Polished Malachite Stalactite - Copper Crescent, Congo

*looks around*

Is

Is anyone gonna say it

malachite is a poisonous mineral. please do not fuck the malachite stalactite

@lizaleigh do you know any rock people that can confirm/deny because I am very curious and really don’t feel like getting into a conversation with my geophysicist brother that MAY somehow get back to the fact I saw a malachite that looked like a weird dildo.

…sadly, I am not on good enough terms with any of our partner geologists to just attach this to an email with the subject line: “EXPLAIN.” Although I think @mollisaurus is a mineral person. Thoughts?

oh geeze, i’m kinda rusty on minerals but malachite is just copper carbonate and is really common in both antique and modern jewelry so i think like if you were really gun-ho about it you could go ahead and put it wherever you want?

It’s really only a problem if you’re polishing or cutting it. The particles would be bad to breathe. It’s rather porous too, so I would worry about bacteria growing. Well, being literal anyway… Better to leave the poor thing alone. ._.

I mean it kinda depends on where you stick it because malachite does not like acidic environments very much and the malachite will degrade and also might dye your bits blue-green as the copper dissolves out.

So use a condom when fucking rocks is the takeaway here.

Oh my god guys it’s poisonous

It is super poisonous

There is a reason we do not use it in make up any more

Not even with a condom, do not fuck the rock

Try this one instead. 

malachite literally explodes in water does it not?

I… no… I think you’re thinking of pure sodium?

Malachite is however water soluble, which really just means it will poison you quicker

This is both hilarious and cool as fuck because you’re getting all this information on minerals and rocks. You’re also watching people argue over wether or not you can fuck this rock

I go on hiatus for a week and come back to find tumblr molesting my post, but hey, at least we all learned something so yay tumblr, you just keep on  being you.

I’m still not sure if I can fuck this rock.

I’m looking into it.

UPDATE:

Today in “I’m so sorry, coworkers, it’s for Tumblr,” I brought this post to the attention the science reporters at BuzzFeed. Dan Vergano did a some research and weighed in on the question “Can you use malachite as a dildo or is it toxic?”

The answer is “It’s probably fine, just wash it first and maybe use a bunch of lube.”

Oh man this got so much better than the last time I saw this post

This is my favourite. Science side of tumblr: asking the REAL questions

*biologist crashes through the underbrush* Ok so here’s the thing though Malachite is not poisonous to YOU. BUT fucking this stalactite will probably wreck your vaginal flora and leave you with a gruesome infection within a couple days. Want details? SO GLAD YOU ASKED, ‘CAUSE HERE THEY ARE. • Malachite is not copper oxide. It’s Cu2CO3(OH)2. Like most carbonates it’s water soluble– that’s how it became a stalactite in the first place! And technically any given chunk of “malachite” isn’t just malachite– it’s a mix of various copper carbonates & oxides. This will become important later.  • When malachite dissolves it makes a bunch of copper (Cu++) ions. Cu++ is GREAT at killing bacteria and fungi– so good at it that sprays with Cu++ get used a lot as a spray in agriculture to stop plant disease. It takes such a large dose to harm larger organisms that copper sprays are used a lot in organic agriculture (like Bordeaux mixture).  So bottom line, yes malachite is technically nontoxic to humans. But it kills bacteria when it dissolves and releases Cu++. • Malachite dissolves somewhat slowly in water– but vaginal secretions aren’t just any water. A healthy human vagina has a pH of 3.8-4.5 and a salinity of about 0.9%. It’s also warmer than your average underground cave at 37°C (or 98.5°F in American meat units). As luck would have it, acidity, salinity, and warmth all make malachite dissolve faster.  • In other words, the human vagina dissolves malachite.  • I have no deeper explanation for why human females can dissolve rocks with our genitals. It simply is.  • Gonna to take a quick moment to point out that sex toys that dissolve when you use them are maybe not the best investment.  • Anyway the key question now is “how fast does the human vagina dissolve malachite?” Are we talking geological timescale, a Nazis-in-Indiana-Jones situation, or something in between? If the reaction kinetics of dissolution are very slow, then there’s nothing to worry about. An encounter with a stalactite would have to last years for enough Cu++ to leach out to cause problems. If it’s quick then we’re in trouble.  • Unfortunately it looks like nobody really knows. One of the best sources on how malachite dissolves & precipitates in water– an EPA document on how to avoid too much Cu++ in municipal drinking water systems– helpfully says “The kinetic constraints on the formation of these solids in water systems are largely unexplored” (p. 42) because end equilibrium points is all you need to run a city water system safely. In other words, the experiments that would tell us how fast malachite dissolves in various types of water just don’t exist because nobody’s ever needed to know before. So we’d better assume it’s going to happen reasonably quickly, #for safety. • So in best scientific fashion, we’re just going to bullshit our way ahead using what facts we DO have on hand: endpoint equlibria.  • Is there any info out there telling us what equilibrium concentration of Cu++ we get in salty acidic water at body temperature? Almost! One J.F. Scaife published some great data on this back in 1957. TAKE IT AWAY, SCAIFE. 

