How did I get here, again?

Contrary to popular belief, there are three states a cat in a box might be: Alive, Dead, or Bloody Furious.

- Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett.

Y’all!!!!! Prayer for the Hough family!

I just saw that on the news. I thought they said it was from a fall while dancing but I may have heard wrong. Prayers for sure.

Harry got the first perfect score of the season

I hope the judges are proud of themselves

Okay, I know that’s crazy, but it was hard to find fault with their group dance. There was a lot of content. Each couple coming in repeating the last move of the couple before did it perfectly. I wasn’t expecting tens, but it was a heck of a dance. #dwts

So cute!!

Jim’s combover and shoesies!!

He looks good as a little vampire. Should we be worried?

In 1944 a kitten named George (short for General Electric) was saved from drowning by a U.S. Navy crew member. George was then photographed and given a liberty card and detailed health record. Source.

I always wondered why the Western Zodiac and the Chinese Zodiac were both called zodiacs if one was associated w astronomy and the other w time in general. Like what defines a zodiac that the word is only used to describe these two things? Looking up the word “zodiac” in the dictionary didnt help bc it only talked about the western one.

Well, I decided to look up the etymology for zodiac and it turns out it comes from the Greek for “circle of little animals.” I love humans

was unwilling to accept this outright so i checked etymonline and, truly:

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Behold, a zodiac!

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As the person who got their R keyboard broken and the world mocked me for being forced to use the uwu language as replacement

My condolences

put that back

Curse of Elmer Fudd

peony cupcakes | by cakesbyjanetaylor

you know what really grinds my gears?

okay, bear with me: so as you may know, harry houdini and arthur conan doyle were friends, at least for a while.

by the early 1920s, both arthur conan doyle and acd's wife jean, aka lady doyle, believed whole-heartedly in spiritualism, talking to ghosts and all of that. (sidenote: this was of course right on the heels of a devastating world war and a devastating pandemic, both of which had created a huge population of grieving people, so spiritualism was having a moment.)

lady doyle sincerely thought she had the ability to go into a trance state and pass along messages in writing from the dead. she offered to do this for houdini. houdini agreed.

lady doyle attempted to channel houdini's late mother. she basically drew a cross at the top of the paper and filled it with generic platitudes addressed to "harry." houdini's mom was jewish and didn't talk like that, so houdini knew the jig was up, even if lady doyle didn't. but not wanting to make the situation awkward, he kind of went along with it to their faces.

then acd decided to publish a glowing account of the seance, and since both he and houdini were super famous, it got a lot of attention, and letters started pouring in for houdini, asking if this was true. ultimately, houdini couldn't life about it. so he essentially said, like, "yeah, i think lady doyle THINKS she can talk to ghosts but she absolutely can't." and it ruined his friendship with acd forever.

and then of course a lot of the people running seances weren't even well-intentioned like lady doyle, they were just simple charlatans taking advantage of traumatized people mourning loved ones. in houdini's youth, he and his wife had traveled the carnival circuit where he did an act pretending to commune with spirits, so he knew all the tricks of the trade AND he had lingering guilt over having done this, AND he was infuriated by this increasingly popular wave of con artists so he decided to assemble a team of anti-grifting grifters and together they went on the road exposing whichever spiritualists were preying on the locals.

houdini's best agent was a young woman named rose mackenberg, who donned disguises to visit the fraud de jour and then importantly sussed out what non-supernatural thing was actually happening, and then houdini would demonstrate the techniques onstage to packed audiences.

(if you want to know more, check out episode 175, "ghost racket crusade" of the podcast Criminal or read Tony Wolf's book The Real-Life Ghostbusting Adventures of Rose Mackenberg.)

but yeah, what really gets my goat is that all this happened and as far as i know, we still don't have like four seasons of a Leverage-style historical procedural about rose mackenberg and the rest of the crew having adventures in the 1920s as they unmask craven hucksters all over the united states. (what we do have, apparently, is one season of a show called "houdini and doyle" which is about the oddball friendship of two contrasting men solving sometimes-actually-supernatural mysteries, and whose premise does i think at the very least a real disservice to houdini's whole quest and also totally erases rose, who is arguably the most interesting part of this story to me.)

i am just steamed about this. steamed.

My parents are dead, so if I saw them, there’s a good chance I’d swear.

1. Doctor finds anecdotal evidence that people are passing kidney stones after riding on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disney World

2. Doctor makes 3-D model of kidney, complete with stones and urine (his own), takes it on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad 60 times

3. “The stones passed 63.89 percent of the time while the kidneys were in the back of the car. When they were in the front, the passage rate was only 16.67 percent. That’s based on only 60 rides on a single coaster, and Wartinger guards his excitement in the journal article: ‘Preliminary study findings support the anecdotal evidence that a ride on a moderate-intensity roller coaster could benefit some patients with small kidney stones.’”

4. “Some rides are going to be more advantageous for some patients than other rides. So I wouldn’t say that the only ride that helps you pass stones is Big Thunder Mountain. That’s grossly inaccurate.”

5. “His advice for now: If you know you have a stone that’s smaller than five millimeters, riding a series of roller coasters could help you pass that stone before it gets to an obstructive size and either causes debilitating colic or requires a $10,000 procedure to try and break it up. And even once a stone is broken up using shock waves, tiny fragments and “dust” remain that need to be passed. The coaster could help with that, too.”

SCIENCE: IT WORKS

Update: 

MSU Today

I just love this because it’s HILARIOUS and yet also a perfect archetypal example of The Scientific Method:

1. Hypothesis

2. Experiment

3. Results

4. Discussion 

5. Conclusions

6. GOTO 1 (the scientific method is iterative, don’t forget that part)

was this like… done in cooperation with disney management or did some  random scientist go through bag check with a 3d printed kidney and a bottle of piss and start looking for big thunder mountain fastpasses

He asked first!

that is beautiful.

I love this

Science makes your look really fucking weird sometimes, but by hell you’re helping

When I was in the hospital, they gave me a big bracelet that said ALLERGY, but like. I'm allergic to bees. Were they going to prescribe me bees in there.

So there's a medication called hyaluronidase. It's used to make other medications absorb better, because it makes the cell wall more permeable.

One common usage is to make local anesthetic more effective during surgery, for instance. It's used in a number of injected medications.

Bee stings contain an enzyme very similar to this medication, so sometimes, people with bee allergies have an allergic reaction to hyaluronidase.

This is called cross-reactivity, where your body mistakes something for the thing it's actually allergic to, and has an allergic reaction anyway. For instance, sometimes people with latex allergies also are allergic to bananas and other fruits. They don't actually contain latex, but there are some similar proteins.

Apparently, hyraluronidase used in humans is derived from one of four sources: sheep testicles, cow testicles, cow testicles again, and GMO hamster ovaries.

tl;dr: They won't inject you with bees, but they might inject you with purified cow testicle juice, and your body might say 'eh, cow balls are BASICALLY bees' and try to kill you anyway.

That's why they emphasize more on learning industry-specific skills...😥😭

Can't let British people have air conditioning because first they'd call it something twee like "the climate fixer" and then in 20 years they'll call it "the climb" or "the climmy"

French kids would call it "le climot", frustrating language officials who would prefer they call it "machine pour le contrôle du climat froide à l'interieure de l'édifice"

If I recall correctly they call it air con.

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