Thursday, October 22, 2015
Do You Remember These Important Dates From "Harry Potter?"
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, October 22, 2015
Dark and difficult questions lie ahead.
11 Roald Dahl Quotes That Will Inject A Little Magic Into Your Day
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, October 22, 2015
“A little magic can take you a long way.” — Dahl
The 10 Types Of Coworkers Absolutely Everyone Has Had
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, October 22, 2015
There’s an Oversharer in every office.
Maritsa Patrinos / BuzzFeed
Description: The Swamped Thing is always too preoccupied with work to chat or help you with a project. Swamped Things answer your e-mails only after an immense amount of prompting. And as soon as you are locked into a project, they want to drain minutes out of your day with some very pressing issue that cannot wait. Everything the Swamped Thing is doing is the most important thing. Everyone else's work, in his or her eyes, is essentially mini-golf or paddleboating.
Typical Quote: "Auto-Reply: It may be a while before I get to your e-mail, but that doesn't mean it's not important to me."
Description: Cool Boss wants you to know that he or she is just like you. Cool Boss doesn't like wearing stuffy suits. Cool Boss isn't hung up on "titles" or "company policy." Except Cool Boss gets paid way more than you and can break rules with impunity while you tiptoe around making sure that Cool Boss's Hard-ass Boss isn't there to bust you.
Typical Quote: "Have you read Outliers? I think you'd really dig that shizz."
Description: Yes, we ask each other how we're doing in the office. None of us are monsters. Except the Oversharer, who uses a pleasantry as an excuse to launch into an in-depth monologue full of details that most of us wouldn't even admit to our therapists. If there are any Oversharers reading this right now, just know three things: 1) No one wants to see more than one picture of your vacation. 2) The details about your love life are either making us jealous or bumming us out. 3) Yes, you should get that rash checked out, and you didn't need to describe it to us first.
Typical Quote: "Have a good weekend! I'll be spending mine alone again!"
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
22 Reads That Will Take You Through Earth's Entire History In A Day
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Grab a nice, warm drink, and curl up with a fluffy blanket — it’s time to get your science on!
Andrew Richard for BuzzFeed
"How Old Is the Earth?" by Fraser Cain
The Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. In this story, Fraser Cain takes you through the processes that formed our world, the long and contentious history that lead to the realization that our planet is hella old, and the science behind it all.
NASA/GSFC / Via astrobiology.gsfc.nasa.gov
"Earth's Oldest Crust Dates to 4.4 Billion Years Ago" by Dan Vergano
Just when the earliest crust formed on Earth is a hard question to answer, but it is super important because life probably would struggle on a molten surface. In this story, Dan Vergano (now a reporter for BuzzFeed) describes how microscopic grains are the only evidence left of this time and how, remarkably, we can still learn a lot from them.
John Valley, University of Wisconsin, Madison / Via news.nationalgeographic.com
"Could Giant Viruses Be the Origin of Life on Earth?" by Carrie Arnold
Scientists generally consider something living if it can metabolize (break things down, build things up, create energy, use energy, etc) and replicate (make a copy of itself). Viruses are self-replicating genes that need to feed off of other things to metabolize, and as such many think they came onto the scene after life had formed. This excellent feature by Carrie Arnold unpacks the idea that viruses could have come first and therefore played a big role in creating the earliest life.
Julia Bartoli and Chantal Abergel/Information Génomique et Structurale, CNRS-AMU / Via news.nationalgeographic.com
The Strange Case Of The Woman Whose Skin Was Turned Into A Book
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, October 21, 2015
No one knows much about Mary Lynch apart from the fact that her thighs are wrapped around three medical books in The College of Physicians of Philadephia’s Historical Medical Library.
Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
They're not the only books to be bound in human skin. We know of several notable examples: a French Bible, various anatomy texts bound with dissected cadavers, and a death-bed confession of a highwayman robber called James Allen who requested that the book be given to a man he once tried and failed to rob (he admired the guy's bravery).
