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I made this thread... FOR SCIENCE!
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Ugh fine. I'll have sex with them if someone has to. But I'm only doing it to benefit society.
I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
From down to up
Because after that you can make a potato fall anywhere you want to for free.
Test specimens
I'll take twenty!
The option to perform invasive tests on people who suggested it.
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
For those of you who are unaware, the La Brea Tar Pits aren't really tar pits, because tar is man-made! It's asphalt. And it's been oozing and bubbling up around this area in LA for ages. Like, literal ages. Tens of thousands of years. Soooo many years, in fact, that the gajillion bones they excavate include mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, and dire-wolves! (Those don't exist in North America anymore FYI.)
Anyway, lately Science Friday has been talking about them a lot!
They started with this audio piece a few weeks ago. They talk about paleoforensics (the COOLEST SCIENCE), the study of how prehistoric animals died. And how they lived. I guess. See, for all those tens of thousands of years, all sorts of animals kept going into the gloppy gloopy glop for a variety of reasons, and getting stuck, and dying, and getting sucked down and preserved. Tar preserves all sorts of things that regular fossilization doesn't! For example, "Gimli" was a saber-toothed cat, and he was stunted and sad. His teeth had lots of wear and were broken, and they could tell he was super-old. Which is confusing! But they have hundreds and hundreds of saber-toothed cat skulls, so with comparison they were able to say, this was an old-ass saber-toothed cat. And old animals only survive to be grandpas and grandmas if there's a social structure around that provides for the elderly of a species. So voila! Discovery!
In the video, they chose three different animals, and framed their stories in a very Film Noir manner.
Then they did a follow-up about all the myriad kinds of tiny fossils and scraps they find, and how they excavate!
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
Really even stuff that on a cosmic scale is tiny, like our solar system, is too vast for the human mind to really comprehend it
when you get above that, to scales where the distance light travels in a year is measured in billions, a mind developed to think about what berries do not poison your cave dwelling ass kind of hits a mental brick wall
"I bet that guy won't follow me into this strange... black... goop... awww fuck."
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
TEACH THE CONTROVERSIES.
Hollow World is one of my favorite D&D campaign settings ever.
edit: and by "into" I mean "obsessed with"
Not as far as I know
You will summon him!
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
See, that actually gives me panic attacks trying to visualize and think about the enormity of the universe. I've even had nightmares where I was floating in space in front of a metal planet that I was moving towards and it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and somehow I knew that this planet was bigger than any known star in the universe and I got super bad vertigo and then I woke up. I get the same feeling when playing space games and I'm above a planet and I roll so that the planet is above me and I feel like I'm about to fall with nothing beneath me to catch me. It's weird and disconcerting, but I keep at it anyway.
I just think within the same scale.
If you consider the Universe as made up of galaxies which are made up of local groups, which are made up of star clusters, which are made up of star systems, which are made up of planets, then you might as well start thinking of yourself as made up of organs, which are made up of tissue, which are made up of cells, which are made up of proteins, which are made up of amino acids, which are made up of molecules, which are made up of atoms.
If you just think about everything within the same scale, then it's less daunting I find.
I kind of like to fall back on the idea, no matter how bad my day is possibly going, I can't fuck up THAT bad considering how little influence I have on everything as a whole. It is when I get yanked back to scale that I go, "oh right, but it's also so large that none of it matters to ME and all that is and ever will be for ME is on this stupid speck of dust in what is measured to be an absolutely impossibly massive sphere"
The planet is an icosahedron!
The Flat Earth Society wants you to believe that there is only one flat side!
But I say no! We are not a one among nothing! We don't have to live with this side! We can throw off the shackles of flat earth oppression and roll our society on to critical success!
But I'm having problems getting up on time to go to class. I have brain problems, you see. Which is another area of science that I'm not quite as interested in, but still need to know out of necessity.
Which never ceases to amuse me
The clinical term is Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD), and short answer? We're basically already there. The only differences are that the list isn't as comprehensive as the one in Gattaca (it's a lot easier to screen for diseases with a relatively simple genetic cause like CF) and of course it isn't as universally available as in the film, but both of those things will change rapidly over the next few years. You can type "pgd clinics [your area]" into google and a get a list of places near you that already do it.
Oh, and apparently it's completely unregulated in the U.S.
USA! USA! USA!
What drives me nuts is that, humanity has been expanding for thousands of years, and like any good geek I enjoy the sci-fi futures where we continue to explore and colonize the galaxy and all of that.
But...multiple galaxies? Hundreds and thousands and millions of galaxies in clusters on that kind of scale? Even if we discover FTL travel, and don't go extinct any time soon...it's too big to imagine that we'll be able to explore even a fraction of the universe before the universe itself runs out of time. I wonder if our future descendants would ever reach the point where they go, "You know what, having thirty thousand planets per person is enough, we're stopping here. You keep on being way too fucking big, you giant fucking universe."
It's only short.
Read it.
Need some stuff designed or printed? I can help with that.