Vienna Waits

There is,,, a lobster. On the way

There is a lobster somewhere in the facility but we don’t know where

This is not a joke btw I was supposed to receive and acclimate a lobster today but I waited around in the lobby for an hour before finding out that the Lobster Deliverer went around back and gave the lobster to the aquarist and he went out on a diving trip without telling anyone where he put the lobster. There is literally a lobster here somewhere and we can’t find it. Lobster location unknown.

Update he put it in one of the lobster traps tied to the pier. Which is fine, that’s where it was gonna go anyway until we set up its display, but I would’ve preferred to acclimate it before plopping it into the ocean. But the hooligan has been contained. There will be no surprise lobster attacks today.

Update 2 here is Thee Lobster

Why is it blue???

“Great Tits!”, inspired by the Great Tit, a small insectivorous bird with a black and white head, blue wings and tail, olive green upper body and yellow underparts.

TIL a family in Georgia claimed to have passed down a song in an unknown language from the time of their enslavement; scientists identified the song as a genuine West African funeral song in the Mende language that had survived multiple transmissions from mother to daughter over multiple centuries (x)

the researchers have given up trying to find the origin of the song. They tried one last village. When they played their recorded song...

Their audience sang along.

Well, if you want to sob, this is worth watching. The song was almost lost in Sierra Leone due to the British spreading Islam and Christianity after WWI. The woman who still remembered it learned it from her grandmother, who said she had to always remember it, because it was how she'd know when her brothers or sisters came home from far away. She learned it specifically to be able to recognize other people of the Mende nation.

watching reddit go into a full death spiral is like watching the specifically trans equivalent of the library of alexandria go up in flames

like yes reddit is also the only place on the internet you can get an actual answer to any question in general. but it’s also a huge centralized community database about which surgeons will fuck you over, who takes what insurance, which doctors you can trust, how to write a template therapist’s letter, insurance appeals, peer support, questions that feel too stupid to ask anywhere else, diy guidelines, “hey this is embarrassing but,” finding trans people in your area, explaining why you need PTO without getting way too personal about it, safety tips, et cetera you get the picture

Someone on trans Reddit just bought the url transgender.org and have put out a call for folks to help turn it into a replacement (and more). Here's a link on r/ftm but it's open to everyone

I was working with an item today that just utterly flabbergasted a part of me (the other was deeply frustrated with the catalogue record AS SOMEONE APPARENTLY THOUGHT IT WAS PRINTED ON SILK, coming back to that in a minute) … but ANYWAYS … said item is a replica of a medieval manuscript prayer book THAT IS ENTIRELY WOVEN out of grey and black silk … WOVEN … text, images, intricate grey scale, WOVEN … NOT PRINTED …

And it’s flabbergasting because it’s from 1888, Jacquard machine, IT USED PUNCH CARDS to weave these intricate pages … something like 400 weft per near square inch … IT looks like a page of textured paper, but it’s not, it’s entirely SILK … F*CK …

Anyways …

OKS I’ve since calmed down and found out that the reason they used “printed” is because it is essentially printed by a computer … in a weird way; when I import the record, I’m just gonna take that note out …

BUT this is the item btw

WOVEN! WOVEN ON A LOOM using f*ckin’ punch cards!

This portrait of Joseph Marie Jacquard was also woven with punch cards in 1839!

Every once in a while someone rediscovers that the relationship between Jacquard Looms and modern computers, an intuitive leap originally made by mathematician Ada Lovelace while writing an extensive discussion of Babbage’s calculating machine.

– Ada Lovelace, 1843

Babbage was using it to add numbers. Lovelace went further and suggested that anything one could represented by numbers, such as music, could then be manipulated, transformed and generated (“woven”) according to equations, algorithms and steps programmed in by punchcards in the same way the looms made repeating patterns.

