theglintoftherail - Tumblr blog

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I was looking for information about tulip trees recently, I looked at over a dozen websites before I got home and consulted my books and more than half this information is simply not available online at all, and what little is there is scattered over multiple different sites:

Books are very important actually!!

You guys rlly don't realise how much knowledge is still not committed to the internet. I find books all the time with stuff that is impossible to find through a search engine- most people do not put their magnum opus research online for free and the more niche a skill is the less likely you are to have people who will leak those books online. (Nevermind all the books written prior to the internet that have knowledge that is not considered "relevant" enough to digitise).

Whenever people say that we r growing up with all the world's knowledge at our fingertips...it's not necessarily true. Is the amount of knowledge online potentially infinite? Yes. Is it all knowledge? No. You will be surprised at the niche things you can discover at a local archive or library.

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The Tower Andrey Zakirzyanov.

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Simple lifeform facts I take for granted that I've now seen blowing people's minds on here:

That sea urchins walk around and have mouths with teeth on their undersides

That corals are related to jellyfish

Barnacles being related to crabs and shrimp

Ants being an offshoot of wasps

Termites being totally unrelated to ants and all similarities just being convergent evolution (they're actually a group of cockroaches, but even science didn't know that part until a few years ago)

Starfish having an eye at the end of each arm

That the bodies of ticks and mites are also their heads, essentially big heads with legs (they even frequently have eyes way up on "the body")

Sperm whales have no upper teeth, and also their bodies are flat from the front

Goats also having no upper (front) teeth

Tapeworms having no mouth at all and just absorbing nutrients over their entire body surface

That flies are bigger pollinators than bees

That moths are bigger pollinators than bees

That wasps are just as important pollinators as bees (more important to many groups of plants) and when we say they're "less efficient" at it we just mean individually they get a little less pollen stuck to them.

That honeybees are nonnative to most of the world and not good for the local ecosystem, just good for human agriculture

That earthworms are also nonnative and destructive to more habitats than the reverse

There being no hard biological line between slugs and snails; all slugs aren't necessarily related to each other and there are gastropod groups where some have shells and some don't

That ALL octopuses (not just the blue ring) have a venomous bite

Most jellyfish and sea anemones being predators that eat fish

"Krill" being shrimp up to a few inches long and not some kind of microbe

Blue whales therefore being the deadliest predators to ever evolve as they eat up to several million individual animals per day

That krill are still "plankton" because plankton refers to whatever animals, algae and other organisms are carried around by the sea's currents, not to any particular group of life or a size category

Fungi being no more related to plants than we are, and in fact more like a sibling to the animal kingdom if anything

Venus fly traps being native to only one small area of North America in all the world

Parasites being essential to all ecosystems

Leeches not having a circular ring of teeth anywhere

That algae is not a type of plant

That most seaweed is just very big algae

That enough wood ends up in the ocean that plenty of sea life evolved to eat only wood

Speaking of which the fact that the "ship worms" that make tunnels in wood are just long noodly clams

Butterflies technically just being a small weird group of moths we gave a different name to

That insects only get wings once they reach maximum size and therefore there can never be a younger smaller bee or fly that's not a larva

Spiders not being any more likely to kill their own mates/young than just a cat or dog might, for most species maybe a lot less often?

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Ella Enchanted (2004) Hannibal (2013-2015)

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writer’s block (dry) = no desire to write, no ability to write (bearable)

writer’s block (wet) = HUGE desire to write, no ability to write (very evil)

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i was curious so i looked up what story alana was reading to abigail and it's about a inmate who escapes a prison and ends up killing an entire family. she was reading that to a teenage girl who just narrowly escaped being killed by her serial killer father. anyway i never want to hear about how normal and well adjusted alana is ever again

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real

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Glasses people love to make you try their glasses on to see how fucked up their eyes are. It's a sign of respect in their culture.

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THE TYRANNY OF THE SUN IS OVER

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The Survivor, 1950 - oil on canvas. — René Magritte (Belgian, 1898-1967)

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anyone wanna have a toxic homoerotic psychosexual rivalry with me? it does have to be weird

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nasa: we're going to shoot three rockets directly at the sun during the total eclipse. for study and research purposes.

me: oh cool

nasa: we have named the rockets apep. this stands for atmospheric perturbations [in the] eclipse path.

me: oh cool

nasa: apep is also the ancient egyptian deity of chaos and darkness, who ceaselessly seeks to extinguish the sun. we launch these rockets directly at the sun in the name of apep.

me: oh... cool?

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asked my almost 50yo slur-using father who watched house every night during its original run if he thinks house and wilson had a thing and after a 10 second pause he shared "they didn't have a normal friendship" and didn't elaborate. so

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Via Paige Elizabeth Art | TikTok