That orange box is how many moles of dissolved Cu++ Scaife got from sticking malachite in some water that had 0.171 moles NaCl/L (body salinity is about 0.154 moles NaCl/L so this is slightly less salty than people) at 30°C. He’s got no acidity in there, and again the salinity and temperature are slightly lower than people. But this is probably the closest we’re going to get to data on how malachite behaves in vaginas anytime soon, folks. From this we can take away that if you leave malachite alone in a vagina you’ll get AT LEAST 9.12 x 10^-4 moles/L, or 5.8 ppm, of Cu++ at equilibrium.  • Recall from above that most “malachite” isn’t actually pure malachite, it’s a mix of various copper carbonates & oxides. The EPA document elaborates: “[T]raditional ‘eyeball’ identification of malachite by its blue-green color is extremely unreliable, because almost all cupric hydroxysulfates, hydroxycarbonates, hydroxychlorides, and even fresh cupric hydroxide can be some shade of blue-green. … Thus, the uncertainty in the computed copper concentration in equilibrium with malachite is at least about a factor of 2 … until further experimental data focusing on this problem is generated.” In other words, “do your math and then double how much Cu++ you think is going to be in the water, just in case.” So that gives us 11.6ppm Cu++, at equilibrium, with malachite in a (til now!) healthy vagina.  • Next step: do we have any idea what happens to bacteria in acid conditions with copper? OH MY GOD WE TOTALLY DO. Gyawali et al 2011 checked this out in the context of “so what if we rinsed tomatoes with a solution of lactic acid and copper, because that would be a safe & organic way to get rid of E. coli?” So now this post has officially ruined stalactites, vaginas, and tomatoes.

^This would happen. These are the counts of 4 E. coli strains exposed to various levels of lactic acid & Cu++ for 8 hours. This table only shows the end counts but it represents the death of 99.7% of bacteria*. • Losing 99.7% of your vaginal flora is seriously bad news. You’re looking at really good odds of a yeast infection, bacterial vaginosis, and/or other infection issues. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to not be in the 4% of the population or so that’s sensitive to skin contact with copper.  • The good news? Biochemically speaking, you’re probably ok to put it in your butt. It’s not as acidic or salty in there, plus there’s a huuuuuge stockpile of gut microbes right upstream that can quickly repopulate the colon after spelunking is complete. However this stalactite is not flared at the base so it is the wrong shape for putting in your butt. Do not put this stalactite in your butt.  • This all looks like fun and games, but I think it’s really interesting that the internet’s mistake in concluding that this stalactite is fuckable is very similar to the mistake made by the Flint water management system. Hear me out.  • Central to the Flint lead poisoning crisis is that authorities only looked at & tested Flint’s water in its central treatment plant before it went out through the pipes. Not after it went through the pipes. They did not consider what would happen biochemically as it went through the pipes and metals started dissolving.  • Similarly, in concluding that the stalactite is fuckable, the internet only considered the stalactite itself. Not the biochemical processes that would happen to it as it, welp, went through the pipes.  • Media frequently reports that the Flint River’s water is “corrosive,” leading many to believe the river is full of industrial waste. This ain’t the case. You’d need industry to fill a river with industrial waste, and industry left decades ago. That’s why Flint’s so poor. So what IS in the water? Road salt. Plain old stupid road salt. The old Detroit-based source didn’t have salt because it came from Lake Huron which has a large, mostly rural watershed. Meanwhile the Flint River runs through a lot of towns, making it slightly salty as everything melts down in spring. And as we recall from the stalactite experience, a little salt is all it takes to get metals to dissolve.  • Information on this engineering problem was not coming through clearly from the engineering or chemistry sides. It took a biologist, pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha, to document the real-time results and provide the data to kick-start a high-level investigation.  • Morals of the story: when dealing with a biological system pls consider asking a biologist, your vagina and/or city could depend on this • Pls use a condom when fucking any water-soluble material • Still don’t put the stalactite in your butt -3/10 do not recommend

