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for New Scientist

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Communicating with my cat is so crazy, it’s like, you watch my back for predators when I sleep. You meow only because you know that I vocalize often, but the words I use are nothing to you unless they’re associated with things relevant to your little baby life (food, for example). You slow blink at me because you feel safe with me. You point your ass at my face, indicating that you trust me to watch your back for predators, because you feel safe with me. You sit in my lap and sleep pressed against my side because you need to warm yourself up, and you trust me to warm you. I know this because I have access to information. If I didn’t, these things would be weird to me. I call you Lulu, but you don’t need a name for me; you have your senses to identify me. You smell me to identify me. You nuzzle me with your head to mark me as family with your scent. We ARE family. You are both the baby I feed and the elderly little lady who watches over me. It’s a very special and pure interspecies bond. I have a concept of “love” that is metaphysical, conceptual; you have an instinctual bond to those that you “trust” to help you survive (and that you, in turn, help to survive). You DO aid my survival on an emotional level that you can’t possibly understand, because you try to aid me on the physical level that comes naturally to you. Who said survival of the fittest has no room for love? We share the pure love of deep friendship because you and I must survive. My creature, Lulu, my best friend. My stinky.
Several years ago, my spouse was like, “you gotta give the kitties a warning before you grind your coffee beans” and I was like “okay sure makes sense” so now every morning before I grind coffee beans I yell “it’s gonna get loud babies!!!! Gotta grind some beans!!!!” And my spouse will yell back from corners of the house, in a despondent tone, “OH NO NOT THE BEANS!!!! SCATTER!!!”
this is a legitimate problem in robotics.
like, if you're a bomb disposal guy and your team has a cool bomb-disposal robot which you've given a cutesy name to, you may hesitate to put that robot in harm's way, which is NOT OPTIMAL in the bomb-disposing field.
it also doesn't help if you hold funerals for the robots after they get exploded (this happens pretty regularly).
anyway nobody has worked out how to stop humans from pack-bonding with literally inanimate objects and they probably never will. (like even knowing it's a problem, I *still* think those EOD robots deserve funerals).
In 2007, the US military rejected a multi-limbed anti-mine robot because it's demise was too inhumane.
oh perfect, this is EXACTLY what I was talking about
Scientists in films: this alien/AI is not human and therefore undeserving of any kindness or sympathy
Scientists irl: This is my friend Robob he's five feet long, has ten legs and was built to explode mines and if anybody hurts him I will tear apart time and space to get revenge
Fun little thing about medieval medicine.
So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.
It’s easy to take the magic words as superstition, but they’re important.
The length of time it takes to say a paternoster was a typical method of reckoning time in the Middle Ages. It’s likely that whoever wrote this remedy down was thinking of it both as a prayer and a timespan and that whoever read it would have understood it the same way.
I wonder if this shows up in other historical areas besides medicine?
I ask because I have a very Italian, very Catholic friend who was once describing how she makes pizzelles. They’re cooked in a specific press, similar to a waffle iron, long enough to get light and crispy but not burnt, and in her own words: “I don’t know the exact time it takes to cook them in seconds, but I usually do either two Hail Mary’s or an Our Father and a Glory Be.”
I would be extremely surprised if medieval people didn’t use prayers while cooking. You don’t want to roast an egg for too long, have it explode, and get hot yolk in your eye. :P
I know that church bells were definitely used as timekeepers.
Before oven thermometers existed, one way to check the temperature of your oven was to stick your hand inside and recite an Our Father. The length of time before you snatch your hand out was timed by how far you’d gotten in the prayer. The shorter the time, the hotter the oven. So you knew that if you wanted a hot oven to bake bread, you wanted your hand out by “kingdom” (for example) but to slow cook a stew, you might want the oven cool enough to get to “trespasses”.
This popped up in “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook” as well, though there the timing method wasn’t prayer but X verses of “Where Has All The Custard Gone?”
Other timing methods are “a while” (approx. 35 mins) and “a good while” (variable, up to 10 years, which the book suggests is a bit long to let batter rest before making pancakes…)
All absolutely standard, and also varied from region to region. The use of prayer was more common than most, since the Catholic church had a monopoly on… well, pretty much everything. And all the prayers were in Latin, and at a specific cadence, so the effect is similar to watching the second hand on a clock today.
it’s important to note that to the medieval people the prayers were important because of timekeeping AND god. like, i think as modern people we do tend to want it to be “just timekeeping, they weren’t just superstitious idiots, they had a good reasonable scientific reason!” but it’s also important to remember just how culturally steeped in a mystical religion they were, a relationship with christianity entirely unlike the modern relationship found in modern american culture even amongst the most religious people. i have no doubt that in the medieval mind, they were aware of the prayer being the time it took but also if there had BEEN another way to measure that time, the prayer would have been held to be preferable and important in its own right because of the importance of spiritual assistance in worldly things like bread-baking
Definitely, this is a great point! I was talking to somebody in the comments who was saying that medieval medicine was mostly bunkum because it involves spirituality, supposedly meaning it couldn’t also have logical basis behind it. But that’s a really modern way to see it. To the medieval worldview, those things aren’t contradictory. They’re part of each other. Think about how many medieval Christian scientists were monks, nuns, and priests.
