Our Beautiful World

In honor of the new year, I’ve decided to reblog my Top 10 Facts from 2016. I hope you enjoy them!

(In theory, you should… cuz they’re the ones you liked the most)

#9). Pencil Plants. Or Plant Pencils. I Don’t Care; You Decide.

There are pencils that turn into plants when you’re done using them. 

The ‘Sprout Pencil’ is the first sustainable pencil in the world that can be planted after use.

“We have chosen the seeds for our pencils with great care, and they germinate quickly: i.e. within 1-3 weeks, depending on the seed variety. Most plants can be grown both indoors and outdoors.” 

It’s made of natural materials: the body is cedar wood, and the “lead” is a mixture of clay and graphite.

Sprout pencils are available in 22 varieties, including sunflower, mint, lavender, sage, forget-me-not, cherry tomato, sweet pea, cilantro, and wild strawberry.

What to do

“When the Sprout Pencil has become too short to write with, it is ready to be planted. Follow the simple instructions below and see your Sprout pencil sprout.”

They are also available in the colored pencil variety, which makes me oh-so-happy! 

As someone who has epilepsy and used to have several grand mal seizures a day, I’d also like to add that “offer help” can range anywhere from keeping the person calm to explaining to them where they are and what they were doing to even just telling them they should sit and rest for a while longer (lack or coordination is common, and it can be hard to walk straight or see clearly).

It’s okay for them to take up to a half hour to fully regain their bearings and sort out what they were doing prior to the seizure. Just answer any questions calmly and be there for support.

If they come around and you start to panic or shake them or ask them what the heck is wrong with them they are going to freak out and panic too.

I cannot stress it enough that this is bad.

DO NOT CALL THE POLICE. I’m dead fucking serious. I had a grand mal in public once and the POLICE were called and imagine coming out of the seizure, feeling like you got smacked in the head with a sack full of bricks, confused, dazed, in desperate need of some sugar to boost low blood pressure and some DIPSHIT has called the police and I was being threatened with being ‘drunk and disorderly’. It took a phone call to my doctors office to get them to back off. The police cannot properly deal with sick people. 

Offer help can be:

assuring person where they are/what time it is

getting them something to drink if they can; seizure burns so much energy and does cause a blood pressure drop

getting them safely to transport or a carer

getting them some dignity like a blanket/towel [loosing control of your bladder and bowels is fucking horrifying]

ensuring they have a way to get home. Someone who has just had a seizure should NEVER DRIVE straight after

calling emergency services if you notice any of these symptoms because they may have stroked out.

Why you shouldn’t put anything in someone’s mouth: they will choke. Yes, they may bite their tongue but I can assure you it’s less traumatic than cracking your jaw on someone’s greasy wallet or choking on a spoon.

Noam Chomsky: Seeing Donald Trump win reminded me of listening to Hitler’s rallies as a boy

Linguist also says he believes a ‘militant labour movement’ could unseat the magnate in 2020

Noam Chomsky has spoken of how watching the results come in on the night of Donald Trump’s US election victory dredged up memories of his feelings after listening to Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies as a boy.

The linguist was speaking during the 20th anniversary party for online news channel Democracy Now. He told audience members that spending November 8 in Barcelona had a “special personal resonance” because his first published article was about the city’s fall to dictator Francisco Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War.

He had written about “the apparently inexorable spread of fascism over Europe and maybe the whole world”, he said.

He added: “I’m old enough to have been able to listen to Hitler’s speeches, the Nuremberg rallies, not understanding the words, but the tone and the reaction of the crowd was enough to leave indelible memories.

"And watching those results come in did arouse some pretty unpleasant memories, along with what is happening in Europe now, which, in many ways, is pretty frightening, as well.”

Mr Chomsky also said he believed Donald Trump supporters could be enticed to vote Democrat again if the Bernie Sanders movement offered a real program for “hope and change”.

On the same evening  Vice President Joe Biden said he might run for president in 2020, Mr Chomsky told the audience that reigniting a “militant labour movement” could swing the next election.

Researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen found proof that psychopathic individuals can feel fear, but have trouble in the automatic detection and responsivity to threat. For many decades fear has been put forth as a hallmark feature of psychopathy, the impairments in which would lead to bold risk-taking behavior. Sylco Hoppenbrouwers (VU Amsterdam), Erik Bulten and Inti Brazil (Radboud University) reviewed theoretical and empirical brain and behavioral data pertaining to fear and psychopathy and found that psychopathic individuals have trouble detecting threats. There was however little evidence that the conscious experience of fear was affected, indicating that the experience of fear may not be completely impaired in psychopathy. It’s the first study to provide empirical evidence that the automatic and conscious processes can be independently affected within one psychiatric disorder. The results are published in Psychological Bulletin.

In their systematic review and meta-analysis, Hoppenbrouwers, Bulten and Brazil reviewed the available evidence for the potential existence of the relationship between fear and psychopathy in adult individuals. Importantly, their definition of fear was based on state of the art knowledge of the neurobiological and cognitive underpinnings of this emotion. They used this knowledge to generate a model that separates brain mechanisms involved in automatic detection and responding to threats from those involved in the conscious experience of fear as an emotion. Using this model as reference, they first performed a conceptual analysis of the work of earlier theorists, going back to as early as 1806. They found that only one theorist incorporated the construct of fear into an etiological model of psychopathy.

Fear isn’t absent in psychopathic individuals The evidence for impairments in brain areas involved in the experience of fear was less consistent than is often assumed, indicating that the experience of fear may not be completely impaired in psychopathy. The researchers then conclusively showed that psychopathic individuals have trouble in the automatic detection and responsivity to threat but may in fact feel fear, providing direct empirical support for the claim that the conscious experience of fear may not be impaired in these individuals. An additional meta-analysis examining the five other basic emotions found that there may also be impairments in the experience of happiness and anger, but the lack of consistency in the current literature precluded the generation of strong claims.

★★★★★ “This is literally the reason the internet was invented.” —SugarScape

★★★★★ “The wait is over.” —BuzzFeed

Jellyfish becomes a floating safehouse for tiny fish! [video]