There are more. Some, like a copy of Marquis de Sade's Justine et Juliette, are reportedly bound in breasts.
Beth Lander, librarian at the Historical Medical Library, told BuzzFeed: “The practice of using human skin to bind books seems to have occurred mostly in the 19th century. However, there are instances of books purported to have been bound in human skin dating back to the 15th century.”
There is no master list of anthropodermic books (meaning bound in human skin), so there’s no telling how many exist today. The Historical Medical Library has five, the largest confirmed collection in the United States. But why would they exist at all?
“The skin of executed criminals was said to have been used to bind the court proceedings of their trials, often as a public and long-lasting condemnation of their crimes,” says Lander. “And physicians were supposed to have created books bound in human skin in memorial to their patients.” Like Mary Lynch.
Three of the five anthropodermic books at the Historical Medical Library are made from a poor Irish widow named Mary Lynch, who died in 1869, at the age of 28.
Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
But we don’t know a lot about her.
“We don’t know when Mary emigrated from Ireland, nor can we be certain that she was ever married," says Lander. "The name ‘Mary Lynch’ is a pretty common Irish name, which makes it difficult to track her with any certainty.”
We do know this:
She was admitted to hospital six months before her death with tuberculosis, but tuberculosis wasn’t solely what killed her.
The summer that Mary was hospitalised was hot, with temperatures averaging around 30°C. Hospital food was no doubt even more bleak than it is now, so family and friends brought her food from the outside, just like your mum would. It was pork and bologna, and it was, it turned out, infested with Trichinella spiralis, a parasitic roundworm sometimes referred to as “pork worm”. Mary landed a massive case of food poisoning and died six months later, her 5’2" frame weighing just 27kg.
Records do not show how bad her family felt about the whole pork thing.
LINK: I Hung Out With Jeremy Bentham’s Severed Head And This Is What I Learned
Soon after her death, a 23-year-old doctor on the ward, Dr John Stockton Hough, performed an autopsy. His particular area of interest was encysted trichinosis, Mary’s ultimate cause of death. He wrote a graphic depiction of her condition, published in 1869 in the American Journal of Medical Sciences. A horrifying and apparently notable number of parasites had made a host of Mary.
Before she was buried in a pauper’s grave on the grounds of the hospital, Hough removed a slice of skin from her thigh. There aren’t any records to say why he chose this particular thigh, or what he planned to do with it, nor is there any documentation that Mary gave consent prior to her death. Since a corpse can’t, she probably didn’t.
Hough took her skin to a basement room in the hospital and tanned it in a chamber pot. Experts suggest he would have cured it in one of two ways: the traditional method (soaking in lime water, then removing any flesh, fat, or hair by hand before leaving the skin to soak in lime water for a few more days, before moving it to increasingly strong baths of tannin) or the urine method (urine was used for thousands of years in this way – the ammonia dissolves flesh, fat, and hair). No tests have been done to be certain either way, but given he worked in a hospital he no doubt had a lot of urine to hand.
It would have taken a month, if not several, to fully tan the thighs of Mary Lynch.
Twenty years passed before her skin was used to bind these three publications: Speculations on the Mode and Appearances of Impregnation in the Human Female (published in 1789); Le Nouvelles Decouvertes sur Toutes les Parties Principales de L’Homme et de la Femme (published in 1680); and Recueil des Secrets de Louyse Bourgeois (published in 1650). All three are about women’s health, conception, and childbirth. It seems relevant to note that Hough’s first wife died in childbirth, six years after Mary passed away in hospital.
It was only when he settled in Trenton, New Jersey, with his second wife and their five children that Mary’s skin finally found its way to the library.
The books are not on show, and are generally kept locked away in a room upstairs from the College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s more famous exhibit, the Mütter Museum, except on special tours.
They each bare a brief note in the front written by Hough, explaining that the leather they are bound in came from the thighs of a patient called Mary L.