!20 years later, the computers in the Apollo spacecraft that took astronauts to the moon were given “rope-core memory”: fabric-like networks of wire hand-woven by women recruited from textile factories, because it was the most information-dense and durable way they had to store information and computer instructions (far higher density than transistors) at the time.

it was never used again, but it’s a nice link back to the technology which made that book, eh?

The fucking legendary WAIT to fake bomb them to show them you knew the whole time. 

Legend.

i love that there was definitely an intelligence briefing where someone in charge heard that there was a fake airfield in progress and went, "...hey you know what would be funny?" and then everyone else agreed it was indeed SO funny that they would devote man-hours and a sizable log to making a fake bomb to drop on it while being only somewhat busy fighting a war, but never too busy for a funny craft project

that pilot was probably laughing so hard after he pulled the trigger and turned back to whatever convoy i'm shocked he was able to keep the plane in the sky.

Humans will always be humans.

reddit migrants y’all are adorable, it has been a pleasure watching you learn to tumblr like tadpoles coming up on land after growing legs. I am examining your terrarium with great interest

i am being compared to so many delightful critters

hello. this is a PSA. ao3 is NOT releasing your browsing history, despite what you may have heard on tiktok.

if you’re signed into ao3, your history is viewable in the dashboard tab. it always has been, nothing is changing. please don’t believe everything you hear on tiktok.

no one is able to view your browsing history unless they are signed into your account.

“Ohhh, dadgummit!” Jack Schmitt tumbles over into the lunar dust during the Apollo 17 mission to the Moon, December 11-14, 1972.

worth noting that this is the most recent living person to have walked on the moon

fucking cringe

you post cringe on the moon once and then no one ever goes back there

btw the french word for panties is "culotte" so when ladybug was trapped in the cage and the lucky charm disappeared it meant they were now "sans culotte" (literally "without panties", and also the name of 1789 french revolutionaries) which means the only way to get out was with the help of a revolution coming from the people

harvesting cinnamon

…How did it ever occur to someone that this was edible?…

I mean, I’m guessing some variation of “hey that tree I used as firewood sure had some good smelling smoke and made the food we cooked over it better, I wonder what else we could do with it … ”

Yea, that or

I mean. There’s foods out there that if you don’t cook them exactly right they will kill you. Humans have been trying absolutely everything to see what they can eat.

there is a shark. The greenland shark. It lives in the ocean where humans naturally die. At depths that would crush a human. In water so cold it would very quickly kill a person. It’s a big shark, 20ish feet. Several have been found with polar bear in their stomach. They live hundreds of years. To keep from freezing, their blood is full of anti-freeze chemicals that makes their meat poisonous to humans.

They are considered by humans living near them to be… a delicacy.

Of course you have to bury it for six months to let it ferment the poisons out.

i swear to gods, if it’s on this planet, we will find a way to eat it.

did you know, the first scientists to find a whole frozen mammoth out in the tundra … cooked some and ate it? Like, they found it and excavated it, and while still on site these 2 professionals with degrees said to each other, oh we gotta eat some of that. It was like 17 THOUSAND years old. They said it tasted bad. No shit. But that’s humans for you.

anyway, the cinnamon harvesting is awesome, never saw that before

Humans are one of the most accomplished omnivores on the planet.

Two things. The first is that huh, I guess you kinda coppice cinnamon, which makes a lot of sense now I think about it. The second is that we eat almonds and cassava, both of which are, in their wild state, hilariously toxic.

Both contain copious amounts of cyanide, or more accurately, compounds that release cyanide when you eat them. And yet? Cassava became a staple for people in the Amazon and beyond, because despite the fact that eating improperly prepared wild cassava will straight up kill you, people worked out that if you grind it up into a wet paste and leave it covered for several hours to offgas its cyanide. Though some domesticated varieties can be detoxified just through proper boiling and discarding of the water, a lot of domestic strains still require this whole involved process to not fatally poison you.