OK, I haven’t reblogged this before now but the final post takes it to a whole new level and I can no longer resist. 

Every time this post comes back around it gets better.

Some ways that statistics can lie to you without ever falsifying their data:

I’ve received a couple of questions about what point #3 means, so let’s try a simple example.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a test whose results are correct 90% of the time, in terms of both false positives and negatives.

(In other words, whatever it’s testing for, it’ll say you have it when you don’t 10% of the time, and it’ll say you don’t have it when you do 10% of the time.)

Sounds pretty good, right? I mean, you wouldn’t want to rely on it for a final answer, but it’s a good starting point.

In reality, it depends entirely on how rare whatever it’s testing for is among the population to be tested.

Consider a condition that affects 10% of the population to be tested. If you test a group of 1000 individuals - 10% of whom, or 100, are affected, and 90%, or 900, are not - you’ll have:

Now that’s interesting; the test is 90% accurate, yet in practice, fully half of your positive results are wrong.

If the condition to be tested for is rarer among the population to be tested, it gets worse. Let’s consider, instead, a population to be tested where 1% of people - or 10 out of 1000 - are affected. Now we have:

Now the false positives outnumber the true positives eleven to one! Again, we’re talking about a test that can be described, in absolute truthfulness, as 90% accurate.

That’s what point #3 is talking about.

In my statistics courses, they actually brought up #3 as a deliberate thing.

Like… sometimes that 90% is the best we can get. The people with the condition and the people without it have too much chemical overlap. We can’t make a test any more sensitive with our current technology.

We could reduce the test’s sensitivity so that there are fewer false positives. But then we’ll get more false negatives (people incorrectly diagnosed as not having it), which means more people with a potentially life-threatening condition slipping through the gaps. So, just to be safe, we use the sensitive test, knowing full well that the majority of positive results will be wrong.

Which is fine, as long as we’re really careful about how we communicate this.

If you’re talking to investors, “This test is 90% accurate” is the right thing to say, because you’re focusing on how it’s an effective way to detect the condition.

But if you’re talking to a patient who has just been diagnosed, that’s completely the wrong thing to say, because you’ll scare them when it’s probably just a false positive. On the other hand, “this test is 10% accurate” would alarm you for a different reason – you be misled into thinking the test was worthless, worse than guesswork, and it would undermine your confidence in the medicine.

In practice, doctors often use “we just need to run some more tests.” Which is scary, but hopefully less scary than saying “we’ve found that you have Condition X” when you actually probably don’t.

(I’m coming at this from the statistician’s side; I know nothing about the medical system.)

Sure, and in its proper context, that’s reasonable. The problem is when fear-mongers and snake-oil salesmen go “[huge number of people] test positive for [scary thing]!”, relying on the twin misdirections that a. testing positive for something doesn’t necessarily mean you actually have it, and b. the fact that the test in question is very accurate doesn’t necessarily mean that most of its positive results are actually correct.

Hey the common age of legal adulthood in the West is not an arbitrary “cultural” thing, it’s ideally 18 at a minimum because that is when the human brain has gotten past its most intense emotional and hormonal development hurdles.

The difference in judgment is staggering even between someone who just turned 16 vs. someone 16.5; we do a MASSIVE amount of mental growing and changing crammed into those first two decades at a pace unrivaled by any other species.

And then even after your psychological state has calmed the fuck down around 18, we now know the effects of adolescent development continue until about age 25. You got over the worst of it, but 25 is when the parts of your brain responsible for the bulk of your reasoning skills actually wrap up their growth process.

Some further maturation seems to continue between 25 and 40, but some countries now recognize 25 as the official end of “adolescence” as far as psychologists are concerned.

