How much is that vicious doggy in the window?
BRILLIANT
When my mother lived in North Carolina, I noticed that the family across the street, who happened to be black, had recliners on the front porch. The porch wasn’t enclosed, but was covered. I had never seen anyone put upholstered furniture on a porch like that, so I pointed it out to my mother. She said that it’s apparently practiced predominantly by black people in the South. So much so that when a neighboring town tried to pass a law banning upholstered furniture on front porches, they were accused of racism.
I thought it was really interesting that something so seemingly neutral to me as an outsider could be the cause of a racially contentious legal battle. Can’t upholstered furniture on a porch just be upholstered furniture on a porch?
As I gazed out the window contemplating racial harmony, wedge issues, and stereotypes, the guy across the street pulled his car in the driveway and went into the house carrying a giant watermelon.
I don’t know what made me think of that just now.
Source: bbsbboy
It’s about time (part 2).
It’s been seven weeks, non-stop, but now I have an offline backup.
The spread of the black death.
Poland
Poland, tell us your secret.
Poland is the
oldnew Madagascar.
If I remember correctly, Poland’s secret is that the jews where being blamed all over europe (as usual) as scapegoats for the black plague. Poland was the only place that accepted Jewish refugees, so pretty much all of them moved there.
Now, one of the major causes of getting the plague was poor hygiene. This proved very effective for the plague because everyone threw their poop into the streets because there were no sewers, and literally no one bathed because it was against their religion. Unless they were jewish, who actually bathed relatively often. When all the jews moved to Poland, they brought bathing with them, and so the plague had little effect there.
Milan survived by quarantining its city and burning down the house of anyone showing early symptoms, with the entire family inside it.
I reblogged this tons of times, but the Milan info is new.
Damn Italy, you scary.
Poland:“Hey, feeling a bit down? Have a quick wash! There, you see? All better”
Milan: “Aw, feeling a bit sick are we? BURN MOTHERFUCKER, BURN!!!!!”
Also, this might have something to do with it: from what I understand, O blood type is uncommonly… common in Poland. Something to do with large families in small villages and a LOT of intermarriage. The black plague was caused by a bacterium that produced, in its waste in the human body, wastes that very closely mimic the “B” marker sugars on red blood cells that keep the body from attacking its own immune system. Anyone who has a B blood type had an immune system that was naturally desensitized to the presence of the bacterium, and therefore was more prone to developing the disease. Anyone who had an O type was doubly lucky because the O blood type means the total absence of ANY markers, A or B, meaning that their bodys’ immune system would react quickly and violently against the invaders, while someone with an A may show symptoms and recover more slowly, while someone with B would have just died. Because O is a recessive blood type, it shows in higher numbers when more people who carry the recessive genes marry other people who also carry the recessive gene. Poland, which has a nearly 700 year history of being conquered by or partnering with every other nation in the surrounding area, was primarily an agricultural country, focused around smaller, farming communities where people were legally tied to, and required to work, “their” land, and so historically never “spread” their genes across a large area. The economy was, and had been, unstable for a very long period of time leading up to the plague, the government had been ineffective and had very little reach in comparison to the armies of the other countries around for a very very long time, and so its people largely remained in small communities where multiple generations of cross-familial inbreeding could have allowed for this more recessive gene to show up more frequently. Thus, there could be a higher percentage of O blood types in any region of the country, guaranteeing less spread of the illness and moving slower when it did manage to travel. Combine this with the fact that there were very few large, urban centers where the disease would thrive, and with the above facts, and you’ve got a lovely recipe for avoiding the plague.
Interestingly enough, as a result from the plague, the entirety of Europe now has a higher percentage of people with O blood type than any other region of the world.
WHY IS THIS ALL SO COOL
When Tumblr teaches you more about the plague than 12 years of school ever did.
Just to throw a nod in, as a medieval historian, this is all credible, and is the leading theory as to the plagues effectiveness at this point. So. Enjoy your new knowledge!
Mad happy about my O blood type right now.
This is fantastic. I wish schools taught people this way.
TYP O 4 LYF!
Literally.
I forcefully dropped my phone yesterday in the bathroom.
By “forcefully,” I mean it was attached to the speaker dock by an extension cable (THANKS, LIGHTNING CONNECTOR!), and I caught the cable with my clean underpants as I was flapping them to turn them right-side-out before my shower. The phone got slammed onto the toilet lid and bounced to the floor.
These two corners of the Ringke Slim case got damaged. The corners are exactly the worst place for the front glass to be impacted. If I didn’t have the case, the phone would definitely be broken.
I like this case because it’s flat black (there are other colors, too), very slim (It’s right in the name!), doesn’t have the ridiculous hole in the back to show off that you have an iPhone, and has a place to attach a strap for added security. If you’re going to get a case, this is a good one to get.
“Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.”
- Leonard McCoy
Yeah, but it’s also pretty fucking gorgeous.
mfsb:
Giant Ring of Black Holes
”Tue, 08 Feb 2011 23:00:00 -0600”
Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes a new image of a ring — not of jewels — but of black holes. This composite image of Arp 147, a pair of interacting galaxies located about 430 million light years from Earth, shows X-rays from the NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (pink) and optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, blue) produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md.
Arp 147 contains the remnant of a spiral galaxy (right) that collided with the elliptical galaxy on the left. This collision has produced an expanding wave of star formation that shows up as a blue ring containing in abundance of massive young stars. These stars race through their evolution in a few million years or less and explode as supernovas, leaving behind neutron stars and black holes.
A fraction of the neutron stars and black holes will have companion stars, and may become bright X-ray sources as they pull in matter from their companions. The nine X-ray sources scattered around the ring in Arp 147 are so bright that they must be black holes, with masses that are likely ten to twenty times that of the Sun.
An X-ray source is also detected in the nucleus of the red galaxy on the left and may be powered by a poorly-fed supermassive black hole. This source is not obvious in the composite image but can easily be seen in the X-ray image. Other objects unrelated to Arp 147 are also visible: a foreground star in the lower left of the image and a background quasar as the pink source above and to the left of the red galaxy.
Infrared observations with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and ultraviolet observations with NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) have allowed estimates of the rate of star formation in the ring. These estimates, combined with the use of models for the evolution of binary stars have allowed the authors to conclude that the most intense star formation may have ended some 15 million years ago, in Earth’s time frame. These results were published in the October 1st, 2010 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The authors were Saul Rappaport and Alan Levine from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, David Pooley from Eureka Scientific and Benjamin Steinhorn, also from MIT.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra’s science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.
More information, including images and other multimedia, can be found at:
http://chandra.harvard.edu
Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/S .Rappaport et al. Optical: NASA/STScI
Is this in mourning for BP’s murder of the Gulf Coast, or does Tumblr know I love a black background?
The Others are coming…