Meanwhile almonds, wild almonds, are also deadly poisonous. It takes about 50 to kill and adult but as few as 5 bitter almonds can be fatal to a child. Thing is, wild almonds occasionally produce plants that aren’t stuffed to the gills with cyanide. But still, it feels insane to me that people who lived off the land in the places where wild almonds grew found out that some of these plants wouldn’t kill you, because idk I feel like my instinct there would be to not even try And yet? Almonds are a thing. (almonds were a very early domesticated fruit tree and there’s some features of almond propagation that make this even more insane)

If something is potentially edible, and I really do mean capital-P-Potentially here, someone, somewhere figured out how to eat it, even if figuring that out involved a truly ludicrous string of steps and/or luck to not just fucking die from it.

I feel like it’s worth drawing out explicitly that there’s a very simple reason for this: for the vast majority of human history, there would be regular patches of time when at least part of the population would go through a state where “I might die if I eat this” took back-seat to “I will die if I don’t eat something.” 

We also ported knowledge forward, mind, from our pre-human ancestors. Other primates are more than smart enough (while also going through “I gotta eat SOMETHING” phases) to know about That One Almond Tree That Doesn’t Kill Us, and to pass that knowledge on through generations; other primates may  even smart enough to figure out through trial and error that the smushed up cassava under the leaves didn’t kill me, so maybe if I smush it up and leave it under the leaves for a bit I can eat it later. 

So are other animals, mind, and we got really good at watching what other animals got away with eating, which is I suspect how you got the shark thing: other meat-eaters eat the fresh shark, they die! Then the famine hits and you notice that the fox or the whatever else is digging up that shark that washed up that you buried ages ago except now it’s NOT dying and you figure, what do I have to lose? Especially since by that time you’ve got thousands and thousands of years of cooking science behind you - of the collective knowledge that fermenting, cooking, freezing, drying, and doing other things to potential food makes it more or less poison or edible.

(Tumblr won’t let me add a link on mobile right now e.e but https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/04/science/explorers-club-mammoth-dinner.html it’s worth being a LITTLE sceptical about stories of eating mammoth or giant sloth or whatever meat. There are “credible” stories about it from the early days, but.) 

For Greenland shark specifically, “bury it in the sand with salt and let it ferment” is also a way of preserving fish that are edible in their unfermented state. (This is how gravlax gets its name–literally “buried salmon.” It isn’t generally prepared that way any more but that is the traditional method.)

“Let’s see if the technique that makes edible foods tastier/more digestible makes poison ones edible” is a pretty obvious experiment.

Oh good point!

There is also the fact that in between “poison” and “food” there is “medicine”

Back when contracting parasites was more of a regular thing, people would eat a bit of a poisonous plant to basically flush out their digestive system and get rid of the parasites, and since poisonous plants can have a variable amount of poison, it makes sense to develop means of reducing the potency so you can just eat more for a higher dose

Doesn’t even have to be a purgative/laxative, the main concept of most abortifacient plants is “poison you just enough to cause your body to reject a pregnancy”

Generally if you eat too much of a medicinal plant, that’s poison baby!

Sooner or later someone figured out “hey, if you boil pokeweed 3 times and replace the water every time, you can actually just eat it” and poke salad became important food for poor people

Side note, but it’s really interesting to me how so many medicinal plants have such a wide distribution e.g. Yarrow, makes me wonder if they might have been spread by humans tens of thousands of years ago

I used to assume that gaining knowledge of dangerous or medicinal plant life was basically a lot of russian roulette, won by massive amounts of bodies and time. But I’ve changed my mind after reading some stuff from naturalists. In Botany In A Day, Thomas J Elpel had a great paragraph that was really enlightening for me personally. He said that lots of plants share chemical components which can be detected by distinctive tastes and smells. So to identify a plant with a particular medicinal property you don’t have to go in blind trying it for every condition to see if it works and hope it doesn’t kill you. You can relate tastes and smells to other plants you’ve already seen and tried, and have educated guesses about their edibility and medicinal properties.

