From, The Phantom Thieves of Heart

and that’s a good thing, 

because the roar of the sun would clock in at around 120db heard from earth, about the equivalent to having a train’s horn go off three feet from your face. 

And they recorded the planets too:

Mercury

Venus

Earth

Mars

Jupiter

Saturn

Uranus 

Neptune

Pluto

Macbeth is absolutely willing to fucking throw down for Lady Macbeth. Has already threatened a wall, a desk, a few students, a textbook that was neither his nor Lady Macbeth’s, and me

Lady Macbeth is enjoying the attention and has begun to use this new connection to his advantage. I’m starting to suspect he’s read ahead in the play.

Macbeth is going to end up living in detention at this rate.

Macbeth has no idea that he is the tragedy of the story. Claims to be the hero of the play, fails to see the irony in this

Macbeth slowly scooted his desk across the classroom to hold hands with Lady Macbeth. He was not subtle.

Macbeth has proposed on several occasions. Lady Macbeth just laughs and says they’re already married.

Macbeth’s girlfriend is in the class with them and is “totally not jealous or anything just thinks this whole fucking play is a waste of time”

Lady Macbeth should probably be a theatre major at some point, he fucking rocked Act V scene I

Fisheye Placebo by Yuumei

The human eye only has three types of color sensitive cones, which detect red, blue, and green light. Your brain is making up every other color you perceive.

Let’s have a little fun with that thought. This is the visible spectrum of light.

You will of course note that yellow is on the chart. Yellow has a discreet wavelength, and is therefore a distinct physical color. But we can’t see it.

“Sorry, what the fuck?”

What we call yellow is just what our brain shrugs and spits out when our red and green cones are equally stimulated. We have light receptors that can pick up on the physical spectrum of light we call yellow: that’s why yellow things don’t just look like moving black blocks to us. But your brain has no fucking idea what the color yellow looks like. 

Some animals have eyes that can perceive the color yellow! Goldfish have a yellow cone in their eyes. If they could talk, they could tell us what yellow looks like. But we wouldn’t be able to understand it.

What your brain actually sees of the color spectrum:

We can measure the wavelength of light, so we know that when we see ‘yellow,’ we are seeing light in that 550-ish nanometers range. But we don’t have a cone in our eyes that can pick that up. Your brain just has a very consistent guess about what color that wavelength of light could be. We decided to name that guess ‘yellow.’ We can’t imagine what yellow really looks like any more than a dog can imagine the color red.

Here’s the funny thing: your brain is never perceiving just one photon of light at a time. Something like 2*10⁸ photons per second are hitting your retina under normal conditions. Your brain doesn’t individually process all of them. So it averages them out. It grabs a bunch of photons all coming from the same direction, with the same pattern, and goes, “yeah, that cup is blue, fuck it, next.”

That’s how colors blend in our eyes. So sure, if a photon of light with a wavelength of 550 nanometers bounces into our eyes, we see what we call “yellow.” But if we see two photons at the same time, coming from the same object, one of which is 500 nms and the other of which is 600 nms, your brain will average them out and you will still see yellow even though none of the light you just saw was 550 nms.

So how does magenta factor into this?

Well, as we’ve just established, when your brain sees light from two different slices of the visible light spectrum, it will try to just average them together. Green plus red is yellow, fuck it. If it’s more red than green, we’ll call that ‘orange.’ Literally who gives a shit, we’re trying to forage over here. There are bears out here and it’s so scary.

What happens if you take the average of blue and red light, which we perceive to be magenta? What’s the centerpoint of that line?

Fucking green.

Hey, that’s not gonna work? We live on a planet where EVERYTHING IS GREEN. If something is NOT green, that means it’s either food, or a potential source of danger, and either way your brain wants you to know about it.

So your brain goes, WHOOPS. Okay - this is fine. We already made up yellow, orange, cyan, and violet. We’ll just make up another color. Something that looks really, really different from green. 

And so it made up magenta.

So, physics-wise, is magenta “real?”

No; there’s no single wavelength of light that corresponds to magenta. But you’re rarely seeing only a single wavelength of light anyway. And even when you are, every color other than RGB is a dart thrown on the wall by your meat computer. This is the CIE Chromaticity Diagram:

Explaining this thing is a little more than I want to take on on a Saturday morning, but I’ve included a link above that goes into it a little more. The point is that only the colors that actually touch the ‘outline’ of the shape actually correspond to a specific wavelength of light. All of the other colors are blends of multiple wavelengths. So magenta isn’t special.

Given that color is just a fun trick your brain is playing on you to help you find food and avoid danger, is magenta real?

Yeah, absolutely. Or at least, it’s just as real as most of what we see. It’s what we see when we mix up blue and red. It would be disastrous from a survival standpoint to perceive that color as green, so we don’t. Because it’s not green. Light that’s green has a wavelength of around 510 nm. Stuff that’s magenta bounces back light that is both ~400 and ~700. Your brain knows the difference. So it fills in the gap for you, with the best guess it has, same as it does with your blind spot.

