The actual smell of rain comes from plants. When plants are in drought they produce oils in replacement for waters. When the time comes and it finally starts raining the plants get their needed water and they release these oils in the air and the smell of that oil is what we call smell of rain
the scent is called petrichor
This is my absolute favorite smell
I just learned that some websites use cookies to adjust prices. That is, if you visit a certain website a lot the price will increase.
You can tell if that’s the case by checking the same web page on a different browser if you have a different number of stored cookies for that site. I checked something on Chegg and it was $14.95 on Chrome, $19.95 on Firefox, and $16.95 on Safari.
The fix? Clear your cookies for that website.
Reblog, save a wallet.
Plane tickets almost always do this!
PLANE TICKETS DO THIS ALL THE DAMN TIME
When you’re looking for plane tickets and waiting for prices to drop, ALWAYS clear your cookies beforehand and switch between browsers. A friend of mine was looking for a flight and getting prices that were the CHEAPEST at $800-1000, I sent her a link for a round trip that was like $495, and it read as $900 on her computer because she had been hounding the airline site.
alternatively: avoid all this headache by using incognito when shopping for plane tickets, text books, etc
Hotel rooms are notorious for this, as well. Just like, go on incognito mode to look at these sites, saves u a lot of time & hassle.
Bruh I ain’t never know dis thank you man
weed will set us free
HEMP AND WEED ARE NOT THE SAME PLANT. *huffs*
*clears throat*
They’re cousins. They look similar, but Hemp can be used to make durable clothing, paper, biodegradable plastics, and has high nutritional value. It’s oil is good as an anti-inflammatory if taken in pill form with other medication. If you smoke hemp, you’re not going to get high. There’s no THC in hemp.
Doing the above things with Marijuana is a waste of THC ;p
Pot = medicinal and recreational depressant drug
Hemp = practical and nutritional plant capable of replacing tree-pulp, cotton and synthetic fibers. Also replenishes the nutrients in farming soil when other food crops have depleted the nutrients (Such as corn)
HALF OF THE WAR ON DRUGS (the half that wasn’t about racism) WAS LITERALLY PAPER AND PLASTIC COMPANIES NOT WANTING THE COMPETITION
All of this is true shit. Hemp is an extremely diverse, multi-use plant with soooo many incredible possibilities and I really hope we start using it more in every day products because we need to
All for biodegradable!!!
all of my fellow introverts and old souls, please remember that there is no shame in:
Witchcraft
Fuuuuuuck
The moment people were like “oh shit water benders”
I really loved this episode though, it was an established theme in the show that firebenders are associated with death and waterbenders are associated with life and healing, and up to this point it all seemed so clear-cut, because fire obviously destroys everything in its path while water can put out fires and heals, as we’ve seen particularly in Katara’s case with her natural healing ability.
Then we meet Hama, who due to years of torture and hatred has found a way to turn the classic gentler waterbending ways into a weapon of destruction and manipulation, and honestly I can’t think of a better way to introduce people to the fact that things are never as clear cut as they seem. We’ve thought of waterbenders as the good guys up until this point, so it’s jarring to find out that no, despite stereotypes and traditions, there are always going to be good and bad people in every culture/group, but that’s the point of the entire show.
It’s revisited later too when Aang and Zuko find the Sun Warriors who teach them firebending is not just about death and destruction, but also about bringing warmth to the earth and making plants grow and both Aang and Zuko needed to hear that they weren’t just instruments of destruction and gain confidence from the idea of using firebending to create life and I love it I love this show so much.
The kind of thinking I like to see, the kind of thing I like to think about– and tell my students to think about.
Amazing how much a movie could be fixed by telling it from the woman’s POV.
“I was genuinely surprised by just how creepy Pratt’s character is when you take away his POV. We don’t know whether to trust him or not, believe him or not … We feel the cruelty as she feels it.”
I mean, I doubt many women would be nearly as surprised but yeah, a very interesting take on how stories are not the same when told starting from different points and perspectives
Excellent analysis.
Do you guys remember the scenes after the revelation where JLaw told Pratt to leave her alone and she’s jogging around the concourse…and Pratt keeps talking to her over the ship-wide comms system? Given the original edit with Pratt being set up as a Nice Guy™ , it was supposed to be romantic like a boombox scene, I guess…
…but it’s terrifying! She can’t get away from him. No matter where she goes he can still talk to her, force her to hear him. Like the creep who sits down next to a girl on the train and insists on talking to her despite her book, her headphones, her body language and her verbal refusal to engage, Pratt just keeps coming at her like an entitled predator.
