DNA analysis. We share a huge amount of DNA with them, and not just repeating patterns in non-coding DNA. We have numerous genes that are identical and likely diverged around 7 million years ago, when Sahelanthropus tschadensis was roaming the earth. S. tschadensis was a woodland species with basal ape and basal human-line traits. The most notable was the positioning of the foramen magnum towards the central base of the skull and not emerging from the back suggests bipedality. This, along with other traits such as small canines worn at the tip, which implies a reduced or absent C/P3 honing complex (the diastema), suggests that this is actually a basal trait and the pronounced diastema we see in other species was a trait that came later. But more on that later- back to chimps and what we mean by sharing DNA. Our chromosomes and chimp chromosomes are structured far more like each other than other mammals. Furthermore, the genes located on these chromosomes are very similar. Chromosome 2, for instance, is nearly identical to two chimpanzee chromosomes. (Chromosome 2 in humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans is different from Chromosome 2 found in apes and is actually the remnant of an ancient mutation where Chromosome 2 and 3 merged- you can see that from its vestigial centromeres and the genes found on it. We can’t get DNA from fossil material, but Neanderthal and Denisovan subfossils have demonstrated that this reduced chromosome count- we have one fewer pair than apes- is a typical trait of the Homo genus). Here’s a side by side comparison of Human and chimpanzee chromosomes. 

Gene coding regions are colored- bands at the same place mean that there’s two identical genes at that locus. Our similarities to lemurs, on the other hand, aren’t on homologous chromosomes. We have similar coding around the centromeres but the genes express themselves differently. The structure of non-ape primate genes is also significantly different; when the first chromosomal comparisons were done between humans and lemurs back in the 1990s, it was discovered that lemurs have much more highly-concentrated heterochromatin at their centromeres, whereas the structure of human and chimpanzee centromeres is similar. The major differences in chimp and human DNA are in the noncoding regions; most of our genes have identical structures. 

2.  All primates evolved from a lemur-like organism, not just humans. Here’s one of them. I’ve seen her in person. Pretty cool, huh?

Her name is Ida and she’s a member of the genus Darwinius. But that’s just like saying all primates evolved from something that was basically a tree shrew- which is also true. See, one of the main points of evolution is that organisms are continually changing throughout time. We didn’t jump from lemur-like organism to human; changes were slow and gradual and the lineage isn’t really a straight tree. The fossil species we have and know lead to different lines branching out. Some things died off, some things flourished. Heck, look at the Miocene- twelve million years ago, there were hundreds of ape species. Now there’s twenty-three. (Sixteen gibbons, two chimp species, two gorilla species, two orangutan species, and one human species. There’s also some subspecies of gorilla and gibbon, but I’m only counting the primary species.) It’s hard to trace things back, but saying that we evolved from lemur-like species is obtuse and obfuscates the real point, which is that Homo and Pan descended from a relatively recent-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things common ancestor. 

3. Our dentition is unique to the extant primates, but not australopithecines. Our teeth look very much like other members of the genus Homo, the extinct ones, as well as many of the australopithecines. We also have very similar enamel proportions to gracile australopithecines; apes have much thinner enamel overall.

But what did australopithecines eat?

Everything. We know they were eating fruits and nuts based on microwear analysis and strontium analysis, but we also know they were eating meat- and in pretty decent quantity, too. We’ve found all kinds of butchering sites dating back millions of years and in association with Australopithecus garhi, the earliest tool user, but we can also see this in tapeworm evolution. There’s many, many species of tapeworm in several genera. But three of them, in the genus Taenia, are only found in humans. And these species diverged from… carnivore tapeworms. Their closest relatives infect African carnivores like hyenas and wild dogs. 

Tapeworms that are adapted to the specific gut of their host species need a certain environment, as well as a specific cycle of infection so that it can reproduce. A tapeworm that infects hyenas is going to be less successful if it somehow makes the jump to a horse. But if the hyena tapeworm was able to adapt to our gut, that suggests that our stomach was hospitable enough for them chemically to survive- which brings me to the intestines.