This is why someone 20 should not be dating someone 16 even where it’s legal, why a 14 year old boy shot by police should not be described as a  “man,” why we should be raising the age of military and police enlistment by a couple of years, and people probably shouldn’t start driving cars until at least 18-20 either.

If you’re under 18 you actually are mentally and physically a child in the most objective possible sense. That’s not an insult to any of you 17 and under, just try to have a nice childhood while you still can and don’t sneak into bars and join the air force and shit, you’ve got like up to 80 years ahead of you for that.

One day after I decided to close this place down, this post turns up. One day.

OK the thing is? I don’t fundamentally disagree with the point of this post, i.e., teenagers are dumbasses, don’t pretend they’re not.

But it opens with this: Hey the common age of legal adulthood in the West is not an arbitrary “cultural” thing. And. I can’t.

...so all those studies purporting to show that “teenage brains” are fundamentally different from adult brains, and that the ages just happen to line up with Western cultural concepts of adulthood? Guess who all the people being studied were.

If you guessed “primarily White, primarily middle-class people, all of whom live in the West”, you win a depressing no-prize.

(I can’t say that none of those studies have moved beyond that demographic, because there’ve been quite a few of them, and a lot of psychology papers are really crappy about going into detail on their subjects’ demographics, but all of the ones I have looked at closely are drawing from people in the US and Europe who have good access to medical care and sufficiently stable home lives to take part in long-term studies. If someone knows of a study comparing the brains of teenagers whose cultures treat them as adults with the brains of teenagers whose cultures don’t treat them as adults, please let me know, I’ve been looking for one for years.)

There have also been a LOT of studies lately showing that human brains aren’t statically programmed, that what we do with our brains changes the structure of our brains, just like what we do with our muscles changes the structure of our muscles.

So all those studies are proving that people who have never been expected to make mature, adult decisions have brains that show they aren’t very practiced at making mature, adult decisions.

Amazing result there.

I mean. It could be a real result. But before you use a study as evidence that something isn’t an “arbitrary cultural thing”, you need to study people who aren’t saturated in said arbitrary culture.

PLUTO 2015

NASA

I AM SCREAMING OH MY GOODNESS

OH MY GOD DO YOU GUYS UNDERSTAND HOW AMAZING THIS IS I HAVE BEEN READING ASTRONOMY BOOKS FOR YEARS AND EVERYTIME THERE’S JUST A PIXELLY BLUR FOR PLUTO NOT ANYMORE. NEVER AGAIN.

This is just an artist’s rendering!

New Horizons won’t do its close-up Pluto flyby until July. Here are some of our best actual photos of Pluto as of April, and here’s a NASA tweet from yesterday showing one of the latest. Nowhere near this quality. Not yet, at least.

(C’mon, Tumblr, double-check whether something is confirmed on NASA’s actual websites before freaking out!)

This is my LiveJournal post about the tumblr post about the Gouldian finch chicks with supposedly phosphorescent spots (spoiler: they aren’t).

Scientists Create World’s First Peanut-Butter-And-Jellyfish

2a: Magnified moon jelly showing progressive particulate peanutbutterification; 2b: Bottom left, recently peanutbutterified jellyfish; center, plain jellyfish; note difference in coloration

“We  would  love  to  claim we conducted  this  trial  with  noble purpose, but the truth is that we just wanted to make peanut butter and jellyfish simply to see if it could be  done. Whether  or  not  it should be  done  is  a  question  no  doubt  to  be  debated  by philosophers for the ages.“  —- Montoya, P. Zelda and Barret L. Christie. “THE CREATION OF THE WORLD’S FIRST PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLYFISH“ Drum and Croaker, Vol. 45 Jan 2014, pp. 14-18.

Its called the Death Waltz, and was written as a joke but people have attempted it on piano.

Saxes move downstage.

I’ll just leave this here.

SWEET JESUS CLICK THAT

the added directions are great. 'insert peanuts' 'gradually become irritated' 'cresc., or not' 'untie slip knot' 'bow real fast, slippage may occur'

Release the penguins

Oh I got a shirt with this on it, and people would endlessly stare at it

Madness.

I thought a waltz was in 3/4. This sounds like 4/4 to me.

The YouTube video isn’t actually a rendition of the sheet music, for a start: it’s a notoriously mislabelled recording of what’s actually a piece of theme music from the Touhou Project video game series, which has been haunting the internet for years and will probably continue to do so until the internet goes dark.

