It should also be recognised that Lucille Ball helped advance the medium of television as a whole by, more or less, inventing the idea of reruns. This was, in large part, what drove the success of non-serialised shows such as Star Trek, but also paved the way for extremely popular television genres like the sitcom

The sand in Okinawa, Japan contains thousands of tiny “stars”. These “grains of sand” are actually exoskeletons of marine protozoa, which lived on the ocean floor 550 million years ago.

AAAAHHHHH, my area of expertise!! Okay, so these little guys are called foraminifera, or forams for short. Foraminifera is their order name, for anyone interested. (Remember Kingdom-Phylum-Class- and all that fun stuff?) Foraminifera translates from Latin meaning ‘hole bearers.’ Keep that in mind, we’ll get back to it a bit later.

Forams are super cool because they are a single-celled organism that creates a calcareous shell around themselves as protection. A calcareous shell is kind of similar to the calcium in your teeth in a way. Forams take calcium out of the water that they live in to create their shells.

So why is this neat, you may be asking? Because there are something like 4,000 living species of forams in present day and many many more throughout geologic history. Forams also are a fantastic indicator species, so an organism that likes to live in very particular environments depending on the species. For example, some only live in the deep, deep ocean. Other species love the warm waters of the Bahamas or other tropical environments. Certain species also can indicate things like salinity levels in the ocean, calcium levels, and oxygen levels. Basically, by IDing the forams we find on the ocean bottom, in oceanic sediment cores, and fossilized into rocks, they give us a fantastic look back in time to help identify previous oceanic conditions thousands or even millions of years ago.

Also, forams do create the ‘star sand’ that you can find along certain beaches of Japan but they’re so much cooler up close!

See those little holes in their shells? That’s how the foram feeds itself. It sidles up to a food source (usually a diatom, bacteria, algae, or any detritus smaller than it on the ocean floor), then it extends these sticky tenticle-like things called pseudopods from its single-celled body through the holes in the shell and absorbs the food source. There’s a fascinating video showing this if you go to YouTube and search for ‘Orbulina feeding on Artemia’. These holes are also how the foram moves around underwater. It can extend these pseudopods to slowly pull itself along.

The star sand forams are neat but are far from the most beautiful forams, in my opinion. Most forams create a spiraled or multi-chambered shell like a few of my favorites below. (These are forams from the Bahamas if you were curious)

This one here is called Archaias Angulatus. It starts life out as a small, roundish shell like in the top row of diagrams, then creates this flat, galaxy-shaped edge to it as it grows bigger. Again, you can see the holes in the shell used for feeding and maneuvering.

This is a poor picture but this guy is called Discorbis Rosea. Rosea meaning pink after the color. There are some beaches in the world that look pink because of the shells that have washed up from dead forams like these. You can see the holes in the shell on this one too, as well as a really great example of how the foram builds more chambers as it grows bigger kind of like a snail’s shell.

This concludes my Ted-talk for the evening, please do send me questions or messages if you want to know more! I did my undergrad research on foraminifera and it’s always so exciting to tell people more about them! Think of how many forams there might be at the beach the next time that you are there - right underneath your feet and you wouldn’t even know it…

vader: who tore the warning sign off of this wampa cage?? storm trooper: security footage shows it was removed by a golden protocol droid vader: LOL

Vader in RotJ: wait the Alderaan princess is my daughter?? don’t know how to feel about that.

Luke: she strangled Jabba the Hutt to death with a chain.

Vader: OH HELL YEAH

why would you hide this in the tags that’s hilarious

garfield caused a controversy a decade ago by publishing this on veterans day

LIFE ADVICE FOR YOUR TEENS AND EARLY TWENTIES (and probably beyond but I haven't made it much farther than that so far):

All absolutely legit.

Surprise. :)

romans: conquer a shitload of the known world, including parts of africa and the middle east

romans: institute a policy that says that conquered peoples are allowed to gain citizenship by military service, but also can’t serve in their home areas (because armed native soldiers + angry locals = revolt), thus requiring everyone who wants to be a citizen to work abroad for years of their lives, creating diversity.

racists: a single black person in an educational video about rome is unrealistic and i feel attacked.

And a lot of times legionaries settled down not far from where they served once their service was up. Some brawny Libyan kid signs on with the legions and gets stationed on the Rhine frontier. He learns to fight but also how to build roads and walls. After his service is up, he finds work as a mason, settles down with a sandy-haired German lass, and has a couple half-Libyan, half-German kids.