I think the example he gave was about tasting astringency in a certain family of flower being a good indicator it contains a certain home remedy for stomach pain. But in my own words, for example, I think arums (family of plants) have a particular sickly-sweet smell and a certain kind of thick stem and leathery leaves. If I ate almost any raw arum I would chew on thin nedele-like calcium oxalate crystals, which would lead to swelling in my mouth, potential numbness, etc. Say I try boiling the root of one (like taro), and am able to eat it without issue. If I found a different jungle plant which smelled the same, had leathery leaves, thick stem, etc, I would be able naturally hazard a guess that eating it would suck. But I might be able to get away with eating it’s boiled roots.

a lot of traditional abortifacients and traditional de-wormers (such as tansy) are the same mildly poisonous plants

There's also the fact that sometimes the atmosphere around you changes things to make them edible/more edible/tastier, and we're pretty disconnected from that these days because we've done everything we can to get out of nature, but the example that comes to my mind is meat. Humans didn't actually develop into humans until we started eating cooked meat. The theory is that the fat and proteins in it became more digestible to us when cooked, and so our brains began to grow bigger and develop. (Yes, we literally had to eat cooked meat to become homo sapiens. We would be stupid without meat.) So anyway, how's a big dumb monkey figure out how to cook meat? ....we don't know. We probably never will. But somebody here on this website made a pretty astute observation that I think is as good a guess as any, and that's "wildfires." The wildfires we see today as a result of climate change are fucking insane. In a cooler, wetter environment, the only things really causing wildfires would have been lightning strikes, and they would have been smaller in both intensity and duration. And once they're over...well, there's all these dead animals on the ground. Birds and beasts that couldn't run or fly fast enough. And yeah, the outside is charcoal, but it smells good, and if you pull off the fur...what's underneath isn't going to be a five-star pan-seared steak, but it's going to be edible, and it's going to have a lot more flavor than raw meat, even without seasoning. (I've had raw meat, because once upon a time I was a dumbass. It's very bland. 0/10 do not recommend, the steak tartare people are lying to you.) So what do you do? Well, you fuck around for a few thousand years trying to start fires on purpose. The earliest evidence we've found of controlled fire is about a million years ago, but scientists think there may simply be a problem of "the remains of fires are extremely biodegradable and don't hold up in the archaelogical record," because the fossil record shows anatomical changes in homo erectus consistent with cooking food several hundred thousand years before that. Eventually you manage to get it together and boom, cooked meat! Does it taste better more well-done? Less? Hey, you know that tree bark that smells so good? What if we sprinkle some of it on this gazelle leg? And voila...cooked meat and modern humans. We used to be much, much better at learning from the natural world around us. That's how we discovered a lot of this stuff.

every site and app everywhere is stealing my data yet i still get ads for animal products

on Reddit it’s even worse for me. Just constantly bombarded with meat posts. Here, I only get German ads for dark web viagra 🤷🏿‍♀️

If you're constantly being "bombarded with meat posts," it's...because you're always talking about meat.

When I've been at work talking to the Mexican ladies for awhile, my ads are in Spanish. When I've been binging anime, I get Funko pop ads. If I've been talking about body image, boom, ads for acne wash and plastic surgery and weight loss. I mostly hang out in Jewish and gaming subs on Reddit. You know what I get ads for? Jesus. No, literally, those stupid "Jesus was X too" ads. If you're only getting ads about meat, then try growing a personality along with your vegetables. Because targeted ads literally look for keywords in what you say.

Wild that folks keep saying beekeepers abuse bees as if bees are not both venomous flying animals and fully unionized

Hubris to think you COULD abuse bees

I think that if you see a balrog in an unlocked kitty kennel then you can assume that it wants to be there

Actually, beekeepers take many precautions to keep their bees from leaving.

many clip the wings of the queen, destroy new queen cells, cull queens they don’t like and use bee pheromones to prevent a hive from naturally swarming or absconding. They also try and prevent mating with the African honey bee, which makes them less docile among other things. During artificial insemination of queens, drones are crushed and „spare“ queens are killed.

and commercial beekeepers even cull their hives during winter, or when they are not producing well.

