A dinosaur obsessed 12 year old studied fossils and found a 69 million year old hadrosaur skeleton embedded in rock while hiking. A fisherman in Australia noticed tiny shrimp in his net that looked slightly different from the others and he sent a few specimens to biologists for testing. Turned out to be a never before described species, going unnoticed in a popular lake. I posted a pic ~here on tumblr~ of a weird parasite on a dead fish and a parasitologist found it and asked to report it as the species has never been seen in my area before.
There is so, so much out there we literally don’t even know. And the best way to find that stuff out is to be intensely curious about everything you see. You might not discover a new species but you absolutely will gain a deeper appreciation for the world around you.
I am truly in awe of the penis poll and the snail race (aiming to draw) and stuff like that. Not because Tumblr finally gave us polls and the first thing we did was use them as a medium for cooperative games that aren’t polls. But because they keep succeeding! The E poll aside (excused because I think a lot of the respondents didn’t understand the aim), these polls are really really good at getting the desired result.
Which is amazing when you think about it, because the respondents don’t see the result until they click. Until we participate, we don’t know how long the dick is! We don’t know how big the balls are! We have no idea which snail is ahead! We have to make a guess on what other users have done and behave accordingly. “Oh yeah, but there’s a lot of respondents, just using probability you can – ” do you know how much variation you get in probability? And yet every time I see those snails, they are NECK AND NECK. That penis always has appropriately sized balls that are approximately the same size, to within about 4% of the poll! You’d think everyone would play it safe and just make a dick, but no – people knew it needed balls, they made a guess as to whether other people were giving it balls, and the proportions worked out! It could’ve gone the other way; lots of people could’ve been like ‘oh I be no one is doing the balls’ and they could be massive balls with a micropenis. Or one testicle could’ve gotten all the attention by accident, and we could’ve had a single-ball cock on our hands. But respondents are predicting each others’ behaviour with amazing precision, giving us results far more precise than you’d expect from random generation over so many different polls! Those snails are at EXACTLY FIFTY PER CENT every time I see them!
I am so proud of our collectively drawn dick and balls you guys.
The worst thing you can do, as someone who has recently realised they are transfem, is to let terves and transphobes convince you cis women will never accept you.
I was told that when I came out everyone would reject me. That I would find myself isolated from the world, and from other women especially, who would react to me with horror and revulsion.
In reality, within the first months of coming out, in no particular order:
My sister’s reaction on my coming out was, “Right, so I have a sister instead of a brother. Cool. I’m taking you clothes shopping tomorrow.”
A friend, when she learned I am a woman, immediately invited me to her women-only, girls-night-out birthday party the following week.
Another friend, when a friend of hers expressed doubts about my gender, immediately shut them down and reaffirmed I am a woman.
I went camping with a group of friends, and we had two tents, one for the boys and one for the girls; I was unsure as to which I should enter, to which a girl friend responded by grabbing me and physically dragging me inside the women’s tent.
In the women’s bathroom at a movie theatre a random woman, whom I’d never seen before and haven’t seen since, stopped me as I was going into a stall, to warn me there was no toilet paper in there, because she’d just used the last of it.
All of these, and more, some from friends, some from complete strangers. All within a few months, as a trans woman who hadn’t started medical transition yet, and was very visible as being a trans woman.
I’ve had some people reject me, true, but the vast majority, including almost all cis women, accepted me as a sister with open arms.
ALT