4. Our intestines are also unique. Yes, we have longer intestines than carnivores, but we also don’t have cecums like herbivores. We are omnivores and that means we still needed to retain the ability to digest plants. 

The key to being omnivores is omni. All. I’m not saying we should only be eating meat, I’m saying our ancestors ate a varied diet that included all kinds of things. If we weren’t omnivores, why would we have lost the cecum’s function? Why is the human appendix only a reservoir for the lymphatic system, as it is in carnivores? The cecum is an extremely important organ in herbivores, as it houses the bacteria needed to break down cellulose and fully utilize fiber from leaves. But we don’t have that. Instead, we compensate with a long gut. Our ancestors absolutely did eat fruits and nuts and berries, but they also ate other stuff. Like scavenged carcasses and bugs and probably anything they could fit in their mouths. Which- actually, primate mouths are interesting. Humans and chimpanzees have enclosed oral cavities, thick tongues, and jaw angles much more like herbivores than carnivores- suggesting a herbivorous ancestor. That’s not something I’m arguing against at all. But again, we have adaptations for eating meat and processing animal protein because we are an extremely opportunistic species. 

5. Our canines are true canines. First, semantics: having a diastema does not canine teeth make. We refer to the canine teeth by position- even herbivores, like horses, have them. They’re the teeth that come right after the incisors. All heterodonts have the potential same basic tooth types- incisors, canines, premolars, molars- in various combinations and arrangements. Some species don’t have one type of teeth, others don’t have any- but it’s silly to say that the canine teeth aren’t canine teeth just because they don’t serve the same function as a gorilla’s or a bear’s or some other animal’s. It’s basic derived versus primitive characteristics. 

Now that we’ve got semantics out of the way, let’s talk about that diastema. The lost diastema is a derived trait, which means that our ancestors had it and we lost it over time. All other extant non-Homo primates have a canine diastema. All of them. However, when you look at australopithecines, we see that many of them either don’t have it or have it in a reduced capacity. At the earliest known hominin site, Lukeino, we see Orrorin tugenensis with reduced canines compared to ape fossils and modern apes- and… you do know that apes don’t use their canines for eating meat, right? Like, primate canines serve a very different purpose than carnivorans’ canines. It’s suggested that the large canines are for social display moreso than anything dietary- bigger, more threatening teeth are useful if you’re a gorilla or chimpanzee fighting to the top of your group’s social structure. 

I’m going to refer you to a blog post written by Dr. John Hawks, a good friend of my advisor and generally a pretty cool guy. He’s got a nice writeup on the evolution of hominin teeth and how the human line’s teeth have changed through time. 

Also, of course our teeth are going to be smaller. When we compare archaic Homo sapiens fossils to modern skeletons, their teeth and jaws are much more robust. This is likely related to the introduction of soft foods- and by soft, I mean cooked grain mush- to the diet around the time of domestication, right before the population explosion that happened about 10k years ago. In general, post-domestication human jaws are much smaller and more crowded than any other humans and hominins that came before.

6: Neanderthals did die out, but not in a catastrophic event like we think of with dinosaurs. While there are no living Neanderthals today that we would classify as Homo neanderthalensis, there is plenty of evidence that we interbred and likely outcompeted them as a species due to our overwhelmingly large population size (hypothesized based on number and locations of remains found). While there’s only a small percentage of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA lines in human populations today, it’s quite likely we lost a lot of that due to genetic drift and population migration- Neanderthals, after all, had a much more limited range than Homo sapiens sapiens. Their eventual extinction is a mosaic of events- outcompetition plus assimilation. The line between Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis/Homo sapiens neanderthalensis is blurry- there’s some physical anthropologists who actually think we should be including them within our species as a subspecies- but they are extinct in that the specific subset of hominins with distinct karyotypes and potential phenotypes no longer exists.

And if you don’t know, now you know.

