Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

houseplant hack: just fuckin steal everyone’s coleus

roachpatrol:

this is coleus. for reasons that escape me, it grows in seventy fuckzillion bizarre alien colors, from neon pink to white, and is very close to unkillable. additionally, it propagates extremely well through cuttings. you know it’s coleus if you touch it and it is just a little bit soft, with a juicy stem, and it grows in bunches with alternate paired leaves, and has sort of ‘embossed’ veins that stick out on the bottom of the leaf but are creased in on the top. 

when you see coleus growing in a planter you can reach, look both ways to see if the coast is clear, then pinch off a little sprig with your fingernails. you need at least two leaves, though four and a centimeter of stem is best. keep the clipped end moist, like in a water bottle or wet napkin, and get it home fast.

fill a soda or beer bottle up with water. pop the stem in. put on a windowsill to get some light. in two or three days you’ll see little roots starting (make sure to refill the bottle periodically), and in as soon as a week you can plant it, though a month is a good time to wait. you can also keep it in a bottle indefinitely, though green and brown bottles are best for that, as it will block sunlight and cut down on algae growth.

coleus that wants more water will have very droopy, limp leaves, so it’s easy to know when to water it. after it’s been watered, the leaves perk back up in an hour or so and it looks happy. coleus are very dramatic plants.

enjoy your coleus collecting! don’t get caught. if you do, don’t show them this post. 

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

redshoesnblueskies:

elodieunderglass:

squeeterbee:

downwithcisfandom:

vergess:

vergess:

If anyone tells you that there are 2-3 sexes in the world I want you to just go ahead and slap them.

I was making a chart this morning, but by the time I got to the twentieth configuration of primary sex characteristics, I got bored and angry, so just fucking slap them. Don’t bother giving them a chart, it’s a pain in the ass to produce anyway.

Here’s some non-chart-form lists.

Primary sex is defined by taking one or more item from each list (roughly, because just as there are double dominant intersex conditions there are double recessive ones too and it’s a whole thing). All potential combinations of these options can be said to constitute their own primary sex category.

Chromosomes:

• XX
• XY
• X/X0
• Mosaic
• XXY
• XXXY
• XXX
• XYY
• Others (there are so many, like I think you can live with up to five chromosomes? So many)

Hormones

• Estrogenized
  
• Androgenized
  
• Double dominant (high levels of both estrogenic and androgenic hormones)
  
• Double recessive (low or no sex hormones)
  

Gonads

• Testicle/es
  
• Ovary/ies
  
• Ovotestes
• Gonads
  
• Testicular agenesis
  
• Gonadal dysgenesis
  
• Probably more, I’m not a professional here

Genitals

• Penis
  
• Vagina
  
• Pseudovaginal pouch
• Clitoromegaly
  
• Micropenis
  
• Hypospadias
  
• Diphallia
• Definitely more but I am Tired™

There’s like at least several dozen primary sexes, and that’s before secondary characteristic development comes into play and the point is biological sex is a fucking mass hallucination. Slap anyone who says otherwise.

(This is not a professionally sourced and cited resource post please do not treat this like it’s some kind of all powerful reference work I literally just made it in a fit of rage in abt ten minutes based on stuff I already know I didn’t even research it be careful use google etc and so forth)

#;-; THAT IS SO CONFUSING (– @all-the-ships-all-of-them )

It so is? Like it’s just ridiculously confusing and complex.

WHICH IS WHY PEOPLE WHO SAY IT’S SIMPLE AND COMES DOWN TO “MALE OR FEMALE”/”MALE, FEMALE, OR INTERSEX” NEED TO SHUT THE FUCK UP AND ACCEPT THEIR SLAPPING PEACEFULLY INSTEAD OF SENDING ME DOZENS OF ANGRY LETTERS

This has gotten more attention than expected so I figure I will put it here as well.

My favorite is that there’s a good chance that people so insistent on the existence of a binary may be intersex and never know unless: they don’t get a first period, develop unexpected secondary sex characteristics during puberty, or struggle with infertility later in life, or GET KARYOTYPED

These are also very human-centric! There are vertebrate animals that don’t use chromosomes as their sex-determination system (reptiles and some birds can also use the environment to determine sex) and there are vertebrate animals that use different chromosome arrangements. 

Birds for example, don’t use XX/XY, they’re ZW/ZZ. In birds, the egg determines the sex (not the sperm) and females are the heterogamous sex (with ZW chromosomes).  There is plenty of room for variation, too - a ZZW bird who presented as female successfully laid and hatched her own eggs (x)

Platypuses, meanwhile, have a system that resembles both XX/XY and ZW/ZZ in function, but the form is a little baffling. Platypus males are XYXYXYXYXY, and females are XXXXXXXXXX. 