LINK: 19 Photos Of The Last Surviving Chinese Women With Bound Feet
It’s entirely possible to request a kind of immortality like this in your own will. You can donate your tattoos to the Foundation of Art and Science of Tattooing if you want to, so why not this?
You would just have to hope that your executor complies and you’ve got enough thigh to wrap around a copy of Infinite Jest.
Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
You can follow the Historical Medical Library on Twitter.
Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
LINK: This Guy Had Himself Dissected By His Friends And His Skeleton Put On Public Display
149 Thoughts Everyone Has While Shopping At Dymocks
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, October 21, 2015
“There are so many books for dummies.”
1. How many signs does one shop need?
2. Fuck, haven't been book shopping in ages.
3. Wow. Have bookshops always been this massive?
4. Okay, bit overwhelmed. Choices!
5. Going to start here with Best Sellers.
26 Things That Happen When You Date A "Harry Potter" Nerd
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, October 21, 2015
They’ll stay with you until the very end.
Their bookshelf looks like this.
To make room for your own books, claim a corner and call it "The Restricted Section."
And their jewelry box looks like this.
Take. Note.
They're loyal, smart, brave, and resourceful.
Harry Potter has taught them pretty much every life lesson they know. YOU'RE WELCOME.
You never have to worry about what to give them for Christmas.
Bertie Botts and an Invisibility Cloak if you can swing it pls, but if all else fails, a very cosy jumper with their initials on it will do.
Chelsey Pippin / BuzzFeed
I Was A Fundamentalist Christian Until I Discovered Feminist Writers
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
I knew three things for sure in my childhood: Jesus was the only way to heaven, Democrats were ruining America, and women's lib was the most horrifying invention since evolution.
I was an earnest, evangelical, right-wing Christian fundamentalist in America’s heartland. I took the Bible literally, and I thought everyone else should, too. My family didn’t confine our beliefs to church, which we attended at least three times each week. We prayed aloud before eating in restaurants. We spent our summer vacations at missionary camp and occasional weekends at prophecy conferences, learning how the world would end.
Maybe some girls grow up hearing about Margaret Fuller instead of the apocalypse; I don’t know. Maybe they weren’t told that it was a disgrace when Susan B. Anthony’s face made its way onto a coin in 1979, when I was ten, and a scandal when Brooke Shields’ Calvin Klein jeans commercial started airing the following year. But I was led to believe that those feminists who thought women should flaunt themselves on coins and in blue jeans were as much of an affront to God as atheists and abortionists, and their every protest against the status quo was a slap in our collective, God-fearing face.
As far as I knew, the feminists’ main goal was that I should have to share a bathroom with men, as evidenced by the unisex-bathroom-driven agenda of the Equal Rights Amendment. I liked lots of privacy, especially as related to the bathroom, so between that and my affection for America and God, I warmed up to feminism late.
Today, I own a tank top that says “my Marxist-feminist dialectic brings all the boys to the yard” on it. I haven’t attended church — except for the occasional holiday service to spend time with my family — in 15 years, since the day I stood up and walked out halfway through a Sunday service. It's finding feminism, not God, that makes me want to testify. If you had known me as a girl, so sheltered that the first time I heard about the Beatles was during a school presentation about the evils of rock ’n’ roll music, you would never have seen that coming; I certainly didn’t. So what happened?
For a girl who spent nearly every spare moment alone in her room reading, it still surprises me that it took me so long to discover all the incredible women to be found in literature. But Nancy Drew and adventure stories about girls smuggling Bibles were as close to girl power as I got, other than a single Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem I found in an anthology gathering dust in our basement. I eventually made my way to a few poems by Emily Dickinson, and some Virginia Woolf, but even after majoring in English at a Christian college, I entered adulthood unfamiliar with many female writers.
It wasn’t until I arrived at graduate school in my mid-twenties that my life really changed, forever and ever amen. I met scholars with points of view that I knew should have sounded like warning bells. I was ready to dismiss their ideas, and had the arguments to do it after years of hardcore fundamentalist training, but some wiser part of me prevailed, and I kept listening.