Keep reading

And then @kaijutegu killed a man.

optimysticals:

insanityandimpossiblethings:

optimysticals:

in-fi-ni:

a pretty standard arrangement for engagement rings. a raised stone is better than nothing. 3/10

a lovely, simple, elegant wedding band. a classic anybody would be pleased to get married with. useless in a fight. 0/10

huge. tacky. kinda pretty tho. but look at that raised diamond in the center. you could easily break someone’s tooth with this. 7/10

also huge and tacky. at first glance you’d think the rounded edge might not cause much damage but look at how those rows of diamonds are raised in the second view. you could really rip up someone’s face. 9/10

this one is almost elegant. no sharp edges, but it’s solidly built. you would cause more damage with the ring on than off, which is a solid basis for choosing an engagement ring. 5/10

a lovely design, i enjoy open filigree. however im not sure how said filigree would stand up to the impact of being slammed into someone’s face. 2/10

the twisting design is pretty, but im not entirely sure that socking someone in the jaw wouldnt break off those stones. it looks somewhat reinforced but do you really want to leave the Punching Power of  your engagement ring up to chance? i wouldnt. two raised stones tho. 6/10, pending experimentation

HAHAHAHA holy shit. thats Five raised stones, with reinforced prongs, for maximum damage at any angle. i highly recommend this ring both for its sapphire centerpiece and its capacity for causing pain. 10/10

there’s not even a stone, its just gold which aint exactly the hardest metal in the world. just fucking stay home if you’re not going to take this seriously.

*jeweler voice*

That filigree you gave 2/10? much sturdier than the filigree tacky rings… Trust me. Those are super hollow and light on the settings so that they aren’t too heavy or expensive. (and so they don’t roll on your finger)

Also worth noting:

White gold = sturdier than yellow gold (which is why most prongs are in white)

Now, if you want a ring that’ll hold up to socking someone in the nose, may I suggest 10kt white gold (hardest of gold options, sturdier than silver, and more reasonable than platinum)

See how thick all that metal is? It’s not going to cave in on you.

And you can do this with it:

Because nothing says punching a nazi in the nose like a diamond/sapphire/ruby encrusted Captain America ring…

read this again but imagine its Peggy Carter picking her engagement ring

yes. good.

snowtiefling:

cousinborris:

your-naked-magic-oh-dear-lord:

randomstabbing:

trilliath:

friendlycloud:

craftykryptonitealpaca:

craftykryptonitealpaca:

craftykryptonitealpaca:

I grew up believing that women had contributed nothing to the world until the 1960′s. So once I became a feminist I started collecting information on women in history, and here’s my collection so far, in no particular order. 

Lepa Svetozara Radić (1925–1943) was a partisan executed at the age of 17 for shooting at German soldiers during WW2. As her captors tied the noose around her neck, they offered her a way out of the gallows by revealing her comrades and leaders identities. She responded that she was not a traitor to her people and they would reveal themselves when they avenged her death. She was the youngest winner of the Order of the People’s Hero of Yugoslavia, awarded in 1951

23 year old Phyllis Latour Doyle was British spy who parachuted into occupied Normandy in 1944 on a reconnaissance mission in preparation for D-day. She relayed 135 secret messages before France was finally liberated. 

Catherine Leroy, War Photographer starting with the Vietnam war. She was taken a prisoner of war. When released she continued to be a war photographer until her death in 2006.

Lieutenant Pavlichenko was a Ukrainian sniper in WWII, with a total of 309 kills, including 36 enemy snipers. After being wounded, she toured the US to promote friendship between the two countries, and was called ‘fat’ by one of her interviewers, which she found rather amusing. 

Johanna Hannie “Jannetje” Schaft was born in Haarlem. She studied in Amsterdam had many Jewish friends. During WWII she aided many people who were hiding from the Germans and began working in resistance movements. She helped to assassinate two nazis. She was later captured and executed. Her last words were “I shoot better than you.”. 

Nancy wake was a resistance spy in WWII, and was so hated by the Germans that at one point she was their most wanted person with a price of 5 million francs on her head. During one of her missions, while parachuting into occupied France, her parachute became tangled in a tree. A french agent commented that he wished that all trees would bear such beautiful fruit, to which she replied “Don’t give me any of that French shit!”, and later that evening she killed a German sentry with her bare hands. 

After her husband was killed in WWII, Violette Szabo began working for the resistance. In her work, she helped to sabotage a railroad and passed along secret information. She was captured and executed at a concentration camp at age 23. 

