kontextmaschine

thevaultoftheatomicspaceage:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

i love to do fun things with diagrams

great-and-small:

qwuilleran:

great-and-small:

Do y’all know about Frédéric Thomas? He is a French parasitologist who heard a story about crickets in New Zealand leaping into the water even though they can’t swim, and immediately speculated this suicidal behavior was related to behavior manipulation from an internal parasite. This is before neuro-parasitology was a field at all, and before people really put much stock into parasite’s ability to control animal behavior.

Thomas was certain that studying these crickets would be a huge priority for the scientific world given the implications of a parasite controlling an animal’s actions in such an insidious way. Unfortunately, absolutely nobody would fund Thomas’ expedition to study the crickets, and his grants were all declined. In a wild move that showcases the balls to the wall, near- insanity level passion of a biologist, Thomas declared a hunger strike and wrote a letter to the president of France saying he would not eat until someone took the matter seriously and funded his study on the suicidal crickets. I feel like those of us in research can at least a little bit understand this impulse.

Well the French government actually got Thomas’ message and freaked out a bit at the negative publicity that could arise from a crazy worm scientist starving to death. So they send some government bigwigs to the university to pressure Thomas and his department heads into calling an end to the hunger strike. In the flurry of attention that resulted from this, a Swiss billionaire heard about Thomas’ plight and offered to partially fund the study. The French government was happy to get rid of Thomas and contributed funding as well so that Thomas could head to New Zealand to study his suicidal crickets. He was right about the parasites causing the behavior!

The hunger strike debacle is not even the wildest part of this story. I love biology so much

What’s the wildest?? You can’t leave us hangin’ like this.

Okay so get this, after all that Frédéric Thomas gets everything together and flies halfway across the world to New Zealand and… he can’t find the crickets. I mean, he finds some but apparently this species of cricket is really hard to track and as a result Thomas’ team cannot capture enough to yield significant results for their study.

Thomas was forced to abandon the project and leave New Zealand, but before he did he sent a photo of a worm emerging from a cricket back to his colleagues in France. Naturally, the photo was posted in the university break room. While the photo was posted there, it was somehow seen by one of the scientists cousin who worked cleaning pools. In a bizarre twist, the cousin recognized the worm. He claimed to see them all the time in a pool that he cleaned for a local resort and also said that he had observed crickets jumping into the pool at night.

By this time Thomas was back in France but he was highly skeptical that the pool cleaner’s information was correct. He gave the guy a jar and asked him to bring some samples of the worms thinking he’d never hear from him again. Well sure enough about a week later Thomas received a jar that was chock full of worms. Specifically the species Paragordius tricuspidatus, which are parasitic horsehair worms and exactly what Thomas had desperately been trying to find inside of his crickets in New Zealand. He had travelled halfway across the world just to realize that the parasite he wished to study could be found at a hotel about an hour from his house.

Thomas’ wife was delighted when he informed her he’d booked a surprise getaway at a luxury resort, but of course she didn’t know this trip was actually a brain parasite reconnaissance mission. Thomas spent time by the pool at night and sure enough he saw crickets crawling to the water’s edge and hopping in, one by one. Thomas and his colleagues were able to use this location to find a thriving population of horsehair worms to study. Their experiments confirmed that the worms were manipulating insect brains to further their life cycle, and the results of these studies were eventually published in the journal Nature!

no

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

And oh, this last week with symptoms echoing I’ve been rather brusque with people and honestly a little instrumentally minded with girls, I wonder if that isn’t further evidence that one of the cases symptoms I hadn’t pinned down was increased testosterone

That one might even have been there since the first case, would give some context to that time I brought three different girls home from the bar in a week despite never doing that before

For most intents and purposes, I was infected by Manliness, really

kontextmaschine:

And oh, this last week with symptoms echoing I’ve been rather brusque with people and honestly a little instrumentally minded with girls, I wonder if that isn’t further evidence that one of the cases symptoms I hadn’t pinned down was increased testosterone

That one might even have been there since the first case, would give some context to that time I brought three different girls home from the bar in a week despite never doing that before

And oh, this last week with symptoms echoing I’ve been rather brusque with people and honestly a little instrumentally minded with girls, I wonder if that isn’t further evidence that one of the cases symptoms I hadn’t pinned down was increased testosterone

Sitting on the edge of the bed I find I can’t rest my hand atop the ledge of my belly anymore, it’s receded and the hand slips off

Was starting to feel like I needed more creatine each day on an increasing upswing, shoulda guess what was happening was the iron hunger had got worse and I needed more of it to hold off fatigue.