In a class about women writers during the Middle Ages, I sat around the most ordinary table you’ve ever seen with six other women and had my mind blown every week. I read mystical nuns’ subversive poetry about the body of Jesus. I was inspired by Margery Kempe, who wrote what’s considered to be the first autobiography in English. I was astonished to read Christine de Pizan's 15th-century Book of the City of Ladies and realize how many of her arguments defending women still felt relevant. The word “patriarchy” entered my vernacular.
Slowly, the girl sitting quietly in a pew became a woman who asked questions.
In another class, books by Audre Lord and Alice Walker showed me how sheltered I’d been, not only by my religion, but also by my whiteness. I saw for the first time what now seems obvious: that the system made itself look so necessary that I never questioned its rightness. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I was living in the master’s house, much less that I could dismantle it.
I felt grateful, humbled and cheated. These brilliant, generous thinkers had been there the whole time, and I’d thought the only thing that mattered was whether a person knew Jesus. They made me bold. Slowly, the girl sitting quietly in a pew became a woman who asked questions.
Grad school ended, but I kept reading: feminist theologians like Rosemary Radford Ruether and Mary Daly, who made room for themselves in their interpretations of scripture, and fellow former evangelical Bart Ehrman, and the brilliant Jungian analyst Marion Woodman. I let go of my literal take on the Bible, deciding that metaphors are more powerful anyway.
Of course, 20-plus years of being certain you could burn for eternity in a literal pit of fire gets a grip on your psyche. I left the Midwest, moving to San Francisco and then Los Angeles, but my break from religion took longer than my move across the country. I still identified as a Christian, even though the tenets of my faith felt less and less true. I felt bold without knowing what to do about it. Emily Dickinson wrote that “The truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.” My progress was slow, but I was starting to see.
One Sunday morning a few years later, midway through one of the church services I still sometimes attended in Los Angeles, I realized how much the pronouns of God — the incessant him, him, him, he, he, he, him, he — had gotten under my skin. Nothing anyone was saying from the pulpit sounded right, and none of the hymns sounded right, either. I couldn’t sing words that I no longer meant — or even stand in the same room while it was happening. So I left.
I excused my way to the end of my row and walked past each pew on the way to the door, resolute but not wanting to make a scene. As walks go, it was pretty short. But my world was shifting tectonically with each step.
I sought refuge at a coffee shop and sipped a latte, wondering if I would ever stop worrying that I might be wrong. I walked back outside and realized I didn’t mind not knowing.
Feminism gave me the perspective to see the world for what it is, and to locate my own authority in that world.
My family remains unimpressed by the so-called facts I discovered as I un-converted myself. My parents still believe the universe was made in six days, and my mother volunteers at a crisis pregnancy center, hoping to steer women away from abortion. I once requested, while eating dinner, that doctors who give abortions not be referred to as "baby murderers."
We've moved into a rather delicate detente that involves regular, if not frequent, communication and holiday visits. I've established that Fox News won't be the source for evening wrap-ups when they're visiting me, just as they have their own house rules. I hope to avoid all mention of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign over the next few months.
Fundamentalism taught me to cede my power to an authority figure and to find my joy in pleasing others. Feminism gave me the perspective to see the world for what it is, and to locate my own authority in that world. Now I take up space without apologizing for it, and, usually, make noise without assuming I’ll be judged for it. That change was hard-won, one book, and one belief, at a time. But the result, to me, is dazzling.
18 Cats Who Don't Want You To Finish Reading That Book
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Reading is never worth it, in their opinion.
"You don't wanna know how this chapter ends anyways."
"I've read this one before and, trust me, it ain't gonna win any awards."
"I'd rather eat this whole book than let you read one. more. word. of it."
"All of these are garbage. May I interest you in playing with some yarn instead?"
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