dream bigger. dream harder.

Call it a basso profundo

everyone says stupid shit about deep sea animals being lovecraftian horrors then they find the deepest fish and it's this cutie that looks like an axolotl crossed with a puppy

Guys I am begging you please read Brennan Lee Mulligan's story about the Insane Christmas Party. He does not even BEGIN to describe it in the Fireside Chat.

PLEASE. Please. Please take the time to read this.

“The reason this champagne is on the house is that the house is largely on Africa, South America and rural India”

This line is so fucking good

The real challenge of cooking for one is that potato size takes on disproportionate importance. There are so many dishes where one average potato isn't enough, but two average potatoes is too much, so now I'm assessing diameters and ratios like a tuber phrenologist in search of the potato that's just the right amount of potato.

Try going by overall weight rather than size

Do I strike you as the sort of person who can reasonably be expected to keep track of partial potatoes?

consider: any partial potato can simply be boiled. miniature mashed potato for you

Any partial potato will be forgotten in the back of the fridge until the resulting mould culture starts developing a state religion.

The Avignon Potatocy

no, they actually do mean kites

as in, a loooooooooong piece of steel cable with the sail at the end of it

of course it's ~basically a sailing ship~ but you can't stick masts on a container ship, that is a disaster waiting to happen for so many reasons

you'd only really get one point to anchor the mast, and that is right where it meets the deck, the containers get it the way of any ropes you might wish to use further up

you'd have to build entirely new container ships or some sort of ... mast container frame to account for the fact that the ships are built to exactly fit the containers, and sticking a mast in the middle of it will mess with that entire system by not being the size of a container

loading and unloading around the masts is going to be hell for the crane drivers and there will be damage to everything given the speed they usually work with, so every harbor will hate you if their cranes even have the height to work around the masts

and if you still decide to stick masts on a container ship, they won't be easily and quickly removeable, so you have to recertify and reclassify the entire ship, and it's going to take ages and ages to do properly, and they'll have to figure out how to do it so it's either expensive as fuck or they may refuse entirely. a steel cable on a winch is by definition removeable (that is, uh, uprollable?) so you don't have to deal with any of this nonsense. hell, if you calculate the pre-determined breaking point properly, it'll even fail safely

this isn't ~ooooooooooh we invented sails! we're the smartest~

this is "hey, we finally figured out how to do this tried and tested thing in a way that works with the circumstances we're working under". it's a good thing, even if it is presented badly

Thank-you for that info ^ because this is very heartening then. Transport really is so awful rn in what it’s doing to our atmosphere. Looked this up and this is actually a really neat prospect for the planet if it gets implemented.

i don’t know where the notion that if you don’t give big bucks to an artist then you’re not really supporting them came from, but when people say even a tiny bit of monetary support saves an artist, it’s not for the aesthetic or the gesture of it all. i’ve been able to have actual drinking water on days i’ve been incredibly broke simply because someone bought a brush pack for 2 euros. in the most actual, literal way i could possibly convey this: the SMALLEST amount counts. in practice counts. people-get-to-eat-today counts. especially in this age of everyone and their mother being out to deplatform artists. there’s value in the tiniest of ways

#don’t get me started on how sharing people’s works helps bring in the money down the line even if all you did was reblog something#a little bit goes a long way#that is all

Tony & Chelsea are wonderful photography teachers. They just released their 7 hour training series for free on YouTube. This instruction is as good or better than an expensive college course.

If you have any interest in learning photography, this is a fantastic place to start.

As Tony explains, this is much better than bouncing from video to video getting an out-of-order photography education.

Today's crab is: patiently waiting and polite

lesbian flag color-picked from this crab...

[id: two images. first is a orange pink and white crab with its pinchers in front standing in a way that makes it look polite. second is the five striped lesbian flag with its orange white and pink shades picked from the crab. end id]

So apparently, if you sign up for Threads and later decide to delete it, it will also nuke your Instagram account.

Source: Techcrunch.com

Think carefully before creating a Threads account (or anywhere else, really).

Back from our honeymoon in 2020 ❤️

spiky elf with big stick

Leucistic Common Kingfisher

This bird looks like an awl. You could make neat holes in required materials with this bird.

okay americans how’d i do

There are so many parts of this that just genuinely brighten my day

The very excited blonde lady owns the resort where this is taken. She’s super excited because this is the closest they’ve ever come in before. Everyone else is less excited because this was taken crack of dawn; when blonde lady realized how close the whales were coming, she ran around waking everybody up to see it.

A good, wholesome post.

Fun fact: after the American Physical Society held their 1986 annual meeting at the MGM Grand, the entire city of Las Vegas politely asked APS to never, ever come back.

Was it because the physicists were super-smart MIT-blackjack-team forerunners who took the casino for everything it was worth? Actually, the complete opposite: they didn’t gamble. At all. After all, they knew their statistics. Most of them were broke grad students who had no intention of throwing away their stipends on fundamental misunderstandings of Poisson processes. As a result the casino gaming floor was dead. Sometimes the winning move really is not to play.

@sixth-light

Me the only time I’ve ever been to Vegas - had one beer and didn’t gamble a cent. Funny thing is, they happily welcome back hacker cons, and you’d think hackers would be at LEAST as aware of probability. Apparently not!

When I was a kid living in LA, we went to Vegas pretty regularly, since it was only about 4 hours away. My parents would find coupons in the LA Times in the off season and we’d go for a few days. Our whole family could stay in one of the fancy Strip hotels for like $20 a night, and there were $5 all-you-could-eat buffets with actually good food. Plus the arcades were amazing. And so was the hiking! Which is what we were really there for. Red Rock Canyon, with all its tiny caves that you can easily climb up to, is amazingly fun when you’re a little kid. Our vacations were very much subsidized by gamblers.

Relatedly, one time when I was a kid, a large chunk of my extended family went on a cruise to see an eclipse. Everyone on the cruise was scientists or science hobbyists. The crew didn’t know what to do with us! Everyone wanted the 6 pm dinner, no one wanted the 10 pm dinner that you had to dress up for. The casino was empty for the entire week. A group of passengers demanded that all the lights on the deck be turned off at night, even the pretty decorative ones, for at least an hour and preferably more, every single night. One night at dinner, my grandmother saw dolphins out the window, and as word spread the entire dining room emptied, even though it was still the middle of dinner. And that’s not even getting into how my grandfather started talking to the cleaning staff (who were not supposed to talk back) and found out they wouldn’t be let off work to see the eclipse, and within hours had formed an entire committee to go with him to demand to speak to the captain about this mistreatment of the staff.

There are… a lot of places where large groups of scientists probably aren’t welcome a second time.

I think a large roving group of scientists causing mild chaos should be everywhere actually

You guys are missing the best part of this though! The comments are gold!!

Antivaxxers stress me out and piss me off, but these comments are beautiful

I specifically jumped out of bed earlier than anticipated on a Saturday morning just to read these to my nan… and now both our stomached hurt from laughing so hard