It ends up being a multi-generational thing when one of the kids also signs on with the legions. He gets stationed in Iberia, protecting Rome’s silver- and steel resources. He falls in love with a Celtiberian woman and has a couple quarter-Libyan, quarter-German, quarter-Celtic, quarter-Iberian kids.

Libyan kid’s grandson keeps the family tradition going by also signing up for the legions. He gets assigned to the Parthian frontier and after retirement settles down with a Syrian woman to raise a bunch of eighth-Libyan, eighth-German, eighth-Celtic, eighth-Iberian, half-Syrian kids.

And this is just from the legions. This isn’t counting trade fleets and caravans, the tourist industry, the slave-trade, or migration to Rome and provincial capitols for jobs or political reasons.

Stop clutching your pearls, racists. The Roman Empire was problematic in many ways, but racism wasn’t one of them. (They did occasionally act bigoted toward people of a specific nationality, but that was about culture, not about appearances.)

A poster boy—literally—for this diversity: black Egyptian kid grows up in Thebes (where there were a lot of people of color due to Ethiopia being next door), joins the Roman army, rises to command his largely-black home legion, and is sent with them to Gaul to deal with an uprising.

shin.2580

aerarius_metalworks

@eldriwolf sent me this, and I immediately thought of the Indian bagh nakh “tiger-claw” weapon, which isn’t usually articulated or as realistic - for a given value of realism - but was a very nasty piece of kit.

The basic version was a steel bar with two rings for index and pinkie fingers, and four steel claws for ripping into an enemy’s soft parts - probably neck and stomach, where there were no awkward bones and the result would be more effective.

These simple versions had an extra advantage of being easy to conceal…

…and sometimes the finger-rings would be gilded and decorated with gems as if they were just jewellery.

Okay, maybe quite a lot of jewellery.

I bet that if timing and location were organised properly, political assassination could be passed off - in honest belief or for convenience - as the victim having encountered a real tiger.

“But where are the marks of the tiger’s teeth?” That too could be arranged:

These double daggers have proper flattened-diamond blade profiles, and their points are too close for a full-grown tiger or leopard - but (fiction-writer imagination at work) there’s no reason why a special-purpose one couldn’t have been made with realistic separation and correct tooth-spike shape.

The modern era has seen plenty of convenient “accidents” and “suicides”(what writer Len Deighton calls XPD or Expedient Demise) so how good was Mughal-era CSI?

Or more correctly, when required by Certain Circumstances, how bad did it need to be?

If an Important Person announced: “Clearly a tiger did it. How sad. Too bad. Long live the new maharajah, my Dear Little Nephew”, the best way for doubters to maintain good health would be agreement…

*****

There was another version which - if the “attacked by a wild beast” excuse was still used - came with a suggestion that tigers in that particular region were getting disturbingly smart. (Though pointing this out may not have been wise, see above…) :->

These are bichuwa bagh nakh, “scorpion-sting tiger claws”, the dagger name deriving from its recurved blade shape resembling the business end of a scorpion’s tail.

They were sometimes carried in combat, bichuwa bagh nakh in the left hand and a talwar (curved) or khanda (straight) sword in the right.

During close-quarter grappling the claws could rake and the dagger stab, while the finger-rings meant less risk of dropping it.

In the same way that many Indian weapons had “tacticool” add-ons - miniature pistols, axe-gun combinations, concealed daggers and so on - there were bagh nakh with more than just one extra blade…

…bagh nakh with extra folding blades and a knuckle-guard…

…and this articulated contraption which (IMO anyway) was for defence as well as attack.

*****

It was, like the much simpler two-ring-no-blades version, a lot less obvious than the first photo suggests…

…and since many Indian helmets were open-faced while others had face-protection only of mail…

…a surprise slap across the face might spoil any warrior’s day.

The reason I think it also had a defensive purpose is the fairly thick metal palm and that little spur low down on it, almost certainly meant to stop a palm-blocked blade from sliding any further.

I’m not sure there’s enough articulation for such a blade to be actually gripped tightly, but once trapped between spur and claws it could be twisted aside for long enough that a weapon in the other hand could attend to its wielder.

*****

Yet again: when creating a fantasy weapon for writing or RPG, do a search for whatever you have in mind, because it may well have been made for real a couple of centuries ago by an Indian weaponsmith demonstrating what he could do to advertise his skill, or just making some oddity in steel to see if it was possible… :->

(reminding self to ask @petermorwood if he’s sharpened the kitchen knives this week)

Get wrecked, Siobhan!

Eggman family

Mint Cream Magician - Submitted by SeesawSiya

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