Fun fact: by just using imaginary numbers, some Evil Math, and 101 rotating vectors You Can Create a shitty approximation of a fish.

if i was eliot spencer and people were calling me up all the time to hire me to do murder i wouldn't tell them i don't do that anymore i would be like yeah deal and i'd take their money and then i'd just fucking tell the person and have hardison help them vanish (i would have so many enemies and would get assassinated daily)

tags by @violetren:

literally so true. absolutely no notes.

I'm trying to come up with something clever to say here but I feel like I've been hit by a truck. In a good way. I never thought anything like this would pass in the Midwest, not even in a blue state like IL, because it's simply not the kind of thing anybody campaigns on or even talks about at the gubernatorial level.

This is honestly the perfect legal addendum to NAGPRA, and I'm thrilled it's at the state level. This type of legislation would be way too complex at the federal level, but the individual state responsibilities are manageable, and more importantly, doable.

Here's some of the highlights of what the law does:

My favorite comment is this: When asked about what he would say to museums that may push back against the law, Illinois State Rep. Mark L. Walker said: “Too bad.”

Left out unconventional woman, total woman, brush woman, and woman of attrition.

Albino microraptor by Ruben Koops @paleo.parallax

tumblr isn’t a social media it’s a farmers market and the people you follow are the vendors and your mutuals are regulars and sometimes a person I buy pumpkins from will start selling realistic models of sailboats and damn i’m not gonna buy any but I will come by and compliment you on your sailboats

Sometimes the bakery stall that's been selling top tier muffins and bread for years all of a sudden has an entire table dedicated to moss balls wearing little hats. and the correct response to that is "okay! happy for you!"

(via)

I drew a little something for the Hiveworks micro comic summer~

me: *googling what kind of bike helmet i should get*

search result 1, AI-generated article: Since the dawn of time, humans have wondered what kind of bike helmet is best for protecting their cranium and lower intestine. In the event that you find yourself with a bike helmet, you must find a way to save your family. Therefore, we have compiled a list of qualities to look for. First, sodium content is of great importance when biking your helmet.

search results 2, 3, and 4: sponsored ads for bike helmets on amazon

search result 5, reddit thread: bikeaholic363736: hey guys, do any of you have experience with the windslapper 30g helmet from spronklegear?

spokejunkie666: it's probably the best helmet on the market right now. if you're not using the windslapper you might as well just be riding your bike into a woodchipper

handlebar_hamburglar: idiot. we've had this thread a hundred times. don't the mods enforce the repost ban anymore? OP, don't listen to spokejunkie. the windslapper is the leading cause of death in the netherlands

@kawuli

look, I know this is not the point but.

all bike helmets have to meet safety standards (in the US, I am guessing also in most other countries but I don't actually know). that means when you are buying a bike helmet there are really only 3 things to ask.

1. do you want MIPS?

MIPS is basically a plastic lining in the helmet that is designed to protect your head from twisting type forces. If you eg bike to work in traffic daily it's probably worth it, but if you bike occasionally on bike paths you probably don't need it.

2. what is comfortable for you?

largely this is about temperature and weight. I have a heavier, warmer helmet that's great for winter commuting, and a very light helmet with lots of ventilation holes for longer rides and summer.

3. how much do you want to pay?

there's usually trade offs between this and the other two. MIPS helmets are a bit pricier, and lighter helmets are pricier. for calibration purposes, I've used helmets I got for $30 and they're fine if a bit clunky. the helmet I wore daily for about two months cost around $100 and when I first got it I multiple times panicked halfway home from work thinking I'd forgotten my helmet because it was so light. if you want fancy stuff like lights and turn signals on your helmet you might need something more expensive, but that's the most I've ever spent on a helmet.

.... oh and I guess you might care how it looks. I just accept that I look like a big dork when biking, but if you want to look nice I hear there are helmets for that too.

What is it about Kylo Ren that had so many cishet women in an absolute goddamn chokehold

Like I'd get it if he was smoking hot but it's literally just Adam Driver????

Was gonna just passive-aggressive tag this, but fuck it: Some people are into dark hair and big noses. I'm into dark hair and big noses. And as someone who's into dark hair and big noses, Adam Driver is an excellent example of the type. If that's not what you're into, that's amazing and I'm happy for you. But not everyone's into the same shit, and that's what makes life fun.

