Gay weddings from different cultures
Adding pictures from a Jewish wedding because these guys are really cool!
[“In Magnus Hirschfeld’s The Transvestites, “Case 13” consists of letters, written in 1909, from a person known variously as Jenny, Johanna, and John, who was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and who later moved to the United States. Hirschfeld considered this person to be “a typical representative of the group we are concerned with.” These reminiscences are abridged from the original.
I was born in 1862. I did not want any trousers and put up such a fuss, and since my sister was one year older I could wear her clothes until Mother died in 1868. My aunts then forced me to wear boys clothing. I clearly remember that I always only wanted to be a girl, and my relatives and acquaintances would tease me.
I wanted to go to the teachers’ seminary because later, I thought, when I finished, I could go around as a governess or a children’s teacher. Even at the time I had firm plans to become a woman. When I saw that they were not going to allow me to study to be a teacher, at the first opportunity I stole from a girl who was my size. I put on her things and took her certificate of domicile and burned my boy’s things that night. Everything boyish I left behind and went to Switzerland where my relatives would not know where I was.
I first went to work as a nanny and did general housework. At the same time, I learned embroidery. I grew strong and not ugly, so that boys would lie in wait for me. At that time I felt fully a young woman, except when the fellows got fresh with me, and it would occur to me that, unfortunately, I was not one. At 16½ a man tried to rape me. I protected myself, but he gave me a bad name as being a hermaphrodite, so I had to move away and went to France. I had a friendship with a girl, who, like me, was in opposition to her sex, namely manly, and when she went to St. Quentin to the embroidery factory there, I followed her. There I had the opportunity for the first time to come together with women who with other women lived like married people.”]
susan stryker, transgender history
Guys I don't have much dating experience what does it mean when you match a guy on tinder who recognizes you from high school and there's no way he doesn't remember that you weren't a girl yet back then but he's not mentioning it and he's complimenting you and your taste in videogames line up and you talk for 4 hours and he talks about how he likes cooking and invites you to taste test some time and after you wake up the next day there's a new message from him that was sent at 10 am
Congratulations on the new boyfriend ♥♥♥🥰
hydrogen, H₂, is such a weird edge-case molecule. Two protons, two electrons. There’s nothing really like it. Kind of a molecule but also kind of a few elementary particles hanging out. So when people keep proposing to do like serious engineering and infrastructure around creating, storing, transporting, and using it, I don’t think the challenges are necessarily intuitive to the people listening.
- It embrittles steel
- It’s really easy for it to leak, like with sufficiently thin metal it will just go through
- Very difficult to liquify… like you know how you have liquid butane in a Bic lighter? That’s because just plastic can withstand enough pressure to liquify butane. For propane, you need those steel propane tanks. Methane can’t be liquified at room temperature but they transport it on refrigerated ships. But the refrigeration required to liquify hydrogen is much more extreme.
like… ok, if you’ve got a gas stove, that’s probably mostly methane. So that’s “gas” to you. And hydrogen is just another kind of gas, right? Some flammable gas you can pump through a pipeline? But it’s a weird little molecule, there’s just these problems you wouldn’t necessarily think of
@steadyangelrunaway said:
would there be a way to store it in more complex molecules that degrade into hydrogen, similar to how they store carbon dioxide?
yes. I mean you could even make methane and just use it, it’s basically natural gas at that point…
we already convert hydrogen to ammonia at massive scale, by reacting with atmospheric nitrogen, so there’s been some talk of actually using ammonia as the fuel, once you’ve got green hydrogen production going
as @official-kircheis pointed out, we use that ammonai to make fertilier, so this would be a bit like burning food, and who would do that, it’s insane (a derogatory reference to corn ethanol)
corn ethanol sucks im allergic to it and the more common gets the easier it is for me to die of going outside.
the data plumbing modules ive been writing for this postdoc project are genuinely good imo... i wonder if anyones interested. Havent gotten anyone in the lab using them, i dont think they get the appeal. Ill start with the other postdoc, he seemed interested. Ill convert him
fictional stories involving cloning and the "moral dilemma" of whether a cloned human should be considered a person are so fucking obnoxious to me, like from the earliest possible age it never made sense to me why people would hand-wring about the personhood of a clone. that's just a human being baby, don't be so weird about it
"but do they have SOULS???"
good question but here's a better one, are you hungry for a knuckle sandwich
My favorite rabbit trail to drag the "life begins at conception! The moment the sperm meets the egg, a new soul is created!" crowd down is to start theorizing at length about identical twins, naturally occurring clones that divide... after fertilization. It always takes them off guard and completely derails the rant.
Does each twin have half a soul? Is there one full-souled twin and one soulless twin? Did you know that in a lab you can cut a freshly fertilized embryo in up to eight pieces and they will all develop completely? Would this produce seven extra lab-created soul or one lab-created Lord Voldemort split seven ways?
And then we move on to the opposite problem: what about naturally occurring human chimeras, a pair of fraternal twins that collide and merge into one organism with the DNA of both... after fertilization. Does a chimera have two souls? Two half-souls that don't match? Does one soul kill the other? Both sets of DNA survive, so what determines which soul lives and which dies? Does that make the surviving soul a murderer before it even develops a heartbeat, let alone awareness?
And given that both identical twins and human chimeras are psychologically indistinguishable from anyone else, what does a soul actually do? What are the theological implications, if your theory of soul-at-fertilization requires drastic soul weirdness when confronted with biological reality, but that soul weirdness ends up producing... no effect whatsoever?
