For Manhattan, a special day comes twice a year, when the setting Sun aligns precisely with the Manhattan street grid, creating a radiant glow of light across Manhattan’s brick and steel canyons, simultaneously illuminating both the north and south sides of every cross street of the borough’s grid. A rare and beautiful sight.
For best effect, position yourself as far east in Manhattan as possible. But ensure that when you look west across the avenues you can still see New Jersey. Clear cross streets include 14th, 23rd, 34th. 42nd, 57th, and several streets adjacent to them. The Empire State building and the Chrysler building render 34th street and 42nd streets especially striking vistas.
#Taylor Swift #hey look it’s that post I used as an example a while back #of how prosopagnosics can use TagViewer to identify famous people in Tumblr pictures #I have tagged this reblog with her name to help other faceblind people with this process in the future #prosopagnosia #the more you know
Back in the 1960s, the U.S. started vaccinating kids for measles. As expected, children stopped getting measles.
But something else happened.
Childhood deaths from all infectious diseases plummeted. Even deaths from diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea were cut by half.
“So it’s really been a mystery — why do children stop dying at such high rates from all these different infections following introduction of the measles vaccine,” says Michael Mina, a postdoc in biology at Princeton University and a medical student at Emory University.
Like many viruses, measles is known to suppress the immune system for a few weeks after an infection. But previous studies in monkeys have suggested that measles takes this suppression to a whole new level: It erases immune protection to other diseases, Mina says.
Tags:
#illness tw #needle tw #biology #the more you know
notactuallycute this concerns me for some reason, is this okay?
Hello, shorter-url. Your concern is very much understandable! Many people are taught that a shark cannot swim when still, which is partially true.
Sharks mainly breathe via two methods– buccal pumping, in which the shark actively draws water in through its mouth to pass over its gills, and ram ventilation, in which the shark must constantly move to force water over their gills. Buccal pumping is more prevalent in ancient sharks, and while some sharks adapted for bottom-feeding still use it, many modern sharks – like the great white shark – have lost that ability altogether and instead can only breathe via ram ventilation. These are called obligate ram ventilators and they have to keep moving in order to breathe.
This particular shark is an adult S. fasciatum, a Zebra or Leopard Shark, depending on the region. Fortunately, they aren’t obligate ram ventilators and, in fact, have very strong buccal muscles. You can even see them working in the first two gifs. When it starts moving to swim away, the diver lets it go, and there’s no harm for either party.
All the best, Fatanyeros
Also, in my work with nurse sharks (same branch as S. fasciatum) I found them to actually enjoy scritches and petting. They would actively seek them out on their own terms.
My life is infinitely better for knowing some sharks like scritches.
– Lots of free food, parties and alcohol. If you’re a “bro” then you’ll have a great time.
Cons
– Tumblr is run on a tangled mess of homegrown tools, horrendously fragile code and the worst engineering practices I’ve ever seen from any company. There is no QA, code reviews aren’t taken seriously, anyone can commit to master and push their code to production at any time. The entire development process can best be described as institutionalized cowboy coding.
– Brogramming is real and Tumblr exemplifies it. It was the norm for bros to knowingly push buggy, incomplete, untested code into production after a few rounds of drinks then leave the problems for others while they moved onto another project.
– Engineering management is filled with dead weight who have been loyal and stuck around long enough. They aren’t qualified to lead teams, they have horrendous technical knowledge and do absolutely nothing to help grow the careers of their subordinates.
– Every position from VPs down to engineers are a revolving door, every week at least one person quits and the one thing that the people who quit have in common is that they were very good at their jobs. I can safely say that if you see someone has been at Tumblr more than six months they are looking for a new job; if they are there for two years or more they are probably incompetent. Absolutely no one who has options stays at Tumblr.
