May 2013
26 posts
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A nightmare, she knows it’s a nightmare, because the man in front of her is unnatural. Not just unnatural, but impossible. What she sees is not an image that could be produced by a real form.
His face is everything at once. He has her skin but darker (like her dad’s; but he doesn’t look like him, exactly), but also lighter, and also a paleness she’s only seen in graven...
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Aquatic proto-people and the theory hypothesis of... →
Regular readers will know that I am an unashamed fan of non-standard theories, aka fringe theories or whacky theories, and of course we looked just recently at the haematotherm theory. Doubtless you’ve all heard of the aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH): that strangely popular notion which promotes the idea that modern humans owe their distinctive features…
Posting this link I got from miijhal in a...
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Кракозя́бры: jesus christ darwin →
literallytheterminator:
Judging from the hideous ornaments, and the equally hideous music admired by most savages, it might be urged that their aesthetic faculty was not so highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, as in birds. Obviously no animal would be capable of admiring such scenes as the heavens at…
Alas, the scientists of the time mostly did think that the different races...
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Coordinated rhythmic movement has been a staple of the perception-action literature
since the basic task characteristics were described by Kelso (1981; see Kelso 1995 for a
detailed overview). The core task is simple: take your two index fingers and move
them up and down so that they do the same thing at the same time; this is 0° mean
relative phase and is easy to produce and maintain over a wide...
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jesus christ darwin
Judging from the hideous ornaments, and the equally hideous music admired by most savages, it might be urged that their aesthetic faculty was not so highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, as in birds. Obviously no animal would be capable of admiring such scenes as the heavens at night, a beautiful landscape, or refined music; but such high tastes are acquired through culture, and...
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COMPARISON OF THE MENTAL POWERS OF MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS.
The difference in mental power between the highest ape and the lowest savage, immense
Certain instincts in common
The emotions
Curiosity
Imitation
Attention
Memory
Imagination
Reason
Progressive improvement
Tools and weapons used by animals
Abstraction, self-consciousness
Language
Sense of beauty
Belief in God, spiritual...
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Tzetze (mnxmnkmnd) on Twitter →
I have a twitter now, by the way. It’ll be like this and IRC, except less obvious to me that nobody’s listening to whatever I spit out.
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“He who rejects with scorn the belief that the shape of this own canines, and...”
– Charles Darwin in Descent of Man, snarking it up, and unsubtly advertising his book on emotional expression
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5targuitarandco:
oh ah… wow. i didn’t think there were so many .hack fans on tumblr. mm if you guys wanna request some things go right ahead.
Well if you’re taking requests for .hack stuff, how about something or somebody from the net slum? There are a lot of wacked-out looking minor characters there, like .
(I really love your Tsukasa picture, gosh.)
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The best color schemes - for spinning: PSA: TV... →
the-real-seebs:
First off: Especially if you are seeing this long after I wrote it (May 20, 2013), please do not reblog this without verifying it for yourself. We do not need more eternal chain letters. Also, you should always verify security claims before forwarding them.
I know a lot of…
Man, remember the parsing? The way tooltips were parsed with regexes? Or, oh shit, when Tangent128...
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It can never be too strongly impressed upon a mind anxious for the acquisition of knowledge, that the commonest things by which we are surrounded are deserving of minute and careful attention. The most profound investigations of Philosophy are necessarily connected with the ordinary circumstances of our being, and of the world in which our every-day life is spent. With regard to our own...
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The Talking Ghost: End of cycle plots have always... →
aondeug:
kingcrackers:
thefutureghost:
aondeug:
kingcrackers:
thefutureghost:
End of cycle plots have always bothered me. Y’know the kind. “Evil thing comes every so many years, and we can only ever manage to bind it but now you kill it once and for all!” is the one that actually really bothers me. I understand why it normally goes this way, since most people don’t want…
Those plots...
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Ergo Socialismus: thecreach: baronessvonbullshit:... →
Like yeah, I read some of Kropotkin’s essays, and his theory of mutual aide seems far more likely model fo human behaviour than “survival of the fittest”
Reblogging this again because I got linked to an essay by Gould on the topic. It’s inauspiciously titled “Kropotkin Was No Crackpot” but it’s worth reading.
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Ergo Socialismus: thecreach: baronessvonbullshit:... →
thecreach:
baronessvonbullshit:
i don’t think darwinism presents that much of an obstacle to socialism in any way though - it’s worth noting that marx’s reaction on the publication of origin of species was largely positive. evolutionary theory has merely been manipulated to suit…
Kropotkin’s essays are cool enough that Dawkins did a short documentary based on the idea. (I thought...