It’s the last two people on earth fantasy that guarantees the man his choice of hot babe. :/ Because he’s a Nice Guy™ and deserves a second chance.
This is a really good example of two important storytelling principles that I’ve come back to over and over again.
1. Entering the story as late as possible is often the most interesting choice. See how much creepier–and more engaging–the movie gets when we chop off the first 30 minutes? In this case, withholding important information until as late as possible is much more effective than seeing the story in a purely linear fashion.
2. Who you pick as your protagonist is the most important political choice you make as a writer. You’re choosing whose eyes we see the world through, whose mission we’re hoping will succeed, and whose interior life we empathize with. This is an example of a premise that gets way more interesting when you don’t assume it’s going to be told from the Default White Guy’s point of view.
Something I wish more people would understand…
What’s her name?
Her name is Jane Elliott. She was a former schoolteacher, now she’s anti-racism activist, feminist and LGBT activist. She’s tiny, mean, and boss as fuck.
She’s known for her “blue eyes-brown eyes experiment” where she divides a group of volunteers from the blues and the browns. The minute the people walk in, the blue-eyes know they’re not welcomed. She makes them wait in a separate room, gives them shitty chairs, bad food, and shows them less respect. And (obviously) it causes all sorts of discomfort and rage, but that’s precisely her point. It doesn’t help that most blue-eyed volunteers happen to be white as well. Sometimes they get the message, sometimes they don’t and leave, sometimes crying or screaming. And Jane Elliott says that’s exactly what minorities want to do everyday of their lives, but they simply cannot do.
Did I mention she’s boss as fuck?
Note that the blue eyes-brown eyes experiment started with her students. I think she taught third grade, so 8 and 9 year-olds. There’s whole documentaries on the experiment and what the kids learned and how it effected them later in life. Her expirement is one of the few things I actually remember from my high school psychology class.
This is from the Wikipedia article on Elliott:
Steven Armstrong was the first child to arrive in Elliott’s classroom, (referring to Martin Luther King, Jr.) he asked “Why’d they shoot that King?” After the rest of the class arrived, Elliott asked them how they think it feels to be a black boy or girl. She suggested to the class that it would be hard for them to understand discrimination without experiencing it themselves and then asked the children if they would like to find out. The children agreed with a chorus of “yeah"s. She decided to base the exercise on eye color rather than skin color in order to show the children what racial segregation would be like.[2]
On the first day of the exercise, she designated the blue-eyed children as the superior group. Elliott provided brown fabric collars and asked the blue-eyed students to wrap them around the necks of their brown-eyed peers as a method to easily identify the minority group. She gave the blue-eyed children extra privileges, such as second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym, and five extra minutes at recess. The blue-eyed children sat in the front of the classroom, and the brown-eyed children were sent to sit in the back rows. The blue-eyed children were encouraged to play only with other blue-eyed children and to ignore those with brown eyes. Elliott would not allow brown-eyed and blue-eyed children to drink from the same water fountain and often chastised the brown-eyed students when they did not follow the exercise’s rules or made mistakes. She often exemplified the differences between the two groups by singling out students and would use negative aspects of brown-eyed children to emphasize a point.
At first, there was resistance among the students in the minority group to the idea that blue-eyed children were better than brown-eyed children. To counter this, Elliott lied to the children by stating that melanin was linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability. Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed “superior” became arrogant, bossy, and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades on simple tests were better, and they completed mathematical and reading tasks that had seemed outside their ability before. The “inferior” classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children who scored more poorly on tests, and even during recess isolated themselves, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children’s academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.[6]
The next Monday,[2] Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed children in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, Elliott reports it was much less intense. At 2:30 on that Wednesday, Elliott told the blue-eyed children to take off their collars. To reflect on the experience, she asked the children to write down what they had learned.[2]”
Sorry I made this post so long. But I love her. And this is important.
170509 BTS official’s Tweet
THE INVITATION from #2017BBMAs #BTSBBMAs
The story follows Rachel Chu (Wu), an American-born Chinese economics professor, who travels to her boyfriend Nick’s (Golding) hometown of Singapore for his best friend’s wedding. Before long, his secret is out: Nick is from a family that is impossibly wealthy, he’s perhaps the most eligible bachelor in Asia, and every single woman in his ultra-rarefied social class is incredibly jealous of Rachel and wants to bring her down.
Directed by John M. Chu
Why primary care is VITALLY important (written by the wonderful Atul Gawande!!!)
Why I hate clinic (I’m impatient) but also why I will never half-ass my clinical duties. Outpatient primary care is so critical.