– New employees, no matter how experienced, are treated like they are complete idiots. Recently, I watched someone who had more experience than everyone on his team quit out of frustration. His manager told other people that he was useless and contributed nothing. What the manager didn’t realize was the same person he called useless had accepted a more senior role at Google.
my mom has been a coder from way back, like she helped write the first ATM networks and stuff, and she worked with a guy who liked to dump his buggy ass code into the production machine and then leave for the weekend or a vacation or whatever
the systems administrator had a process that would remove any changes he’d made
dude never did run anything on the test box without being told to and never got fired for it
– There’s a complete lack of engineering best practices, their codebase is so fragmented, fragile, tangled and highly unreadable. Minor changes to the code cannot be made without risking the entire site going down. They don’t use continuous integration to test against anything and do not have the technical capital to even being writing tests. It’s shocking beyond belief…
– You get a really strange vibe from everyone in the office, people talk badly about others behind their backs and sometimes within earshot. Lots of inter-office romantic relationships.
– It’s a rotating door, nobody really stays for more than 1-2 years, many people including directors have left the company even before their stock reached it’s 1 year vesting cliff. This kills morale when nobody likes the company enough to stay.
– Morale is terrible after the acquisition, people talk poorly about yahoo and make fun of how old and outdated yahoo is as a company yet tumblr itself is old and outdated. The traffic to the website has plummeted on a monthly basis.
– A very small percent of the early employees have stayed and those who have keep talking down upon the newer employees
– They’ve built tons of custom, in house services which constantly break because they were so poorly written which makes being on call an absolute nightmare.
– Top it off with a few rats run around in the Manhattan HQ
This sounds like such a horror story, somebody write the gothic-meme version of this office please
There are really only four known groups of spiders with medically significant venom- the rest can’t do much worse than a bee sting. (Of course, some individuals can have allergic reactions to spider venom, just like bee stings.)
These four groups are: the widows (Latrodectus sp.), the brown spiders (Loxosceles sp.), the Australian funnel web spiders (Atraxus sp.), and the Brazilian wandering spiders (Phoneutria sp.).
Black widows are found across the U.S. and in parts of Africa, Europe, and Asia. Despite their reputation, most black widow bites are harmless. Many are dry, with no venom injected, and about 75% of those that do contain venom only produce localized pain with no other symptoms.
Occasionally, more severe symptoms do develop in the form of latrodectism. This can cause symptoms such as generalized pain, headache, nausea, sweating, and racing heart. Most of these symptoms resolve within a week and for more severe cases, an antivenom is available. There has only been one death recorded from a black widow bite in US in the last 50 years, and it was an elderly man. Several thousand people in the US get bitten by black widows every year without suffering any major ill effects.
The brown spiders include the brown recluse spider, famed for its necrotizing bite. However, as with the black widow, the deadliness of this spider has been greatly exaggerated. Like the black widow, brown spiders are found worldwide. Also like the black widow, their bites are often venom-free, and even envenomated bites produce nothing more than mild irritation.
Here’s a map of where brown spiders are found in the US:
The brown recluse is very rare in Ohio specifically, so you don’t have much to worry about.
Bites with high concentrations of brown recluse venom can produce a necrotic skin lesion that is slow to heal. About 66% of these lesions heal on their own without complications. Those that do not may require skin grafts or corrective surgery. A systemic response, which is the response that may become fatal, occurs in about 1% of bite victims. In the last decade there have been two recorded fatalities from brown recluse bites, and both were young children. And as a matter of fact, there are no confirmed reports of a necrotizing bite leading to amputation.
Interestingly enough, there are lots of reports of brown recluse “bites” from states where there are no brown recluse spiders. Spiders often get blamed for symptoms that come from everything from lyme disease to lymphoma. My state is not within the brown recluse range and I’ve still heard stories from a number of people who insist they were bitten by the spider.
Australian funnel web spiders are found, obviously, in Australia- specifically along the eastern coast. While it is suggested that these spiders are more likely to give “wet” bites than the others on this list, there have been no recorded fatalities from their bites in Australia since 1981!