(Or until a significant percentage of Tumblr users learn to read sheet music to the minimal level necessary to realize that it’s a completely different piece of music - but really, which of those alternatives is going to happen first?)

Mind you, if you ever come across a copy of the actual “Fairie’s Aire and Death Waltz” by John Stump that doesn’t have the top and edges cut off, you’ll find that at no point is it ever actually in waltz time. I imagine the composer felt that even so small a concession to musical conventionality would spoil the joke.

Where the World’s Unsold Cars Go to Die

Above are photos of thousands and thousands of brand new, unsold cars in various locations from the U.S., Italy, U.K., Spain, Russia, and elsewhere. 

Millions of unsold cars are left to deteriorate in old airports, parking lots, and new tracks of land being bought to store these cars. Auto companies won’t sell them at a cheap price because it wouldn’t be profitable to. 

The car industry cannot stop making new cars because they would have to close their factories and lay off tens of thousands of employees. This would further add to the recession. Also the domino effect would be catastrophic as steel manufactures would not sell their steel. All the tens of thousands of places where car components are made would also be effected, indeed the world could come to a grinding halt.

Source

capitalism is cool, correct, and sensible

gotta love that invisible hand

The contents of this post are incorrect.

I had a suspicion about these photos, and Snopes backs me up. The text doesn’t tell the entire story, not by far.

It also makes no sense, because car factories have been closing. In great numbers. If they were somehow magically churning out cars that were filling our planet for years without going bankrupt, what happened in Detroit (or closer home for me, Trollhättan) then?

And seriously - “The car industry cannot stop making new cars because they would have to close their factories and lay off tens of thousands of employees.” 

When the fuck did big business care about laying off 10k of employees or not

Every scientist ever about their study species (via sweetteascience)

Or the math version, “Isn’t it amazing?” about some symbols that make no sense. 

(via mathed-potatoes)

(http://xkcd.com/877/)

?????? i am literally appalled. what poor image are they setting for america, i’m sorry. those girls don’t look like pole dancers SIR. i can’t stress enough how pissed i am.

Funny how the country of “freedom” can be ruled buy individuals’ religion and stupidity

they`re upset because she showed her KNEE?! HOW FAR DOES ONE HAVE TO SINK TO BE DISTURBED BY A KNEE?!

What the literal fuck

Conservative republicans: Muslims are barbaric how they make women cover so much ! Clearly an oppressive society making women submissive slaves, its ridiculous !!! Conservative republicans: …and they cannot show any of their feet outside of socks and YOU CAN SEE THEIR KNEES thats repulsive !!!

Why are they looking at his daughters that way????

me: wtffff how is this real

me: …wait, is it real?

me: *googles* no, it’s not. ok. well, that’s good. 

be on the lookout for fake news! 

this instance: http://www.thatsfake.com/do-the-gop-really-want-a-dress-code-for-obamas-daughters/

more generally, ~The National Report~ (the source for the dress code bill article): http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/22/this-is-not-an-interview-with-banksy/

SPIDERS GRANTAIRE, or, the best historical discovery i have ever made

so i was searching scanned archives of historical books for references to the names of the amis outside of les mis, like you do, in order to try and find clues for why hugo picked the names that he did. i found a few things (which i’ll make a post about later), but i wasn’t having much luck overall… until i found this sentence in a french scientific journal (Cosmos: revue des sciences et de leurs applications) from 1895:

for those of you who don’t speak french, allow me to translate:

…okay cosmos, you have my attention. the full article is even better:

COUNTERFEIT WINE 

SPIDER-FARMER GRANTAIRE

IS A THING

and it gets better — apparently this story went “viral,” in a nineteenth-century sense, appearing throughout different american newspapers and journals, including the scientific fucking american. here’s an excerpt from the story about it in the hartford locomotive:

aka: 

here’s the headline of the san francisco call’s article:

HE HAS A MOTHERFUCKING SPIDER FARM. 

the text of the article (which we can all read because it is available online, thank the old gods and the new) includes an interview with spiders grantaire, in which he waxes rhapsodically about his charges in exactly the way that you imagine the grantaire of les mis would:

one million stories, please, about a grantaire who miraculously survives the barricade and moves to the united states where he starts a spider farm and keeps the flame of the revolution alive by bilking snobby fat cats out of their wine money.

