Unmute !

Drew Struzan, the greatest poster artists ever, made this fake poster for a scene in "Jurassic Park 2," with Arnold as Shakespeare's "King Lear." He also made one for "Jack and the Beanstalk" with Robin Williams.

The whole "the brain isn't fully mature until age 25" bit is actually a fairly impressive bit of psuedoscience for how incredibly stupid the way it misinterprets the data it's based on is.

Okay, so: there's a part of the human brain called the "prefrontal cortex" which is, among other things, responsible for executive function and impulse control. Like most parts of the brain, it undergoes active "rewiring" over time (i.e., pruning unused neural connections and establishing new ones), and in the case of the prefrontal cortex in particular, this rewiring sharply accelerates during puberty.

Because the pace of rewiring in the prefrontal cortex is linked to specific developmental milestones, it was hypothesised that it would slow down and eventually stop in adulthood. However, the process can't directly be observed; the only way to tell how much neural rewiring is taking place in a particular part of the brain is to compare multiple brain scans of the same individual performed over a period of time.

Thus, something called a "longitudinal study" was commissioned: the same individuals would undergo regular brain scans over a period of mayn years, beginning in early childhood, so that their prefrontal development could accurately be tracked.

The longitudinal study was originally planned to follow its subjects up to age 21. However, when the predicted cessation of prefrontal rewiring was not observed by age 21, additional funding was obtained, and the study period was extended to age 25. The predicted cessation of prefrontal development wasn't observed by age 25, either, at which point the study was terminated.

When the mainstream press got hold of these results, the conclusion that prefrontal rewiring continues at least until age 25 was reported as prefrontal development finishing at age 25. Critically, this is the exact opposite of what the study actually concluded. The study was unable to identify a stopping point for prefrontal development because no such stopping point was observed for any subject during the study period. The only significance of the age 25 is that no subjects were tracked beyond this age because the study ran out of funding!

It gets me when people try to argue against the neuroscience-proves-everybody-under-25-is-a-child talking point by claiming that it's merely an average, or that prefrontal development doesn't tell the whole story. Like, no, it's not an average – it's just bullshit. There's no evidence that the cited phenomenon exists at all. If there is an age where prefrontal rewiring levels off and stops (and it's not clear that there is), we don't know what age that is; we merely know that it must be older than 25.

why are star wars planets more boring than earth and our solar system like sure we’ve seen desert, snow, diff types of forest, beach, lava, rain, but like… 

rainbow mountains (peru)

red soil (canada/PEI)

rings (saturn’s if they were on earth) 

bioluminescent waves

northern lights (canada)

salt flats (bolivia, where they filmed crait but did NOTHING COOL WITH IT except red dust?? like??? come ON)

and cool fauna like the touch me not or like, you know, the venus flytrap.. and don’t get me started on BUGS like… we have bugs cooler than sw aliens

BASICALLY like???? come on star wars you had one (1) job where are the cool alien species

I KNOW!! I did a report on filming locations in Star Wars last year and just made a list of places that looked so surreal they could make a convincing other planet. You covered some on my list but if I could just add a couple more:

Tsingy di Bemaraha, Madagascar

Zhangye Danxia, China (similar to the Rainbow Mountains in terms of appearance)

Chocolate Hills, Philippines

Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland

So many missed opportunities with cool ass things on Earth, Lucasfilms smh…

Earth is effing amazing!

Quebrada de Humahuaca, Argentina

Lake Retba, Senegal

Tepui, Venezuela

Tianzi Mountains, China

these would make amazing Star Wars planets OR fantasy material:

Tsingy du Bemaraha, Madagascar again (but a different part)

(those are razor-sharp, if you were wondering. very little of this area has been explored because YIKES)

Lake Natron, Tanzania

(looks cool, but is alkaline enough to Kill Your Shit)

Lake Baikal, Russia

(the deepest lake in the world, seriously)

and I’ll wrap it up with Son Doong Cave, Vietnam, the largest cave in the entire world.

it puts anything Dagobah has to offer to absolute shame:

(seriously, the largest chamber is 660 feet high. you could jam a fucking skyscraper in there and still lose it) 

anyway I really like caves thanks for coming to my ted talk

If I’m ever gonna make a movie with cool weird alien features I’m first gonna ask the internet for weird, wonderful places on earth to look at for inspiration.

I’d like to contribute!

Namib-Naukluft Park in Namibia

Cave of Crystals, Mexico

Socotra Island, Yemen

Crooked Forest, Poland (look at their funky little trunks they look like they’re doing the Michael Jackson lean)

REBLOG THIS POST IF YOU FEEL SAFER WHEN QUEER SPACES ARE OPENLY ACCEPTING OF AMAB NONBINARY PEOPLE

That was…unexpected

That was…unexpected

Google is actively blocking Captcha on Firefox

Firefox users have noticed that captchas - both the picture kind and the click the box kind - are not resolving on Firefox. Tests on Chromium based browsers show that it works perfectly fine on them. It is also known that Chrome will be disabling all ad-blockers in June when it moves to Manifest v3, which will greatly limit what extensions can do.