Arthur Conan Doyle never put Holmes in a deer stalker (also “elementary my dear Watson” is never said in the books, and he doesn’t smoke a curved pipe)

There are boys at Beauxbatons and girls at Durmstrang schools

And iirc the area is fairly poor as well, so a lot of people don’t pursue medical treatment right away when they get sick because of the distance & expense, on top of using a lot of folk medicine / remedies like eating raw marmot in the first place.

The woman who died was also pregnant.

Rabbi Reuven Israel Kott was a Torah prodigy whose cleverness and chutzpah saved thousands of Jews from annihilation by the Nazis. Born in a Polish shtetl in 1897, Reuven was one of fifteen children. His family were Hasidic followers of the Ger Rebbe. Reuven’s exceptional intellect was apparent at a young age. He was a gifted scholar of Talmud and Jewish scripture, so precocious that he was given rabbinic ordination when only 17 years old. The Rebbe took a special liking to Reuven, and every Friday night Reuven sat next to the great man at his festive Sabbath gathering. Small in size - he stood only 5’1” - Reuven was known for his big brain, and big heart. Reuven was selected by his community to represent them as the Jewish voice on the local provincial council. When the Polish president died in the 1920’s, young Reuven stood at the graveside with other clergy and delivered a eulogy on behalf of the Jews of Poland. Although life seemed fairly good for Polish Jews at the time, the Ger Rebbe sensed that big trouble was coming. He urged his followers to get out of Poland and move to Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), at that time British Mandate Palestine. As the Rebbe’s right-hand man, Rabbi Reuven Kott threw himself into the mission of helping Jews leave Poland and return to their ancestral homeland. The British had a quota system restricting the number of Jewish families they let in. Reuven took advantage of a bureaucratic loophole defining “family” as two parents and an undetermined number of offspring. Reuven collected money and bribed Polish authorities to get blank birth certificates. He would then “create” new families, matching people up, changing names and identities as needed. Every “family" had at least a dozen children. Reuven told those he helped that they must stick with their fake identity. Most people complied, but a few didn’t and were caught. Under threat of being sent back to Poland, somebody gave Reuven’s name to the authorities. Reuven and his brother were on a train in Warsaw when three plain-clothes officers approached. After verifying his identity, they arrested Reuven for bribery and forgery and threw him in jail. As a pious Jew, Reuven couldn’t eat the non-kosher jail food, so every day his daughter brought him a kosher meal - a two hour journey each way. After several long months, his brother finally got word that there was going to be a hearing in the case. He went to visit Reuven in jail, told him the news and asked which lawyer he wanted to hire. Reuven scribbled something on a scrap of paper, folded it up and slipped it through the bars of his cell. Outside the jail, Reuven’s brother unfolded the note. He was shocked to read the contents: “Hire me the most anti-Semitic lawyer in Warsaw!“ Reuven’s family was baffled. With so many top-notch Jewish lawyers, why would he want an anti-Semite? Had his incarceration led to a mental breakdown? Reuven’s brother assured them that he was of sound mind, and he went to Warsaw and found an attorney notorious for his fierce hatred of Jews. The day of the hearing arrived, and the courthouse was packed with hundreds of Hasids from Reuven’s community. Reuven was allowed only three minutes with his lawyer, and then the hearing began. To everybody’s shock, Reuven’s lawyer stood up, made a brilliant argument, and got the case dismissed. Back home in the shtetl, everybody wanted to know what Reuven had said to his lawyer in those three minutes. Reuven said his Talmud study had taught him that in a business deal, if you get three “Yes” answers, the deal will close. He asked his lawyer three questions: - You hate us Jews, don’t you? - Do you want to see me rot and die in jail? - Would you like all of us Jews gone from Poland? The lawyer answered yes to all three questions. Reuven immediately shot back, “What good would it do if one measly Jew rots in jail? If you set me free, I can get all the Jews out of Poland!” Reuven got what he wanted by blinding the lawyer with his own hate. He continued his work “creating” large families and helping them move to Palestine. The anti-Semitic attorney even helped him procure more blank birth certificates. People often asked Reuven when he would go to Eretz Yisrael. He said, “I’m like the captain of a sinking ship. It is my responsibility to get all the passengers out before I get in the lifeboat.” Over the course of 20 years, Reuven helped tens of thousands of Jews escape Poland. Today, almost half a million descendants of those Polish Jews owe their lives to Rabbi Reuven Israel Kott. Unfortunately, Reuven himself never made it to Israel. He was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942. For proving that one small man in three short minutes can accomplish miracles beyond measure, we honor Rabbi Reuven Israel Kott as this week’s Thursday Hero at Accidental Talmudist. This story was told to us by Reuven’s granddaughter, Ziporah Bank. She heard it from her mom - the daughter who brought kosher meals to Rabbi Kott in prison.

like, “I’m not not dying of some random disease or having to work a 50 hour work day today, better go watch some dude get his leg sawed off in a science tent.”

random citizens there:

the bard: