Cards Against Humanty just released their “For Her” pack, parodying products geared towards women and also giving proceeds to Emily’s List, which helps more women get elected to government.
The fact that the location of the world’s oldest tree has to be kept secret encapsulates everything that’s bad about humanity.
There’s a story about that, actually.
According to the smithsonianmag.com, the world’s oldest bristlecone pine was a nearly 5,000 year old tree later named Prometheus. In 1964, a man named Donald Rusk Currey decided to use an increment borer to determine its age (a process that cuts a small hole into the center of the tree trunk, and is not intended to kill the tree). Unfortunately, the borer got stuck. He and a park ranger cut the tree down to remove the equipment, and when they counted the tree rings, they realized their mistake. Oops. This incident lead to better protection of the remaining bristlecone pines.
There’s some wiggle room about what can be called “the world’s oldest living tree.” The world’s oldest living single tree is the tree that the OP is referring to. Its name is Methuselah,and it is also around 5,000 years old. Since its location is unknown, nobody knows what it looks like. But it might be this tree here:
But technically, it isn’t the oldest living tree. Let me explain.
It turns out that root systems of trees can send up genetically identical saplings (aka clones) via their root systems. Like so:
Which means the original trunk can die, but since the root system is attached to other trees which give it nutrients, it lives on. The root system can theoretically do this indefinitely. So the tree trunks could be fairly young, but the roots could be large and very, very, very old. So the oldest “tree” isn’t a small grove, it’s a logic-defyingforest.
I’d like you to meet Pando.
This male quaking aspen covers 106 acres and is ancient. I’m talking an estimate of 80,000 years. The trees you can see are just “shoots” he sent up, and their average age is 130 years old. He is his own forest. If trees could talk, I’d love to hear what he had to say.
He might be dying, due to insects and drought (hmm, wonder what could have happened to cause that). A section of Pando is being studied in an attempt to find a solution. But in the meantime, we can enjoy him for his beauty.
TIL a cave goat that went extinct approx. 5,000 years ago is the first known mammal to have become cold-blooded. Their bone growth rate is unlike any other mammal, and more similar to crocodiles in showing slow and adaptive rates to environmental temperature.
The goat’s binomial name is Myotragus balearicus. It was kind of an oddball in a lot of other ways, too, an example being that it had forward-facing eyes, giving it stereoscopic vision, which was pretty odd for an ungulate.
So I used to have a Russian friend who had a pretty thick accent and like a lot of Russians tended to eschew articles. She would say things like “Get in car.” And stuff.
Well one day this asshole who had been kind of tagging along with us asks her why she talks like that because it makes her sound dumb and I still remember her response word for word.
“Me? Dumb? Maybe in America you have to say get in THE car because you are so stupid that people might just get in random car, but in Russia we don’t need to say that. We just fucking know because we are not stupid.”
One time I was proof reading a paper for a Russian student. As I was correcting her paper with her, the many mistakes in her grammar started weighing on her. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, almost sobbing,
“In Russian I am so intelligent and clear. In English I am like [an] idiot”
Respect to anyone trying to master a foreign language. I get so sad thinking about that student.
Full offense but people who make fun of someone else’s accent or belittle their limited vocabulary when they’re speaking a language not native to them are fucking disgusting and are just begging to be punched.
They’re speaking your language because you don’t know theirs. That’s not something they should be made fun of, it’s something that should be commended because learning a language is hard fucking work.
I hate people who do this so much.
Fluency in a language isn’t the ability to speak it 100% clearly with perfect grammar and no accent. It’s the ability to speak and understand words and phrases, to have yourself be understood, and to understand nuances. An Indian man who speaks English with a heavy accent isn’t any less fluent than a Scotsman speaking English with a heavy accent. You’re just choosing to be ignorant and racist about it.
I worked in my college’s writing center in the US, and I worked a lot with international students. In particular, one my friends came in a bunch, and we ended up working together. My friend is Korean, and obvi insanely smart, but she had trouble with articles/small filler words while writing. But she didn’t have any trouble with this when speaking. So, when she came in and we got to work together, she’d read her paper out loud and catch 99% of those mistakes herself. It wasn’t me correcting her, but sitting with her while she corrected herself. Because she knew that shit but it’s hard when writing. And so she’d leave much happier, knowing that she did the work herself but that someone else was there just in case she missed something on her own.
tldr: people know shit, let them figure it out on their own, and offer the support that they seek, and be a friend
i don’t want to achieve equality by sinking to men’s level, i want them to get on ours! why should i have to unlearn the conversational art of waiting my turn, unlearn sexual self-restraint, unlearn trust in others’ good intentions, unlearn the impulse to cater to others’ needs, just to have a chance at success among savages? why can’t the men learn some fucking manners so we can all conduct our affairs in a civilized manner? i shouldn’t have to stop saying sorry, you say sorry!
In the 80s when I was in my freshman year in college, they still had entirely separate mens and women’s dorms. I was in class waiting for a final to start and one of the guys was telling someone about how he had had to go into a women’s dorm to drop something off, and he was startled to see posters on the walls, flowers, curtains, etc. He said his men’s dorm had holes in the walls, things on fire, fights, guys walking around with open wounds and he just didn’t understand why they had to live like this. He said, “I want to live with the women, in civilization.”
Am reading Sisterhood of Spies, about women working for the OSS during WWII. One of the stories mentions that the women in London had a male visitor who would eat in their mess hall once a month. He was married and wasn’t interested in hitting on any of the women; he just wanted to eat in an atmosphere where people said “Please pass the butter,” instead of “PASS THE GODDAMNED GREASE”
I dated a guy who brought me along on group activities (movies, video game night, etc.) with four or five other male friends. Once I mentioned to one of the other guys that I hoped I wasn’t intruding on their “guy time” or some such. He got this sort of rueful look and said, “The truth is, I really like it when you’re here because it gives us a reason to act better. When it’s just guys, we all have to try to outdo each other with how vile we are.”
So the moral of these stories are men don’t even treat each other like human beings.
I remember in high school there was a big uproar for awhile because the boys bathroom doors were locked open during the day, had broken stall doors, the soap dispensers didn’t work right, they had no mirrors and were just overall a mess, while the girls bathrooms could keep the doors shut, had mirrors and nothing was broken and were generally nice. The guys tried to complain that the school was sexist and only giving the girls nice things until our (male) principal was like listen up you little fuckers every time we fix something you guys break and/or vandalize it in less than a week, you don’t get nice things until you stop acting like animals…. okay he didn’t put it just like that, but that was the general tone.
Girls sports also fundraised to set up our own weight room (which the guys didn’t have to do but that’s a rant for another time) and the guys were mad that ours was kept so much nicer and didn’t smell like there’s did and we were just like that’s because we pick up after ourselves asshole!
If you leave a hamster wheel out in the forest, wild mice will come and run on it.
that is my favorite fact
Bobcats and lynx will sit in cardboard boxes abandoned in the middle of the forest.
I asked the lynx researcher who told me this why, and he said “Cats, man” and shrugged.
I had to see this for myself and it is better than I imagined:
“Rats, shrews, and even frogs found their way to the wheel—more than
200,000 animals over 3 years. The creatures seemed to relish the feeling
of running without going anywhere.“ (Link)
