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There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:

仁智懷德聖虞唐，

貞志篤終誓穹蒼，

欽所感想妄淫荒，

心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:

Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,

zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,

qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,

xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:

傷慘懷慕增憂心，

荒淫妄想感所欽，

蒼穹誓終篤志貞，

唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:

Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,

huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,

cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,

táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:

蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:

- A love letter (expressing personal longing)

- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)

- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)

- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)

- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

no because the term "carcinization" was created to describe the tendency for marine decapod crustaceans to convergently evolve crab-like body plans, it was never supposed to be applicable to other animals!

I blame pop science for spreading it around as a funny term that got misunderstood and misapplied basically from that point onward. most other animal groups don't get their own term for this phenomena and carcinization does NOT apply because... these animals aren't evolving into crabs. only decapods do that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How did ancient bugs get so big? The prevailing theory may be wrong.

Flying insect respiratory systems suggest abundant oxygen can’t explain ancient gigantism.

About 300 million years ago, giant dragonflylike insects with half-meter wing spans buzzed through hot and swampy forests on the former supercontinent of Pangaea. Scientists have long debated what allowed griffenflies, as they’re known, and similar fearsome flying bugs to grow so big during the Carboniferous period. The atmosphere at the time held more oxygen than it does today, and the textbook hypothesis suggests these giant insects developed more respiratory tubes to deliver that gas to their muscles, enabling them to grow and grow. But a new analysis of the anatomy of insect flight muscles, published last week in Nature, undercuts that idea, suggesting past ferocious fliers didn’t incorporate oxygen into their muscles any more generously than their smaller counterparts do today...

Bounding this on the lower end is the presence of ice hockey - mentioned by Heat Miser - and the use of telephones. Ice hockey was invented in 1875, while Alexander Graham Bell built the telephone in 1876, meaning the year must post-date these. These figures give a range of approximately 100 years during which Santa may have taken his holiday.

Yet, narrowing this further is the presence of a December calendar counting the 1st to a Wednesday. Between 1876 and 1974, only the Decembers of 1880, 1886, 1897, 1909, 1915, 1920, 1926, 1937, 1943, 1948, 1954, 1965, and 1971 started on a Wednesday.

But still this can be narrowed further.

When Santa set out that Christmas Eve, we see what appears to be an almost full Moon in the sky. Within the years listed, only 1920 had a full Moon on Christmas.

Rounded collar on the man at left, both boys (white coat in front and pink shirt in back right) are wearing knickerbockers.

Santa, dressed but not in his suit, has pinstriped pants, spats, and a watch chain. We can assume he probably dresses a bit older than those around him because he's elderly and doesn't necessarily care about trends, and--what? What's this? A fashion plate from the Edwardian era?

No spats on this guy, but they were common at the time--it might be because spats were practical and the drawing is intended to be fashionable.

Now let's look at some of the parents. Once again, we can expect both that they're going to be dressed ever so slightly older, and also decades don't have hard start/stop lines in fashion and culture like they do on a calendar.

The dove-breasted dress front isn't present in AYEASC, but the length and collar are perfect compared to this photo from 1910, and if we assume the mom is wearing something just a couple of years out of date, the bodice shape lines up very neatly with the end of WWI.

Likewise, look at her hair and how loose it is around her face in spite of being in a bun, and then check out this photo of a Gibson girl:

And then we've got the dad, with his hair parted straight down the middle, his large shirt cuffs, and vest. Check it out:

Also please note Dad is in plaid and as you may see in this ad, that was A Thing in the time period. He's not the only one, either--several of the kids wear it.

Other than Santa's outdated Edwardian attire (which makes sense for his character as an old man), all of these styles date within five years of 1920. Most date to ever so slightly before. These are middle-class people, so we'd expect them to not look like the latest fashion plates. Not only does their clothing make sense for a 1920 date, it actually makes sense for real people of their socioeconomic class in 1920.

IT'S CALLED A BOQUILA TRIOFOLIOLATA AND IT'S FUCKING WITH MY BRAIN

IT APPARENTLY CAN MIMIC OTHER PLANTS AND AT FIRST I WAS LIKE "oh cool man it must take it's genetic code and copy it or feel the roots or something like that!! :3"

AND THEN I READ AN ARTICLE ON IT AND THESE FUCKING PARAGRAPHS HIT ME LIKE A BUS

LIKE READ THIS SHIT

And yet, they seem to be able to mirror or mimic these attributes. They can sense, they can move, they can see, taste, eat, and more.

