Our society structure. Society is still structured with a few persons living extravagantly like kings on the top, while the masses are mostly content with mediocre scraps.
A 5-day, 40 hour work week “standard”
Somebody saying “bless you” to someone else who sneezes
The president
Bless you is such a weird way to respond to a sneeze though. Fitting for the clusterfuck the english language is tbh.
From ancient Rome when they thought sneezing was an omen and may dislodge and expel the soul from the body (Pliny the Elder, Suetonius, Homer).
We know know sneezing can wake the small elf living in your stomach. According to RFK.
Sure feels like that sometimes.
Still weird that english uses it. Most other languages I k ow just say something about your health.
In Germany we say (literally) “Health” as in “Get better”
Love the joke from (probably not actually) nazi times
“Heil Hitler!” “Seh ich aus wie ein Arzt?” Or " Heil ihn selbst!"
In english: “Heil Hitler” “do i look like a doctor?” Or “heal him yourself”
Love it
I know. We do the same
The english language has a lot of religious language hidden away in expressions
For example, goodbye is just a shortening of “god be with ye”
“langaige”
Seinfeld suggested: “You’re soooo good looking!”
The baths on the Titanic still hold water today
There are more hydrogen atoms in a single water molecule than there are stars in the entire solar system!
That’s good I’ll admit it took awhile.
Did you mean water drop? Because I thought it was precisely two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms that make up a single water molecule…
Take another minute to think about just how many stars are in the solar system…
Whoosh…
Incredible
There’s an even more fucked up joke in there somewhere about the shared bathwater still belonging to the same people
Leather burnishers have been pretty much unchanged for 50,000 years
I need more of these.
One I’ve heard recently was…the hair styles you see on ancient Roman art look remarkably modern. Art historians got to wondering just how they managed such complex hairstyles without modern hairspray, plastic clips or elastic bands? A hairstylist took one look and said “They’re sewn.” The historians go “NAAAAAH that can’t be it. Whoever heard of sewing hair?” The hairstylist goes “Hairstylists. Watch” and then she replicated the styles on the statues by sewing.
Here’s another one: Marine biologists long struggled to understand/describe the shapes of certain marine life, including corals. They had these weird wavy patterns that didn’t make sense to us rectangle building monkeys. Meanwhile, a mathematician studying hyperbolic geometry realized that crochet patterns that add loops with every row achieve wavy ruffles in a hyperbolic pattern. It took a few others to piece those two ideas together, to recognize the coral structures as having hyperbolic geometry as a means of maximizing surface area while minimizing volume. The Crochet Coral Reef project has been making crocheted models of sea life ever since.
As a woodworker, it amazes me how the mortise and tenon is still hanging on.
If you aren’t familiar, a mortise is a square or rectangular hole in a board, might go all the way through, might not. A tenon is a square peg basically cut on the end of a board to fit into a mortise. This produces a very strong joint.
The very oldest intact wooden structure known on earth - a well head in Germany - is held together with mortise and tenons. We don’t know the name of the man who built it, because written language hadn’t been invented yet.
There is a thing called a floating tenon. Imagine you want to join two boards, but don’t really want to cut a tenon onto either. Make a mortise in each, then make a third smaller board to fill both tenons. Floating tenon, loose tenon, there are many words for it. The Ancient Egyptians held boat hulls together this way, the hull planks were joined edge to edge with loose tenons which were then cross-pinned with dowels. One such boat was found disassembled in a pit next to the Great Pyramid at Giza; the seal on the chamber was so good they said it smelled of cedar when opened. The ship was assembled and is currently on display.
All the way on this end of history, the European tool brand Festool has a tool called a Domino. It has the form factor of a Lamello-type biscuit joiner, but the domino cuts with a wagging router bit to form a wide, short, deep mortise to insert store bought loose tenons into. This tool is so new, it is still protected under patent.
We’ve been making mortise and tenons for tens of thousands of years, and yet we’re still innovating on the concept.
That’s dope af
Fascism.
Hey, it’s neo now.
Nothing new under the sun.
less surprised, more disappointed.
Horseshoe crab. These things existed before DINOS! AND ARE STILL AROUND!
Although they’re struggling at the moment, due to their blood being harvested for use in biomedical research.[1]. Although fortunately, there have been synthetic alternatives developed in the last few years, so hopefully their numbers should recover as that is phased in.
Edit: if this makes you feel overly sad, here is a palate cleanser(30 minute long, ideally listened to in one uninterrupted block). It’s one of my favourite things I stumbled across last year, and it makes me feel hopeful about the world. It made me cry, but in a good way.
[1]: Linked article has more info, but the TL;DR is that their blood clots in the presence of bacterial toxins, so it’s super useful in stuff like vaccine development and production. They capture the crabs, harvest the blood and return the crabs alive, and the stats that the system has on this says that only a small percentage of them end up dying as a result of this. However, given that we can’t see how many of them die or fail to reproduce in the weeks and months following their release, we can’t confirm that.
We do know that the numbers of a bird that feasts almost exclusively on horseshoe crab eggs have seen severe reductions over the last 40 or so years, so it seems likely that the impact of this harvesting on horseshoe crab populations is more severe than the official data suggests.
It’s unfortunate because they fall between the cracks when it comes to animal research ethics. For one, the research isn’t being done on them, so they probably wouldn’t be protected under most existing legislation anyway. But also, animal research legislation doesn’t tend to give much protection to invertebrates (with the exception of octopuses, which are smart enough that they get additional protections).
I think it’s a pretty interesting case study of a big gap in the legislation that protects the rights of animals — existing legislation focuses a lot on our duty to individual animals, but here, despite the harm to any one horseshoe crab seeming to be tolerably low, the vast scale at which we have been harvesting them has had an impact on the species as a whole.
My view is that an anthropocentric framework that puts humans above all other animals is probably harmful in general and something we should work to undermine, but that if we are taking that tack (which seems necessary for the utilitarian view of “harvesting these crabs’ blood has saved many human lives” that most people seem to take on this topic), then we must also accept that we have an ethical duty to be good stewards of the natural world. We can’t have it both ways and think of ourselves as so rational and smart, but not accept the responsibility that would come with that.
I find the legislative angle of it especially interesting, because most people I have told this to are shocked to learn of how they’re not protected, and they share at least some of my view that effective animal research ethics legislation should surely account for our duty to ecosystems as a whole. People far more learned than I in legal matters have struggled to think of ways we could effectively legislate this though. It’s possible that additional legislation isn’t the best way to handle this, and that we would be better served to aim to regulate in opposition to the economically extractivist ideology that seems to be the default setting nowadays (because horseshoe crabs are just an illustrative case study of the problem).
I apologise for info dumping in reply to your joyful comment with such downer info. I do feel hopeful about the progress of synthetic alternatives though. I also find it a fascinating topic to learn about, even if it is a bit depressing
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Dude, I live with alligators, actual living dinosaurs. There’s an 8 footer in the pond directly across the street from us. His name is Rocky. He’s always basking on the bank on a sunny day.
Sorry to disappoint but alligators are not closely related to dinosaurs even though they have existed for a long time. Birds on the other hand are dinosaurs.
He looks pretty dinosaury to me.
Because that’s what defines something… A banana can look phallic but that doesn’t make it an “actual living penis”.
How the fuck does someone in 2026 not know that alligators and crocodiles, reptiles, aren’t dinosaurs?
We also look very monkey. We have a comon ancestor with monkeys but arent monkeys ourself. The same thing goes for crocodiles and aligators
The chicken I ate last night is more closely related to dinosaurs then the alligator.
I love them! Little cute babies with their scuttling legs and long spike!!
Litteral little living roombas.
Hmmm if they would get along with cats?
Cashiers not being able to sit down
For real?!? Which inhumane country are you talking about?
America lol
Japanese here, it is still crazy people need to bring a big wooden stemp around to sign government documents and contracts. and bringing physical documents around in a suitcase.
A wooden stamp or is stemp something I’m unaware of?
Speling. It’s spelled speling.
/s
Its \s, actually
*I’ts
It’s actually called a hanko! I think they’re pretty neat. You get a custom one that counts as your signature.
Kind of silly in he modern era, but also neat. Maybe they gotta start putting in security chips for like cryptographic signatures.
Signing your name is equally as silly. They don’t know why my signature even looks like lol
I see nothing wrong with a giant wooden stamp.
Bring back melted wax letter seals too.
I made a wax seal last year so that I could be an extra bitch when sending letters to my friends.
I like sending people letters and postcards, because the added friction of the physical process makes it feel more meaningful. It’s almost got a ritual feel to it.
How else will I sign for packages in dog form?
Mail man just thinks im a good puppy.
Vinyl records. Its a very… space inefficient way to store your music, but they are pretty to look at.
And the dust on the needle sounds pleasing
Also incredibly heavy
Religion. And it all needs to go.
Amen to that.
Polytheistic religions that don’t try to take over the world are nice enough. (I mean, monotheistic religions that don’t try to take over the world are also fine, but I personally prefer “our gods are our gods. you have your own gods? cool!” to “there is ONLY our god. Your gods are FALSE.”.)
– Frost
In my mind, I always envisioned a scene that explains why Christianity struggled to take off in India.
I imagine an old missionary, some old missionary in a robe, holding a Bible, talking to the locals in India and telling them about Jesus.
Missionary: “And that is why you should follow the teachings of Christ!”
Local, thumbing through Bible: “you know, you’re right. This Jesus guy does sound really great. Thanks for telling us about him!”
Missionary: “wonderful! So you’ll worship him as your Lord and savior?”
Local: “Sure! Alright boys, add this Jesus guy to the wall!”
Camera pans over, and some stone mason starts adding the name Jesus to a large wall listing hundreds of various gods, in a position of no particular centrality or importance.
<Missionary curses and wanders off.>
King James Bible has a bit in “Acts” about this actually: 22 Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars’ hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. 23 For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, To The Unknown God. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.
(then theres a lot of "Paul made really good arguments for God and some people agreed with him)
Caveat-I have read most of the Bible in bits and pieces but it’s been a while, I think I got the context though.
There’s a Trevor Noah bit like this
yep. outdated dogma holding back the species all over. we can’t have nice things because people keep killing each other based on some asshole’s ‘interpretation of god’s will’ - nevermind each of those ‘gods’ said repeatedly not to murder people, assholes will always twist it to their own ends as long as people continue to believe.
I would specify it to religion as an institution. Religion alone isn’t so bad.
This. Organised religionwith heirarchy and enforcingone specific way to interpret the spiritual, is dangerouse.
But that goes for everything not just religion
Trump.
Credit card imprinters. Went to a car rental that required a card to be swiped with that thing. Needless to say the card got canceled the second it got in there lol
Those are just identity theft devices.
At this point, all but one of my cards would be completely incompatible with those things. They’re completely flat, with printed numbers on the back instead. I hadn’t even thought about that change in a while, but I am glad that my wallet is a little bit thinner.
Retails stores sometimes still have these in high-volume areas. Imagine your store loses power on Black Friday weekend. Some stores live or die by a few critical weekends a year. You might lose some merch through declines later but avoiding the loss in total sales will almost certainly make up for it.
In my retail years, we called those “Knucklebusters”
Credit card imprinters.
In western Canada the electronic ones used to be called sliders (from when the magnetic strip was still widely used, before chip & pin), and these were called strikers (from how the card was pressed or physically struck onto the paper).
Cnidarians. (The sort of animals that includes jellyfish and sea anenomes and coral and such). Theyre so old that the first known predatory animal as far as I’m aware was one of them, and some of them still resemble those ancient versions to a significant degree. Even tho every time theres a mass extinction corals seem to be some of the first things to go, and jellyfish tend to be slow, stupid and not very good at controlling where they go, it somehow works out for them.
Oh, and them:
They are related. Say hy to Jerry.
The entire animal, including tentacles, is several meters long.
Wow, that was an evolutionary dark alley.
Basically the minimal assembly kit of a higher organism.
They need a skin bag to put all that stuff in, and cover it with some pretty scales or feathers or something.
Nah, it’s all modular. No size fits all.
Also I’m in the UK, visited the next town over last week and walked past a pub and thought, that looks like a pretty old building… turns out the pub was built and has been running as a pub since the 1500s
Me.
I mean, I’m not particularly old — only 29. But I’m super surprised I still exist. And it’s not for lack of trying. It just turns out that even though I’m pretty mediocre at living, I’m even worse at dying. Fortunately, I’m in a place now where that’s a thing I’m happy about, for the most part.
I’ve got at least 8 different attempts under my belt, and the way that some of them failed makes me feel like it’s almost offensive to be an atheist. For instance, when I swam out into the sea, as far as I could until I couldn’t anymore, and the next thing I remember was waking up on the beach, not super far from where I’d swam from. I thought that was a thing that only happened in movies. Granted, I’m not a strong swimmer, so I didn’t get very far out, but still.
That was one of my attempts as an adult, but I had a lot as a teenager too. When I was about 16, I was resentful of all the people who cared about me, because the guilt I felt over hurting them was the only thing keeping me alive. Building off of the crisis management advice that I’d seen that said it’s good to try to put some distance between you and your suicidal feelings by trying to hold off until the next day, for instance, I resolved that I would stick around until I was 20, and if nothing had improved by then, I would kill myself and fuck anyone who begrudged me this escape — no-one could say I didn’t try.
Well, it turns out that some things did improve by age 20 — enough that it suggested there was a non-zero hope that I could some day live and actually be happy to be alive. I still struggled a lot after that point, because it’s not like my mental health was magically resolved (it still isn’t), but I’m glad I stuck around.
In a way though, things got harder after age 20. Ironically, there were countless times throughout my late teens in which looking forward to my death was the only thing that saved my life. When things were particularly rough, I would work out how many days I had to go before I could rest, and it soothed me. After I was 20, however, I was unanchored. I had a life that didn’t feel like it was my own, because I never expected to make it this far. Even now, it still sometimes feels like I’m in a bonus level. It’s a bizarre feeling.
But yeah, I, and many of the people who know and love me, are surprised that I’m still around. I’m proud of myself, even if a significant part of why I’m still here is sheer luck. Obviously this wasn’t what you meant when asking your question, but I’ve been reflecting on my progress a lot lately, and the idea of giving this answer amused me. It feels healing to joke about this stuff a bit, I think
Sometimes it’s good to fail, even eight times, and I’m glad you did. Thanks for sticking around. I hope you continue to do so.
