stavee

[stavee]

Long before the introduction of color film, a Russian chemist and photographer named Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky used an innovative technique. He took three individual black and white photos, each through a colored filter (red, green, and blue), to create fully colored, high-quality pictures. The photo of this woman, taken by him, is around 107 years old!

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"the three dots on the side" call her by her REAL NAME.. Meatballs Menu

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People who say the U.S. has no culture clearly have never had the experience of chasing your cousin around the yard with a sparkler at a cookout, lips stained from cherry kool-aid and your grandmothers strawberry shortcake as the sun turns the sky gold and the air smells of woodsmoke and grass, or sang take me out to the ballpark with thousands of strangers, ballcap on your head and an overpriced hotdog in your hand as you root for a team for no reason other than hometown pride, or felt sheer terror as the rickety ferris wheel shifts under you as you reach the top, already sick from eating something that definitely shouldn't have been deep fried, and then the thrill of seeing the entire fairgrounds from up there turned pink as the sun sets, or driven down a backroad with all the windows down as the leaves turn bright orange with George Strait on the radio, or felt the hum of excitement from the crowd as the air fills with red dirt and the announcer calls out the name of the next bull rider, or sat on a blanket on a dark hillside somewhere surrounded by a few dozen other families as the town shoots off fireworks for the 4th,

but maybe that's just me

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i cannot keep quiet about this anymore.

if you're in the US or Canada and interested in learning a language using a free app please get a library card and download MANGO. it's very good and extremely free with a library card (there are many public libraries and universities using the service, so make an account and use the search feature here to find out if there's one near you).

mango currently has 72 available languages and dialects (that's right! different courses for french or canadian french! spanish or latam spanish!). it's set up basically like an audiobook with text. the idea is that the narrator explains the words while you read, and you repeat after them or say the translation out loud when prompted. there's a daily review where you go through flashcards. you can also use the flashcards at your leisure and create your own. at the end of each chapter there's a listening comprehension quiz and a reading comprehension quiz. i cannot emphasize how effective this all is. and it's free with a card.

if you're not in the US or Canada and/or looking for something more like duolingo (don't use duolingo btw tldr they fired translators and replaced them with "ai"), then try BUSUU! it only has 14 languages atm but the lessons are really descriptive and effective. it also has a feature where you can correct other people's open-ended speaking/typing exercises. you set your fluent languages, and exercises by people learning those languages will appear in your feed for you to correct. you can even add others as friends! and, much like duolingo, it has a streak and leaderboard system for you to strive for, minus the guilt-tripping owl.

busuu is free (you watch ads to unlock lessons and they're all skippable after like five seconds), although it also has paid premium/plus versions (i don't use the paid version—the language courses are available for free, and the ad system is Really unobtrusive).

so that's my wisdom for the day. mango and busuu. please check them out :)

[stavee]

The best part about knowing Latin plurals is using them incorrectly on purpose and seeing if anyone who knows why you're full of shit is within earshot. Insist that the plural of of "waitress" is "waitrices". You know you want to.

[stavee]

“They’re trying to convince people they can’t do the things they’ve been doing easily for years – to write emails, to write a presentation. Your daughter wants you to make up a bedtime story about puppies – to write that for you.” We will get to the point, she says with a grim laugh, “that you will essentially become just a skin bag of organs and bones, nothing else. You won’t know anything and you will be told repeatedly that you can’t do it, which is the opposite of what life has to offer. Capitulating all kinds of decisions like where to go on vacation, what to wear today, who to date, what to eat. People are already doing this. You won’t have to process grief, because you’ll have uploaded photos and voice messages from your mother who just died, and then she can talk to you via AI video call every day. One of the ways it’s going to destroy humans, long before there’s a nuclear disaster, is going to be the emotional hollowing-out of people.”

Justine Bateman on AI in this article from The Guardian

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I know for a fact that this has been posted elsewhere on Tumblr, but I wanted to share this:

This is a document ful of resources about things you can do politically that are not voting or going to protests. As a disabled person who struggles at protests, this is incredibly valuable. It has tons of resources about mutual aid, political education, migrant justice, disability justice, and much much more.

[stavee]

This bird came back from extinction - now scientists in a glider are teaching it to migrate

Extinct in central Europe for 300 years, 36 northern bald ibis are following an ultralight aircraft on their long-forgotten migration route from Austria to Spain

Fritz was inspired by the 1996 film Fly Away Home in which the main character flies an ultralight plane to show orphaned geese their migratory path. The film was based on the work of “Father Goose” Bill Lishman, a naturalist who taught Canadian geese in the same way in 1988.

Breeding efforts to increase their population over the past two decades have been successful, but without guidance from wild ancestors, the birds – known for their bald red head and long curved beak – no longer had any knowledge of which direction to fly for winter. Early reintroduction attempts were largely unsuccessful – instead of returning to suitable wintering grounds such as Tuscany, Italy, the birds flew in different directions and died.

When they reach the wintering grounds, the birds become fully independent and no longer need their foster parents, although they still recognise them years later and actively approach to say hello (the birds have a ritual greeting in which they spread their hair and bow, making a “chrrupp” noise). The central European population has increased from zero to almost 300 since the start of the project in 2002, and in 2011 the first bird migrated back to Bavaria from Tuscany without human help.

This is amazing and also very sweet. Do click though and read the whole article at the Guardian.

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Possibly the greatest NPR exchange ever recorded

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Really crazy how "writing" is not a universal skill and "fiction writing" vs "technical writing" vs "writing peer reviews for work" are somehow all different muscles

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plany off time is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have

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i do 5 minutes of work and then 20 minute scroll break like a reverse pomodoro method that makes all tasks longer

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they have to invent a kind of committed relationship for hyper-independent people

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[stavee]

Many of you I fear

[stavee]

breakfast of 2.5 coffees and a loose handful of very sour candy my body is going to invent a fifth humor