*INHUMAN SCREECHING*
M Y T I M E H A S C O M E
You guys don’t understand how excited it made me to read this post, I literally wrote my master’s thesis on this exact topic.
STORY TIME
Sometime in the 10th century in Anglo-Saxon England (for context, this is before the Norman Conquest and near-ish to the reign of Alfred the Great), a dude named Bald asked another dude name Cild to write a book. Not just any book. A leechbook, which was essentially the medieval version of WebMD for practicing doctors. BUT NOT JUST A LEECHBOOK. This leechbook was gonna be the damn Lamborghini of leechbooks. This thing was going to be split into two parts, the first dealing with external medicine and the second dealing with internal medicine—something that was unheard of at the time. It was going to be organized (head to toe, like all the good leechbooks were). It was gonna be nice (leather and vellum). It was gonna use all the best ideas (from all over the known world). And the whole thing was going to be written in Anglo-Saxon. Now, a few medical books had been compiled in Anglo-Saxon before, but none like this. This one was going to be EPIC. And it was—and still is.
Bald’s Leechbook (also goes by the more boring but more informative MS Royal 12 D XVIII over in the British Library) contains a lot of medical remedies. A lot of them rely on things like prayers and chants and odd charms, like one for a headache, which recommends plucking the eyes off a living crab, letting the crab back into the water, and wearing the eyes about your neck in a little sack until you feel better. However, it’s worth pointing out that the really wild remedies, the stuff that makes absolutely no freakin’ sense, is most often recommended to treat ailments that are hard to treat even today—migraines, toothaches, cancer. These things are really painful or deadly and, without modern medicine, almost impossible to treat. So are you going to make up some nonsense to make your client at least feel like they’re doing something, and hey, if it sort of works, it works? Of course you are. You want to help people. Even if it sounds crazy, what else are you going to do? You have to try something, and the people who are suffering are willing to try anything.
But there’s also things that make complete sense. To echo concepts that have been mentioned by commentators above, there is a recipe that calls for the recitation of the paternoster while boiling a honey-based salve meant to treat carbuncle. The book instructs the physician to bring it to a boil, and sing the paternoster three times, and remove it from the fire, and sing nine paternosters, and to repeat this process two more times. A century ago, historians read the use of the paternoster as a magical incantation, but today, most agree that in lieu of a stopwatch, the paternoster is just meant to make sure you don’t burn the honey.
BUT THAT ISN’T NEAR THE COOLEST THING.
Now, this book was compiled by a master physician (we don’t know if it was Cild himself or if Cild was the scribe for an unnamed author) who was compiling recipes that had been written down for some time, and had, as many things do, gone through various permutations over the years. Many came from Greece or the western Mediterranean, and had been adapted for local English horticulture and herbs. Some came from around what is now Germany, and some ideas came from farther away in the Middle East (King Alfred was a sickly king; some scholars believe that he had his physicians seek out cures from all over the world in an attempt to treat himself). But there is one recipe that has only ever been identified in England. Not only has this recipe only ever been identified in England, it’s only ever been identified in this one manuscript. When translated into modern English, it reads as follows:
Work an eyesalve for a wen [stye], take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together, take wine and bullocks gall, of both equal quantities, mix with the leek, put this then into a brazen vessel, let it stand nine days in the brass vessel, wring out through a cloth and clear it well, put it into a horn, and about night time, apply it with a feather to the eye; the best leechdom.
For those who don’t know and/or are lucky enough to have never had one, a “wen” or a stye is a bacterial infection that manifests like a boil or a cyst that on the eyelid. They hurt something awful, and can cause larger infections of the eye. They are usually caused by Staphylococcus aureus.
With me? Okay. Fast-forward to 1988. A former biologist turned historian called M.L. Cameron decides to take a look at this old medical leechbook to see what he can see. He takes a good look and says “Lads I do believe these Anglo-Saxon leeches weren’t nearly so daft as we thought they were” (he did not and probably would never actually say that, I’m paraphrasing). Cameron was particularly interested in the recipe above. As a scientist, he knew a few things:
Garlic and cropleek (leek or onion, or another related plant) have been known to have antibacterial qualities for centuries.
Wine (alcohol) also has antibacterial qualities.
Bullocks gall (literally bile taken from a bull) is known to have detergent properties, and has long been used as an additive to soap for particularly tough stains.
A brazen vessel, or a vessel made of brass, contains a good amount of copper in it. And that copper, when left to sit around for, I don’t know, about nine days, would have plenty of time to react with the acids in the onion and garlic and the tartarates in the wine to create copper salts.
Coppers salts, as it happens, are cytotoxic, meaning they kill everything: tissue and bacteria.
What an interesting find.
Fast-forward again to 2015. A paper is published by a team from the University of Nottingham, who’ve been working on an ‘Ancientbiotics’ project to investigate ancient medical remedies and see if they actually work. They’ve turned their sights to the Anglo-Saxons, and are, as was Cameron, particularly interested in this recipe for an eye salve. Without boring you with the finer details of the experiment and its various trials (read it yourself!) I will spoil the ending by telling you that they discovered a few things:
This recipe, which was over 1,000 years old when they tested it, worked.
It worked well.
It worked extremely well.
So well, in fact, that (in a lab setting) they even got it to kill Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or as it’s more commonly known, MRSA. MRSA is a modern superbug that has built up a resistance to the antibiotic Methicillin. And this goddamn Anglo-Saxon witches’ brew freakin murdered it.
Now, as an advocate for modern medicine and sound scientific method, I’m not about to say that we should go throwing this salve on everything in 2019, because it is, if anything, just a starting point for modern scientists. This salve is still incredibly crude by modern standards and comes with a lot of potential problems. But as a historian… it works, you guys, it really works.
Medieval physicians were not idiots. They believed in magic, they believed in all things supernatural, they believed in all those things that are ‘unreasonable’ or unpopular today, and they practiced them too. But they also interacted with the real world with brains and intellects as sharp if not sharper than yours and mine. They were smart, they studied, they talked to each other in Latin and Greek and Arabic and Anglo Saxon. They made old recipes better and came up with brand new ones. They tried dumb stuff and they tried smart stuff. They didn’t have access to even the smallest fraction of the information we have at our fingertips today, and yet they created things like this.
To this day, no one knows who created the eyesalve recipe. And no one truly understands why this is the only copy of it. If it worked so well, why isn’t it plastered to the headings of every medical textbook from Alfred to Victoria? Speaking personally, I would argue that it has to do with language. Not so long after Bald’s Leechbook was written, the French invaded England and took over. Latin and French became the language of the court, and while Anglo-Saxon lived on throughout the country, and certainly lay doctors would have used Anglo-Saxon books daily, the language of formal English medical education was Latin. Oxford and Cambridge were late to the medical ed game after Salerno, Bologna, Paris, and Montpellier, and naturally fell in step with continental schools as a result, using Latin almost exclusively, and sometimes Greek or Arabic.
Point being, by the time medical licenses and medical college degrees are a thing in England, not only does almost no one of university-eligible class speak Anglo-Saxon anymore, no one has use for those Old English texts, because they don’t get you your degree, and you can’t make a living as a doctor without a degree and doctor’s license. And no one’s going to translate an old Anglo Saxon text into Latin when Avicenna’s newest old hit, now in Latin, is fresh off the boat from France.
All that to say: Never write something off because it’s old. 1,000 years is a long time ago, but human ingenuity and intelligence are hardly modern inventions. The science of the world hasn’t changed; only our tools and our perspective.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk
Further reading:
The 2015 Ancientbiotics report: A 1,000-Year-Old Antimicrobial Remedy with Antistaphylococcal Activity
NPR: ‘Ancientbiotics’ Researchers Look For Old Fixes To Modern Ailments
Mental Floss: 20 Anglo-Saxon Remedies from Bald’s Leechbook
Read a paper about how scholars are building on the work of the Ancientbiotics project to better understand how to apply ancient ideas effectively to modern medicine.
Look through Royal 12 D XVIII for yourself! Bald’s eyesalve recipe is on f. 12v and looks like this:
@cervinesatyr

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Now I've seen the film I'm going through the glass onion tag and people have fluffy headcanons about Hugh Grant's five seconds cameo. How Phillip is baking for his husband and calls him "Blanc" because of some cutesy backstory...
No.
That is the face of a man who has been lockdown stress baking for two months and has more bread in the house than he can eat and his partner's been hogging the bath instead of helping him eat the damn bread and now said partner's weird ass job is at the door and the bastard is getting some actual purpose in this hell time and good for him and lucky wanker and that is when you address your husband by his last name.
Have you ever seen a poster and thought.
Wait what.
I just did so i googled
Huh. That seems.... not that far? What about...
Okay. Okay that's... still.... but maybe I'm seeing distances wrong let's try what the poster said
.....
Huh. That's. I'm. Wait what is...
Okay so the international space station is roughly 10 times closer to me than the west coast is that's fine this is fine I'm fine what
Up is very very near by, it's just hard to get to, because the planet loves us very much and hates to let go.