Grace Hopper was a computer scientist who invented the first ever compiler. Her invention makes every single computer program you use possible. 

Mona Louise Parsons was a member of an informal resistance group in the Netherlands during WWII. After her resistance network was infiltrated, she was captured and was the first Canadian woman to be imprisoned by the Nazis. She was originally sentenced to death by firing squad, but the sentence was lowered to hard lard labor in a prison camp. She escaped. 

Simone Segouin was a Parisian rebel who killed an unknown number of Germans and captured 25 with the aid of her submachine gun. She was present at the liberation of Paris and was later awarded the ‘croix de guerre’. 

Mary Edwards Walker is the only woman to have ever won an American Medal of Honor. She earned it for her work as a surgeon during the Civil War. It was revoked in 1917, but she wore it until hear death two years later. It was restored posthumously. 

Italian neuroscientist won a Nobel Prize for her discovery of nerve growth factor. She died aged 103. 

EDIT

jinxedinks added: Her name was Rita Levi-Montalcini. She was jewish, and so from 1938 until the end of the fascist regime in Italy she was forbidden from working at university. She set up a makeshift lab in her bedroom and continued with her research throughout the war.  

A snapshot of the women of color in the woman’s army corps on Staten Island

This is an ongoing project of mine, and I’ll update this as much as I can (It’s not all WWII stuff, I’ve got separate folders for separate achievements). 

File this under: The History I Wish I’d Been Taught As A Little Girl

Part 2

Annie Jump Cannon was an american astronomer and, in addition to possibly having one of the best names in history, was co-creator of one of the first scientific classification systems of stars, based on temperature. 

Melba Roy Moutan was a Harvard educated mathematician who led a team of mathematicians at NASA, nicknamed ‘Computers’ for their number processing prowess. 

Joyce Jacobson Kaufman was a chemist who developed the concept of conformational topology, and studied at Johns Hopkins University before it officially allowed women entry in 1970. 

Vera Rubin is an astronomer and has co-authored 114 peer reviewed papers. She specializes in the study of dark matter and galaxy rotation rates. 

Mary Sherman Morgan was a rocket scientist who invented hydyne, a liquid fuel that powered the USA’s Jupiter C-rocket. 

Chien-Siung Wu was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, as well as experimental radioactive studies. She was the first woman to become president of the American Physical Society. 

Mildred Catherine Rebstock was the first person to synthesize the antibiotic chloromycetin.

Ruby Hirose was a chemist who conducted vital research about an infant paralysis vaccine. 

Hattie Elizabeth Alexander was a pediatrician and microbiologist who developed a remedy for Haemophilus influenzae, and conducted vital research on antibiotic resistance. 

Marie Tharp was a scientist who mapped the floor of the Atlantic Ocean and provided proof of continental drift. 

Mae Jamison is an astronaut who holds a degree in chemical engineering from Stanford University and was the first black woman in space.

Ada Lovelace was a mathematician and considered to be the world’s first computer programmer. 

Patricia E Bath is ophthalmologist and the inventor of the Laserphaco Probe, which is used to treat cataracts. 

Barbara McClintock won a Nobel prize for her discovery that genes could move in and between chromosomes.

That’s it for now, part three will be on its way. (Josephine Baker was requested in the first installment, just know I did not forget her! She’s in a different folder, titled ‘famous people you didn’t know were complete badasses, and she, along with Hedy Lamar and Audrey Hepburn will be in the next installment :) )

Part 3

Josephine Baker, though today remembered for her dancing, singing, and larger than life personality, actually played a significant role in WWII. She joined Women’s Auxiliary of the Free French Air Force, got her pilot’s license in 1933, and by 1944 she raised 3,143,000 francs for the war effort. She entertained the troops, which was a doubly whammy of justice. She refused to entertain segregated troops, so the French military was forced to integrate the troops for all her performances. She also smuggled secret messages in her music across countless borders. 

Audrey Hepburn is known as one of the most beautiful and talent actresses of the 1950′s, but her contributions to the world started far before her first film and continued until well after her cinematic heyday. In WWII stricken Austria, Audrey, then an aspiring ballerina, would give secret ballet performances to raise money for the Austrian resistance. She even helped smuggle secret messages for the resistance. On one such occasion, she was stopped by an enemy soldier. He asked her what she was doing and she, pretending not to understand, presented him with a bouquet of wildflowers she’d been absentmindedly picking. She was let go and the message was delivered safely. It was her experience in the war which would later prompt her to become one of the founders of UNICEF. 

Hedy Lamarr was an actress well known for her piercing gaze and deadpan wit. What she’s less known for is being a brilliant mathematician who invented the frequency hopping spread spectrum. Without her invention, we wouldn’t have bluetooth or wifi. 

Ching Shih was one of the world’s most successful pirates. At the death of her (pirate) husband, the former prostitute took command of his ships and started her pirating career. At the height of her career she commanded 1800 ships and more than 80,000 male and female pirates. She became powerful enough to challenge every empire’s naval forces in the world and her Red Flag Fleet was feared from the Chinese coast to Malaysia. Unable to defeat her, the Chinese government caved and offered her amnesty. She surprised everyone by taking it and became one of the few pirates in history to retire. She also took care of her crew even after her retirement; most of Ching’s pirates were pardoned. She died a respectable millionaire. 

Sophie School was an active member of the White Rose non-violent resistance group in WWII Germany. In 1943 she, along with her brother and the rest of the White Rose were arrested for passing out leaflets encouraging passive resistance. She and her brother were beheaded by guillotine just a few hours later. Her last words were “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”

(Written by Emporer-of-nerds) Constance Markievicz (was a) Very important figure in the Irish independence movement, first woman elected to the British House of Commons, and one of the first women to hold a cabinet position in government (Minister for Labour of the Irish Republic (which was a short-lived revolutionary state predating the current Ireland/Éire))!

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an English ambassador to Turkey in the early 1700s, and documented her experience carefully. When she saw the Turkish perform an early method of small-pox vaccination, she urgently wrote home. She is responsible for the first variolation small-pox vaccinations in Europe. 

Marie Curie is fairly well known. Unfortunately she’s often known as the ‘assistant’ to her husband. She was a pioneering physicist and chemist, who’s work with radiation was groundbreaking. She was the first woman to win a Nobel prize and the only one to win one in two fields for her discovery of polonium and uranium. It’s also notable that she was the first woman in Europe to receive a doctorate degree. Her discoveries made the x-ray machine possible, and Curie immediately put it to work. She invented a small, mobile type of x-ray machine and worked with her daughter at casualty collection points in WWI, using the machine to locate shrapnel and bullets in wounded soldiers. She died of pernicious anemia, a result of years of radioactive exposure. Many of her notebooks are still too radioactive to be read. 

Margherita Hack was an Italian astrophysicist and became administrator of the Trieste Astronomical Observatory, bringing it to renowned respect and fame. She was a prolific science writer and was awarded the Targa Giuseppe Piazzi for the scientific research, and later the Cortina Ulisse Prize for scientific dissemination. Asteroid 8558 Hack, discovered in 1995, was named in her honor.

(This installment was a little all over the place as far as achievements go, and short, since it was mostly requests! Hypatia of Alexandria was also requested but she, along with Sappho and others, are getting their own installment. The next installment will center around women of the literary world!)

Great respect for this!

Note that there were many many more, both before and after photography was invented.

Don’t ever let some fuckboy tell you that women just cleaned and cooked until very recently.

I feel like I want, like, amazing, huge portraits painted of all these women in the finest fine art oils, and for them to adorn hallowed halls everywhere.

A WOMEN OF SCIENCE AND HISTORY MUSEUM.

Can I see some movies about these gals?

Lieutenant Pavlichenko  has a movie

@fuckyeahwarriorwomen

For @batarangst bc Idk if it will fit in an ask, and I hate being constrained by word counts anyway.

Back when I was 23 or 24, some friends visited from downstate. It was T’s 21st birthday, so I figured the best thing to buy her was alcohol. She requested a bottle of 99 Apples, which 99 proof apple schnappes. We all bought other alcohol too, but it isn’t relevant.

