Cephalopods Shall Inherit the Earth

You’re given three wishes, and naturally your first inclination would be to wish for something for yourself, but then you step back and realize that you’re supposed to wish for something unselfish, so you decide to wish for world peace.

The world’s population is on track to exceed the maximum carrying capacity of Earth. You could say that war is helping to keep this population growth at bay, but I’m not so sure. Casualties from war have been decreasing at each war. The war with the highest annual body count by far is the Mexican drug war with roughly 20,000 deaths per year. I’m not so sure that keeping these wars up will lower population. I do believe, though, that the growth rate is high in less developed areas because all of the money poured into war has prevented the development of health infrastructure and thus prevented the distribution of birth control. If you eliminate war, countries will have more money for the development of health infrastructure and will be able to control their birth rates.

Why Nikola Tesla Was the Greatest Geek who Ever Lived

Bizarrely Realistic Japanese Robotic Buttocks Responds to Slaps

Just skip to 2:00

(Source: buttsbutts)

Anne Bowlin’

I’m doing math homework, and I keep inadvertently changing all the x’s to y’s.

It’s because internally, my mind is just screaming out “whyyyyyyy”

A woman named Elia built a time machine and, hoping to see the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, visited Antipater of Sidon. As her rocket touched down on Greek soil, Antipater threw himself on the ground and scratched at his eyes, for he had seen a sight so damning to his vision of the gods that he could no longer bear to look at the world he had believed to be real. Elia ran to his side, bound his arms behind his back and pleaded to him, “Antipater, please, do not be afraid. You have seen the wonders of the world - this is merely a wonder of the future world. I come as a humble student, an observer. I wish to learn and to see what you have seen, to explore the wonders of the world. You need only tell me where they are, and I can bring you along as well.”

Antipater rested his arms and looked at the time traveler. “If you wish, I will tell you where to find the wonders, but you must show me one more.”

“Anything at all.”

“You must take me to the future.”

“Absolutely.”

“Then we shall begin with Alexandria.”

The lighthouse left Elia breathless. Pheidias’s shameless flirting was almost as shocking as the statue of Zeus that he carved, though the Colossus of Rhodes proved to be even more spectacular. The sunburn she earned in Giza was well worth the sight of the Great Pyramid. She saw the sun to be equal to the temple of Artemis.

As Elia leaned against the massive walls of the mausoleum of Halicarnassus, she thanked Antipater. “You are truly incredible for allowing me to see all of these wonderful buildings and statues as they are now - intact, marvelous. But the last - the hanging gardens - we have never been able to guess where they stood.”

“The gardens? What gardens?”

“The Hanging Gardens of Babylon! High walks, stone pillars - you said you saw them in your anthology.”

“I haven’t written any anthologies.”

Elia slid to the ground and sighed. Of course she couldn’t have calculated the time exactly, but she had hoped that she would at least catch the man after he had seen all seven wonders.

“Thank you for your time. As promised, I will bring you back to my city. Are you sure you are ready for the journey? My home is over 2 thousand years away.”

Antipater smiled. “Seeing all the wonders again has only made me more eager to see what humanity will produce.”

The man fainted immediately upon arrival in Hillah. He woke up on hard concrete to the sight of flying orbs full of people dressed in bizarre clothing he had never seen before - some in tight body suits, others swathed in layers of cloth. There were strange smells of spices he had never seen, foods he had never tasted. New materials everywhere- some spongy material on the corners of buildings, an odd bendable tar on the bottom of people’s shoes - confused and amazed him. Fifty story steel skyscrapers stretched across the horizon, and planes shot through the sky. Most amazing was the skyscraper directly next to him- a thirty story glass structure full of plants on conveyor belts under tiny, indoor lights.

“Hanging gardens!”

“What?”

“The hanging gardens! I see them now! Where is this?”

“We’re on the Hilla branch of the Euphrates -“

“Incredible! Take me home immediately so I can record this.”

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A Question for Incoming College Freshmen

When you’re looking through a dorm’s website, what do you look for? What do you wish you could see?

Rockwall teacher fired for out-of-wedlock pregnancy | Dallas - Fort Worth

socialismartnature:

I think the U.S. is vying for the title of the “Nation Showing the Most Regression on Women’s Rights.” This is seriously some Medieval shit. I mean, if you get an abortion you’re evil, if you get pregnant out of wedlock you’re evil, if you use contraception with your married partner you’re evil.

This country makes me sick. And this should not simply be a matter of “private employers being able to do what they want.”

I mean, the whole point of the civil rights movement was that even private employers are NOT allowed to discriminate against someone based on race.

I would argue that the only reason a private employer could get away with doing this to a pregnant woman is because we have not yet had a women’s rights movement on the scale of the struggle for black rights in the 1960s. It should be illegal for a private employer to fire someone based on their sex, gender, health, pregnancy, etc.

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Cathy Samford, a volleyball coach and science teacher, was fired from Heritage Christian Academy for getting pregnant and not being married, the school acknowledged.

For almost three years, she coached volleyball at the private school. Samford was named “Coach of the Year” and recently began teaching science.

But when she got pregnant last fall, the school fired her because she was not married.

“I understand some people that would say ‘It’s a heartless thing to do,’” said the school’s headmaster, Dr. Ron Taylor. “It wasn’t easy to do.”

Taylor acknowledged that Samford could not get fired for an out-of-wedlock pregnancy in a public school. But HCA is a private, religious campus, and Taylor said the school considers teachers to be ministers, since they’re allowed to share their beliefs in the classroom.

I had a health teacher who had an accidental pregnancy. She didn’t get fired from being a health teacher, but they wouldn’t let her coach softball anymore.

Nonetheless, the whole “safe sex” part of health class became ten times more interesting.

I feel the same way about living off-campus as I do about space travel.

Everybody talks about how cool it would be and how much they want to do it. They say that they would feel independent to go boldly where they’ve never gone before. They say it’s an important step.

I wouldn’t do it though. I would get too lonely.

Every day, at some point I say to myself, “man, I wish there was a thing that could do that for me.” I used to write these ideas down in a notebook, but I stopped doing that a while ago.

Except now I’m in a class where I’m actually supposed to come up with an idea and see it to fruition, and I’ve got nothing.

Recently a bunch of moviegoers have returned from seeing the Hunger Games, sat down at their keyboards, and typed out angry tweets about how Rue and Thresh were black.

Decent human beings found these tweets and called the racists out for being upset, but others have taken it to another level and said that those people were racist for merely imagining Rue and Thresh for being white.

I will admit, I read Rue as white. Maybe it was because I kept reading into how much Rue reminded Katniss of Prim, but I kept imaging Rue as a mix between Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine (glasses included, for reasons I cannot explain) and 12-year-old Dakota Fanning. Somehow I picked up on the fact that Thresh was black, but not Rue. Nonetheless, when I saw the trailer, I recognized that I had the reading comprehension skills of a newborn baboon and respected their choice. Was I racist because I defaulted to imaging Rue as a white girl? I hope not.

Was there a box on the 2010 Census for sexual orientation? There should be one in 2020.