Clearly, there is nothing perfect, universal or holy about XX/XY - and anyone who insists there is has demonstrated that they don’t know anything about biology.

And it’s a fluid system even once you grasp the idea of chromosomes - we know that you can hack sex in lizards to create “superfemales” (by incubating an egg with “male” chromosomes at a temperature that hatches “female” babies). Superfemales present as females and can lay viable eggs. You can do it with lizards that happen to use the XX/XY system, and hatch fertile males with XX chromosomes. You can do this with chickens as well - take a “genetically male” fertilized egg and incubate it at the perfect temperature, and you can hatch a “male” chicken that will lay eggs for you. The difficulty is that this only works some of the time in chickens - the cooler temperatures that hatch female chickens tend to kill the male embryos that don’t transition, which is wasteful. Otherwise, this would revolutionize the poultry industry.

So now we know that XX/XY is like the Windows 7 of sexual determinism (lots of people use it, but would be silly to call it the only operating system in the world) how fixed is “sex” anyway? Well, most of us know that clownfish can change sex - if there are changes in their social structure, the dominant female can transition from a reproductively functioning egg-fertilizing male to a reproductively functioning egg-laying female. Bio textbooks say that clownfish “don’t have” sex chromosomes, but I think it’s more likely that they do, but that they don’t have any function. At any rate, the change is down to hormones, which change in response to the social environment the fish is in.

So are hormones, then, the Thing That Totally Definitely Determines What Men and Women Are? Not really. Before puberty, human children don’t have many sex hormones circulating in their bodies, and human children are often quite clear about their own gender. Humans who have had ovaries removed, or who go through menopause, no longer have waves of “female” hormones sloshing around - but we still call most of them “women.” Humans who have had their testicles removed or their androgens depleted (usually because of testicular or prostate cancer, which can feed on hormones) are usually still called “men.” And ovaries produce natural levels of testosterone quite happily, because they need to - just at lower levels! Pregnant humans often have particularly high levels of testosterone. Weirdly, “male” partners of pregnant people often drop to lower levels of testosterone than usual - their pregnant partner’s hormones influence their own biology. But a cisgender father of a fetus does not stop being a male just because he has less testosterone.

Pregnancy gets weirder, too - decades after the fetus has moved out, a pregnant person who once harbored an XY fetus will have XY cells in their body and brain. If you looked at, say, Molly Weasley, you’d be able to find “male” tissue in her brain - where her body traded for some fresh young stem cells from her fetuses, and used them to replenish her own older tissues. So a cisgender person born XX can exhibit microchimerism later in life and never know it. But having XY tissue in your brain doesn’t make you a man. 

Okay, so what about gender roles? Surely those are clear - surely those are necessary for sex and sexuality and the Natural Order and all those things?

Well, we also know that animals practice a range of gender roles. Again, a lot of it is more obvious in fish, reptiles and birds, partly because sexual dimorphism tends to be more pronounced in these animals. But there are plenty of species in which you get multiple “types” of sexes. The most common is the territorial/satellite male arrangement, in which there are multiple distinct types of males, with different genetics, behavior, life history, physical appearance and courtship strategies. 

Ruffs, a type of sandpiper, have distinct territorial and satellite males, plus “faeder” males that were only recently discovered to be male; faeders are identical to females in appearance and most behavior, and plenty of previous sightings of lesbianism in ruffs were probably faeder/female matings. Satellite and territorial males top faeders, but as faeders also top satellite and territorial males, researchers have interpreted this as “ruffs are perfectly aware that faeders aren’t the same as females, and none of them give a shit.” 

Above are some different forms of masculinity in ruffs. The bird on the top left is a female; the birds below are the different male types. In the picture on the right, the independent and satellite male are vying for the attention of the female; the faeder is the brown one on the left. The territory belongs to the territorial male, who will defend it from other territorial males, but he doesn’t attack the satellite and faeder males, because they aren’t in competition. (Imagine your OT4.)

Outside of that, gender roles aren’t as important as humans pretend they are. There isn’t really a Breadwinner/Housewife divide in the animal kingdom because most animals don’t practice capitalism. Performative masculinity only benefits species that gain an evolutionary advantage from it. Non-human mammals don’t find mammary glands to be sexually arousing. Mostly, animals just try to survive in complicated, complex environments that are constantly trying to kill them. The rules are: 1) adapt to changes in environment by being resilient, adaptable and diverse; and 2) successfully pass on the genes that succeed in your environment. You don’t need to be “fit” or fierce or have lots of bright plumage - those are not your objectives and may, in fact, distract you. You don’t even need to mate, or be fertile, or have children of your own - you just need to make sure that your traits survive, and hopefully help your species after your death. There is nothing in the rules about the superiority of special genital configurations, which animals are allowed to touch the color pink, and who gets to grow a beard.