So we go back to my other friend’s apartment, and start drinking. Now, I have very little self-control once I start drinking. I’ve gotten better over the years, but it was bad back then. We were playing drinking games, and I just kept taking shots. I know I bought myself something to drink, but I ended up drinking a lot of the Apples.

We must have been getting loud, because someone in the complex called the cops. I have no idea how I managed to compose myself while they were there. All I remember was everyone telling me to shut up in desperate whispered voices. After the cops left, the mood was kinda ruined, so we all decided to go to bed.

I was drunk. I was so drunk, I started stripping the minute I got into my apartment, completely forgetting that my friends were behind me. Somehow, my husband got me to bed.

After a night of drinking, I always wake up really early. It’s very frustrating. Anyway, my husband decided he wanted to take care of me, so he asked me what he could get from the store for me. Bacon. Eggs. Hashbrowns. I was suddenly so hungry. I wanted everything.

So he leaves, and I’m sitting there waiting in the bedroom bc T was out on the couch still sleeping. I don’t know why my husband and I didn’t just go out for breakfast, but maybe I didn’t want to. So I’m waiting, and I start to feel a little nauseous. Then worse and worse and worse. I don’t think I threw up, but I felt awful. By the time he got back, I certainly wasn’t in any shape to eat anything. I wanted to sit and watch tv, but T was still asleep in the living room.

My husband had the key of our friend K’s apartment (who hadn’t been drinking with us bc he doesn’t do that kind of thing.) K was at work, so we decided he probably wouldn’t mind if he hung out at his place until T woke up. Well. I spent hours throwing up. Once, it started, it did not stop. I had a bucket, thank god. We didn’t mess up K’s place. But to this day he doesn’t know that I spent an entire morning puking my guts out in his apartment. I threw up water. I couldn’t keep a thing down for longer than ten minutes. Eventually, it calmed down enough for me to eat, but it was rough. The sickest I’ve ever been from drinking.

And that is why artificial green apple flavored stuff makes me nauseous.

miffly:

airy-minotaur:

strangeasanjles:

laughingacademy:

commovente:

While in graduate school at the University of Houston, I supplemented my income by working as a writer in residence for Writers in the Schools (WITS). I was with WITS for three years, during which I visited third, fourth, and fifth grade classrooms, and worked with groups of students visiting the Menil museum of art, the Houston Historical Society, and the Houston Arboretum.

When first hired by WITS, I expected that working to explain some of my favorite poems to fourth graders would result in me becoming a better teacher of poetry. What I wasn’t expecting was that (thanks to having my brain blown apart on a weekly basis as I browsed my students’ folders of barely legible poems) I would become a better poet.

Here are some lines written by students in grades 3rd-6th:

“The life of my heart is crimson.”

[Writing about a family member’s recent death:]

“My brother went down/ to the river
and put dirt on.”

“Peace be a song,
silver pool of sadness”

“Away went a dull winter wind
that rocked harshly, and bent you said,
‘Father, father’.”

 

[Writing about a terminal illness:]

“I am feeling burdened
and I taste milk……
I mumble, ‘Please,
please run away.’
But it lives where I live.”

“The owls of midnight hoot like me
shutting the door to nothing.”

[Writing about life as a movie:]

“The choir enters, and the director screams
‘Sing with more terror!!!’”

 
“I have provisions. Binary muffins.
It’s an in/out/in/out kind of universe.
We cannot help you,
this is a universe factory.
A sound of rolling symbols.
Disappearing rocks, screams of lizards.
Sanity must prevail. Save vs. Do Not.”

“I, the star god,
take bones from the
underworlds of past times
to create mankind.”

These young writers are addressing subjects that still obsess poets fifty years older: sadness, death, love, responsibility, aging, family, loneliness, and refuge…and they are addressing these subjects in language that is new, and thus has the power to emotionally effect a well-seasoned (/jaded) reader. The average fourth grader is able to do this because she hasn’t been alive long enough to know how to do it (and by “it” I mean talk about the world) any other way.

Story time: When I was a child I believed that one day I might be allowed to cross into an alternate dimension by walking through a quilt hanging on my living room wall. As I got older I stopped believing that this was a possibility—not because I grew to believe that the universe was not an extremely strange place where incomprehensible things could happen on a daily basis, but because I passed year after year after year not being able to enter the spirit realm through a wallhanging.

