We´re all alone in this.

I am trying to see if this gets as many or more votes than the last one so PLEASE I'm begging you reblog.

Everyone acting like "oh no not this again" not really getting (1) the addition of Hestia and (2) Hestia is winning.

transluscent chinese tea set by 青山不语·茶事

@interstellar-lamb

One of the best shot of Total Solar Eclipse from 08-04-2024.

Via @nasa-official

in honour of my husband finding the necessary cables to fire up the N64 so that we can finally play Mortal Kombat 4 on date night again, have this post once more

glad google ai is on top of this

Renfield.

This assumes a single fly weighs 8g, which is the weight of a 1-2 week old mouse (!). If you are unfamiliar with metrics: 100g is a bit less a quarter of a pound.

Btw, Wikipedia says a single house fly weighs in the range of 0.2 grams, so Google has discovered a world where flies are about 40x bigger

I was going to tell you that horseflies still absolutely do not weigh 8 grams

but I found a funnier answer

No they're right. They're called horseflies for a reason they're the size of medium dogs and just look like Shetland ponies with bug wings

AI doesn't know shit. Flies are equivalent to raisins. Source: when I was like 2 I found and ate (half of) a dead fly because it was obviously a raisin no matter what my mum says.

Maybe this goes without saying, but DO NOT trust google’s AI results if you search something about bugs. Every single AI result I’ve seen about bugs so far has been wildly incorrect.

I mean it’s also been incorrect about literally everything else but it’s easier to tell when you already know a lot about a subject

jumping in here because I’m a professional entomologist. if you have found a bug that you want identified you can upload it to iNaturalist. iNat is an amazing platform that connects you with real people who will ID your bug - and what’s better is that it requires 3 people to agree for that ID to be confirmed. Then researchers and other curious people can access that data, building a database of what bugs are where. this is super useful!! iNaturalist is my go-to bug search engine, I never ever rely on google images or google lens.

The reason why google lens and apple phone cameras are always wrong is because they do not take your location into account. those ai are searching globally for an image match, when insect IDs usually require a good deal of knowledge about local species, host plants, behaviour patterns, and examination under a microscope. if the ai spits back a species at you that is definitely not present in your area and you are concerned about it, phone it in to your local biosecurity hotline and you should be able to get in touch with real, professional entomologists who can identify your bug. just make sure you catch it in a jar so you can give them the specimen.

Found this and I swear there's no image better fitted to describe my drinking experience

I want you to know I found this one.... So to see the another one was hilarious

vampire who’s married to an archaeologist voice: my love, stop trying to carbon date me

*at the museum* my love, why is my cursed amulet in this display case

Ok, my archaeometrist ass has something to say!

First, an archaeologist wouldn’t carbon date something. It’s not his job. This kind of analysis belongs to the archaeometrist, thank you very much!

Next, using carbon dating on a vampire raise really interesting questions. Because, you see, you can only carbon date completely dead things. Basically, the body absorb Carbon 14 while it’s alive, and after death, this radioactive element slowly decompose (half of it every 5730 years). When you measure how much is left, you can know how long ago the person/plant/whatever died. Going back to the vampire. Officially, vampires are dead. But they feed on human blood, living humans. I’m not sure of the logistic of carbon 14 linking itself to a body, but I think it would false the result. The good news is, as vampire can talk, they would be able to confirm or not. Meaning that we would be able to create a template and see if drinking blood reset your quantity of carbon 14, or if you can still get the age of death of the vampire by removing whatever carbon 14 they ingest through blood. But I think it would depend of how much blood they had ingested since their passing, and a lot of other variables.

The other question is: how dead is a vampire? Do they still breathe? How do they interact with their environment? Would that be enough to keep their carbon 14 at “normal” level? If so, they would be considered alive by this dating technique. Wouldn’t that be an emotional journey for our poor vampire?

I’m actually really invested in this.

*dropping a garlic-free lasagne on the counter top* my love, we’ve talked about inviting archaeometrists to our dinner parties

But they’re a vital part of my interdisciplinary work! The beauty of archaeology is its ability to draw from multiple disciplines, incorporating the strengths of many fields to better allow us to understand the human past!

My love, none of my discoveries would be possible without my incredible colleagues, and I have invited them to this dinner party to celebrate the announcement for our impending publication in a peer reviewed journal of great scholarly repute!

Don’t ask what the publication is about, my love. Certainly it is not about that interesting but obscure tool you have refused to tell me the origins of.

Interdisciplinarity for the win!

But also, the question of whether you can carbon date a vampire will probably keep me up at night (or more up. It´s already midnight). Because from what I remember, we get C14 via food, which presumably means it enters the body via digestion and then gets incorporated into the cells as they gradually renew.

Which raises the important research questions of

Hmm, something to further complicate the matter:

It’s my understanding that we can’t carbon date anything after 1950 or so, due to the massive amounts of C14 that were released into the atmosphere, and also the burning of fossil fuels. Or, at the very least, it makes carbon dating much more complicated. @irrational-dreamer you probably know more about this than I do.

However, there’s some recent research being done in living human tissues by calculating the residual C14 from the 1950s onward, although the C14 level is stabilizing to a normal level.

Again, this all depends on whether or not a vampire is capable of ingesting carbon from the organisms it feeds on, but 1) if vampires do indeed absorb carbon, and 2) they have fed one or more times since 1950, then presumably you’d need to figure out a way to control for the post-bomb C14 levels.

reblog this post to send your followers one (1) ancient egyptian fahaka puffer fish hieroglyph

špt sweep!!!

(fun fact: špt does mean 'pufferfish' but it can also mean 'angry' and it's spelt in the exact same way, so it's an excellent example of an ancient egyptian homonym and play on words!)

his rage is unceasing

✨ Please reblog the polls to make them reach out to as many people as possible, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people listen to the music with an open mind 💖 Artists and titles will be revealed after the poll's conclusion, check the original post for an update! ✨