Helicoprion: What If, Like, Teeth,

Helicoprion: What if, like, teeth,

Mesosaurus: Yeah?

Helicoprion: but WHEEL

Mesosaurus: No don’t -

Helicoprion:

(Image by ДиБгд)

Hey. I saw your reblog of that post saying something about your favorite Youtuber uploading a history of the human race with the last minutes dedicated to a possible message being sent into space? “We’re the last humans left”. Do you still remember which video that was? I’d like to watch it.

it’s linked in the post! the red underlined text, which is also the title of the video: We’re The Last Humans Left. the YouTuber in question is exurb1a, who makes fantastic and thought-provoking video essays about the intersections of philosophy and science. my favorite vid of his is and then we’ll be okay, a neofable about acceptance.

Member States of the United Sol System

(c. 30th century CE)

The United Sol System (top flag) is an entity that fills the same essential function as the United Nations of Earth: it is a pan-governmental organization conceived to deal with issues that affect internal interplanetary relations and/or the system at large. The USS is a member of, and serves as the primary seat of, the interstellar United Nations of Humanity, which is in turn a member of the United Spacefaring Sophonts Coalition (multilayered decentralized government is the most practical form of organized government in space).

Left column, top to bottom:

Inner System Territories, with the flags of Mercury (left) and Venus (right) Territories below

Free Democracy of Ma'at, a multi-body nation composed of several large inner-system asteroids (Apophis, Eros, Icarus, and Phaethon)

Earth-Moon Union, in turn composed of the United Nations of Earth and the Lunar Territory

People's Republic of Mars, which includes Phobos and Deimos Territories

United States of the Solar Belt, which is composed of hundreds of main-belt asteroids including Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea

Right column, top to bottom:

Jovian System Federation, including the lunar-planetary states of Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, and Io

Saturn Alliance, including the Ringshadow Federation of aerocities on Saturn and the lunar-planetary states of Iapetus, Rhea, Dione, Tethys, Enceladus, and the Joint Authority of Titan

Uranus Coalition, including the Tilted Sky Confederacy of aerocities on Uranus and the lunar-planetary states of Titania, Oberon, Ariel, Umbriel, and Miranda

Moons of Neptune Alliance, including the lunar-planetary states of Proteus, Nereid, Larissa, Galatea, Despina, and the Republic of Triton

Outer System Territories, with the flags of Pluto-Charon (left) and Terminus (right) Territories below (also including Eris, Haumea, and Makemake Territories, not shown)

Bonus: flag of the United Nations of Humanity itself, composed of hundreds of member star systems across a sphere of influence nearly twenty parsecs in diameter.

i will defend improvised storytelling till the day i fucking die i think stories told by people under pressure to do it fast, stories told in collaboration…. that shits gorgeous and ALIVE. have you ever gone to a writing workshop and someone writes the rawest shit in the entire world during a ten minute free write? playing dnd and some dialogue is so moving it makes you wonder how it came from your dumbass friends? got really into one of those ‘one sentence at a time’ campfire story games and ended up making something— totally unrecorded, lost except to the people who were there— that should have been in the fucking moma?

people are full to the BRIM with stories and honing that storytelling into a specific practice (ex. writing) is for sure a learned skill that takes tons of practice to do effectively but…… it’s there. it’s there and anyone can tap into it if they’re given opportunity and an audience to say it to.

look, the point of telling stories is to connect with other people. and all we’ve ever done throughout human history is connect connect connect so is it any wonder when you put a human being in front of an outlet and you say ‘tell me a story’, no one stays silent? 

To say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.

“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

Navigation and Pormpuraawans In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.

Blame and English Speakers In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.

Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.

Gender in Finnish and Hebrew In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

Native artwork is honestly fucking gorgeous and it infuriates me that when you think of or try to look up “Native American art”, you get fetishistic, colonizer bullshit.

I’m so fucking sick of it. We’re always defined by how other people see us.