Anecdote that I hope you’ll find relevant: When Jean Piaget began studying the intellectual processes of children, he was not doing so because he had any special interest in children. Piaget was interested, rather, in the intellectual processes of (adult) humans and was seeking a control group. [His first thought was that the best control group would be comprised of martians but, as he did not have access to martians, he decided to use children since children possessed what is farthest from human consciousness.]

So let’s look at what happens to our young writers as they age [I took these lines from poems written by middle-school/ high school students (Italics, mine)]:

 Snacking on this and that
my friends and I keep the party going
even when it is over”
 

“Whispers of a
secret crush being unraveled”

“I’m trapped in this hole that
I can’t break through”

“Barack Obama in the White House.
I can feel the inspiration
Can you feel it?”

“Now I feel secure with my head held high.

Sad times. By middle school/high school, the average student has learned how normal people talk. The resulting language is underwhelming and predictable—the safe regurgitations of a thoroughly socialized consciousness.

While the average older student’s poems are heavy with allegiance to a limited view of reality, the average younger writer’s vision of the world is nimble and surprising—bazaar, yet true.

Last year I spent every Saturday tutoring an extremely undersocialized kid in vocab. When I taught her the word blandishments (“to flatter, coax, sweet-talk, appeal to”) she wrote this sentence: “The blandishments of the sugar flowers made the cake so much more inviting.”

The sentence is interesting because the student understood that a blandishment is something that attracts favorable attention without fully realizing that people almost always use the word to refer to a human action.

The poet’s job is to forget how people do it.

(source)

Never has such a short line of text completely broken my heart like “my brother went down to the river / and put dirt on”

daystarsearcher

adults often forget how complex and intense the emotional lives of children are. i do too, sometimes. that’s part of why stuff like this is so important, a reminder that while yes, kids are kids and do kid stuff, their lives are not necessarily easy.

paper-storm:

Australian comedian Jim Jefferies points out the ridiculousness of American pro-gun arguments. x x

*at the time of this performance, the Port Arthur massacre that resulted in 35 killed and 23 wounded was the worst mass shooting in history.

thursdayplaid:

zennihilation:

thursdayplaid:

zennihilation:

othercat2:

thursdayplaid:

aufanficfanatic said: Isn’t it like, 14 or something?  I dunno man, educate me. 

I’m so glad you asked @aufanficfanatic because I have so much to say!

In upper classes the children were considered the property of the family, so they married whenever the parents wanted them too.  There were children of the nobility who where married as infants and then never saw their spouse until said spouse’s funeral due to the ague or whatever.  Even the daughter of a simple gentleman might start feeling a bit alarmed if she hit 24 without any offers of marriage, but then her duty was to secure a suitable match.

The merchant, crafts, and agricultural classes were a bit different.  And by a bit different I mean they were entirely different.  A lot of this marry at first blink of puberty thing is part of the mythology that because the average age of death pre-1700 was about 35-40 that meant everyone died at forty.  What really happened was that most people lived to 70 and half of all children died.  Application of math tells us that if you add 70+0 and then divide by two the average death date is a bit misleading as a statistic.

The two most important things to people in a primarily agricultural culture is population numbers and food.  You need more population to grow more food and you need more food for your population.  There are other, more complicated factors such as the local nobility using the peasantry as cannon fodder, taxation, self-defense of the village, trying to avoid depopulation, but we’re going to skip that discussion.

Population is the big issue when it comes to marriage age, and let’s be honest.  When we pick a teenage marriage age the picture people have in their minds is a forty year old man and a sixteen year old girl.  This large age gap marriage mythology is a largely colonist era idea that means to depict sexual exploitation of children is natural and traditional for the purpose of corrupting men’s natural healthy instincts and discrediting cries of alarm from women.

But we’re not here to talk about politics, we’re here to talk about population.  For Western Europe marriage was for the purpose of creating a home, a social, emotional, and physical support system - children were an expected part of that.  However!  Even among women who chose not to get married, and there was at least one bastard born every year, they chose to have their children at an older age.