They allowed themselves to show some speculative behaviors and anatomy, and the show definitely has a lot of educational elements, but the focus was on good storytelling rather than being 100% accurate to the fossils.

To compare, Planet Dinosaur came out over ten years after WWD, but holds up way worse. The information in both series is equally outdated, but PD prided itself on being completely accurate, to the extent where they cut away from the action every two minutes to show a specific fossil that supports their reconstructions. However, once the field progressed, PD had nothing else to fall back on. Without the accurate science, it lost its primary selling point.

The problem is that paleontology, ironically enough, is a very rapidly evolving field. The most accurate reconstruction ever is going to be horribly obsolete in six months. (Just look at what happened to Spinosaurus recently.) But, a good story will always be a good story.

Incidentally, of all the countless copycats that the past two decades have spawned, Dinosaur Planet is the only one that I think really recaptures the magic of WWD. Because, like you said, it tells the stories of ordinary dinosaurs living ordinary lives.

Generally, paleo documentaries fall into one of two categories - educational & storytelling. On the educational side, you have shows like PaleoWorld/Jurassica, which focus solely on the science aspect - they show fossil excavations, explain paleontology, recent findings, history, and everything. On the other hand, you have the Walking with... series, which focused almost exclusively on telling a story, with the science taking a back seat. I'm not going to argue over which is better or worse, because both have their strengths and weaknesses.

What I instead want to focus on is a recent trend where documentaries try to be both story-focused and educational. Series like Amazing Dinoworld and, yes, the 2025 reboot of Walking With Dinosaurs attempt to combine aspects, mixing story segments and science segments together.

In my experience, this tends to end up with a documentary that's sub-par in all aspects. Without committing fully to one aspect over another, you wind up with a weaker program that fails to deliver fully on the impact that either of the other options would be able to. Without fully focusing on the story, you wind up with a shallow and bland plot that's easily forgettable, and without focusing solely on science, your science show will feel distracted and desperate to keep an audience.

Neuschwanstein, literally the inspo for the castles in Disney's Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella

Hohenschwangau, the practical castle

Linderhof, the final, the smallest, and the MOST fab.

Every room is incredible and the park is beautiful, but shoutout to The Bedroom, the biggest room

The Hall of Mirrors, which he probably wandered by candle light because he was a serious night owl

The Dining Room, with a wishing table that lowers to the kitchen, and rises with a crank, returning magically full of food

The Venus Grotto, constructed for the sole use of Ludwig to larp to his heart's content

A full artificial cave, it features a waterfall, fake stalactites, and a custom-designed swan boat floating on an artificial lake. The first electricity in Bavaria was generated here, to change the colors of the stage lights and to power Ludwig's fountain and wave machine.

the public paid for zero of his fairytale castle hobby

I need to see this child grow up to be, like, naturally proficient at the game? But then they get bullied for it in elementary school, like "OOOH look at this kid! They learned how to play teh vibeo games from mommy!", and they suddenly get self-conscious about their skills so they hide it down and try to avoid it as they grow up?

BUT THEN when they get to High School, and they're like the super smart student? So they naturally get alot of friends and stuff? And then the school announces a Mortal Kombat tournament, to like raise awareness for some charity or whatever, but it also includes a small prize pool or something. And their friends are like, "Man, Mortal Kombat is so cool! Maybe we should enter and try to win!"

But of course, they feel insecure because of those childhood bullies, and it becomes this story where they have to face their past, overcome it, and then become the Champion of Mortal Kombat that their parents always knew they could be <3

here's my new OC I call her Recombinantia she has every single allele and her starry purple eyes refract the sunlight filtered by her dichaete wings

https://www.sciencecourseware.org/FlyLabJS/

The earliest name we know from oral history is an Egyptian king named Iry-Hor, the earliest name we have written down is a Sumerian accountant called Kushim. The earliest known author is a Sumerian priestess named Enheduanna. Another name we have from that period is Enmebaragesi. I probably forgot some other beautiful names in this directly-from-wikipedia list. We can't look further back, but there is nothing to suggest that we were less capable of giving each other beautiful complex names.

Human society has only really existed for the past 9,000 years, since the discovery of agriculture and the development of permanent settlements around that development.

That leaves 201,000 years of history missing from our story. Over 200,000 years of people living, creating, exploring, learning, dying, then passing on their stories to others. And none of us know anything about them, because so little of theirs has survived the ages.