Someone sent me this literally just this morning. It’s excellent. Dr. Gawande is wonderfully articulate as always. This is a must read for pre-meds, med students, hell, everybody really.
lately i’ve been replacing my “i’m sorry”s with “thank you”s, like instead of “sorry i’m late” i’ll say “thanks for waiting for me”, or instead of “sorry for being such a mess” i’ll say “thank you for loving me and caring about me unconditionally” and it’s not only shifted the way i think and feel about myself but also improved my relationships with others who now get to receive my gratitude instead of my negativity
This is some 2017 mood
when someone loves you - really loves you - treat them gently. text your best friend back when you can. tell your mother you noticed her haircut and that she was right about that recipe. tell your grandfather that the boats in his bottles are the best things you’ve ever seen. be good to the people who are good to you. it’s the least you can do.
This is why we needed feminism - this is why we know that feminism works
I just want to reiterate this stuff, because I legit get the feeling there are a lot of younger women for whom it hasn’t really sunk in what it is today’s GOP is actively trying to return to.
Did you go to a good college? Shame on you, you took a college placement that could have gone to a man who deserves and needs it to support or prepare for his wife & children. But if you really must attend college, well, some men like that, you can still get married if you focus on finding the right man.
Got a job? Why? A man could be doing that job. You should be at home caring for a family. You shouldn’t be taking that job away from a man who needs it (see college, above). You definitely don’t have a career – you’ll be pregnant and raising children soon, so no need to worry about promoting you.
This shit was within living memory. I’M A MILLENIAL and my mother was in the second class that allowed women at an Ivy League school. Men who are alive today either personally remember shit like this or have parents/family who have raised them into thinking this was the way America functioned back in the blissful Good Old Days. There are literally dudes in the GOP old enough to remember when it was like this and yearn for those days to return.
When people talk about resisting conservativism and the GOP, we’re not just talking about whether the wage gap is a myth or not. We’re talking about whether women even have the fundamental right to exist as individuals, to run their own households and compete for jobs and be considered on an equal footing with men in any arena at all in the first place.
I was a child in the 1960s, a teenager in the 1970s, a young adult in the 1980s. This is what it was like: When I was growing up, it was considered unfortunate if a girl was good at sports. Girls were not allowed in Little League. Girls’ teams didn’t exist in high school, except at all-girls’ high schools. Boys played sports, and girls were the cheerleaders. People used to ask me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone told me it was impossible–those just weren’t realistic goals for a girl–the latter, especially, because you couldn’t trust women to judge fairly and rationally, after all. In the 1960s and 1970s, all women were identified by their marital status, even in arrest reports and obituaries. In elementary school, my science teacher referred to Pierre Curie as DOCTOR Curie and Marie Curie as MRS. Curie…because, as he put it, “she was just his wife.” (Both had doctorates and both were Nobel prize winners, so you would think that both would be accorded respect.) Companies could and did require women to wear dresses and skirts. Failure to do could and did get women fired. And it was legal. It was also legal to fire women for getting married or getting pregnant. The rationale was that a woman who was married or who had a child had no business working; that was what her husband was for. Aetna Insurance, the biggest insurance company in America, fired women for all of the above. A man could rape his wife. Legally. I can remember being twelve years old and reading about legal experts actually debating whether or not a man could actually be said to coerce his wife into having sex. This was a serious debate in 1974. The debate about marital rape came up in my law school, too, in 1984. Could a woman be raped by her husband? The guys all said no–a woman got married, so she was consenting to sex at all times. So I turned it around. I asked them if, since a man had gotten married, that meant that his wife could shove a dildo or a stick or something up his ass any time she wanted to for HER sexual pleasure. (Hey, I thought it was reasonable. If one gender was legally entitled to force sex on the other, then obviously the reverse should also be true.) The male law students didn’t like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman. My reaction was, “Thank you for proving my point…” The concept of date rape, when first proposed, was considered laughable. If a woman went out on a date, the argument of legal experts ran, sexual consent was implied. Even more sickening was the fact that in some states–even in the early 1980s–a man could rape his daughter…and it was no worse than a misdemeanor. Women taking self-defense classes in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently described in books and on TV as “cute.” The implication was that it was absurd for a woman to attempt to defend herself, but wasn’t it just adorable for her to try? I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high school–1978-79 and 1979-80–because, as the principal told me, “Only boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you won’t use it.” When I was in college–from 1980 to 1984–there were no womens’ studies. The idea hadn’t occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professor–a man who had a doctorate in history–informed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist because…wait for it…womens’ brains were too small. (He was very surprised when I came up with a list of fifty women gifted in the arts and science, most of whom he had never heard of before.) When Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate in 1984, the press hailed it as a disaster. What would happen, they asked fearfully, if Mondale died and Ferraro became president? What if an international crisis arose and she was menstruating? She could push the nuclear button in a fit of PMS! It would be the end of the WORLD!! …No, they WEREN’T kidding. On the surface, things are very different now than they were when I was a child, a teen and a young adult. But I’m afraid that people now do not realize what it was like then. I’ve read a lot of posts from young women who say that they are not feminists. If the only exposure to feminism they have is the work of extremists, I cannot blame them overmuch. I wish that I could tell them what feminism was like when it was new–when the dream of legal equality was just a dream, and hadn’t even begun to come true. When “woman’s work” was a sneer–and an overt putdown. When people tut-tutted over bright and athletic girls with the words, “Really, it’s a shame she’s not a boy.” That lack of feminism wasn’t all men opening doors and picking up checks. A lot of it was an attitude of patronizing contempt that hasn’t entirely died out, but which has become less publicly acceptable. I wish I could make them feel what it was like…when grown men were called “men” and grown women were “girls.”