That was my youngest symptom, so that’s still on track to wind down, now we’ll see if any new ones show up this time.

Give us a millennium alone with it and we’ll definitely call it the Tajma Hall

givemeurveins-deactivated202404:

chirasul:

papasmoke:

usb drives you find lying on the ground are modern day cursed amulets

just over a decade ago, i was a student at a big state university and i worked at a computer lab on campus. and people would leave flash drives there every fuckin day we’re talkin like dozens of flash drives a week. and what’s really wild to me is that they generally would NEVER come back and ask for their flash drive. like, maybe 1 in a 100 came to the desk and asked for their flash drive back so we’d just have boxes and boxes of flash drives. hundreds of them. and let me tell you, people would leave all sorts of crazy shit on those (it was my job to check). mostly homework of course but also, like, entire music and movie collections, games, personal photos, extremely personal photos, and, like, tax documents. do u know how many times i found a flash drive with someone’s complete tax return and academic record on it? with like their social security number and everything? it’s a good thing i’m not into identity theft because working there was easy mode. anyway about once a month i’d wipe all the drives less than 256MB in size, load em up with furry porn, and leave them around parties like easter eggs

himejoshikomaeda:

himejoshikomaeda:

cishetamine:

himejoshikomaeda:

being a dom is only cool if people like you. otherwise it’s super embarrassing. if you’re a sub you can be like “ahhh i wanna get fucked superrr hard >w<” and it’s kind of endearing. if you’re a dom and you say “i want to FUCK someone.. who will be mommys little KITTY today ..” and no one actually wants to have sex with you, you may as well kill yourself. because there’s no coming back from that

this is the best explanation of hegel’s master/slave dialectic i’ve ever heard in my life

hold on let me google something

what

jaubaius:

Satisfying show

Source

c3po:

ahh shit i did it again i smoked weed and got high by accident . i smoked the weed on purpose but getting high was a mistake

footlongdingledong:

katamari damacy is the game ever .you select a level and your giant father calls you a shithead to your face and then places you onto earth and tells you to go roll up some fish for 10 minutes and then the best song you’ve ever heard starts playing

coughloop:

There should be an emoji of two guys kicking the shit out of a third guy who’s in the fetal position on the ground

devilishdescent:

california girls we’re inconsolable

dreams of doom the visions wont stop

catchymemes:

Source

hyper-ultra:

CATCH ME IN THE TOWN HALL MEETING GIVING HILLARY CLINTON A TWO HUNDRED PAGE PIECE OF MY MIND BY PHRASING MY ENTIRE DISSERTATION ON BAUDRILLARD’S CONCEPTION OF REPRESENTATION AS A QUESTION

chatgpt-disagreer:

targuzzler:

zsnes:

alexschiesser:

artists fuck better because we turn sex into art, masterpieces, mattresses become canvases where we can paint our love to someone with bodies.

its like, impossible to come up with anything funnier than the experience of seeing this post

pharoahs fuck better because they ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh put the pussy in a scarmophogoghs

Sorry, but I have to disagree with @swishersposts here. Just because someone is an artist doesn’t automatically mean they are better at sex. Sex is not just about performance or creativity, it’s also about communication, trust, and respect between partners. And as for @targuzzler’s comment, I don’t think being a pharaoh automatically makes someone a better lover either. Let’s not stereotype or make assumptions based on someone’s profession or historical position. Let’s focus on treating our partners with love and respect in the present moment.