The Mauritius “underwater waterfall” is not a true waterfall but an naturally occurring optical! In the sense that that’s not water falling, it’s sand and silt shifting! Shifting down a 4000-meter-deep abyssal drop. It is in fact exactly as deep as it looks, sorry :)

Other fun facts about Mauritius include:

that’s where Dodo birds were from!

the entire island has an abnormally strong gravitational pull

I don’t purposefully allow the accents of your name to fall flat on my tongue like the European English demands or the language to sound chopped and misheard.

If I don’t say your name correctly, don’t shrug and say it’s ok because people have been doing it all your life. Your mother worked hard to name you that name, with all its syllables and apostrophes and hyphens and inflection.

I don’t want to disrespect your heritage, your culture, your great grandmother or grandfather and their struggle.

SHINKAI MOVIES + FOOD

however.

this has not been the case for the vast majority of time. this is not currently the case for many people on the earth right now. we evolved alongside earth’s ecosystems, as they evolved alongside us. we are part of it. we are embedded in the world. we have never been seperate from it, and the idea that we are – that our actions somehow could have no consequences for the world at large – is the mindset that allowed the current crisis to reach where it is.

it’s. hard to truly get a sense of the scale of humans’ existence on the planet– under the readmore i’ve drawn out a rough timeline for you. it is very long, so i’ll put it under the cut.

suffice it to say: humans, homo sapiens, have existed on the earth for 315,000 years. we did not invent agriculture until 11,500 years ago. the industrial revolution, the drilling for oil and dumping plastic? that has happened only in the last 250 years. 

we are part of the world. we are in the world. some of us have very, very recently forgotten this fact. but we are remembering, and remembering quickly.

the earth needs us. it needs us to fix the things we’ve gotten wrong, yes. but it also needs us to be humans. to hunt, to burn, to care for the forests and the fields and the grasslands. it has always needed us. we are not interlopers here. we belong. we have simply forgotten our manners.

CO2 emissions for one ~4 person tourist space trip are 50-100 times higher than the emissions from one long-haul air flight. One SpaceX flight generates the annual carbon footprint of 278 people. Space travel is the equivalent of vomiting greenhouse gases directly into the atmosphere and it is like spitting in the rest of the world’s face.

People literally are getting sick from West Coast wildfire smoke in NYC, Philadelphia, and Toronto right now. Extreme weather has caused flooding in Germany that has killed more than 150 people. The heat wave in the Northwest in June killed hundreds. The entire American West is going through a drought with the some of the most extreme conditions they have seen in 20 years. We are living through a climate crisis that is going to get worse and worse and worse and it is not only evil and cruel to refuse to do anything about it (with your BILLIONS of dollars!) but absolutely morally rotten to continue contributing to climate change that will kill millions.

sounds like someone needs to go in the water

carmen papalia:

From the series on replacing his cane, this is one where he replaced his cane with a megaphone and would stand at intersections repeating “I can’t see” until somebody would stop and help him cross the street

Another cane replacement, this time replacing it with a high school marching band who would change the music depending on if there was something in the way or not.

A museum intervention where he got people at the MET to go through the museum with their eyes closed and experiencing touching things he’d gotten permission to touch (the floor in this image) and just exploring a visual art museum blind.

The Blind Field Shuffle, in which he has dozens of people form a conga line behind him with their eyes closed and leads them on a blind tour of the city - literally the blind leading the blind.

Wish I could find a better photo, but this is a museum gallery he curated where the works are almost at floor height, making them accessible to children, little people, and people in wheelchairs, but requiring abled people to bend down or sit on the floor in order to see them properly.

Lots of companies have Room Temperature Rooms? Like, literally any company whose products have an expiry date has to have ( or outsorce) a Room Temp Room in their R&D department. Else how would you know that this great new toothpaste flavor doesn’t accidentally turn into poison in two years.

But you can’t just have ONE RTR. Because what if you sell your toothpaste in Antarctica? Or the Amazon? What if the toothpaste turns evil when frozen? Or melts? Or gets dropped 500 feet off the back of a truck in the Himalayas?

So picture, if you will, a wing of an R&D department full of little rooms, each set to a certain temperature and humidity, each with a rack of toothpaste. Every year or so, a scientist comes in an takes out a tube, and does SCIENCE to make sure it won’t kill someone. Or look gross, or taste weird. Or explode. A lot of toothpaste explodes if, for example, you pretend you flew it across the artic circle (froze) then dropped if off in an Indian street market (melt), then sat in someone’s cabinet for three years (at Room Temperature).

And that’s how they make expiry dates. And why developing a new flavor of toothpaste can take ten years.