An Astronaut’s Tips For Living In Confined Spaces

(by @SarcasticRover on Twitter, I think)

The commendable desire to reduce conflict with bears has a long and distinguished pre-history.

edinburgh, 2019

Worlds Within: Pill Bug Terrarium

  Bioluminescent mushrooms are just magical~ I hope to see these in real life one day :D In the meantime, I can dream and paint them instead.

The internet could change next week, and not in a good way

You may have heard about the efforts in Europe to reform copyright law. The debate has been ongoing in the European Parliament for months. If approved next week, these new regulations would require us to automatically filter and block content that you upload without meaningful consideration of your right to free expression. 

We respect the copyrights and trademarks of others, and we take all reports seriously to ensure that your creative expression is protected. We make this clear in our Community Guidelines. There’s already a legal framework that works and is fair: Today we take down posts and media that contain allegedly infringing content when we receive a valid DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown request. We also provide clear-cut ways for people to fight back if they believe their removed content was not a true violation. These instances are monitored and reported and live in our biannual transparency report. 

The suggestion to use automated filters for issues of copyright is short-sighted at best and harmful at worst. Automated filters are unable to determine whether a use should be considered “fair use” under the law and are unable to determine whether a use is authorized by a license agreement. They are unable to distinguish legitimate parody, satire, or even your own personal pictures that could be matched with similar photographs that have been protected by someone else. We don’t believe that technology should replace human judgment. Tumblr is and always has been a place for creative expression, and these new regulations would only make it harder for you to express yourself with the freedom and clarity you do so now. 

If you access Tumblr from Europe and want to act, you can find more information on saveyourinternet.eu. 

Star systems follow a standard blueprint that keeps their orbits stable.  They are organized in a hierarchical setup. What that means is that each set of orbits is on a different size scale.  The sizes of stars’ orbits do not go 1-2-3, they go 1-10-100. Any one star is only really close to one other star.  After that, other stars are much farther away.

Here is a cartoon of a hierarchical 8-star system:

This system is hierarchical because each close pair of stars (stars a and b, b and c, etc) is much closer to each other than any other stars (or pairs of stars).  The separation between stars a and b is much smaller than the separation between stars a+b and c+d, which is much smaller than the separation between stars a+b+c+d and e+f+g+h.  Let’s say that the separation between the closest binaries is 0.1 Astronomical Units, the separation between each pair of close binaries is 1 Astronomical Unit, and the separation between clumps of 4 stars is 10 Astronomical Units.

Watership Down partial fancast:

I’m very very sad because as a kid I had learned that Thomas Pynchon was really good (I knew this from oral tales about books he had written, from fellow high school students knowing about him in hushed tones)

Then I discovered he was a crackpot and an eccentric and he thought that he was Jesus Christ’s replacement (I’m paraphrasing here)

And then I found out he was a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, reactionary zealot, he’s the guy who wrote V for Vendetta

And now I’m wondering if he’s ever going to stop being an interesting, unique and ultimately terrible human being

Love, Death & Robots — Fish Night

You do not have to be valid.

You do not have to scroll through your notes

For a hundred hours repenting

You only have to let the problematic animal of your body love what it loves.

Reblogging for prototype theory (yayyy prototype theory!) and good common sense.

settle this for me once and for all

is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea