People put a ridiculous amount of time into building cathedrals, back in the day. 45 years was apparently considered unusually quick. A century wasn’t unusual.
Apparently one of the main reasons was that the builders usually ran out of money repeatedly, forcing them to stop and restart construction repeatedly.
I wonder what we could build today, if the largest and wealthiest institutions of our time were prepared to beggar themselves over and over for decades on end.
Construction of the Cathedral of Milan started in 1386 and was completed in 1965. It’s a mixture of Gothic, Renaissance, and Neogothic architecture because the dominant architectural style changed several times during construction.
i mean i guess i knew that because there was a girl in middle school who said that genes didn’t really exist, and DNA was like dinosaur bones (a false flag to make us doubt god’s will). i’m pretty sure she grew out of it.
Good old Trofim Lysenko. He did in fact deny the existence of genes (not quite DNA, whose role in heredity wasn’t known at the time), and despite this he was director of the Institute of Genetics in the Academy of Sciences of USSR for a quarter of a century.
He had impressed Stalin with his claim that he could turn a species of wheat into a different species by changing its planting season, which flattered the Party because it sounded like the idea of remaking people into the New Soviet Man through education, while any talk of heredity or natural selection was tainted by association with “social darwinism” and dismissed as fascist or capitalist propaganda; and he kept up the flattering until he was promoted to the highest position in “his” field.
The attempt to change a species of wheat into another failed, obviously, which greatly damaged grain production in the USSR and later in China, dooming additional thousands and possibly millions to starvation (in addition to, well, all the other reasons for starvation that were already around). Since he was personally promoted by Stalin, Lysenko had the power to get rid of anyone who questioned him, so thousands of actual biologists were fired, imprisoned, interned in mental hospitals, or outright executed. (Most famously Nikolai Vavilov, known for his research in the origin of agriculture, who starved to death in a prison cell.) Eventually the whole field of genetics was declared a “pseudoscience”.
After Stalin’s death, Lysenko lost most of its power, and his influence waned until he finally lost his position in 1965. It was actually physicists who made the most important case against him, as biologists were more or less extinct in the USSR; Soviet biology stagnated while physics and engineering progressed, largely because Lysenko had personally gutted the whole field to protect his own position.
I know you mean early homonids but my brain saw the word ‘primitive’ and went “man sacrificed his dick bone to the gods for knowledge of bronze working and the written word”.
So, what you’re saying is it wasn’t a rib God took from Adam, huh?
Biologist Scott Gilbert and Biblical scholar Ziony Zevit have argued precisely that Adam’s rib was, in fact, Adam’s penis bone
its so wild to me that the medici family still exists. motherfuckers are old money
people on twitter are like “you have generational wealth if your parents buy you groceries” meanwhile these bitches are living in beverly hills mansions bought with their great great great grandpappys investment banking money from 1378
Imagine having an ancestor who’s playable in civ
imagine having an ancestor who gets killed in an assasains creed game
The frickin’ Borgias are still around, they just relocated to the West Indies. One of them was president of Ecuador around 1990.
(… I wonder what the oldest still surviving dynasty is. AFAIK no ruling family is known to have survived the fall of Rome, though Medieval nobles often boasted Roman ancestry. The Bourbon, who still occupy the throne of Spain, go back to the 10th century. The Habsburg, who are no longer in power but still exist, trace ancestry to the 7th. The Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia, in a similar situation, claims descendance from the Biblical Solomon but is attested only from the 13th century. The imperial dynasty of Japan claims to go back to the 7th century BCE, but apparently the first historically verifiable emperor is Kinmei in the 6th century CE, and the first plausible one is Sujin in the 1st century BCE.)
There’s no such thing as laughing too hard, only laughing enough to explain your joy. Never understate or minimize the ways in which you experience happiness peace and love
Text published by: First-Arai and Tatum. “Pipeline tells Black Memphis …” The Guardian. 22 April 2021.
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Headline published by: Southern Environmental Law Center. “Memphis rallies and marches draw attention to Byhalia Pipeline opposition.” 23 April 2021.
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Headline and text published by: WMC5. 20 April 2021.
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Since February 2020, the Byhalia Pipeline, a joint venture of Valero and Plains All American Pipeline, has been trying to gain control of part of Johnson-Tutwiler’s land, which is along the route of the proposed 49-mile Byhalia Connection oil pipeline. The route would run through multiple majority-Black neighborhoods in south-west Memphis, and researchers and activists say a spill could threaten the city’s public water source: an aquifer the size of Lake Michigan. […]
On 14 May [2021], a circuit court judge will hear oral arguments from Byhalia Connection, and their opponents, to determine whether any crude oil pipeline developer, including Byhalia Pipeline, has the right to exercise the power of eminent domain under Tennessee law. […]
Developers and the federal government have used eminent domain extensively to take land from Black communities, which contributes to Black land loss and the racial wealth gap. Since the 1930s, the government has used it to evict Black tenants under the guise of “urban renewal,” and bulldozed Black neighborhoods to replace them with highways and public housing projects.
“We have to have a broader conversation nationally and internationally about how much power we’re granting corporations to exploit communities, particularly Black communities, Indigenous communities and [other] communities of color,” said Justin J Pearson, the co-founder of Memphis Community Against the Pipeline, a grassroots group, which is also fighting Byhalia Connection in court. […]
The Byhalia Connection pipeline, which would link two existing pipelines stretching from Oklahoma to the gulf coast, was first announced in December 2019. […] Meanwhile, Energy Citizens, a group created by the American Petroleum Institute, has launched a campaign urging residents to write their elected officials in support of the pipeline, characterizing it as “under threat”. […]
On Tuesday [20 April 2021], the Memphis city council delayed a final vote on an ordinance that might hinder the pipeline, noting the need to prepare for a potential lawsuit from the developers. Pearson, from MCAP, said the project has brought to light the structural racism that has resulted in heavy industrial development and health disparities in south Memphis’ historically Black neighborhoods.
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Headline, images, captions, and text excerpt published by: Leanna First-Arai (for The Guardian) and Carrington Tatum (for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism). “Pipeline tells Black Memphis landowners: sell us the rights to your land or get sued.” The Guardian. 22 April 2021.
The only thing that describes how falling in love with the right person feels it is home. Suddenly having that constant feeling of belonging somewhere and to someone, constantly having the feeling of having every thing in the world, constantly knowing you are happy and it is all because you feel at home wherever you are, as long as you are with that special someone. That is what love felt like when I was in love.
But then it started getting hard. Our schedules kept us apart, my school and job kept me away for days and phone conversations got shorter and less frequent, meeting in person became a once a week thing, date nights disappeared from our lives, we started driving each other insane. When he left for a vacation and we didn’t speak for a bit more than a week, it felt good. It felt like freedom. I realized then, that I felt trapped in a relationship I was not able to keep alive. I realized that the same relationship that used to be my source of energy was draining me and that I was being unfair to me, to us, and mostly to him.
So I broke it off and continued my life like nothing ever happened. But then the volleyball season was over and so were my job obligations, then the school ended and the second my schedule cleared enough for me to catch my breath I broke. I knew, he was my one in a million, I knew he was the one, I knew there will never be anyone else like him in my life, but I also knew I put him through too much already and I was not going to put him through it again so I never bothered telling him I still loved him, even if he said it to me every time we saw each other on the street.
I often think about us. About what would happen if instead choosing work over him, I chose the other way around. I think how happy we could have been, how our lives would be different, but then I remember that he moved on and is happier than ever. I remember the time I saw them on the street and he looked at me with a huge amount of love in his eyes, but a love different from the one we felt before. I remember I knew then that it was as real for him as it was for me, that we were each other’s right person, but it was just the wrong time and now it is too late. He is in love with someone else, they are happy and so am I. I am happy for them. And I will eventually find someone I feel at home with too, I will be okay.
Hoy se cumple exactamente una semana desde que me has dejado de hablar, y no hay un sólo día, ni una sola hora en que yo no revise mi celular esperando ver al menos una notificación tuya… Veremos cuánto tiempo más dura ésto…