Know your history.
So this, too, is what they mean saying “make America great again” and/or the good old days.
REBLOG FOREVER.
I attended an all-girls PUBLIC high school in Jefferson Parish, LA (when the school desegregated by race in the 1960s, the high schools segregated by gender) from 1974-1978. We had to FIGHT for physics and calculus classes. Our parents had to go to the fucking school board and demand we have the same classes the boys’ schools had. THAT is why I’m a feminist.
A good take on why Trumpkins don’t hear what the rest of us hear when President Trump spews incoherent word salad.
Also why I have limited interest in, or energy for, trying to persuade them through rational debate.
I have been baffled by this all along - I could not for the life of me imagine what his supporters were hearing when they listened to him babble incoherently. He’s like a political Rorschach’s test.
I feel like I’ve had the curtain drawn back.
I realized I do this to him too. I’m always trying to figure out WHAT THE FUCK HE MEANS. Only because I don’t like him and what he stands for, I’m actually trying to parse reality from it, so it strikes me as insane.
But if I was predisposed to him, my mind would decide on something that filled out my preconceived expectation.
Humans Brains are so fucking weak and wrong.
President Mary Sue.
“If autism isn’t caused by environmental factors and is natural why didn’t we ever see it in the past?”
We did, except it wasn’t called autism it was called “Little Jonathan is a r*tarded halfwit who bangs his head on things and can’t speak so we’re taking him into the middle of the cold dark forest and leaving him there to die.”
Or “little Jonathan doesn’t talk but does a good job herding the sheep, contributes to the community in his own way, and is, all around, a decent guy.” That happened a lot, too, especially before the 19th century.
Or, backing up FURTHER
and lots of people think this very likely,
“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”
The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.
To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science) indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.
Given this evidence, and how common we now know autism actually is, the Changeling myth is almost definitely the result of people’s confusion at the development of autistic children.
Weirdly enough, that legend is now comforting to me.
I think it’s worth noting that many like me, who are diagnosed with ASD now, would probably have been seen as just a bit odd in centuries past. I’m only a little bit autistic; I can pass for neurotypical for short periods if I work really hard at it. I have a lack of talent in social situations, and I’m prone to sensory overload or you might notice me stimming.
But here’s the thing: life is louder, brighter and more intense and confusing than it has ever been. I live on the edge of London and I rarely go into the centre of town because it’s too overwhelming. If I went back in time and lived on a farm somewhere, would anyone even notice there was anything odd about me? No police sirens, no crowded streets that go on for miles and miles, no flickery electric lights. Working on a farm has a clear routine. I’d be a badass at spinning cloth or churning butter because I find endless repetition soothing rather than boring.
I’m not trying to romanticise the past because I know it was hard, dirty work with a constant risk of premature death. I don’t actually want to be a 16th century farmer! What I’m saying is that disability exists in the context of the environment. Our environment isn’t making people autistic in the sense of some chemical causing brain damage. But we have created a modern environment which is hostile to autistic people in many ways, which effectively makes us more disabled. When you make people more disabled, you start to see more people struggling, failing at school because they’re overwhelmed, freaking out at the sound of electric hand dryers and so on. And suddenly it looks like there’s millions more autistic people than existed before.
“…disability exists in the context of the environment.”
Reblog for disability commentary.