Brazilian wandering spiders are found in parts of Central and South America and are the most venomous spider on this list. This venom, among other things, may give you a lasting erection, which is why some pharmaceutical companies are researching it for use in erectile dysfunction drugs. These spiders are the famed “banana spiders” because they have been found on shipments of bananas outside of South/Central America; however, there are only seven actual recorded cases of this happening. Only about 2.3% of wandering spider bites are medically significant, and again, there have been very few deaths attributed to them.
Spiders, by and large, do not pose a threat to you anywhere in the world.
THESE ARE BRILLIANT. (Can someone explain the alphabet one to me? My sleep deprived brain cannot comprehend.)
I presume the names of the alphabet letters are being spelled out phonetically and then alphabetized — “ay, aitch, arr, bee” and so on. Of course the exact order depends on how one phonetically transcribes the letter names; I would’ve started with “eh, bee, see” not “ay, bee, see”, but then vowels are tricky and most of what gives us varying accents. ^_^
Tags:
#the more you know #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #death tw
Since everyone and their cousin is passing around that kitchen oil fire eruption video, I thought I’d comment on one thing I don’t see mentioned in all the bazillion and six re-tumbles, namely, the optimal uses of fire extinguishers.
Although in my day job I’m your literary torturer, on the side I’ve been a firefighter since 2005 (good god, ten years now). Here’s my standard photo of myself doing so (note that while this was live fire, it was also a staged training exercise in an unoccupied house). WOULD YOU TRUST ME WITH YOUR KITCHEN FIRE? OF COURSE! LOOK HOW GOOD I WAS AT STOPPING THIS ONE!
Caveat: What I’m about to discuss applies to fire extinguisher labeling in the United States, because that is where I live and was trained as a firefighter. I cannot vouch for how labels work around the world. I know there are some slight differences, so do a bit of research.
Second caveat: JESUS CHRIST do not throw flour on a kitchen fire. EVER! Flour and flour dust are immensely flammable. Just Google search for “grain warehouse explosion” and “grain dust explosion” and you’ll never be tempted to do this ever again. I’ve also seen some nice Youtube videos of people (in prepared laboratory environments) throwing handfuls of flour over a Bunsen Burner flame for instant whoosh-flash effects. Very exciting! You do not want this excitement in your kitchen.
Okay, the important part: You should have multiple fire extinguishers in your place of residence, and you should know exactly where they are, AND you should place them in areas that are not especially likely to erupt into flame. For example, if you keep a fire extinguisher in a cabinet above or next to your stove, go watch that water-onto-burning-oil video again. Now, be honest, are you really going to be able to even approach (let alone reach through) that mess to get an extinguisher above or directly beside it? No. Your extinguisher might as well be on the moon in such an instance, so pre-position these things more smartly.
When you look at a fire extinguisher, you should be able to immediately spot a label that has big clear letters on it, for example AB or ABC. These are both very interesting and very important.
You see, in the fire service it’s absolutely critical to identify, as rapidly as possible, exactly what might be burning in any given fire. This is why businesses are required by law (at least until the maniacs and idiots finish breaking down every last concept of useful government regulation) to disclose types and quantities of hazardous chemicals at a commercial site, and to have that information readily accessible to emergency responders. Some burning substances react horrifyingly to the application of water. Cooking oil, for one instance. Large vats of hydrofluoric acid for another.
The thing below is often referred to as a “fire diamond” or “hazard diamond.” The technical name for it is “NFPA 704 Placard.” It’s a quick visual guide to relevant qualities of a given chemical substance, and in this instance the big W with a crossbar through it means HOLY SHIT DO NOT APPLY WATER TO THIS STUFF. Since our primary approach to firefighting involves spraying high-pressure water at dozens or hundreds of gallons per minute, this is, as the kids say, relevant to our interests.
But I am digressing. You shouldn’t have an NFPA placard in your kitchen unless you’re some kind of comedian or a hot pepper sociopath. Back to ABC. The fire service classifies all types of possible burning substances into just a few groups, and the interesting part is, this system has absolutely no concern for their proper molecular or scientific relationship or any of that foofarah— this system is based on how stuff generally behaves when it’s on fire, and how it can be extinguished.
