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NASA’s new searchable media library is a treasure trove of space pics and video

Do you like space? Do you like looking at it, wishing you were there instead of here, perhaps? Well NASA just did something that will make your day. The U.S...

The U.S. space agency launched a new web-based search engine for much of its catalog of images, video and audio files, which you can browse by keyword and metadata, so that you never have to remember the dismal reality that you’re earthbound ever again.

Check out this 1890s advertisement for cowpox vaccines sold by Lancaster County Vaccine Farms. The advertisement was published as part of the 1893 volume of Polk’s Medical and Surgical Register of the United States.

The anime ‘Romeo’s Blue Skies’ is based on a book about a true event which happened in the south of Switzerland unti the 19th century: young boys being sold to Milano to work there as chimney sweepers. There is also a German movie about it called ‘Die Schwarzen Brüder’ [the Black Brothers]. You can watch the trailer here

Prevalence of homosexuality in men is stable throughout time since many carry the genes

Around half of all heterosexual men and women potentially carry so-called homosexuality genes that are passed on from one generation to the next. This has helped homosexuality to be present among humans throughout history and in all cultures, even though homosexual men normally do not have many descendants who can directly inherit their genes. This idea is reported by Giorgi Chaladze of the Ilia State University in Georgia, and published in Springer’s journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Chaladze used a computational model that, among others, includes aspects of heredity and the tendency of homosexual men to come from larger families.

Chaladze, G. Heterosexual Male Carriers Could Explain Persistence of Homosexuality in Men: Individual-Based Simulations of an X-Linked Inheritance Model. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2016 DOI: 10.1007/s10508-016-0742-2

Rockfleet Castle, Co. Mayo, Ireland. It’s a former home of Grace O`Malley (Gráinne Mhaol), the famous 16th century ‘Pirate Queen’.

Photo: Mikeoem (CC-BY-SA-4.0 )

why do people say “don’t be a pussy” when talking about weakness more like “don’t be a man’s ego” because you know there isn’t nothing more fragile than that

In general I am a casual observer and usually do not make comments, especially since I am here to learn and have no background in linguistics. But in this case I feel strongly compelled to put my 2 cents' worth of thoughts in.

Although I cannot say that I am anything like fluent, I do have a reasonable amount of Mandarin Chinese and Japanese, and I have to say the first thing I thought when I saw this article was "ah". Because although I can see how katakana is derived from Chinese, using the rather restricted stroke combinations that is the basis of all Chinese characters, the same cannot be said for hiragana, because at the very least, squiggles do not exist in Chinese, at least by the time it was exported to Japan. What you might think are squiggles in Chinese are in fact just our possibly lazy, or perhaps more elegant way of writing, the way cursive would look compared to printed letters. Hirangana bears only a superficial resemblance to Chinese and always feels like it must have another source of inspiration.

Also keep in mind that Chinese was basically an imported language into Japan, and an attempt to shoehorn Japanese sounds into Chinese characters (which I think I can safely say did not sound the same) must have been unwieldy at best. In fact, today, Japanese pronouciations of kanji differ so much from the Chinese, and often their usage too, that I would use my knowledge of the characters only as a rough starting point as to what they might mean in Japanese.

Also, I looked up Kūkai, and, to cut a long story short, he was a Japanese Buddhist monk who went to China to study the sutras, and, to quote from the Wikipedia page directly:

Kūkai arrived back in Japan in 806 as the eighth Patriarch of Esoteric Buddhism, having learnt Sanskrit and its Siddhaṃ script, studied Indian Buddhism, as well as having studied the arts of Chinese calligraphy and poetry, all with recognized masters. He also arrived with a large number of texts, many of which were new to Japan and were esoteric in character, as well as several texts on the Sanskrit language and the Siddhaṃ script.

And a quick look at the Siddham script shows that it has its roots in the Aramaic alphabet.

This is the man to whom the invention of the kana system is attributed to, and if that is the case, I see a possible connection that is as not as far-fetched as it seems.

The History of Hiragana

In Japanese language, we have three types of letters, Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana.

Hiragana’s root is from old Ivrit and Palmyra letters.

The first column:  Phoenician alphabet The second column: Ostracon The third column: Old Aramaic The forth column: Imperial Aramaic The fifth column: Dead Sea scrolls The sixth column: Palmyrene script The seventh column: Palmyra

The first column: Hiragana The second column: Consonants The third column: Vowels The forth column: combined with the consonant and the vowel The fifth column: Sousho-tai (a hand writing style) The sixth column: Kanji

1971 Japanese re-release poster for THE GRADUATE (Mike Nichols, USA, 1967)

Designer: unknown

Poster source: Heritage Auctions

Celebrating the films of storyboard artist Harold Michelson and researcher Lillian Michelson–the subjects of the upcoming HAROLD AND LILLIAN - A HOLLYWOOD LOVE STORY. This weekend, TCM will mark the 50th anniversary of The Graduate—a film that Harold storyboarded and contributed an iconic shot to—by screening a 4K restoration of the film in 700 theaters nationwide on April 23 and 26. Read more at the Harold and Lillian blog and find out where to see The Graduate here.

HAROLD AND LILLIAN opens next Friday at the Quad Cinema in New York.

How Tattooing Really Works

1. Tattooing causes a wound that alerts the body to begin the inflammatory process, calling immune system cells to the wound site to begin repairing the skin. Specialized cells called macrophages eat the invading material (ink) in an attempt to clean up the inflammatory mess. 

2. As these cells travel through the lymphatic system, some of them are carried back with a belly full of dye into the lymph nodes while others remain in the dermis. With no way to dispose of the pigment, the dyes inside them remain visible through the skin. 

3. Some of the ink particles are also suspended in the gel-like matrix of the dermis, while others are engulfed by dermal cells called fibroblasts. Initially, ink is deposited into the epidermis as well, but as the skin heals, the damaged epidermal cells are shed and replaced by new, dye-free cells with the topmost layer peeling off like a healing sunburn.

4. Dermal cells, however, remain in place until they die. When they do, they are taken up, ink and all, by younger cells nearby so the ink stays where it is.

5. So a single tattoo may not truly last forever, but tattoos have been around longer than any existing culture. And their continuing popularity means that the art of tattooing is here to stay.

From the TED-Ed Lesson What makes tattoos permanent? - Claudia Aguirre

Animation by TOGETHER

David Bowie (1947-2016) at Kyoto - Japan - 1980

Photos by Sukita Masayoshi 鋤田 正義