Coupled with the fact that there is evidence that insects do feel pain, this is not great.

(Not to mention that honeybees are an invasive species in most places, competing with native pollinators and spreading disease)

It is so fucking bold of you to link the exact same paywalled book thirteen times in your reblog to throw people off the fact that you’re using one source from 1859.

having gone to the linked source I’m actually very unsure even if you got behind the paywalled source it says what it’s claimed, as among the preview pages are:

“In all our operations with the bees we must use gentleness. All quick sudden jars and motions irritate them. So does breathing on them. Bees are always more gentle and less inclined to sting when they are gathering honey; and at such times hives can be opened with very little danger; whereas when a dearth of honey prevails the inmates of the same hive might show a great spirit of resentment. I have observed that colour exerts some influence on the temper of this insect. I have found that dark shades of clothing, particularly red, are more distasteful to them than white. Hence when working among them I always go in shirt sleeves pr in light coloured clothes.”

The broader page is about how being stung is unpleasant but not the end of the world, and you can easily minimize it…. By being thoughtful and careful and calm. I can’t find reference to clipping wings or culling; there is a mention of removing drone comb but only carefully, and it’s useful to remember that the hive itself literally drives the drones out to die once they’ve served their purpose. There’s no mention I could find of artificial insemination of queens, and I’m VERY sure that in 1859 they did not have reliable access to BEE PHEROMONES xD xD

There is mention of using smoke but dire warnings of oversmoking; and since the first record of Africanized honey bees is from THE NINETEEN FIFTIES, not the eighteen fifties, that poster is DEFINITELY lying about that citation, as unless the Victorian writer of that book was a fucking Time Lord, they can’t have known that cross breeding was a concern.

This is why it’s not enough to merely assume that because someone has REFERENCED a source, this means they have evidence. It is necessary to check that the source says what they claim. In this case that is in many cases literally impossible, and in all other cases unproven.

These guys agreed to get undressed to address body positivity in the media. No studio lights or beauty retouching required.

📷 @taylormillerphoto

YES YES MALE BODY POSITIVITY

Thank you. Especially to the guy with the acne. Lots of people have acne on the chest and back, but almost no one ever acknowledges that. Young children that just start going into puberty need to know this is normal and not something to freak out/ be embarrassed about. Body positivity in the media helps so many people with self esteem issues.

OH MY GOD AND A MASC NONBINARY PERSON?! YES YES YES YES THANK YOU

My favorite reading from Shabbat evening service is this tiny section right here. Wishing you all a peaceful Shabbat full of whatever it is that makes you feel all of the good things ❤️

HEY EVERYONE

Do you enjoy the idea of Sticking It To The Man, but also you’re fucking tired? Maybe you appreciate the idea of direct action of some kind but ADHD, depression, or physical disability has made it nigh-on impossible for you to actually, you know, do shit?

Well, friends, allow me to introduce you to a small but significant thing you can do to Stick It To The Man while also benefiting your own mental health:

I haven’t bought green onions in a year.

If you’re sitting here thinking “holy shit, Nina, those look like hell,” you’re not wrong—they’re recovering from some unintended abuse. They survived two weeks in triple digits (that’s upward of 35 degrees for y’all with the weird sciencey math units) while I, uh. Forgot to water them. The outer layers dried out to protect the inner layers and as soon as I watered these thirsty bitches they went

They literally looked dead three weeks ago. So yeah, they’re not too pretty right now, but you wouldn’t be either, and they’re bouncing back nicely.

So, how to do this simple thing?

