greenchestnuts:

reallifescomedyrelief:

 

lostintrafficlights:

littlefuckinglesbian:

jawdust:

where is this guy’s blockbuster movie

hero.

Oh my god this is folk tale stuff

This is true:

“Dashrath did not want anyone else to suffer the same fate as his wife, so he carved a 360-foot-long (110 m) through-cut, 25-foot-deep (7.6 m) in places and 30-foot-wide (9.1 m) to form a road^[5] through a mountain in the Gehlour hills, working day and night for 22 years from 1960 to 1982.”

360’ x 25’ x 30’ through solid rock.

Also, apparently someone did make a movie about him but it’s held up in court.

stoweboyd:

Stanford researchers — Professor Shanhui Fan and graduate students Aaswath Raman and Eden Rephaeli — have developed a material suitable to be used as paneling on houses and buildings that reflects light so efficiently, it could passively replace air conditioning, as well as radiating heat in a way that will escape the Earth’s atmosphere.

The trick, from an engineering standpoint, is twofold. First, the reflector has to reflect as much of the sunlight as possible. Poor reflectors absorb too much sunlight, heating up in the process and defeating the goal of cooling.

The second challenge is that the structure must efficiently radiate heat (from a building, for example) back into space. Thus, the structure must emit thermal radiation very efficiently within a specific wavelength range in which the atmosphere is nearly transparent. Outside this range, the thermal radiation interacts with Earth’s atmosphere. Most people are familiar with this phenomenon. It’s better known as the greenhouse effect – the cause of global climate change.

The new structure accomplishes both goals. It is an effective broadband mirror for solar light – it reflects most of the sunlight. It also emits thermal radiation very efficiently within the crucial wavelength range needed to escape Earth’s atmosphere.

Radiative cooling at nighttime has been studied extensively as a mitigation strategy for climate change, yet peak demand for cooling occurs in the daytime.

[…]

The Stanford team has succeeded where others have come up short by turning to nanostructured photonic materials. These materials can be engineered to enhance or suppress light reflection in certain wavelengths.

The new device is capable of achieving a net cooling power in excess of 100 watts per square meter. By comparison, today’s standard 10-percent-efficient solar panels generate about the same amount of power. That means Fan’s radiative cooling panels could theoretically be substituted on rooftops where existing solar panels feed electricity to air conditioning systems needed to cool the building.

To put it a different way, a typical one-story, single-family house with just 10 percent of its roof covered by radiative cooling panels could offset 35 percent its entire air conditioning needs during the hottest hours of the summer.

Radiative cooling has another profound advantage over other cooling equipment, such as air conditioners. It is a passive technology. It requires no energy. It has no moving parts. It is easy to maintain. You put it on the roof or the sides of buildings and it starts working immediately.

This is an enormous breakthrough if it can be manufactured cost effectively.

fishingboatproceeds:

TRIGGER WARNING: Rape, misogyny, general horribleness

I am asked all the time why I think Professional Internet Types tend to be male more often than female. Is it because women aren’t as aggressive about building an audience and so struggle amid the media saturation? Is it because women aren’t as funny, or aren’t as talented, or blah blah blah?

Maybe we need to consider that one of the central reasons women artists/vloggers/musicians/etc. are less likely to rise to prominence online is that whenever women build an audience online, men threaten those women with rape and murder. And unlike traditional celebrities, most of these women do not have the resources to hire the kind of lawyers and bodyguards that one needs to stay safe. 

Like all misogyny, and I want to emphasize this, this is bad not just for women but also for all human beings. We are better off as a species if everyone has a chance to be heard, and we are worse off if talented people like Kitty Pryde don’t have the basic safety and security that one needs in order to effectively make and share stuff.

But it’s not just these kinds of horrifying threats (which as pointed out above is “the most normal thing”).

I also want to say something to all those guys who are like I was as a teenager, the people who aren’t sick people trying to get someone’s attention by harming or threatening them but who do have weird relationships with the women who make stuff they like.* You think that if this person knew you, you could be friends…maybe more than friends. And so you want to get her attention, so you can get to know each other, because then you’ll definitely become friends or maybe—

Stop.

When you start falling down that rabbit hole, stop. I know it’s hard. But stop.

What we love—even if these people make highly personal and confessional vlogs or whatever—is the stuff they make, not the people themselves. And what we really want is for more of that stuff to exist in the world. So the only proper way to be a fan is to let them be, so that they can bring more good and useful stuff into the world for us to enjoy.

* EDIT: Many people are yelling at me for saying the person in the above ask is not a sick person harming or threatening people. That is not what I am saying here. I am speaking to the people out there who are NOT like this person, but whose excessive and sometimes romanticized attention can shut down discourse. I thought that was pretty obvious from the grammar, but I just want to underscore it.

gly9h-the-hellhound:

pillory:

Oscar was adopted as a kitten from an animal shelter and grew up in the third-floor end-stage dementia unit at Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. The 41-bed unit treats people with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and other illnesses, most of whom are in the end stage of life and are generally unaware of their surroundings. Oscar was one of six cats adopted by Steere House, which bills itself as a “pet friendly” facility.

After about six months, the staff noticed that Oscar, just like the doctors and nurses, would make his own rounds. Oscar would sniff and observe patients, then curl up to sleep with certain ones. The patients he would sleep with often died within several hours of his arrival. One of the first cases involved a patient who had a blood clot in her leg that was ice cold at the time. Oscar wrapped his body around her leg and stayed until the woman died.In another instance, the doctor had made a determination of impending death based on the patient’s condition, while Oscar simply walked away, causing the doctor to believe that Oscar’s streak (12 at the time) had ended. However, it would be later discovered that the doctor’s prognosis was simply 10 hours too early: Oscar later visited the patient, who died two hours later.

Oscar’s accuracy led the staff to institute a new and unusual protocol: once he is discovered sleeping with a patient, staff will call family members to notify them of the patient’s (expected) impending death.

Most of the time the patient’s family has no issue with Oscar being present at the time of death. On those occasions when he is removed from the room at the family’s request, he is known to pace back and forth in front of the door and meow in protest. When present, Oscar will stay by the patient until they die, then after death will quietly leave the room.

i find this very interesting as this behavior seems common in many cats that reside in mental and nursing homes. Often sharing the bed of the soon to be deceased. In the ancient world cats were revered by many cultures, most famously Ancient Egypt, as guardians of the underworld, keepers of the gate of death, and sometimes even harbingers of death itself. This makes me wonder whether this behavior was observed during ancient times as well and perhaps prompted this belief and many practices surrounding it. 

pizza:

thedoctors-steampowered-hunter:

deathnoteforcutie:

We’ve done it, we’ve reached the pinnacle of human evolution

Make tumblr user Pizza find the thing. 

holy shit

erisdaughter:

girljanitor:

that’s ok

i didn’t need

MY HEART

theoriginalspike:

ermahgerd-sherlerk:

antlerrs:

renkris:

Gordon Ramsay doesn’t care about your gender, race, or creed. All he cares about is that you can cook.

The contestant, Christine, is blind, and he lets her know exactly what he thinks of her dish.

ive never been more emotional about a pie

I fucking love Gordon Ramsay

Okay can we just talk about how NICE Gordon Ramsey can be?

I know he has a reputation for being insanely blunt and almost cruel.

But when he actually tells someone how well they’ve done and told them to stop doubt them because they’re so good at why they do, it. Is. BEAUTIFUL.

ballerinahomicide:

trapghoul:

the fact that women’s healthcare seems to be a joke among men is sickening. 

lance armstrong loses a testicle and everyone’s like “oh man must have been so hard for him poor guy losing his manhood LIVESTRONG” and angelina jolie gets the jokes after her mother died from cancer and she’s trying to protect herself???? 

most accurate post on tumblr

goodstuffhappenedtoday:

Cleared of Charges of Setting Off a School Explosion, Florida Honor Student Heads to Space Camp

Kiera Wilmot is going to space camp.

In late April, the 16-year-old central Florida honor student was accused of igniting a chemical explosion on school grounds, leading to her arrest and suspension from school, but authorities dropped criminal charges last week.

The nightmarish ordeal was shocking for her single mother, Marie Wilmot, who always encouraged Kiera and her twin sister, Kayla, to follow their passions.

“The initial phone call was terrifying,” Marie told ABC News. “Time will help I hope, it was devastating for me as a mother.”

While school officials debate whether Kiera will return to Bartow High School, the Wilmot family received an unexpected surprise.

The explosion struck a chord with 18-year NASA veteran Homer Hickam, a former lead astronaut training manager for Spacelab, and later for the International Space Station.

In the late 1950s, Hickam had a brush with law enforcement for allegedly starting a forest fire. State police came to his high school and led him and his friends away in handcuffs, but his high school physics professor and school principal came to the rescue, clearing him of wrongdoing.

Back then, schools did not have zero tolerance rules. Kids could make their mistakes without the threat of a criminal record, or serving time in jail.

“I couldn’t let this go without doing something,” Hickam said. “I’m not a lawyer, but I could give her something that would encourage her. I’ve worked closely with the U.S. Space Academy, and so I purchased a scholarship for her.”

Learning of her twin sister, Hickam raised enough money so Kiera and Kayla could attend space camp together. Hickam runs several scholarships for kids with potential, and hopes to create an ongoing Space Academy scholarship. The twins will attend in July.