a weirdo AND a freaking nerd

your parents are not your parents. the idyllic farming community that raised you is not your home. you’re a You-Don’t-Know-What from You-Don’t-Know-Where. all you know for sure is that you’re not human. 

so you can fly. so you can run fast. so you can lift cars. so what? why do you even have this power? what should you even do with it? 

your father said do what’s right, so that’s what you do. 

you stop a robbery. the man’s knife shatters against your skin and you see the same fear in his eyes that you saw in your father’s when you were twelve. you catch a falling child before it can hit the water. his mother looks at you like you’re a god. 

they love you, even though they don’t know you. the most powerful man in the world hates you because they love you. 

you wanted to write when you were younger. you wanted to tell stories that needed to be told. you never wanted to star in them. you never wanted super-geniuses and demi-goddesses looking to you for advice; like you have any idea how to handle threats to reality itself. you’re just a kid from smallville who’s trying to do the best he can with what he’s given. 

you try and get back to the farm as much as you can. it feels normal being back among the open wheat; where everyone smiles because you’re that nice Kent boy. 

when you were younger, you pretended to fly, hands out to your sides and running through the tall grass by the river. it doesn’t look as beautiful from on high; the details get lost and the colors of your hometown blur together from a mile above ground. 

Clark: Oh thank God. This guy gets it.

Bruce *expecting arrogance*: wait what

Clark: yesterday I accidentally locked myself out of my apartment in my underwear trying to get the mail and I forgot I could just break the door open. I stood there for an hour waiting for the locksmith to open before I remembered.

Bruce:….

Clark: I’M AN IDIOT OK, I’m just a guy, I have no idea what I’m doing

Bruce: I hate how endearing this is. Stop making me like you

Clark: if I get my mom to make you lemon squares will you teach me how to pick a lock

second rule of fandom is everything goes back to kirk/spock

third rule of fandom is everything goes back to holmes & watson

the funny thing is. I originally typed out "fifth rule of fandom is everything goes back to gilgamesh & enkidu" but then I thought 'no, I can't trust that people will be familiar with the epic of gilgamesh'

Holmemes pt. 49

The human eye only has three types of color sensitive cones, which detect red, blue, and green light. Your brain is making up every other color you perceive.

Let’s have a little fun with that thought. This is the visible spectrum of light.

You will of course note that yellow is on the chart. Yellow has a discreet wavelength, and is therefore a distinct physical color. But we can’t see it.

“Sorry, what the fuck?”

What we call yellow is just what our brain shrugs and spits out when our red and green cones are equally stimulated. We have light receptors that can pick up on the physical spectrum of light we call yellow: that’s why yellow things don’t just look like moving black blocks to us. But your brain has no fucking idea what the color yellow looks like. 

Some animals have eyes that can perceive the color yellow! Goldfish have a yellow cone in their eyes. If they could talk, they could tell us what yellow looks like. But we wouldn’t be able to understand it.

What your brain actually sees of the color spectrum:

We can measure the wavelength of light, so we know that when we see ‘yellow,’ we are seeing light in that 550-ish nanometers range. But we don’t have a cone in our eyes that can pick that up. Your brain just has a very consistent guess about what color that wavelength of light could be. We decided to name that guess ‘yellow.’ We can’t imagine what yellow really looks like any more than a dog can imagine the color red.

Here’s the funny thing: your brain is never perceiving just one photon of light at a time. Something like 2*10⁸ photons per second are hitting your retina under normal conditions. Your brain doesn’t individually process all of them. So it averages them out. It grabs a bunch of photons all coming from the same direction, with the same pattern, and goes, “yeah, that cup is blue, fuck it, next.”

That’s how colors blend in our eyes. So sure, if a photon of light with a wavelength of 550 nanometers bounces into our eyes, we see what we call “yellow.” But if we see two photons at the same time, coming from the same object, one of which is 500 nms and the other of which is 600 nms, your brain will average them out and you will still see yellow even though none of the light you just saw was 550 nms.

So how does magenta factor into this?

Well, as we’ve just established, when your brain sees light from two different slices of the visible light spectrum, it will try to just average them together. Green plus red is yellow, fuck it. If it’s more red than green, we’ll call that ‘orange.’ Literally who gives a shit, we’re trying to forage over here. There are bears out here and it’s so scary.

What happens if you take the average of blue and red light, which we perceive to be magenta? What’s the centerpoint of that line?

Fucking green.

Hey, that’s not gonna work? We live on a planet where EVERYTHING IS GREEN. If something is NOT green, that means it’s either food, or a potential source of danger, and either way your brain wants you to know about it.

So your brain goes, WHOOPS. Okay - this is fine. We already made up yellow, orange, cyan, and violet. We’ll just make up another color. Something that looks really, really different from green. 

And so it made up magenta.

So, physics-wise, is magenta “real?”

No; there’s no single wavelength of light that corresponds to magenta. But you’re rarely seeing only a single wavelength of light anyway. And even when you are, every color other than RGB is a dart thrown on the wall by your meat computer. This is the CIE Chromaticity Diagram:

Explaining this thing is a little more than I want to take on on a Saturday morning, but I’ve included a link above that goes into it a little more. The point is that only the colors that actually touch the ‘outline’ of the shape actually correspond to a specific wavelength of light. All of the other colors are blends of multiple wavelengths. So magenta isn’t special.

Given that color is just a fun trick your brain is playing on you to help you find food and avoid danger, is magenta real?

Yeah, absolutely. Or at least, it’s just as real as most of what we see. It’s what we see when we mix up blue and red. It would be disastrous from a survival standpoint to perceive that color as green, so we don’t. Because it’s not green. Light that’s green has a wavelength of around 510 nm. Stuff that’s magenta bounces back light that is both ~400 and ~700. Your brain knows the difference. So it fills in the gap for you, with the best guess it has, same as it does with your blind spot.

Yall.

The academics had never been popular with the farmers. Understandable, really. It can be hard to believe in magic when you see more catastrophes than miracles.

When it was too late and dark for farmwork, they’d gather at the tavern to complain about the wizards. Always the same complaints.

The apple farmer would grumble, “A student made my mule fly. We had to tie it to the barn and feed it from the roof until the spell wore off.”

“That’s nothing!” The cotton farmer would argue. “ One of them was trying to woo my daughter, gave her a bouquet that turned her orange for a week! I told her if I ever caught her with him again we’d have words about it.”

“Did she stop seeing him?” The apple farmer asked.

“They eloped.”

The complaints would be met with a chorus of angry agreement, a constant reinforcement of what they all knew; The only thing wizards could see or care about was magic. Wizards just didn’t understand important, practical things.

Then one day, the pig farmer interrupted the complaints, “I don’t know if we’re right about magic being evil.”

The tavern fell silent. Every eye stared accusingly at the pig farmer but they continued anyway.

“The other night, my pigs broke out of their pen. While I was searching for them, I found this wizard lying in the field. So, I asked him, ‘Mr. Wizard, why are you horizontal?’

“I had assumed there was some terrible spell underway. But the wizard just said, ‘I’m looking up at the stars. The universe is so big.’ And if that's a spell, it's not the usual sort. So, you understand I was very confused. And then I heard the oink.

“My pigs, every last one, hovering at an angle, looking at the stars. They were all calm as you please, the universe reflected in their eyes. Imagine seeing the stars for the first time…

They're not only beautiful green spaces but excellent public displays of history and art history, and if you care to look closely you can find out a lot just by studying stones.

For example- notice how few modern headstones are dedicated to young children versus the ones erected before vaccines were widespread.

The cemetery near here has the state's largest silver maple crowning its grounds. Many of the trees in older cemeteries are some of the largest and oldest trees in an area.

Cemeteries are for the living, not the dead. Enjoy them. Go birdwatching in them. Don't be stupid in them sure but don't be too afraid to touch them either.

Theoretically I was just supposed to list off the numbers.  Except. Very early I started parsing the figures and give my own analysis.  Apparently engineers and geophysicists got a bit freaked out by a ten year old going ‘It’s not that good, the flow’s really slow compared to last week, and there’s gas pockets really screwing up the flow in the east pipe judging by the pressure report.’

Dad still got that yelled at him at conferences: ‘This is the fucker who used child labour to do well analysis!’

‘Was it wrong?’

Sherlock: You’re smarter than me, why do you need me?