There are several issues about a woman’s body that could get in the way of a young marriage age.  First being that historically the first child a woman had usually died within a month, if the child was born alive at all due to a variety of issues like nutrition and stress on the woman’s body.  You know how everybody tells women not to carry things?  Well, European women didn’t always have that luxury.  The older a woman was, the more like she would be to be strong enough to lose less babies.

Second, poor nutrition can push back puberty, or at the very least menstruation.  This meant that many young ladies would only have superficial signs of puberty until they hit about sixteen, meaning that even if someone was going by some patriarchal conception of when a woman was marriageable, she’d only appear ‘on the market’ at sixteen, not be married by it.

Third, the woman’s body was insufficiently developed as a teenager, IE if she was sixteen or younger, her vagina would be smaller and her vaginal lining would be too thin  as the thickness therein is determined by the amount of estrogen in the system.  Usually the vaginal lining is not childbirth safe until the end of puberty, which depending on the female, is between 18-20.  People are good at picking up patterns.  They figured out pretty quick that women under eighteen tended to die during childbirth.  I won’t be graphic, suffice to say they bled to death.

Fourth, due to apprenticeships and occupations, many women were too busy to get married as teenagers.  Women had occupations other than some variation of mother or healer?!?  Yes, rhetorical question, they did!  If your last name was Baxter or Webster, not only do you descend from a woman who was a Master of her craft (baking or weaving respectively) but that one of your male ancestors took on her surname instead of the opposite.  Other female heavy professions were black smithing, silver smithing, accounting, leather working, agricultural labor (except wagonering and plowing - no innuendo intended - that was more of a man’s job since they would often have to travel), administratrix (more legal than a steward, more useful than a lawyer), ale wifing and brewing, knitting and lace working, and notary-ing.  Since having one or both of a couple having a craft occupation meant that their children would have a shoe in to a network of guilds it was of great benefit.  Additionally since many men traditionally worked the land or went to war, it meant that their family would be taken care of if something happened to his health.

So there you go!  Women generally started getting married after they finished their apprenticeships or when they reached about 20 and started having their own property and kept getting married until they were tired of it.

I will keep reblogging this until the last person who says any variation of “They married really early back then because everyone died at forty!” has been Informed of the Truth of the Matter. (That is to say, probably forever.)

Okay also I would like more explanation of the occupation of administratrix because I kind of want that on a business card now.

To quote from http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com:

Administrator

A person appointed by the court to manage and take charge of the assets and liabilities of a decedent who has died without making a valid will.

When such a person is a male, he is called an administrator, while a woman is called an administratrix. An administrator c.t.a. (cum testamento annexo, Latin for “with the will annexed”) is appointed by the court where the testator had made an incomplete will without naming any executors or had named incapable persons, or where the executors named refuse to act. A public administrator is a public official designated by state law to perform the duties of administration for persons who have died intestate.

An executor differs from an administrator in that he or she is named in the decedent’s will to manage the estate. If an executor dies while performing these duties, a court will appoint an administrator de bonis non cum testamento annexo (Latin  for  "of  the  goods  not  (already)  administered  upon  with  the  will  annexed")  to  complete  the  distribution  of  the  decedent’s  estate.  This  term  is  often  abbreviated:  administrator  d.b.n.c.t.a.

(West’s Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc.)

What this means is an administratrix would see to the burial, settle debts and disputes, help sell or divide goods, occasionally help to assign guardians to minors, and sort through who had a right to what which meant finding distant heirs on super rare occasion.  It was an awesome job and great for women like maiden aunts who knew everyone and everything in a town.

Okay one, that was ridiculously fast. Like road runner fast.

Two, that is the most detail I’ve ever could have gotten out of a dictionary. I didn’t expect it, and I should have done it. 

Three, that is a f-ton of initials.

This has been doubly awesome.

Beep, beep.  It was a pleasure.

Legal dictionaries are a breed unto their own.  In an occupation where every word is important legal dictionaries will go into a lot of detail.  Don’t feel bad, if you haven’t dealt with them before then you wouldn’t know.

Glad you enjoyed the added info!