Class A materials include wood, plastic, rubber, paper, and most construction materials, etc. and are often referred to as “ordinary combustibles” because they really don’t do anything unpredictable and can be relatively easily extinguished with water. Class B fires involve flammable liquid or gas, and can actually be made worse by the careless application of water. Class C fires involve potentially live electrical equipment, and class C extinguisher chemicals are formulated to be non-conductive for added safety.
So there you have ABC… most readily-available domestic fire extinguishers are going to be rated AB or ABC. I strongly recommend having at least one ABC on hand in case you find yourself having to, say, shoot it into a burning desktop computer (as I did some years ago). Also remember that if you have a burning appliance and you can safely unplug it at a distance from the fire, you can then apply a non-C extinguisher to it without any further worry.
Although you should still exercise extreme caution, an AB or ABC fire extinguisher is immensely preferable to most other approaches (such as attempting to slam a lid down on a wildly out-of-control grease fire, or attempting to fling handfuls of baking soda at it). These devices will allow you to put the right chemicals on the kitchen fire while keeping a safe distance. Distance is your friend. More distance is always more of a friend. Fire extinguisher goop is not a melee weapon. You want some range on that baby.
I should mention two other, rarer fire classes. Class D fires involve burning metals, like magnesium or zirconium. Like oil fires, these can react unpredictably or even dangerously to water. You shouldn’t need a class D extinguisher in any common domestic situation and you won’t even find them on sale in most places, except as a specialty industrial supply. If you have large quantities of Class D material in your house the cast of Person of Interest is probably going to be kicking your door in fairly soon, so you’re not really my problem.
Lastly, there is a newer classification, Class K for “kitchen.” K extinguishers are specially formulated for higher-risk greases and oils. K extinguishers are mostly intended for commercial or industrial applications, like restaurant-sized deep fryers. The good old ABCs should be more than sufficient for nearly any domestic situation.
Now for the most important thing I am going to write all day: If a kitchen fire is well and truly raging, climbing the wall(s) and spreading to the ceiling, don’t be a hero. Get the fuck out. Get everyone in the house or apartment out and call for emergency help. Don’t put yourself inside a room that is rapidly going up in flames on multiple sides, even if you have an extinguisher. Get the fuck out. Your primary duty in a serious fire is to get yourself and your loved ones away from it, alive and uninjured. Fuck everything else. Run.
If the situation is less serious than that, and you do manage to extinguish the disaster in progress, here are a few final but crucial tips. First, ventilate the area as soon as you can. Open doors and windows. People with breathing difficulties, such as asthma, really should go outside for a few minutes until you can clear the air. Even a little bit of smoke can be irritating, and fire extinguisher chemicals, while not actively hazardous, can be a little annoying, too. They taste like salty dish soap. Try not to breathe or swallow those particles if you can. Salty dish soap. Really.
Once you’ve used a fire extinguisher, even if the gauge still indicates remaining material inside, don’t keep it on hand for future use. Get a fresh and unused extinguisher to replace it. Weird things can happen to the propellant supply of a used extinguisher, and a fire extinguisher without propellant is only useful for bludgeoning Col. Mustard in the Library. Trust me on this, you want your extinguisher to go “FWOOOOOOSH” and not “fppt.”
Last thing (I promise!): After a small domestic fire is extinguished, closely examine the area around it and the area above it. Make sure that flames have not penetrated nearby walls or ceilings. In the fire service we call this “extension,” and locating/preventing it is a major part of our operations. You don’t want to blithely walk away from an extinguished stovetop fire, only to discover that the interior wall spaces of your home are full of flames ten minutes later. In fact, if you have any worries at all about the issue, call emergency services. We check up on this sort of thing all the time, and we have a lot of cool tools like thermographic imagers to locate hidden trouble. You are always better safe than sorry, and I assure you, no matter how tired we look, we exist to be bothered like this. We would really rather spend ten minutes finding no fire in your house than four hours filling it with water and tearing it apart. I suspect you feel the same way.
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