If y’all didn’t realize I was going to research the crap out of this just because I could, you clearly don’t understand this blog at all.

So, first off, I seriously doubt there was ever a French military veteran farmer named Pierre Grantaire who moved to Pennsylvania to help wine merchants defraud people and had pet spiders named after Zola and Sarah Bernhardt.

I know it’s sad. And I can’t prove there wasn’t. But you have to understand that “there were articles in a bunch of 19th century newpapers and the notes sections of some scientific journals” is basically  the equivalent, accuracy-wise, of saying “I saw it on my tumblr dash”. Which is to say, they shamelessly made stuff up. All the time. And then shamelessly copied it off each other.

I can tell you that there was no person by the name of Grantaire living anywhere in Pennsylvania in the 1880 or 1900 US censuses, though, and nobody with a name even close to Grantaire who was born in France and lived there. (The 1890 records were destroyed in a fire.)

Plus there’s the fact, as needsmoreresearch pointed out, that if you want to make a cellar look spider-y, you don’t use pretty garden spiders that weave neat patterns, you use the cellar spiders that use the fluffy dusty cobwebby silk, which could be a question of art as proposed in needsmoreresearch’s post, but it seems like if you were actually committing fraud you’d go for authenticity over symmetry.

And the earliest version of this story I can find, after checking a bunch of databases, is in the April 16th Edition of the St. Paul Daily Globe. I can’t guarantee that’s the original source, since digitizing of American newspapers is still pretty patchy, but I’d make a fair bet that it is. It’s the full long-form article and includes all the quotes and wording that were copied in the other publications and tbh it really reads like a 19th century newspaper hoax.

Also, unlike any of the other papers, the Daily Globe was advertising it over a week in advance as one of their cool weird stories in the Sunday edition, which none of the other papers did. Including, for several days, under the headline “NOT A FREAK SHEET”. Daily Globe, methinks you may protest too much.

Now you may think it’s sad if this dude did not exist. But. Just imagine: A bunch of Globe reporters just off their alcohol-soaked lunch break, BS-ing about the most click-bait-y hoax stories they can come up with, and one of them says, “I need a name for a weird old rambly French dude who really likes spiders” and another immediately says “Grantaire. Definitely Grantaire.”

And since the ONLY results in Google Books for the word “Grantaire” in all of the 1890s are a) this story, and b) editions of Les Miserables, I am absolutely sure that whoever proposed that name was a Les Mis fan.

In other words, this is totally somebody’s modern-US-AU Grantaire headcanon from the 1890s that got reblogged a lot and is still merrily going viral 125 years later, because Mis fandom never dies.

dollsahoy:

Yeah, see how those gill slits are moving? This shark is pumping water over its gills just fine. It’s called buccal pumping, and most sharks are capable of it.

I just took a moment to go look this up and double check myself, and there are a minority of shark species that must swim to breathe - this is called obligate ram ventilation . We’re talking roughly 5% off the shark species that we know about (maybe two dozen of over 400 “sharks” and I can’t find statistics for other cartilaginous fishes).

This does include great whites and whale sharks, and those are the charismatic megafauna that tend to come to mind when people think “shark.”

Edited to add: I’m not sure because this is a grainy gif and I’m not a shark expert but I THINK this is a lemon shark, which are definitely capable of buccal pumping.

Yay more data!

Love this. A census return from 1911 which records the birth of a new baby in the household, 10 minutes old and still no name :) 

"Hello, I’m from the Census Bureau…"

"WE’RE A LITTLE BUSY RIGHT NOW"

I am kind of skeptical of this, since the red looks a) like much, much more modern handwriting than the rest (especially the “10 minutes”), like it’s written with a felt-tip or ballpoint rather than a fountain pen like the black text, and also like it may have been digitally added (the weird blue artifacting around the text). But I’m not sure how to go about checking even if I did have time. verseanduniverse? ohnofixit?

(I mean, maybe it’s totally legit…but that handwriting, I don’t know. I’m also not sure why the census person would suddenly switch pens.)

