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Have you ever wondered about like cave paintings?  Like, “What were they doing?  These don’t…  look very good,” -chuckles- In fact, almost every cave painting has Spaghetti Lines, which are webs of lines drawn over-top images, which you can see here.

-picture changes to a grayscale image of a deer standing in tall grass-

And here’s an example of natural Spaghetti Lines in nature, but we’ll get to that in a second.

-picture changes to a photo paleolithic drawing of a mammoth.  Alongside the photo is a tracing of the drawing, to clarify the lines-

The second weird thing is like sometimes animals are given extra body parts, like here the mammoth has two trunks.  And here, there’s a drawing of an antelope or a deer, it looks like, that seems to have two heads.

For a long time, people would assume like maybe the Spaghetti Lines were just some kind of paleolithic graffiti, and maybe the animals were these kind of religious creatures that they had mythologized.  But then, in 1993, a German scholar went into this cave in southern France, and it changed everything.

Unlike the other caves he had been to, this one was very poorly funded, so it had no artificial lights, and he had to be guided in by a local farmer, with nothing but a flickering lantern to guide his way.  Here is how he described the experience. 

He said, “M. Lapeyre finished his story and wanted to move on.  I encouraged him to remain and to slowly swing his lantern back and forth a few feet from the cave wall.  As he moved the light, I saw the colors of the tectiform begin to shift.  When the lamp arced to the left, the blacks faded, the browns became red and the red intensified.  When the light moved to the right, the pattern reversed, creating a shifting color scheme. Moreover, the engraved lines under and around the tectiform became animated.  Suddenly, the head of one creature stood out clearly.  It lived for a second, then faded as another appeared.  The spaghetti lines were no longer a confused two-dimensional pattern.  Rather, they became a forest or a bramble patch that concealed and then revealed the animals within. By firelight, a secret of the cave painters was exposed.  In the space of a few moments, I saw cuts and dissolves, change and movement.  Form appeared and disappeared.  Colors shifted and changed.  In short, I was watching a movie.”

Understood this way, the antelope with two heads, under the dance of the firelight, is an antelope going from grazing to checking for predators.  And the mammoth with two or three trunks becomes a mammoth in motion, swinging his trunk.

There’s something beautiful to me about knowing that hundreds of thousands of years ago, ancient humans descended into the depths to watch movies.

some british guy reading this shit during their break at the work until you die factory:

Pig: *very long disgruntled groan which rises in pitch*

Man: Is that a yeah?

Pig: *shorter groan*

Man: Okay.  Here I come, I gotta get the intoxicated pig… Look at this pig…

Pig: *quiet snort*

Man: Hey!

Pig: *snort*

Man: Are you messed up, girl?  

Pig: *short snort*

Man: Never seen a damn pig… Look at that, that one here’s fine, that one there is fine, this one here is turned belly up 

Pig: *snort snort snort snort*

Man: Hey you

Pig: *snort*

Man: Whoa!  Whoa!  Shit!  [Unintelligible] HOWH!  Come here girl! 

Pig: *grunt grunt grunt*

they observed her overnight and got Animal Control to do a check-up on her. she’s fine

so yes, you you can enjoy the video without worrying about Drunk Pig

It is the circle of the bears cause of ursa major and ursa minor, and the circle without bears cause ya'know opposite part of the sky.

Happy Birthday, Albert Einstein! Genius Scientist Turns 140 Years Old Today.

The year 1905 came to be known as Einstein’s Miracle Year. He was 26 years old, and in that year he published four papers that reshaped physics. 

Photoelectric effect

The first explained what’s called the photoelectric effect – one of the bases for modern-day electronics – with practical applications including television. His paper on the photoelectric effect helped pave the way for quantum mechanics by establishing that light is both a particle and a wave. For this work, Einstein was later awarded a Nobel Prize in physics.

Brownian motion 

Another 1905 paper related to Brownian motion. In it, Einstein stated that the seemingly random motion of particles in a fluid (Brownian motion) was a predictable, measurable part of the movement of atoms and molecules. This helped establish the Kinetic Molecular Theory of Heat, which says that, if you heat something, its molecules begin to vibrate. At this same time, Einstein provided definitive confirmation that atoms and molecules actually exist.

Special relativity

Also in 1905, Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity. Before it, space, time and mass all seemed to be absolutes – the same for everyone. Einstein showed that different people perceive mass, space and time differently, but that these effects don’t show up until you start moving nearly at the speed of light. Then you find, for example, that time on a swiftly moving spaceship slows down, while the mass of the ship increases. According to Einstein, a spaceship traveling at the speed of light would have infinite mass, and a body of infinite mass also has infinite resistance to motion. And that’s why nothing can accelerate to a speed faster than light speed. Because of Einstein’s special relativity, light is now seen as an absolute in a universe of shifting values for space, time and matter.

Mass-energy equivalence

The fourth 1905 paper stated that mass and energy are equivalent. You perhaps know something of this work in Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2. That equation means that energy (E) is equal to mass (m) multiplied by the speed of light © squared. Sound simple? It is, in a way. It means that matter and energy are the same thing. It’s also very profound, in part because the speed of light is a huge number. As shown by the equation, a small amount of mass can be converted into a large amount of energy … as in atomic bombs. It’s this same conversion of mass to energy, by the way, that causes stars to shine.

But Einstein didn’t stop there. As early as 1911, he’d predicted that light passing near a large mass, such as a star, would be bent. That idea led to his General Theory of Relativity in 1916.

This paper established the modern theory of gravitation and gave us the notion of curved space. Einstein showed, for example, that small masses such as planets form dimples in space-time that hardly affect the path of starlight. But big masses such as stars produce measurably curved space.

The fact that the curved space around our sun was measurable let other scientists prove Einstein’s theory. In 1919, two expeditions organized by Arthur Eddington photographed stars near the sun made visible during a solar eclipse. The displacement of these stars with respect to their true positions on the celestial sphere showed that the sun’s gravity does cause space to curve so that starlight traveling near the sun is bent from its original path. This observation confirmed Einstein’s theory, and made Einstein a household name. 

Abortion Clinic Employee Shares How Some Pro-Life Women Act When They Come In As Customers

It’s 13 March. On this day in 1781 Uranus was discovered by William Herschel.

March 13, 1781. The seventh planet – Uranus – was discovered on this date, completely by accident. British astronomer William Herschel was performing a survey of all stars of at least magnitude 8 – stars slightly too faint to be seen with the eye alone, in other words. That’s when he noticed a very faint object – only barely above the limit for viewing with the eye – that that moved in front of the fixed stars. 

This movement clearly demonstrated the object was closer to us than the stars. At first he thought he had found a comet. Later, he and others realized it was a new planet in orbit around our sun, the first new planet discovered since ancient times

William Herschel announced its discovery on March 13, 1781, expanding the known boundaries of the Solar System for the first time in history and making Uranus the first planet discovered with a telescope.

NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft flew closely past distant Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, in January 1986. 

Voyager 2 radioed thousands of images and voluminous amounts of other scientific data on the planet, its moons, rings, atmosphere, interior and the magnetic environment surrounding Uranus.