#i mean i don't go into your posts about square-jawed blond types and start running my mouth#and you know i have opinions on that shit#but i'm keeping them inside because i know they're unwanted#just saying

Also adding “cishet” or indeed “white” in front of “women” doesn’t make (internalized?) misogyny acceptable. Dissing women for being attracted to “the wrong sort of guy” is never going to be enlightened or cool. Just so you know.

In the open, empty cavity

Of my chest

There is an echoing cathedral

And I am there, standing

Shouting

FOR FUCK'S SAKE

As loud as I can

To hear it bouncing back at me

A thousand times and more

And this, my dear

Is how I maintain

My chill

If I see any of you posting shit about not voting, in the year of Clarence Thomas saying we should revisit Marriage Equality and little girls being banned from school sports for having short hair, know that I WILL eat you first when we're in the Mad Max Fury Road level of planet fuckery.

Not For Puppies

support me on patreon!

oh no cigarettes for me thanks i just wanted to be in this dank alleyway with you

TikTok is worth it for this video alone. Gonna have this on repeat for at least a week.

Sounds kind of like a Johnny Cash song

Right? I'm gonna need a whole album of folk music from him STAT.

Looks like there’s one song on Spotify, and a bunch more on Soundcloud!

Perfect! I'd found the Spotify one but hadn't gotten to Soundcloud yet.

Unrealistic polymath genius: has six PhDs.

Realistic polymath genius: just has the one set of degrees, but their bachelor’s, their master’s, and their doctorate are each in a different field, and they’d be happy to explain – at great length – how the three relate to one another.

@cellarspider It’s you.

OKAY SO

My undergraduate degree was in Medieval Studies.

My professional masters degree was in Bioinformatics.

My current PhD studies are in Mammalian Genetics, emphasizing the overall physical structure of the genome.

The PhD and masters are fairly easy to relate to each other: Bioinformatics is a field that develops software and computational methods for examining and understanding biological data. Modern genetics often relies on people with these skills–while many labs can still focus intently on the workings of a single gene, if you want to understand how that gene interacts with the world, you can start generating a lot of data. A LOT. More than it would ever be feasible to process manually.

So, having a background in bioinformatics allows me to focus my work not on single genes, but on how the physical structures formed by DNA affects how genes are used. There’s 3 billion letters of DNA in the human or mouse genome, with thousands of genes, with thousands of mutations my project has cataloged, and tens of thousands of structural components to analyze along side them. If you were to randomly test each and every one of those three types of data against each other to blindly search for interactions, I calculated you’d have to run 371 trillion comparisons. My job started by trying to figure out how the fuck to pare that down to something manageable with the computing power I have, and I’m hopefully about to publish something damn cool on what I found in the process.

So, that’s genetics and bioinformatics. Sure, those fit together logically.

Medieval Studies, tho

That’s where things get interesting. The professors at my university were very careful to teach you about the idea of the “historical lens”. When you read an old text or look at a painting, you’re viewing the subject matter through the lens of your own experiences and presuppositions about the world, and about the time period you’re studying. The person who wrote that text or painted that painting had their own lens, shaped by very different circumstances. Their natural focus is not going to align with your own, and you have to be aware of that. When you start forming ideas about your object of study, you have to ask yourself, “am I seeing what the creator of this piece intended to convey, or am I making assumptions based off of what I want to see?”

In essence, the core of what was taught in that Medieval Studies program was how to think about your own thinking.

And that is so fucking important for good science. “Am I drawing logical conclusions that are supported by the data, or am I just seeing this because I want to see it? Is there some test I can do to check if I’m wrong?”

It’s not easy. Sometimes it can be really uncomfortable, in fact. But it leads to more and better results in the long run, because those moments of self-reflection help uncover possibilities that you missed before.

…And that’s without getting into the seminar paper I wrote on the medieval understanding and treatment of head trauma, as a case study in the medieval period’s contributions to the development of science and technology. Because that was also a thing.

