I’ve talked about this before but I feel obligated every now and then to talk about the time Jimmy Stewart smuggled a yeti finger from a Nepalese Buddhist monastery to America.
The Pangboche Hand was the skeletal hand of a yeti who was a disciple of Lama Sangwa Dorje, and the finger of the hand was stolen in 1959 by a Bigfoot researcher named Peter C. Byrne after the monks refused to let him take the hand for research. Once Byrne got the finger into India, “It’s A Wonderful Life” star Jimmy Stewart, James “Anatomy of a Murder” Stewart, smuggled the finger out of India and to the States by — allegedly — hiding it in his wife’s lingerie case, because no gentleman would ever check a woman's lingerie case.
Byrne, by the way, was hired to steal the finger by eccentric millionaire oil tycoon Tom Slick, who spent the ‘50s obsessed with cryptozoology before dying in a plane crash in Montana. Not important for the story, important to me personally that you know this.
And I tell you this because “Jimmy Stewart smuggled a yeti finger in his wife’s lingerie case” is a fun collection of words and also to remind you that cryptozoology is awash with colonial assholes who will step over other cultures to find the “proof” they feel entitled to.
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If you're feeling anxious or depressed about the climate and want to do something to help right now, from your bed, for free...
Start helping with citizen science projects
What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!
You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases
Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.
Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.
Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.
Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.
Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.
Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.
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I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.
Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help
Remember that actually, you can. And help with some science.
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Ugh. I’m on the verge of tears rn but im too tired to deal with anything
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