I’m pretty sure I just have two souls, if that helps.
(walleyed stereogram)
some protein, whatever, all I want to point out right now is the backbone. You’re looking at a beta sheet, so you have these nice parallel strands from top left to bottom right. The color scheme is carbon in grey, nitrogen in blue, and oxygen in red. (that big green thing in the background is a magnesium atom). So you can see the backbone pattern is carbon carbon nitrogen carbon carbon nitrogen. That’s a lot of nitrogen!
Maybe focus on the strand that goes right in front of the magnesium atom, that one doesn’t have any big side chains in the way.
This is one of those rare cases where you can learn something pretty directly just by looking at a chemical structure. What you learn here is that protein production is nitrogen intensive. If you’ve seen cellulose–look, cellulose is just a polymer of glucose molecules, there’s no nitrogen. Plants can make cellulose just from the air basically, using the glucose they get from photosynthesis. But for protein synthesis, they need the nitrogen they get from the soil. Or, in the case of legumes, the bacteria in their root nodules.
So that tells you something else, that because legumes have an advantage in access to nitrogen, they also have an advantage in protein synthesis. And, sure enough, all the plants you think of as protein sources–soy, peas (actually the protein content of peas seems to surprise people but pea protein powder is common, for example it’s used in Beyond burgers), beans, lentils–turn out to be legumes. So there’s an inference from their nutritional content to them being a certain clade of plants, the legumes, with this weird root feature. And the inference works. Haha I left out gluten though–wheat isn’t a legume. But wheat isn’t high protein the way soy is. So this inference works or mostly works, and it makes perfect sense if you know what proteins look like, on an atomic level, just the most basic fact about them, the backbone. That’s rare, usually the relationship between chemical structures and real world facts is much more complicated.
Actually the protein I made the image from is soy glycinin (PDB 1OD5), one of the two main “storage proteins” in soy (according to the Handbook of Food Proteins). But I could have shown any beta sheet and it would have looked basically the same.
enzymes are nanomachines and it's weird that they just happened, nobody designed them, but... they also don't LOOK like anyone designed them.
like watch on a beach metaphor is a little off... like yes this is functional like a watch, but it's also clearly not designed according to any design principles. You can't look at it and infer the thoughts of its creator. It's some tangled blob.
like, yeah... if polymers tangled into blobs that did something important basically by coincidence, a coincidence preserved by replication and selection... it WOULD look like this. An engineered device wouldn't look like this i dont think, it would look like the diagrams in Drexler's thesis
It’s okay to grieve during your healing. Actually, it’s normal. It’s okay to grieve for any number of things including what you wish had happened or even the parts of you that you felt you lost or changed.
Healing is a process. And it isn’t a linear one. And you’re going to get there. But remember it’s okay to feel whatever it is you need to feel.
pov: you go to dog school and the intimidating dog girl has a thing for you
piplup grain entrapment
piplup cares a lot about his work
piplup reports on the company's finances. layoffs are inevitable.
piplup takes a sick day
piplup considers some jorts
piplup forgives his father.
piplup goes grocery shopping
piplup jumps your battery
piplup lights the menorah
piplup sees the pale blue dot
piplup catsits
- H-H. The smallest molecule. Lots of it on the gas giants, but earth can't hold onto it, it ends up in space. For industrial purposes, mostly made from the methane (CH₄) in natural gas, but some is made from splitting water (H₂O).
- N≡N. A very stable molecule, inert under most circumstances, and therefore used in labs, like you have a glovebox full of nitrogen gas that you do your work in. Prying these atoms apart is difficult, but necessary for life. 78% of the molecules in earth's atmosphere are nitrogen, but it's useless to you, you can't get nitrogen from breathing, the nitrogen in your body comes from your food. "Nitrogen fixation", breaking the N≡N bond to get more useful nitrogen products, is done by bacteria as well as industrially (in about equal amounts). The industrial process is a reaction with hydrogen to produce ammonia (NH₃).
- O=O. A very reactive gas. Reacts with metals to corrode them, for example, rusting of iron and steel. You breath it in and it reacts with glucose to give you energy (in the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell). 21% of the molecules in earth's atmosphere. Which is unusual since it's so reactive. Like Mars, of course, has plenty of oxygen atoms (the red is iron oxide), but it's not in the atmosphere, at least not as O=O, it's in CO₂ instead. It's plants that keep the atmosphere oxygenated.
Einstein showed that the theory that hot things faster-moving atoms manifests in temperature-dependent Brownian motion, making the connection between heat and motion visible under a microscope.
It came later, but seems just as decisive to me: X-ray diffraction. It's almost like "well, if atoms are real, you'd be able to see them under some hypothetical ultra powerful microscope", like something you'd propose as a thought experiment to show that "atoms actually exist" is empirically meaningful. Well, you can't actually focus the required frequency of radiation, but closely spaced atoms should act sort of like a slit experiment, producing diffraction patterns. And after the required frequency was available as X-rays, they did in fact find that crystals produce X ray diffraction patterns.
Espeon with cutiefly in the Johto region. I created this Pokémon fanart traditionally with watercolors :3 (Size: 2,5 by 3,5 inch) - Please do not repost, trace, edit or use my art, thanks :3 ♡
A family of tbhs out on the town! I love these little things sooo much okay (ps, tis a sticker) PATREON