to all of the jewish people that may be reading this, i hope you and your families are safe today. i hope that you are able to grieve with your community and hold one to each other and hold each other up.
i am thinking of you all. i am thinking of our communities and our people.
You can walk in a straight line from Madrid to Shanghai without hitting a major body of water using Earth’s curvature.
Egg hatching route.
For everyone who says “that’s not a straight line it’s a curved line” please remember that the Earth is round, not flat. Here’s the line, as rendered with Google Earth:
As you can see, the line is straight!
I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more, but I wouldn’t swim a single mile
The thing about knitting is it’s much harder to fear the existential futility of all your actions while you’re doing it.
Like ok, sure, sometimes it’s hard to believe you’ve made any positive impact on the world. But it’s pretty easy to believe you’ve made a sock. Look at it. There it is. Put it on, now your foot’s warm.
Maybe medieval people happened upon a T-Rex fossil and came to a relatively logical conclusion that dragons existed.
I’ve read a couple books on this actually, thats exactly what happened. Also cyclops are from looking at bones from a certain type of baby elephant. The giant note hole and tiny eyes made it look like a single eye.
Yep, can confirm! And what’s even funnier to me is that back in the dark ages, Greek people used to find a lot of prehistoric bear skeletons – and those look exactly like human skeletons, except they’re like eight feet tall or something – so they naturally assumed those were the heroes of legend, and made armour and clothes for them and reburied them with the most splendid and sacred religious ceremonies they could think of? Fast forward five centuries, Athens’ all modern and rational, philosophers and scientists aren’t taking any shit from anyone – but the problem is, people will randomly find graves containing giant-ass warriors, so that’s something that can’t be explained away and yeah, demigods were a thing and yeah, they used to be eight feet tall and sorry I don’t make the rules.
Some scientists suspect that the origin of the cyclops myths came about because of elephant skulls, which are vaguely human in shape but with a honking big hole in the middle for the trunk but easily mistakable for an eye socket without any flesh
this is the first time i’ve ever seen an elephant skull outside an elephant and i don’t like it much
Gryphons absolutely came from people finding dinosaur fossils (Protoceratops, specifically) and going “that’s a thing with the head of a bird and a quadrupedal body, what the shit”. And of course, this was before people realized that it was possible for a species to go extinct, too – so when they found the remains of something with a bird-like head and a quadruped body, they assumed that of course there must be more of them out there somewhere.
Which is why 1) the description of gryphons is actually surprisingly consistent between cultures, and 2) most of the gryphon stories originate from one particular region – an area of mountains where it turns out, there’s a lot of Protoceratops fossils.
what other animals have we bred to have a huge variation in sizes like dogs?
why must we play god
let’s not forget cats
Pigs.
Fully grown healthy small breeds clock in between 70-150 lbs. Extreme situation pigs (AKA minimicro teacup etc, which btw teacup puppies are also extreme situations and are not healthy) show up sometimes at less than 50lbs. There are lab breeds (pigs are used in human medical research because of their similarity in organs and tissue composition) that are rumored to be bred “safely” down to 50 lbs but lab pig breeds are pretty tightly kept confidential.
gigantic commercial breeds can weigh 700+lbs when allowed to reach full size. extreme individuals have been recorded over 1500lbs.
here’s a farm pig and a potbelly, but that farm pig is just a regular farm pig. not even one of the huge ones.
And cattle too.
Chianina (an italian draught breed now raised for meat). this is the tallest and heaviest pure breed of cattle.
But holstein-friesians are ridiculously tall. They don’t weigh as much, but they’re suuuuuuuuper tall.
vs a wide variety of mini breeds.
mini zebus
mini texas longhorns
there’s a ton of miniature breeds. A TON. Some are traditional/natural breeds, IE the entire breed is that small. Some are miniaturized versions of full sized breeds (like the longhorns above. There’s also mini holsteins, mini angus, mini herefords, you name it)
Oh my??? MINI LONGHORNS
basically any time humans domesticated an animal they went “now let’s make a small one and a big one”
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