1) obtain dirt and a pot. You’ll want to do this first because the next steps go surprisingly fast. My green onions live in a 6” terracotta pot and some gardening topsoil, but you can use potting mix (not Miracle Gro tho, that stuff is trash), dirt from outside if you live in a place where it’s safe to do so, any kind of soil will do provided it’s clean and doesn’t contain pests (although most pests will leave alliums alone because they hate the smell). To be clear, because we love and respect our biosphere in this house, “pests” in this context means “bugs that specifically will attack green onions while providing no benefit to either the onions or any other plants you may have.” The pot is mandatory, however—if you want to do this year-round, you need to be able to move the onions inside/outside as weather allows/demands.

2) buy some green onions. You can skip straight to step 4 from here if you want, but if you’re planning to use them first…

3) cut them only to the tops of the white bits. In other words you ONLY want to use the green part.

4) put the white bits in a ramekin, measuring cup, etc. with some water. I’ve used things as big as juice glasses for this, but that’s really on the big end. Put your container in a window with some sun.

5) 3-5 days later, you should see about half an inch of root growth on the bottoms of your onions, and possibly the beginnings of a tiny green spear at the top. (Maybe a bit more, if they’re overachievers.) Plant them in your pot with just a bit of the white sticking up overtop of the soil.

6) water just a little bit, every other day. You want the soil to always be moist to the touch, but never out and out wet.

7) watch them sprout. This is excellent for your mood, by the way. Science says having and tending green things provides visible benefits to both your physical and mental health. We also know that making tangible things is good for your mental health, and green onions grow quickly, so you get benefits fast.

8) As they grow, you can reduce watering to three times per week because they’ll be able to store more water. The leaves will feel firm and “thick” (you’ll understand what I mean when you get to feel a properly-watered green onion) when they have enough water, much like a succulent’s leaves will get thicker and firmer when it’s well-hydrated, so it’s relatively easy to tell if they need a drink.

9) trim your onions as you need them! I try to never take more than 3-4 leaves in a week—about half a bunch—so it has time to grow more, but if you live with a bunch of people you can get around this by just starting more green onions. Buy three or four bunches and plant them all. They don’t go bad because they literally just grow until you need them. I’ve actually planned meals around “I have not used enough green onions lately and the leaves are bending under their own weight, I need to trim some tops.” Although the ones you see in the grocery store have open tops, you’ll notice closed spears on your new leaves, and these are completely edible. Yes, I regret to tell you they cut off and probably waste the tapered bits just for The Aesthetic. They’re just like any other green part of the onion.

AND YOU WILL NEVER NEED TO BUY GREEN ONIONS AGAIN. Just add a little soil now and again to replenish the nutrients.

Yes, they’re cheap. Yes, this is a small thing. But many small things added together are a big thing. And when you’re confident in your green onions, if you have the desire and ability to do more, there are many other plants you can grow from grocery-store starters.

GO FORTH. ENJOY THIS KNOWLEDGE.

Mint is also good for the mental health garden. Almost killed it and that actually seems to have given it a sense of purpose.

Just make sure it’s in a pot and kept well away from all other pots.

This also more or less works for any lettuce you get with the root/ 'stem' end still attached like romaine lettuce, you cut it down until there's about a 1-2 inches of leaves left (usually at that point it's mostly the whites and ribs of the plant) and the stem end, put the root end in some shallow water for a couple days until a) roots start regrowing or b) the leaves start regrowing from the middle, than replant it in some soil and a 6" pot! it takes longer than ops green onions but a free head of lettuce is free! Especially if you have the butt end of lettuce that went bad/got slimy, save the root and plant it the way described above and at least it won't be a waste, plus fun plants !! You can also just trim the leaves as needed for eating, wash well and leave the root in the soil, it'll keep regrowing !

Chapter 16 of ‘the warmth of your doorways’ is up!

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

omg, this is the first time i’ve heard older furries refering to themselves as “gray muzzles” 🥺 that’s so cute!!

a twitter thread that actually killed me