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Recently a video from Syria was posted in which a rebel eats part of a dead government soldier’s lung. TIME interviewed the guy:
Al Hamad, who is Sunni and harbors a sectarian hatred for Alawite Muslims, said he has another gruesome video of his killing a government soldier from the Alawite faith. (Syrian President Bashar al Assad is Alawite; the conflict in Syria is increasingly...
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What Is the Why - By Micah Zenko →
I’m liking this Zenko dude. His twitter is mostly links to his stuff, if you want more.
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The inhabitants of the Rong mansion, if we include all of them from the highest to the humblest in our total, numbered more than three hundred souls, who produced between them a dozen or more incidents in a single day. Faced with so exuberant an abundance of material, what principle should your chronicler adopt to guide him in his selection of incidents to record?
my, the earth certainly is full...
April 2013
32 posts
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Having made an utter failure of my life, I found myself one day, in the midst of my poverty and wretchedness, thinking about the female companions of my youth. As I went over them one by one, examining and comparing them in my mind’s eye, it suddenly came over me that those slips of girls - which is all they were then - were in every way, both morally and intellectually, superior to the...
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When in the depth of the winter, a full hundred miles from the nearest land, one sees a loon in the path of a steamer, listens to its weird, maniacal laughter, and sees it slowly sink downward through the green waters, it truly seems a hint of the bird-life of long-past ages.
Protobirds were some spooky motherfuckers? I guess?
babe-prince:
Just another PSA for white queers,
appropriating trans*/non-binary/genderfucking terms from native cultures is not okay
if you’re too blinded by your queerness to understand that you’re being colonialist and oppressive i would like you to completely stop everything now and forever
ლ(╹◡╹ლ)
stop forever
Does this mean like, calling yourself a “two-spirit”? Is it...
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A no less wonderful structure is composed by a sort of spiders, natives of the tropics and the south of Europe, which have been justly called mason-spiders by M. Latreille.
One of these
(Mygale nidulans, WALCKN.), found in the West Indies,
”
digs a hole in the earth obliquely downwards about
three inches in length, and one in diameter.
This cavity
she lines with a tough thick web, which,...
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Anonymous asked: It's not spam.
Anonymous asked: Once upon my time, you were my hero. Now, even though I understand you less and less, my opinion hasn't changed much.
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Reading fiction again, because my mind hurts. In this case Egil’s Saga, as translated by Bernard Scudder, in a Penguin Classics anthology.
I quite liked it. I originally picked up the anthology due to a comment I swear I remember from Borges (but I can’t find where) that the Icelandic sagas were important precursors or pre-echoes (i.e., not actually related by tradition to -, but...
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When Kveldulf and his men came to the gangway, they went up it to the stern of the ship, while Skallagrim headed for the prow. Kveldulf had a gigantic double-bladed axe in his hand. Once he was on board, he told his men to go along the gunwale and cut the awnings fro the pegs, while he stormed off back to the afterguard, where he is said to have become frenzied like a wild animal. Some other men...
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“The wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too. In a very concrete way...”
– The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon (via knowledgeappliedispower)
I have an economist-ish friend that would disagree with this - rather than “Europe plundered the shit out of countries and got rich from it”, he’d say “Europe plundered the shit out of countries and it...
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cyborg sex in public, fan fiction on-line, and a... →
Since the 1970’s, people have been writing fan fiction and organizing communities in which it could be shared. Many of these stories about characters swiped from television, movies, or other mass media revolve around queer erotic narratives. Captain Janeway and the cyborg Seven of Nine from the show Star Trek: Voyager have become a common lesbian pairing, part of the fan fiction explosion that...
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do you think fart jokes are one of the cultural...
jethroq:
did you know, the oldest joke known to anthropologists is one from ancient Sumer, where the joke is:
“such has not been heard in a log time; a young woman did not fart in the lap of her lover”
obviously some nuance is lost in translation.
I’m not sure that an anthropologist embarrassed about jokes or bodily functions could do their job effectively. Behold, the face of early...
literallytheterminator:
mnxmnkmnd:
literallytheterminator:
mnxmnkmnd:
*_*
where do you learn this stuff. can I be your apprentice
would it be less impressive if I said david auttenborough documentaries, a barely memorized comparative anatomy course, and google searches?
Hardly.
I knew the six-limbs thing from a documentary about how dragons could have evolved. Don’t tell anyone
...
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Minority Policy: Xinjiang Riots Spark Debate over...
Another cable; this one summarizes a debate over the PRC’s treatment of minorities in 2009, sparked by riots in the largely Uighur-populated Xinjiang province (it’s in the northwest of China, and borders Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. Central Asia). Read it here.
Chinese academics trying to use the US as an example of minority policy is quite odd to me. Debates about what is essentially...