Tl;dr : every time a human tries to come up with a hard-and-fast rule about what “sex” or “gender” or “male” or “female” means, there is a bird somewhere that has quietly devoted the past 2 million years of its existence to proving that person wrong.

everyone here secretly harboring a massive science!crush on elodie raise your hand now plz

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

To all the Tumblr users who tend to use tags very liberally:

thejadedkiwano:

Let’s play a game.
Type the following words into your tags box, then post the first automatic tag that comes up.
you, also, what, when, why, how, look, because, never

(via dyinghistoric)

elodieunderglass:

downtroddendeity:

bobthemole:

hemipelagicdredger:

bobthemole:

sinesalvatorem:

sigmaleph:

open-sketchbook:

inoue-takehiko:

evilscum:

deenoverdami:

I want you all to know that an Arab Muslim from Tunis proposed the Theory of Evolution near 600 years before Charles Darwin even took his first breath. Don’t let them erase you.

his name is Ibn Khaldun

Also, it was not the apple falling from a tree that made Issac Newton “discover” gravity. He was reading the books of Ibn Al Haytham, an Arab Muslim from Iraq, who pioneered the scientific method, discovered gravity and wrote about the laws governing the movement of bodies (now known as Newtons three laws of motion) some 600 years before Newton existed. Without him, modern science as we know it wouldn’t exist. Read on him. His achievements are far greater than what I’ve just mentioned here.

yo, the two people you’re talking about are both really cool dudes and yes they should be more widely known but stop spreading misinformation. do not use lies to spread the word about cool people and things.

the concept that things evolved from other things was already an idea floating around for basically ever in any scientific circle not completely dominated by creationism. like, darwin didn’t come up with it and he never claimed to. you can find dozens of natural philosophers throughout history like “yo i’m pretty sure that there’s some evolution going on here.”

it was not like the scientists in the 1850s were finding fossils of transitional forms and being like “LOL well dragons i guess!” it was already getting pretty obvious to academics in the 19th century that the earth was really old, life had gone through some serious changes, and there were common ancestors and related species. once maps got good enough for people to go “fuck dude africa and south america fit together” young earth creationism was fucked.

the problem was that there was no mechanism they could devise that would explain how creatures changed from one form into another, which was really kind of the vital piece of the whole thing. they had evidence that there was an evolution of life, but no way to build a theory because they had no way of showing how it might happen. some people were playing with the idea that creatures picked up traits from the environment and passed those to their kids.. somehow, but they had no evidence. they had a chain with no links.

then darwin comes along with some sketches of birds and he’s like “hey so here’s what going on. gregor mendel has shown that traits can be passed along, i’m gonna propose that what’s happening is, creatures that are best suited for an environment to flourish, so this preserves and eventually exaggerates certain traits over time to cause divergences. you go back far enough, like billions of years, all life coulda started from just a few basic types, or maybe even just one ancestor.”

darwin didn’t discover evolution. he proposed evolution by natural selection and he was right.

i mean, mostly. we had to correct his theory a whole bunch as we learned more about things like genetics and dna. he was actually kinda wrong about a ton of shit but that’s to be expected.

secondly, what’s important about newton wasn’t his observations, it was his math. ibn al haytham made a lot of important discoveries and advanced a lot of ideas about physics, especially optics, the big science of the middle ages, but the principles he talked about weren’t quite there yet.

like, he did this whole essay talking about planetary motion which, while more accurate than his contemporaries, was fundamentally inaccurate clockwork universe stuff because he actually hadn’t discovered gravity as a useful theory and he wasn’t able to use it to make predictions about motion.

that doesn’t make him stupid or worthy of being forgotten or nothin’. thats not how science works. he made advances, he didn’t quite have the shape of things yet, his work was important.

newton, building on his successes, was like, yo dawg, orbital mechanics. its like falling, but you miss. here’s a form of math i fucking invented to show some proof. lets check that against the universe.

and we did. and when it turned out his predictions were slightly wrong, some other motherfucker named einstein fixed it. and when he was wrong, etc.

its almost like science is totally built in increments on people who came before and trying discrediting the people who made some of those increments for political reasons is basically just as fucked as forgetting the folks who did the foundation work.

spreading misinformation to try to lionize historical figures so they are acknowledged has the opposite effect. it makes people who know shit roll their eyes and ignore similar posts later on. it makes the people who do read them look like dumbasses when they try to spread the word. it makes you look like one of those liberal stereotypes who disregards reality when it is politically convenient and that is not a good thing to look like.

minor point:

then darwin comes along with some sketches of birds and he’s like “hey so here’s what going on. gregor mendel has shown that traits can be passed along, i’m gonna propose that what’s happening is, creatures that are best suited for an environment to flourish, so this preserves and eventually exaggerates certain traits over time to cause divergences. you go back far enough, like billions of years, all life coulda started from just a few basic types, or maybe even just one ancestor.”

