I love how potato in French is pomme de terre, which pretty much means “earth apple.”
like what stupid frenchman saw this:
and said “zis petite légume looks like a, how you say, APPLE! hmmm… but it grows in ze earth… HON HON HON! MAIS OUI! C’EST UNE POMME DE TERRE!”
j’adore comment ananas se dit pineapple en anglais, ce qui veut littéralement dire “pomme de pin”, genre quel type anglais a vu ça:
et s’est dit : “ow cette étrange big fruit ressemble à une, how do you say, POMME! hmmm… mais plutôt une pomme qui pousse dans les pins… HU HU HU! OH YES, IT’S A PINEAPPLE!”
(z’avez vu, on peut le faire aussi… hon hon hon!)
(via joouheika)
You know you had a Catholic upbringing when somebody says “May the force be with you” and your instant reaction is to reply with “And also with you”.
Lift up your lightsabers.
We lift them up to the lord.
Let us give thanks to the Force our guide.
It is right to give the Force thanks and praise.
(via kulshedra)
Reminder of: reason for eggplant’s name
OH MY GOD I HAVE WONDERED ABOUT THIS MY WHOLE LIFE
(via hinoneko)
Common Descent
There’s a famous old anecdote about Charlemagne that’s been used for ages to explain how interconnected we are among our biological pasts. It has been said that everyone of European ancestry is related to Charlemagne, the great King of the Franks, born in 742 AD. If you’re European, you’re royalty. How is that possible?
I’ll tell you another tidbit first: Not only do all Europeans share Charlemagne as an ancestor, they share everyone alive at the same time as Charlemagne as an ancestor. Everyone who had kids, anyway. Let me explain:
Everyone alive has two biological parents. They each have two parents themselves, for a total of four grandparents. For x number of generations that you travel back in time, you have 2^x direct grandparents of increasing separation. Extrapolate that back to Charlie’s time, and you’d need 1 trillion grandparents to cover all your ancestral bases. Michael from Vsauce did a video about it. Since that’s far more people than have ever been alive, we need to engage some incest to solve the problem. Not banjo-applesauce incest, just a bit of redrawing our family trees into family webs.
Somewhere, far enough back in the web of grandparents, we will find a person whose lines connect to every single person who comes after them. That zig-zagged trail of shared genetic history ends surprisingly recently (for Euros, again): A common European ancestor around 1400 AD. Go a bit farther, and we find a common Earthling ancestor around 3,000 BC. It’s neat stuff. But it’s all based in mathematical models, not real genetic data.
Until now. USC and UC Davis researchers Peter Ralph and Graham Coop have surveyed the genomes of 2,257 Europeans in order to put some real data behind those models. Because of the random shuffling of chromosome fragments that created your father’s sperm and your mother’s egg, you, your siblings and your cousins all share varying chunks of DNA. People who are more closely related share more of these chunks. Depending on how many chunks are shared between two people, we can calculate their approximate relation to each other. Using 2 million shared sequences and a lot of math, they proved the mathematical models correct. Turkish people are more related to other Turks than to someone from Portugal, but they are related enough that, not only do they share one common ancestor a few hundred years ago, but they share every ancestor if you go back a mere thousand years. The models guessed that a long time ago, but now we have the data to prove it.It’s likely that these patterns extend to other regions of Earth, although the numbers might be slightly (but not that) different.
Next time someone in your neck of the ethnic woods points out a famous relative or claims blue-blood descent, remind them that they aren’t so special. All street-sweepers are royalty, all nobles are peasants, and we are all Kings.
Read more at NatGeo. Have more questions? Also check out the great FAQ on the project from the researchers themselves.
You know, not that anybody gives a shit what I think about Angelina Jolie’s double mastectomy, and by no means am I suggesting by opening my mouth that anybody should be listening to me when I talk, but every post I’ve seen so far about this has been about the misogynistic comments from a dismal few (“ANGELINA - TITS = WHAT’S THE POINT,” seems to be the formula), or people responding to other people’s response to those misogynistic comments, and then it charges off into a conversation that is probably inevitable, under the circumstances, but is not one I’m interested in reading.
And I just kind of want to ignore all of that for a second to say: wow, Angelina Jolie is really brave. And when one of the sexiest, most beautiful women in the world has had a double mastectomy, and isn’t ashamed of it, and doesn’t feel like any less of a woman after having it, that’s going to mean a whole lot to millions of women. It makes me really happy, in a way that’s getting me a bit teary-eyed, to think that from now on, women going through this terrifying and psychologically difficult procedure will be hearing from all their friends: “Of course you’re still going to be beautiful! You’re going to look just as beautiful as Angelina Jolie!”
There are more important things than beauty, and there are definitely more important things than breasts. But damn, when you’re in that white hospital gown, cold and scared and feeling less beautiful than you ever have in your life, that sure would be nice to hear.
And the highest paid public employee in your state is…
I hate everything.
this is irritating.
(via handsomesharks)
Stephen Scobie, on the Naropa Institute’s 1994 tribute to Allen Ginsberg (via thisisendless)
FUCK
(via femmeboyant)
I’m just frozen. Absences of women in history don’t “just happen,” they are made.
(via queereyes-queerminds)
(via odificus)
11 of the Weirdest Solutions to the Fermi Paradox
Most people take it for granted that we have yet to make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. Trouble is, the numbers don’t add up. Our Galaxy is so old that every corner of it should have been visited many, many times over by now. No theory to date has satisfactorily explained away this Great Silence, so it’s time to think outside the box. Here are eleven of the weirdest solutions to the Fermi Paradox.
(via flannelfrog)
(via kulshedra)
