Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.
honestly fuck viruses they’re not even alive they’re just strands of punk ass DNA that go around fucking up us normal and god fearing life forms you don’t even have a nucleus you stupid bacteriophage looking horizontally transmitting RNA clump
Margaret Hamilton, lead Apollo flight software engineer, in the Apollo Command Module, circa late 1960s.
![tastefullyoffensive:
“Soup-serving robot. [full video]
”](https://64.media.tumblr.com/321f25bac0c7c23620644bc38d740fd7/tumblr_oyfnr1SXBc1tlb56zo1_400.gifv)
Can we please talk about how our history teacher sent a barbie to the smithsonian as proof of the presence of man two million years ago
pleas,e for the love of God read the whole letter, there are tears streamign down my face rn
Can we please talk about how your history teacher has done this sort of thing enough times that he has his own specimen shelf in the Smithsonian
“yours in science” tho
“B. Clams don’t have teeth” is the part where I lost it.
The letter says:
“Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled “211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post. Hominid skull.” We have gien this specimen a careful and detailed examination and regret to inform you that we disagree with you theory that it represents ‘conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago.’ Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be the ‘Malibu Barbie’. It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain that those of us who are familiar with your prior work in the field were loathe to come to contradiction with your findings. However, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to it’s modern origin:
- The material is molded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are typically fossilized bone.
- The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic centimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified proto-hominids.
- The dentition patters evident on the ‘skull’ is more consistent with the common domesticated dog than it is with the ‘ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams’ you speculate roamed the wetlands during that time.This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses you have submitted in your history with this institution, but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it. Without going into too much detail, let us say that:
- A) The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog has chewed on.
- Clams don’t have teeth.
It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your request to have the specimen carbon dated. This is partially due to the heavy load our lab must bear in it’s normal operation, and partly due to carbon dating’s notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent geologic record. To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were produced prior to 1956 AD, and carbon dating is likely to produce wildly inaccurate results. Sadly , we must also deny your request that we approach the National Science Foundation’s Phylogeny Department with the concept of assigning your specimen the scientific name ‘Australopithecus spiff-arino.’ Speaking personally, I for one, fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your proposed taxonomy, but was ultimately voted down because the species name you selected was hyphenated, and didn’t really sound like it might be Latin.
However, we gladly accept your generous donation of this fascinating specimen to the museum. While it is undoubtedly not a hominid fossil, it is, nonetheless, yet another riveting example of the great body of work you seem to accumulate here so effortlessly. You should know that our Director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the display of the specimens you have previously submitted to the Institution, and the entire staff speculates daily on what you will happen upon next in your digs at the site you have discovered in your back yard. We eagerly anticipate your trip to or nation’s capital that you proposed in you last letter, and several of us are pressing the Director to pay for it. We are particularly interested in hearing you expand on your theories surrounding the ‘trans-positating fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix’ that makes the excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex femur you recently discovered take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9-mm Sears Craftsman automotive crescent wrench.
Yours in Science,
Harvey Rowe
Curator, Antiquities”
—————————————————————————————————-
(sorry if there are misspellings or wrong wordings. this was long and i was reading it off my phone)
“I for one, fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your proposed taxonomy, but was ultimately voted down because the species name you selected was hyphenated, and didn’t really sound like it might be Latin.“
this letter itself belongs in the smithsonian
EXCELLENT
copperfire replied to your post “spaceoperetta replied to your post: minimoonstar replied to…”
Okay! I LOVE FUNGI SO BEAR WITH ME. There was one episode where Stamets likened mycelia to roots (or possible said they were roots?) and I went ‘nooooooo’ at the screen because that’s a misconception enough people have about fungi anyway, we don’t need to spread it! Basically a mycelium is the non-reproductive/vegetative part of a fungus, and is composed of hyphae - hyphae are the fibre-like, filamentous structures that many fungi are made up of.
So fibres definitely isn’t incorrect! Some mycelia are very fibrous, and the space interdimensional fungi they seem to be going for in Discovery DEFINITELY looks very fibrous. Some fungal mycelia are composed of hyphae but don’t look like fibres themselves, so that is also pretty cool. And then some fungi aren’t composed of hyphae at all/don’t really have a mycelia, because fungi like to break even their own rules.
FUN FACT about mycelia: they’re often microscopic or underground or within dead trees or something so we don’t really see them, which is why we get surprised when suddenly mushrooms pop up all of a sudden, but that’s just the fungi that’s been lurking all along in its mycelial stage sending up fruiting bodies, and this all means that they can be super old and super extensive and we don’t even know! There’s a colony of an Armillaria fungus in Oregon that covers about 3km2
and is 2400+ years old! And we really only notice it’s there when it puts up mushrooms.
Disclaimer: I LOVE FUNGI A LOT, but I am not actually a mycologist, I just dabble in mycology and enjoying hanging out with mycologists (mycologists are great people, especially if you don’t just ask them if this particular mushroom is edible, because they get asked that a lot and it does get boring) (Frequent answer from the less patient mycologist: everything is edible at least once)
Apparently it’s the time of night where I ramble about fungi, but also I think those might also be my two favourite moments of Discovery so far? Particularly dancing for science, that was VERY IMPORTANT
MYCELIA FACTS 4 YOU AND YOURS!!!! From my and surely now your favorite amateur/social mycologist!! Sidebar, what is your life.
Oh fungi, you mysterious fibrous weirdos. I read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma like five years ago and lost my whole dang mind during the mushrooms section, which I continue to think about Often.
In other news, I LOVE finding out other people have the same specific favorite moments in something, because it makes me feel like maybe we’re onto something.
In other other news, I’m hopefully gonna be able to use this mycelial pivot to move on to non-Discovery things now — I know there are still some replies from yesterday floating around, but the amount space I’ve already given to something I’m not particularly into is giving me the ol’ blognitive dissonance. Hope you understand!
Oh, oh! But that’s not all.
So in modern taxonomy there’s a concept called a “type specimen.” This is a preserved corpse, image, or detailed description which defines a type (species or genus). All the other attributes of a type definition basically amount to “is this close enough to Type Specimen XYZ to be called the same thing as it?” In the event that thinking on where the boundaries are set changes (and that happens ALL THE TIME) whatever’s on the same side of the new boundary keeps the old type; anything placed on the other side needs a new name. (And a new type specimen is selected for that new group.)
Now, this is a fairly recent innovation– older taxonomical systems going back to Linnaeus thought things would be more static than that, so they didn’t feel the need to have a system for what to do in the event of changes. Now, the rule for type specimens is that they have to be one the person who originally came up with the species knew / got to examine. For most of the species Linnaeus described, he’d worked from a specific specimen anyway, and at least a detailed description was preserved, so that was OK.
Problem was Homo sapiens. His description of us amounted to, well, “dis us.” So the modern taxonimists trying to retrofit THAT to up-to-date standards had to sit down and have a good think. And what they came up with was “Well… There’s one specimen of humanity we know for absolute certain Linnaeus examined in great detail. And there are images preserved, and we know where the remains are.”
So Carl Linnaeus is not just human… Carl Linnaeus is the one person who, no matter what the heck weird changes may happen in taxonomy, is human by definition.
For those interested in all the technicalities on how exactly Linnaeus qualifies as the type specimen of Homo sapiens, here is an article from the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature.
The upshot is that if you are Carl Linnaeus, then by International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, you are VALID, and no one else is.
What a crazy cool idea - a well-placed magnet to protect Mars from the solar wind, & thus grow its atmosphere: https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/how-to-give-mars-an-atmosphere-maybe/ @nasa