Darwin’s work preceded Mendel’s, actually. On The Origin Of Species came out in 1859, Mendel’s paper on inheritance in 1865. That traits could be passed along was known to everybody, though not how; Mendel discovered some particular rules that inheritance follows.

+1

Darwin spent a good chunk of his life wondering what the mechanism of natural selection could be, while ignoring Mendel completely.

To be fair, Mendel was publishing in some obscure-ass local Moravian natural history society journal. I’m not sure how much of that made it into Darwin’s circles.

(And on the original topic: Ibn Khaldun did pretty much legit invent historiography though, as far as we can tell, so there’s that)

This is anecdotal but I’ve heard that in one of the journals in Darwin’s collection, he had scribbled notes on an article across the page from an article by Mendel, which he had ignored entirely.

Probably apocryphal but I love the irony.

@ohnofixit

 As I am both a Person Who Loves Promoting Obscure Historical Figures (Especially Non-Western and PoC Figures Who Have Been Shamefully Overlooked) AND a scientist, the original posts made me pretty damn tired and I didn’t have the energy to post corrections about Ibn Khaldun’s work on evolutionary biology. thanks to everyone who did have the energy. It’s a great topic for discussion and those who are interested in the history of science will always appreciate sharing their knowledge with the public, so I’m glad we had this talk.

one of the most famous quotes by Isaac Newton is “If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” 

(Source: kingdamiyr, via lupinatic)

Flower shop AU

koscheiis:

shenko:

demisexualmerrill:

Person A owns a flower shop and person B comes storming in one day, slaps 20 bucks on the counter and says “How do I passive-aggressively say fuck you in flower?”

Omfg

MY TIME HAS COME

so you’d need a bouquet of geraniums (stupidity), foxglove (insincerity), meadowsweet (uselessness), yellow carnations (you have disappointed me), and orange lilies (hatred). it would be quite striking! and full of loathing.

I adore this person.

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

soulsthatknow:

I am really interested in these tag posts so here is another

the
cry
baby
love
see
ha
happy
perfect

(via n-haught)

To all the Tumblr users who tend to use tags very liberally:

thejadedkiwano:

Let’s play a game.
Type the following words into your tags box, then post the first automatic tag that comes up.
you, also, what, when, why, how, look, because, never

(via dyinghistoric)

Post about Ramadan.

thetenfootlongscarf:

There have been various posts spreading incorrect information about about Ramadan. Normally I am excited by people posting about Islam in any manner; the religion is a fascinating one. However, I became ashamed.

The people who posted about Ramadan seem to have no idea what it is, the rules, or the reason it occurs.

The biggest problems with the posts:

• Myth: Tagging food as “NSFW”, as seeing food will break fast
• Fact: Seeing, smelling, or being around food in general will not break fast. Also, the fast is going without food and drink, not just forgoing food.
• Myth: “if they see food on their dash you’re just making it harder for them to restrain from eating”
• Fact: This is offensive because it says that Muslims do not have the self-control to look at food and then abstain form eating it.
• Myth: ” I’d just seen a couple pieces of untagged NSFW content on my dash, my fast would have been broken right now “
• Fact: Your fast is not broken by viewing images- fast is broken if you act upon desires.

Also, if you read the first post, the person admits they do not know much about Ramadan- but they continue writing instead of reading. Also an important part of Ramadan is avoiding distractions-TV, music, and internet. Which means some Muslims will not be on Tumblr anyway.

For those curious about Islam and Ramadan, please follow these links:

1. aboutramadan.com (the best site)
2. Pre-Ramadan Interviews with new Muslims (replacing 10 Facts About Ramadan- link was broken)
3. About.com
4. IslamzPeace

BONUS:

1. A open Q & A session about Ramadan
2. Ramadan Campaign Against Hunger Offers Donors The Chance To Double The Impact Of Their Sadaqah

Please, please read and listen! Come back and tell me what you learnt!

Ramadan Mubarak

(via skymurdock)