If you use Firefox, there is an extension called User-Agent Switcher and it allows you to change your browser's UA to Chrome. This will allow you to bypass reCaptcha/Captcha blocks set up by Google and make them function properly.

It could be a code snafu on Google's part - but given how predatory they have been acting lately, I'm going to guess not. Don't get locked out of your websites or feel forced to use Chrome again just to browse.

Hexameroceras panderi was a nautiloid cephalopod that lived during the late Silurian, about 425-423 million years ago, in what is now Czechia.

Around 5cm long (2"), it had a downwards-curving egg-shaped shell that preserved the original color pattern on one fossil specimen, showing closely-packed crisscrossing vertical and horizontal bands.

Like several of its close oncocerid and discosorid relatives, its shell also developed a highly constricted opening as it reached maturity. This eventually formed into a narrow visor-like shape with several lobes that probably correlated to the life positions of the eyes and arms, with a "spout" at the bottom for the siphon.

Development of the "visor" in the related Octameroceras sinuosum From fig 6 in Stridsberg (1981)

The function of this structure is still unclear. It may have been a defensive measure against predators – but it would have also severely limited the range of motion of the arms and the size of food that could be eaten through the mouth, suggesting that Hexameroceras may have specialized in very small prey, perhaps even filter-feeding.

Another possibility is that these visored nautiloids might represent brooding females, walling themselves into their shells to protect their eggs and dying after releasing the hatchlings through the tiny remaining gap.

———

NixIllustration.com | Tumblr | Patreon

would you still love me if i was a worm?

An extraordinary Acheulean handaxe knapped around a fossil shell circa 500,000-300,000 years ago.

The maker appears to have deliberately flaked around the shell to preserve and place it in a central position. As a result this handaxe has been described as an early example of artistic thought.

From West Tofts, Norfolk.

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Courtesy Alison Fisk

Half a million years ago. Whoa

i saw this bad boy in person

It's incredible

It was made by HOMO ERECTUS you guys

Like. We were making art before we were "human" in the generally accepted sense

It was almost certainly sacred then. And when you are close to it, it feels super sacred now

When my Mum was pregnant with me she was in the pub and this random creepy elderly woman that nobody ever saw before or since told her that she was going to have a boy and when I was born everyone was like “the creepy lady was wrong” but it turned out I’m trans and THE PUB WITCH WAS RIGHT!

I WAS FORETOLD BY THE PUB WITCH

Witches are always pro-trans culture, transphobes cannot be witches.

Witches are always

pro-trans culture, transphobes

cannot be witches.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Evidence suggests saber-toothed cats held onto their baby teeth to stabilize their sabers

A mechanical analysis of the distinctive canines of California’s saber-toothed cat (Smilodon fatalis) suggests that the baby tooth that preceded each saber stayed in place for years to stabilize the growing permanent saber tooth.

https://phys.org/news/2024-04-evidence-saber-toothed-cats-held.html

I honestly cannot believe how far T(W)ERF rhetoric has spread on this site. They used to be the ONLY ones I saw openly mocking the concept of identifying as queer, the ONLY ones I saw referring to people as ‘kweer’ in a mocking way.

You all are so 100% certain you know how to identify radfem and T(W)ERF rhetoric and can’t possibly fall victim to it but guess what.

They are nowhere near above pulling this shit. And you all are falling for it.

And if you think that screenshot is an isolated incident, think again!

There are countless radfem and T(W)ERF blogs that I’ve blocked that said ‘secret radfem sideblog’ in the description.

Like, it’s great that we’ve made being a T(W)ERF so unaccepted on this site that they can only be open about the most toxic of their views in secret side blogs rather than on their main, but it’s time to accept that they’re taking advantage of that in a really fucking insidious way.

Just a tip on how to recognize these blogs. If you follow someone and you start getting suggested t*rf blogs that’s a good sign the person has sideblog for that stuff. There was some cowboy blog I followed a while ago and I used to get follow suggestions saying “this blog is similar to cowboy whatever” and it was a ton of t*rf shit and low and behold they ended up outing themselves

This is why we learn about what actual TERF ideology is. Saying “trans women are women” and “TERFS not allowed” and putting “TERF destroyer” or whatever in your bio is not enough. Learn how TERFs actually work, and what they believe, and where it stems from, and how they express diluted versions in order to warm up non-TERFs to their ideas.

Do the fucking work. Unfollow/block people who express TERF ideas even if they don’t label themselves as TERFs, challenge those ideas in your community, and you won’t have to worry about secret TERF blogs anymore.

Just in case you happen to be unaware, some of the “radfem lite” they post to warm you up to their rhetoric, just off the top of my head:

The following are some red flags I’ve seen: