Paleo, petro, and whatever else seems interesting

Across the world, protesters and activists are working hard to convince our governments that dramatic change is needed, now, to ensure that our black siblings and neighbors are not only able to survive, but thrive, instead of suffer under systematic antiblack racism and white supremacy. 

We here on Palaeoblr are committed to doing our part for that struggle - but we can’t do it alone. As such, this weekend we will be hosting a Stream on Twitch: 

The Dino Nerds For Black Lives Stream 

During this stream we will be raising funds for The National BailOut Fund and The Bail Project - which both help individuals arrested by police to make exorbitantly high bail amounts, which greatly affects black people even when there aren’t extensive protests occurring. We also will be directing funds to local Black Lives Matter chapters as well as Ranowo Campaigns. More info about how donations will work will come in a later announcement, but all proceeds will go to these charities. 

In return, we plan on rallying eagerness for donations by having a variety of guests across the paleontology community - individuals from Darren Naish to Thomas Holtz to Pete Makovicky and more - to talk about their work and answer questions given by those who donated. We also will have artists working on their work, joking and riffing by our silliest science communicators, and of course, dinosaur-related gaming. 

We hope to see you all there from 6PM (Pacific Time) on June 19th until Midnight on June 22nd (Pacific Time). The twitch channel for the project is https://www.twitch.tv/dinonerdsforblacklives. 

Please, reblog, share, repost, tweet, and spread the word. And if you would like to contribute to the project, email us at [email protected]. 

Thanks,

The clams are just better at measuring the water quality than any man-made sensors.

@becomedog​, you are so right

plus six or seven people who just….can’t figure out what a frog paper could possibly be. (guys it’s…a scientific paper. about frogs.)

and this one

which made me laugh despairingly because i mean

“Underwent unplanned rapid disassembly” – it exploded, and it wasn’t an explosion we wanted to happen

“Lithobraking maneuver” – it stopped because it hit the goddamned ground.

“Engine-rich exhaust” – the engine bell melted or evaporated, or the engine ejected itself out the back of the rocket without having a very good reason to do so.

“Fishing orbit” – the craft is in the ocean instead of space and we didn’t mean to put it there

“Thrust was observed along an undesired vector” – the engine leaked and the rocket spun off into oblivion.

“Wearing his manager hat” – a moron who shouldn’t be an engineer (a reference to the infamous quote “take off your engineer hat and put on your manager hat” in the meeting in which the Challenger was cleared for launch)

Armour has always been about layers.

Example 1200s minor noble: linen shirt, gambeson (layered and quilted linen with wool insulation), chain mail, surcoat, arming cap, helmet, coif, bigger helmet.

Another example Alexander era Macedonian hoplite: linen tunic, greaves, 1" of tightly pressed and laminated linen, helmet (probably with some sort of arming cap/padding inside), big ass shield.

Silk.

Silk.

The Mongolians used silk vests because silk isn’t broken by an arrow, and you can use the silk to gently pull the arrow back out, even if it’s barbed. They also often used silk as the backing for leather armor.

The first bulletproof vests were made in Japan and Korea. Out of, yup, silk. Silk could stop black powder bullets, but was rendered obsolete by higher powered modern firearms. A combination of silk and metal was experimented with, but dropped because of the expense of silk.

Franz Ferdinand was wearing one such vest when he was assassinated, but it didn’t help because of where he was hit.

The US military is now looking into something called Dragon Silk, which is spider silk made by GMO silkworms, to make body armor that might be more comfortable than the current kevlar vests.