Okay someone asked me earlier "Hey CT, you study the occult for a living, off the top of your head, what's the most popular form of the occult in today's world?"

Pseudo-nutrition. Bar none. A massive amount of the fad dieting world goes beyond simple misinformation and ignorance and full on into a systemized non-scientific theory of anatomy and nutrition that 100% qualifies as magic. If you replace the term "toxins" with "evil ghosts" half of these blogs would sound like sumerian curse tablets.

Wild caught Salmonella. Hehe

That’s what happens when you lick a turtle

NEW FISH JUST DROPPED

I KNOW that playing God is morally wrong, but holy HELL, it looks fun.

Why is it playing God? We aren’t violating any natural laws. God set the parameters of the universe to allow these things. There’s nothing wrong with it, there’s no hubris in learning more about how to manipulate the universe around us.

We made a whole-ass fish.

The reason this was accidental BTW is because they used paddlefish eggs as a negative control group for a breeding experiment on sturgeons because the scientists, quite naturally, assumed that they were SO unrelated it would be genetically impossible for them to mate. Like. I cannot stress enough to you how these creatures last related ancestors were

140 MILLION YEARS BACK.

If you don't know how far that is, that's basically the start of the cretaceous. Let me simplify that for you even further. Chimpanzees and humans seperated, what, 5 or 6 million years ago?

This is basically like if humans could hybridise with THESE THINGS.

This is the sort of thing that should be impossible. They used those eggs to be ABSOLUTELY 100% SURE NOTHING WOULD HAPPEN.

And then THEY GOT FISH OUT OF IT.

Like. You can quite clearly understand why they didn't think anything would happen. WE ARE MORE RELATED TO BLUE WHALES THAN THESE THINGS.

THE AMERICAN PADDLEFISH AND THE STURGEON ARE SO COMPLETELY UNRELATED THAT THIS IS NOT PLAYING GOD. IF ANYTHING THIS IS AN ACT OF GOD.

THE SCIENTISTS HAD NO BLAME IN THIS BECAUSE NOTHING LIKE THIS HAD EVER HAPPENED BEFORE

It sort of goes against the rules of genetics a bit.

Oh i forgot to add

THESE THINGS, FOR HYBRIDS, HAD A REALLY HIGH SURVIVAL RATING. LIKE 70% OF THEM SURVIVED.

To put that into perspective, getting a blue whale and a squirrel and trying to hybridise them is more sensible, and that wouldn't produce anything but getting you banned from science. Most animals that aren't plants can barely hybridise two degrees away from each other.

BUT THESE TWO ENTIRELY UNRELATED FISH create PERFECTLY HEALTHY HYBRIDS.

the scientists literally had to do the tests AGAIN just to be like "okay this is real right. This is actually like, not a fluke, this works right" and it worked again. They just Can!

MY SCIENCE TEACHER CAUGHT THE TABLE ON FIRE AND HES JUST STARING AT IT

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone mess up reading a caliper quite that badly.

look, I know I've talked about this essay (?) before but like,

If you ever needed a good demonstration of the quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", have I got an exercise for you.

Somebody made a small article explaining the basics of atomic theory but it's written in Anglish. Anglish is basically a made-up version of English where they remove any elements (words, prefixes, etc) that were originally borrowed from romance languages like french and latin, as well as greek and other foreign loanwords, keeping only those of germanic origin.

What happens is an english which is for the most part intelligible, but since a lot everyday english, and especially the scientific vocabulary, has has heavy latin and greek influence, they have to make up new words from the existing germanic-english vocabulary. For me it kind of reads super viking-ey.

Anyway when you read this article on atomic theory, in Anglish called Uncleftish Beholding, you get this text which kind of reads like a fantasy novel. Like in my mind it feels like it recontextualizes advanced scientific concepts to explain it to a viking audience from ancient times.

Even though you're familiar with the scientific ideas, because it bypasses the normal language we use for these concepts, you get a chance to examine these ideas as if you were a visitor from another civilization - and guess what, it does feel like it's about magic. It has a mythical quality to it, like it feels like a book about magic written during viking times. For me this has the same vibe as reading deep magic lore from a Robert Jordan book.

That "somebody" is science fiction writer Poul Anderson, fyi.

We read this in one of my German linguistics classes in grad school.

I see you've noticed my overhead mural of mushrooms. That's myceiling.

"there are only two sexes, it's literally third grade biology!" and pronouns are taught in kindergarten and you dont seem to understand those either

ok its literally this

this is why, when someone tells me "there are only two sexes, it's basic biology!" my favorite response is to ask "what, you never made it to advanced biology?" like don't load the gun and then hand it to me lmao

you. yes. you get it

if they'd shown me this in science maybe i would've learnt more

oh man, they made you defend your thesis? that's fucked up, they told me mine was perfect the way it is and just gave me the phd

Btw if I say things like “by god” or “good lord” in posts please be aware I don’t mean it in a catholic way I mean it in a 1950s scientist reacting in horror after they create an evil creature in the lab set in the distant future year of 2005

I Love Prehistoric Ecosystems So Much

yeah individual taxa are cool and everything but no species is an island. What did it live with? What did it eat, what ate it? Did it have "friends" (term used loosely)? What was the environment like, where did they get water, what was the climate?

Tell me the whole story

Tell me how they lived

No species was ever alone, they were all part of intricate ecosystems with complex interactions between each other!

Except Lystrosaurus.

what

scientists have discovered an organism which they believe to have the lowest brain power of anything else previously discovered, and they're calling it the customer

Fun things I’ve learned so far working for a company that makes blood transfusion diagnostic tests:

I forgot the part where there’s so many blood types. It’s not just ABO (Lewis) and Rh (+/-). It’s ABO, Rh (D, C, c, E, e), Kidd (Jka, Jkb, JK3), Duffy (Fya, Fyb), Kell (K, k), MNSs, U, Lutheran, and a bunch of others I can’t think of off the top of my head. Plus, any of the ones I listed can cause complications if they’re mismatched.

A fun fact though is that most blood groups are named after the patient they were first identified in.