Hello, I’d like everyone to meet one of the most interesting people I know, also Spider please tell everyone about the Medieval Head Trauma paper because it’s fascinating and hilarious.

oh my gosh coming from gallus that’s saying something, I’m flattered

OKAY SO ABOUT THE MEDIEVAL HEAD TRAUMA

This post contains Thor’s migraines, Arthurian knights spinning in circles, and the medicinal use of egg whites on your brain. CW for mentions of medical gore and aggressive head bonks, obvs. Also, this is the result of undergraduate research, and should not be considered comprehensive. If you know more, throw it at me. If you have a correction, I will happily take it! And if you can remember the title of that one book I found once in my university library called something like “Head Trauma in World Myths and Legends”, TELL ME. I can’t fucking find the thing, but I swear it exists.

Also heck my life, Tumblr ate the first attempt at this post. Always write your long drafts on a more stable platform, guys

So. Depending on where and when you lived in western medieval Europe, you might have a very different relationship with the constellation of injuries falling under the category of head trauma. These injuries were either mysterious and beyond the realm of healing, a weird side effect of people not dying so often, or a comprehensible problem that sometimes could be treated by medical and surgical intervention.

A great example of head trauma as mysterious scourge comes from Norse mythology. To cruelly TL;DR a surprisingly hilarious little myth, Thor’s giant-smacking escapades result in a piece of flint getting stuck in his skull. Neither he, nor Sif, nor a witch they call up can remove it. The witch almost manages it, but Thor distracts her at a critical moment, so her magic fails. The myth ends with a moral to the audience: don’t throw your flint tools around, or you’ll give Thor a migraine. Yes, really.

(personal side note- somebody must be throwing hella flint around today, fuck)

In this story, head trauma is just something you have to live with. Magic might be able to help you, but it failed even Thor, so don’t expect better results yourself. And we do have skulls throughout European history that show evidence of lots of people living for years with untreated skull fractures, though with a higher risk of premature death. (One source here, from Denmark, which mixes in some early modern skeletons as well.)

Now, that myth fits the time and place it originated, which is true of stories in general. But one thing you can do in comparative literary analysis is look at the variations between tellings of common stories. And one great mine for this is Arthurian legend. King Arthur and His Circle Bros were popular subjects throughout the British Isles and France for centuries, which one can use to analyze the values, morals and world views of their storytellers.

And also, what happened when you got bonked on the head. See, each storyteller might have their own first-hand experiences with battle, or they’d have patrons who they wanted to flatter or entertain by incorporating Based-On-A-Shocking-True-Story details into the stories, or they were just paying attention to other storytellers at the time and seeing which action tropes were popular.

So, the early Arthurian treatment of head trauma can be summed up in three words: bonk means death.

But after the late 12th century (which admittedly is where we get a lot of our stories from), head trauma starts to become survivable. And sometimes, it’s weird.

Men’s brains swim like water, and they might fall off their horses. If they’re not mounted, they might run around in circles and then fall down. What changed?

The bonk protectors changed! the heaume or great helm style was developed, which is more likely to stay on and protect the head from any angle, though it’s vulnerable to transferring the force of downward blows into the head, neck and shoulders. With more people surviving blows to the head, that means more concussions and traumatic brain injury, and that’s reflected in the stories.

But what about medical textbooks? Well, it probably won’t surprise many to know that western European medical manuals sucked SO MUCH ASS for centuries. The reason why is a rant for another time (and I CAN AND I WILL RANT ABOUT IT), but there was light at the end of the tunnel.

While Western Europe lost almost all Greek medical scholarship and condensed the Latin texts down to near-gibberish, the Eastern Roman Empire had preserved those texts, and the Islamic world had expanded greatly upon that scholarship with their own research and experimentation. During the Islamic Golden Age, traders from Italy brought some Greek and Arabic texts back from the Muslim world, and translations were made into Latin. This gave Italian academics access to a more vibrant and systemic tradition of medical science.

Enter Rogerius, AKA Rogerius Salernitanus, AKA Roger Frugard, AKA Roger Frugardi, AKA Roggerio Frugardo, AKA Rüdiger Frutgard and AKA Roggerio dei Frugardi (jfc dude), a surgeon from Salerno (unknown-1195). While surgery would remain a low status profession for centuries, Rogerius produced a well-organized and clearly written surgical manual, the Practica Chirurgiae. This book, I want to stress, is not flawless, especially when it comes to pharmaceuticals. Digging into the German Commission E Monographs (started in the 1970s, which systematized scientifically proven effects of traditional herbal medicines), Rogerius’ poultices for wounds do fuck-all for healing, but would probably be fantastic for an upset stomach if you ate them.

