In-pursuit-of-knowledge-blog - Everything Is Interesting!

that must have taken so much resilience and deftness and i’m sure it was very intimidating to the attacker and I hope you were alright!!!

once i got shot with a crossbow, so i took the bolt out and stabbed the attacker with it

i think about that every godsdamned day

Sometimes you have to lick the equipment for science. It’s just a little fluid  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i was looking for info on when artificial sweeteners became popular and came across this. this idiot fuckn scientist just went and licked his entire lab. what a fuckign fool. wht the fuck

Yo!!!!!!

Super blue blood moon rises behind Parthenon, in Athens January 2018

The Fly (1958) is a very good and intelligent movie. Its characters are realistic and it’s an engaging and thought-provoking story (and the practical effects are good). [I’m going to spoil it now, but i really do recommend you watch it yourself.]

I take issue with the doctor’s reaction to his test results- not in how it was written, but with the man himself, fictional as he is. His motivations are not incomprehensible, and he’s not really in his right mind towards the end- I can even comprehend (though I wouldn’t do the same) wanting to destroy oneself rather than lose all agency. Having another conciousness take over your body is frightening (though I do think an imperfect solution could’ve been found with help). But the burned notes are a scarcely-addressed tragedy. The destroyed lab equipment, a nearly perfect teleporter, gone, seems to be the Fly’s doing, assuming the audience can judge this based on which arm acts. That is a great tragedy, but Doctor Delambre seems to be in control again when he burns his notes and his reasoning behind it is chaos! As if destroying his work would prevent the same thing from happening to a future scientist! He didn’t need anyone else’s input to make that mistake, so why should the next person need his? If he had the good sense to leave his research intact, it could be learned from, because that’s how science is supposed to work! You can’t publish results you know are wrong, and you can’t withhold results because they’re not the ones you wanted! What I’m saying is Andre singlehandedly (pun intended) deprived his world of teleportation technology because he had an accident. What a brilliant moron.

You only have to look at how cis hetero people try to interpret being transgender to see how history and anthropology inherently biased 

“So they used to be female, but they’re now male”

“Sort of, but the thing is, he was never female. He was simply assigned the gender at birth but later recognized he was male.”

“But his records show he was female”

“I’m saying he’s never been female, he was just falsely identified as female”

“I don’t get it. So like, they used to be female but are now male biologically???”

“No… ugh, never mind, just understand they’re male”

They don’t get it because they don’t have context for it, so try to apply a context they understand. It’s not accurate, but it’s the kind of argument that becomes moot when they understand the most important details. 

That’s what happens in history and anthropology as well. 

There are existing concepts that colonial historians DO NOT HAVE ANY CONTEXT FOR and they will therefore attempt to apply their own context to those concepts, even if they are incorrect. 

I use transgender people as an example because that’s one of the many concepts largely misunderstood by early colonial historians. They don’t GET the concept of a “third gender”or a “spiritual female”/ “Spiritual male” accepted as part of the community, they don’t understand that two genders are a concept THEY have that the community they study DOESN’T. They don’t understand that the language DOES NOT HAVE GENDERED PRONOUNS thereby eliminating hangups on gender that they themselves have. 

Then they attempt to apply their own context – ie the context of a largely heterosexual, largely cis, and largely male community with pre-programmed ideas of what women are to them rather than what women are to the community they are studying. A society which, given English and other European languages, gender their pronouns in a way that isn’t done in other societies. 

It’s the historical equivalent of 4Kids Dubs changing original Japanese names from anime into weird English names. 

History and anthropology must be challenged CONSTANTLY by different outlooks less affected by white imperialist colonial mentality so that anything misunderstood in the past century or two can be remedied. 

Like the fact that Viking women were warriors and buried as warriors, among other biased misinterpretations. 

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did you know that octopi have three hearts and nine brains? They’re very efficient and clever and this one is very cute.

just woke up from one hell of a nightmare i need a distraction…

Help Explore Your Own Solar Neighborhood

We’re always making amazing discoveries about the farthest reaches of our universe, but there’s also plenty of unexplored territory much closer to home.

Our “Backyard Worlds: Planet 9” is a citizen science project that asks curious people like you — yes, you there! — to help us spot objects in the area around our own solar system like brown dwarfs. You could even help us figure out if our solar system hosts a mysterious Planet 9!

In 2009, we launched the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Infrared radiation is a form of light that humans can’t see, but WISE could. It scans the sky for infrared light, looking for galaxies, stars and asteroids. Later on, scientists started using it to search for near-Earth objects (NEOWISE) like comets and asteroids.

These searches have already turned up so much data that researchers have trouble hunting through all of it. They can’t do it on their own. That’s why we asked everyone to chip in. If you join Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, you’ll learn how to look at noisy images of space and spot previously unidentified objects. 

You’ll figure out how to tell the difference between real objects, like planets and stars, and artifacts. Artifacts are blurry blobs of light that got scattered around in WISE’s instruments while it was looking at the sky. These “optical ghosts” sometimes look like real objects.

Why can’t we use computers to do this, you ask? Well, computers are good at lots of things, like crunching numbers. But when it comes to recognizing when something’s a ghostly artifact and when it’s a real object, humans beat software all the time. After some practice, you’ll be able to recognize which objects are real and which aren’t just by watching them move!

One of the things our citizen scientists look for are brown dwarfs, which are balls of gas too big to be planets and too small to be stars. These objects are some of our nearest neighbors, and scientists think there’s probably a bunch of them floating around nearby, we just haven’t been able to find all of them yet. 

But since Backyard Worlds launched on February 15, 2016, our volunteers have spotted 432 candidate brown dwarfs. We’ve been able to follow up 20 of these with ground-based telescopes so far, and 17 have turned out to be real!

Image Credit: Ryan Trainor, Franklin and Marshall College

How do we know for sure that we’ve spotted actual, bona fide, authentic brown dwarfs? Well, like with any discovery in science, we followed up with more observation. Our team gets time on ground-based observatories like the InfraRed Telescope Facility in Hawaii, the Magellan Telescope in Chile (pictured above) and the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico and takes a closer look at our candidates. And sure enough, our participants found 17 brown dwarfs!

But we’re not done! There’s still lots of data to go through. In particular, we want your help looking for a potential addition to our solar system’s census: Planet 9. Some scientists think it’s circling somewhere out there past Pluto. No one has seen anything yet, but it could be you! Or drop by and contribute to our other citizen science projects like Disk Detective.

Congratulations to the citizen scientists who spotted these 17 brown dwarfs: Dan Caselden, Rosa Castro, Guillaume Colin, Sam Deen, Bob Fletcher, Sam Goodman, Les Hamlet, Khasan Mokaev, Jörg Schümann and Tamara Stajic.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

We should have, like … an event or a tag or something inspired by Magnus’s first duck carving where we’re encouraged to post art (visual, writing, handicrafts, music, whatever) that we’re nervous and uncertain about and then other people come in and say nice things about it.

X-ray binary (black hole devouring a star)

X-ray binaries are a class of binary stars that are luminous in X-rays. The X-rays are produced by matter falling from one component, called the donor (usually a relatively normal star), to the other component, called the accretor, which is very compact: a neutron star or black hole. The infalling matter releases gravitational potential energy, up to several tenths of its rest mass, as X-rays. (Hydrogen fusion releases only about 0.7 percent of rest mass.) The lifetime and the mass-transfer rate in an X-ray binary depends on the evolutionary status of the donor star, the mass ratio between the stellar components, and their orbital separation.

An estimated 1041 positrons escape per second from a typical low-mass X-ray binary.

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