This is actually looking pretty legit to me, the more I poke around, though I can't tell you 100%, but:

1. This is part of a household page from the 1911 UK census that appears to show some of the many Donnellys of Barton-Upon-Irwell, Lancashire

2. I can't access the original scan without paying, which would confirm one way or another, or any of the information that would let me bring up the entire household at once (does anybody have an account there already and want to look at the original page? I'll pay you back in DW points I just don't want to bother signing up) and I can't get it to spit out the record for the the child born 10 minutes ago, but that may be because it was digitized in a way that doesn't work with the search, since the records were all transcribed by hand and it's not exactly in a standard formant.

3. There are plenty of other records for unnamed newborns though, if you look for records with "name" in the name born 1911, I especially like DAUGHTER BORN TODAY NO TIME TO NAME SAME from Islington, so it's not really something you'd need to fake. (Especially since anyone with an account for the UK census could get the same results.)

4. That's definitely a different handwriting and different pen, but the UK census of 1911 (unlike US censuses, until much later) was a form that was left at the house the week before, to be filled in by the householders themselves, as of Midnight Sunday April 2, and then picked up on Monday morning. So a different handwriting and pen is actually, what I'd expect if, say, someone carefully filled out the form well in advance, and then the house had a really busy day Sunday, and someone else grabbed the first pen they found and finished it at the last minute Monday. While a newborn baby was crying and the enumerator was tapping her feet. (That would also explain why the red-pen user re-crossed-out the mistake on the ages, which seems a weird thing for a faker to do. And it looks like the original corrections might even be in a third hand and pen.)

5. You're right that both the pen and handwriting in red look more modern than the black and seem to have different compression artifacts. The red definitely looks like a fountain pen to me (if you look at how it's semi-transparent where it crosses the black, and how it seems to be thicker at the end of the T crossing in "NOT" that really looks like a fountain pen.) Mass-produced fountain pens were around by 1911, though, and in use pretty widely. The black looks like either a dip pen or a fountain pen with a much, much fancier nib.

6. The handwriting does look more modern, but not that much more modern - it actually looks a lot like the handwriting of people I know in my grandparents' generation, the printing in particular, so I'd've guessed off the top of my head that it was somebody taught to write in the 1920s, while the black was someone taught in the 1880s or so. However my gut-feelings are based on people who were taught in the rural US, so I'd believe that even Lancashire was a few decades ahead, especially if it was one of the teenagers who wrote it while everybody else was busy/exhausted. (That D is really distinctive and naggingly familiar, I wish I knew a way to search historic handwriting styles.)

7. I don't know what to say about the compression artifacts. I'm definitely not an expert on knowing because of the pixels. However, the scan has clearly had its saturation/contrast messed with a lot as well as being put through lossy compression, and it was probably all optimized for assuming black-ink-on-yellowed-paper, so I'd be willing take a bet that that's why the red looks weird. (It's also possible that the original scan really washed out the red and some later person went through and upped the saturation just on that?)

Anyway, tl;dr summary: the scan that would prove it one way or another is under a paywall I don't feel like messing with, but everything seems to basically add up, once you realize that the census in question was actually filled out by the same people who'd just had the baby.

Also the 1911 census is the one that was boycotted by suffragettes who figured if they couldn't vote they shouldn't be counted for redistricting either. That has nothing to do with this tumblr post but it's p. cool.

i do not have anything to add to this tbh

#‘a great and confused noise’ #THIS APPLE IS FULL OF DEMONS #how many demons fit in an apple???#‘they’? ‘pushed’? HOW MANY PEOPLE DID IT TAKE TO GET THIS APPLE INTO THE RIVER

OP presumably go this from one of Rosemary Guilley's compendia of the occult, at least via what Google Books is giving me. Guilley used it in several different books and is not always great at sourcing, but in "The Encyclopedia of Witches, Witchcraft, and Wicca" she sources it to Bouguet's 1603 ouvre "Discourse des sorciers" - and presumably Montague Summers' 1929 English translation, under the title An Examen of Witches. (Ah, Montague Summers and your always fascinating translation choices.)

Anyway here's the complete anecdote, per Summers:

...as you can see it does make quite a lot more sense in context, once you accept the premise that witches can confine demons in things.

(The original French for the quote Guilley likes so much is "sortoit un bruit & tintamarre si grand" - "gave out a noise and din so great".)