c0mpmath3nj0y3r

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this is going to be difficult -> i am capable of doing difficult things -> i have done everything prior to this moment -> this difficulty will soon be proof of capability

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so there's this thing called the McCollough effect. i won't post the images here, but essentially, you can break your brain's color perception for months by staring at some red and green striped lines for a few minutes. you can try it on the wikipedia article (if you dare).

anyways, a natural next question is to ask what the auditory equivalent of this is. and though i don't think this is quite the same thing, one possible candidate is listening to opera.

because after watching the entire ring cycle with my friends this weekend, my brain cannot stop interpreting every single background noise as someone belting out a libretto.

[c0mpmath3nj0y3r]

honestly the human brain is so small that you *will* forget how much beauty there is out there to experience unless you leave your house every three days. ik its fucked up but i promise its true

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tumblr has been getting a lot of bots lately

so fyi, if you follow me, don't have any posts, and have a face or irl avatar, i will block you under the assumption that you're a bot

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you know what. after seeing Another blazed poll about this I'm gonna just

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I don't know what planet you are from, but if it's your first time on Earth and nobody told you this beforehand, I want to tell you something fun: if you are navigating on foot among human infrastructures and hear a bright metallic

ding!

you should look around your surroundings, because that means that somewhere around you, you might get to see a creature called a bicycle! And if you can't see one anywhere, but are certain that the sound came from somewhere very close, the bicycle might be right behind you! The most interesting thing about bicycles is that unlike the sea creature called a "shark", a bicycle will die if it abruptly stops moving, and if you are currently right in front of the bicycle when this happens, the bicycle will take you down with it!

In the unlikely event of you standing directly in the path of a moving bicycle, experts in human infrastructure navigation strongly advise you to move the fuck out of the way!

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Alessandro Volta's Electric Eels

Okay so, it turns out that your cell phone battery is a basically a homunculus of an electric fish. 

These are the same thing. Let me explain.

@fishteriously, a paleoichthyologist, told me that Alessandro Volta invented the electric battery after studying electric eels and rays.  This sounded like a fun science factoid!  I wanted to know more!  I saw the claim repeated on any number of pop science articles from the last century or so, but none that quoted from primary sources.

The voltaic pile is one of the most important inventions, ever, of all time.  Before Volta, electricity could be stored in Leyden jar capacitors, which would discharge in a single, brief burst. Volta's pile was the first method of producing a continuous electric current, which launched the modern era of electricity as we know it. His explanation for how it worked was incorrect, but it was still a massive breakthrough.

Batteries use the same principle to this day, just with different materials (e.g. cobalt oxide, graphite, and lithium salts rather than silver, zinc, and brine).

But is it a fish?

This is Volta's first schematic of a battery, or "voltaic pile" – at the time, "battery" referred to a bunch of Leyden jars linked in series, the term wouldn't come to refer to piles until later. "Z" and "A" stand for zinc and silver ("argentum"), with brine-soaked paper disks between. It does look a bit like an eel?

But is it truly?

Surely, if Volta modeled the pile after electric fishes, I’d be able to find a citation!  Wikipedia is usually a good place to start when hunting primary sources, but no luck.  No mention of fish at all.  I trust fishteriously more than wikipedia, however, so I went digging.  Looks like Volta first reported his discovery in a Letter to the Royal Society in 1800.

Found the letter!

Aw beans, it’s in French.  I haven’t studied French since high school.

BUT WAIT. WHAT WAS THAT.

Une commotion électrique? A trembling eel???

Okay so now I NEEDED to read the letter in English. I found an English-language summary published by the Royal Society, but it looks like the only English translation of the full letter was in the appendix of an out-of-print book called “Alessandro Volta and the Electric Battery.”

So I bought a used copy. Let's see what Volta has to say about this:

"To this apparatus ... I have constructed it, in its form to the natural electric organ of the torpedo or electric eel, &c, than to the Leyden flask and electric batteries [battery = linked Leyden flasks], I would wish to give the name of artificial electric organ."

Yes! The voltaic pile was explicitly modeled after electric fishes – torpedo rays and electric eels.  Fishteriously was 100% correct. Volta never even calls it a "pile," it is always "artificial electric organ." A significant portion of the letter is devoted to electric eels and torpedo rays, in fact.

But also, the rest of the letter is bonkers.

He wrote pages on painful experiments with the artificial electric organ – touching it, poking it into his eyes and ears, making other people touch it, generally just shocking the ever loving hell out of himself over and over. He routinely shocks himself so hard that he has to take breaks. And of course, he licks it.

But that's not the best part:

He says that the artificial electric organ can be turned sideways and submerged in liquid...

"...by which means these cylinders would have a pretty good resemblance to the electric eel ... they might be joined together by pliable metallic wires or screw springs, and then covered with a skin terminated by a head and tail properly formed, &c."

There you have it. One of the most important scientific discoveries of all time, and it includes a crafts project for building an authentic electric eel puppet.

In summary, next time you charge your phone, take a moment to thank the soul of the electric fish inside of it.

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map of US social and cultural regions i made that you can use if you want to start a fight

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so i started postin at em

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they need to make more study places for bitches who don't want to expose their back to an open room

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everyone avert your eyes [expresses a standard human emotion] [illogically experiences shame even with only myself as witness]

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hatsune miku

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yesterday, i finished a large class project, and today, i found myself unable to do anything. it's annoying, because i know i have more class projects to do, and also a bunch of work for my job. but alas, all i could do was scroll tumblr.

ah well. at least it's nicer than twitter