HOWEVER, the surgical contents of the manual show that either he was working with fantastic written texts at the University of Salerno, and probably had some good first-hand experience with treating head trauma.

The text provides some practical information on diagnosing the kinds of head injuries a surgeon could actually treat–while concussion was still something you’d just have to deal with, a bonk on the head can have lots of other bad effects. You can develop a build-up of fluid within the skull (cerebral edema), or skull fracture that can press pieces of bone down onto the brain. Or you could have tears in the scalp, or worse, the protective layer of tissue around the brain itself (the dura mater).

Rogerius lists ways to diagnose edema and closed skull fractures (where the scalp isn’t broken but the skull is). He describes surgical techniques that are still the basis of many in use today, for incisions and suturing of the scalp, removal of bone fragments and foreign objects, and relieving pressure on the brain from edema. Yes, that last one involves trepanning, AKA drilling a hole in the skull, and yes, it can actually be life-saving in this particular case.

And there’s one bit he talks about which I find outrageously cool. See, wound healing has always been one of the biggest problems in medicine, and it was an absolute matter of life and death before the advent of sterile medical technique. Sure, you might be able to clean a wound with some alcohol-based mixture, but that would be disastrous for wounds that pierce through the skull. This probably goes without saying, but pouring alcohol on your brain is very, very bad.

So, what the fuck do you do when you have a patient with a gnarly head wound that exposes the dura mater, or the brain itself? Water isn’t clean, alcohol is potentially deadly. How do you wash the wound clean?

Get an egg.

Fresh eggs straight from the chicken are sterile capsules that protect the developing embryo. They’re full of liquid-y stuff you can use as a wash! BUT. Rogerius specifically lists egg whites for cleaning head injuries, not yolks. I don’t have any scholarship on why, beyond some interviews with a doctor in my family, but our best guess was that the cholesterol in the yolks could be harmful to the brain and dura mater. But the egg whites by themselves? They’re almost pure protein, including some anti-microbial factors that help defend the embryo in case germs sneak in.

Overall, it’s a brilliant solution to a thorny aspect of wound care, in a time before germ theory, and centuries before Europe would collectively remember you need to sterilize your medical tools. Fucking! Fresh egg whites! It’s fantastic.

So that’s the tl;dr on medieval understanding and treatment of head trauma. A mixture of mystery, medieval pop culture, and medical science. This is the kind of practical history that I found most engaging to study–not lists of kings, not court politics, not wars, but a small, strange little corner of medical history that tells you more about the life and times of people through the ages.

And that’s what a lot of modern historical research is actually like! Find a tiny little subject that sparks joy catches your interest, and dive in. I ended up jumping over entirely to biological sciences in my post-grad research, but I don’t regret a minute of my undergrad. History in all its crumbly little details is awesome.

It’s the medieval head injury paper! Summarized beautifully for those of us that don’t have the concentration to wade through original sources!

But yeah, it really clear how the skillset of “look at the data to see what it says, not what you hope it says” is extremely applicable across art, history, science and math and that’s why every real genius I’ve met is interested in a wide variety of topics- the thing you’re actually interested in is the act of learning.

I found this post again, so everyone please congratulate

DOCTOR SPIDER

Upon completion of their PhD and their descent into Baldur’s Gate 3 Madness so I’ve been learning a lot about videogames design and narrative construction im visual media from them too.

BTW... PSA.... even if we arent mutuals if youre in my notes regularly theres a Very high chance i am still fond of you. yes im vaguing someones tags on the compliment the person u rbed this from post. but like. positive vaguing? THE POINT IS im weird abt following ppl but IM STILL SENDING U FOND VIBES...

that is so cute actually

I am taking everyone who made a poll to gauge the True Percentage of Queers on Tumblr and putting them through a statistics course

Relevant xkcd

Sure, but I still want to know their priors and sampling techniques. Failing that, using the most easily accessible methods to gather data can still yield potentially interesting information about overall dynamics even if we apply mathematical analyses that assume oversampling of queer users to "correct" the effects of snowball sampling. It's worth noting that sampling information about human sexuality is pretty much uniformly nightmarish in any case; this is actually not that much worse than published peer reviewed sampling efforts, horribly enough.