Opal Chrysalis by Firefly Path couture
here’s the thing, gentiles. there is pretty much no “critique” of judaism you can make that a jew hasn’t already made.
“circumcision is bad!!!!!!!!”
plenty of jews agree and have been wrestling with this practice for decades.
“the bible says being queer is bad!!!!!!!!!”
these verses have been torn to shreds by jews for decades if not centuries. i know dozens of queer rabbis, and most of my friends are queer jews. my rabbi has a trans kid and frequently goes to our state capitol to yell at the government for being transphobic.
“what even is the point of keeping kosher!!!!!!!!!!”
we have entire books written about this and discuss it frequently.
“but israel!!!!!!”
congrats! ur just antisemitic.
in conclusion, there is no Hot Take you as a non jew can have abt judaism and jews that hasn’t already been discussed to death by jews. your dumb one liner has already been pondered for 200 years by a bunch of nerds in kippot on a tuesday afternoon. your revolutionary opinion is old news. you are boring. make some jewish friends and learn something.
So my Jewish friend showed me the Talmud, and, not even kidding, it's like the old Tumblr nested reblogs, but in print.
Gentiles discovering Talmud like this because of the ways it’s like the internet is unironically and wholeheartedly one of my favorite intercultural things. <3
Very strongly disagree with OP. The fact that something's been discussed in depth before doesn't mean it's not a good point. Nor does it mean that you are not free to disagree with the conclusions that the people discussing it reached.
congrats on missing the point so spectacularly
OPs point is that it’s impossible for an outsider to point out something that the people in the community (in this case, Jews) haven’t already discussed or noticed. Because guess what: the people in the community are aware of themselves and their ideals and their flaws. A goy just learning about Judaism for the first time isn’t going to be able to point something out that Jews don’t already know and haven’t already had discussions about.
OP is not saying that you cannot rehash discussions and topics. However, to be able to discuss those things and not be a fool about it you have to know what your talking about deeply, and in the case of Judaism, it’s hard to do that if you’re not in it without years upon years of study, in my opinion. Because without that study you don’t see the nuance, you don’t see the difference of opinion between minhagim, you don’t see the setting specific reasons for various opinions (there are very good reasons why there are different rules of kosher for Passover re: rice, for example, based on the location of the minhag having the conversation) among other things that you aren’t going to see much less understand if you are just learning about it.
If you have not done the work to learn about it, or have not grown up in it, it’s hard to rehash a conversation without making a fool of yourself.
Also: Jewish intracommunity discussions about our own laws and customs is not a debate open to goyim. Because (1) goyim are not Jews, and (2) we don’t care what your opinion on them is.
To keep with the Tumblr comparison, imagine looking at a screenshot of the OP of a 500K note post from 2008 without bothering to read any of the other comments, reblogs, or tags in subsequent years, and trying to say something authoritative about all of the people in that conversation based on the original note — also without any regard for the context of that original note which also was responding to something.
That would be absolutely ridiculous and arrogant.
But many people, usually cultural Christians, are willing to do exactly that with a religious tradition thousands of years old with much, much more internal and external conversation than half a million Tumblr notes.
Because supersessionism endures inside Christian atheism.

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The discovery that we had it backwards and that more realistic cave paintings are generally older than more abstract ones is exciting from an anthropological perspective, because it demonstrates that art movements have existed for as long as art has, but I have to imagine there’s some poor biologist out there somewhere going “you mean to tell me that our Paleolithic ancestors had the ability and means to record realistic, highly detailed depictions of contemporary flora and fauna the whole time and simply chose not to?”
The duality of nature
it fucken wimdy ||| ydmiw nekcuf ti
so this happened to me today
fucked up some bird tried to steal your car like that
He’s not stealing, he’s robin
(Clasping your shoulder gently)
You’re right. And he looks like a real tit doing it too
Emojis aren’t Hieroglyphs. But they could be. Because I have insomnia.
🌊📰🐍 1 🦉🥞📰⬇️ 🦉 🎵🐶📰👕🕛 🐶🐰🐰😩
🌊💡🕛 🦉🚶 🥞📰🐶🐰🐶🤔
🌊🐰😩 🦉📰🐶 🌊🐰😩
That’s the opening to Poe’s The Raven. It doesn’t represent the story, it says the words. Those are two different things, and I can prove it.
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The Great Salt Lick: salt blocks licked into beautiful shapes by cows.
I was searching for some pretty Hanukkah gifs to schedule a post tomorrow wishing my Jewish followers Happy Hanukkah and I found a fit/shape/body building site that posted this
And I thought to myself, I simply must show my Jewish followers fit Menorah Man
muscle tov
MUSCLE TOV IM SCREAMING
This was NOT how i planned to wish my Jewish followers Happy Hanukkah but with that said I must share these additions to the post:
Happy First night of Hanukkah my friends