also u all know that the manic pixie dream girl trope is supposed 2 be a discussion about male wish fulfillment and misogyny in storytelling not a new way 2 ridicule girls right
genderfluid-loki-and-trans-peter:
I want you all to know that an Arab Muslim from Tunis proposed the Theory of Evolution near 600 years before Charles Darwin even took his first breath. Don’t let them erase you.
his name is Ibn Khaldun
Also, it was not the apple falling from a tree that made Issac Newton “discover” gravity. He was reading the books of Ibn Al Haytham, an Arab Muslim from Iraq, who pioneered the scientific method, discovered gravity and wrote about the laws governing the movement of bodies (now known as Newtons three laws of motion) some 600 years before Newton existed. Without him, modern science as we know it wouldn’t exist. Read on him. His achievements are far greater than what I’ve just mentioned here.
#no offense but arabs literally invented chemistry and algebra and we came up with the concept of the camera #the cataract operation that’s still practiced today was invented by an Arab #we created alchemy and the wright brothers used abbas ibn firnas’ findings and writings to build on to create a plane #I could go on and on and on #pls don’t erase our scientific history
I reblog this post every time I see it
We fucking replaced a Muslim scientist with an apple?
In the middle ages, THE place to go for an education was the middle East, or, failing that, Spain. The Muslim world didn’t have the same limits placed on scientific inquiry that the Christian world did, and since they were willing to look at more than just Aristotole and actually compare texts to the observable world, they had some incredible scientific and mathematical advancements. And street lights and toilets. I mean theories and algebra are great and all, but street lights and toilets. In the 12th century. Also medical advancements, and fewer rules against women studying. Hell, women *should* be the ones studying the female body, would you rather a woman see your female relatives, or some old man? Would you rather have someone who lives in the same kind of body, or one who has no first hand idea what the parts can do?
Europeans erased centuries of knowledge from the East because of fear. When we “rediscovered” it, we were still too egotistical to admit that non-whites could have been smarter, so we invented our own mythology.
Bring credit back where it’s due. Honor the true pioneers.
Well fuck guess I’ll be yelling at my physics teacher tomorrow.
There’s a lot to consider here, so I’d like to start with the things said above that are true:
Ibn Khaldun did suggest that evolution occurred.
Ibn Al Haytham was a pioneer in optics and in formalizing scientific methods, among many other contributions.
(Also there is no such thing as *the scientific method* outside sixth grade science projects, but that’s a story for another day)
Algebra and alchemy(later shortened to just chemistry) are both obviously rooted in Arabic etymology.
And key to this thread, these contributions are usually understated or ignored entirely by western science historiography.
Now then, lets discuss some of the misrepresentations above.
First, no human discovered gravity. Some fish in the Cambrian period crawled out of the ocean, dimly noticed there was some new pressure on its belly, and died of asphyxiation. Something like this happened constantly on earth for the next five hundred million years. And none of it matters all that much, because long before we understood its nature we were using it to our advantage. Catapults and siege engines requiring a clear understanding of what objects will do under the influence of physics, but don’t require any clear formalism.
What Newton proposed was an explanation that the gravity all humans are aware of has no upper end, that it just keeps going, and could therefore hold the planets and moons in place.
To do this well, and to finalize the rules that we still use to describe celestial motion, he needed Kepler’s notes on planetary motion
And Kepler need Brahe’s data
And Brahe needed good optical instruments.
So he needed some good optical and algebraic books.
And the best to consult at the time were the works of Ibn Al Haytham.
This is what Newton meant when he said “If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” He critically consulted the works of others and used them as a tool to gain scientific understanding.
As Al Haytham would have wanted.
This is a common theme in science history. We often ignore tributary works and focus on the end product. To give a more self contained example, consider
Maxwell’s Equations
There’s a whole story here that I won’t get into, but the basic story is this.
Benjamin Franklin (may his name be cursed till the end of time) was among a large number of people looking at the dynamics of electricity. Between the late 18th and mid 19th centuries there were several key relationships that had been worked out: Gauss’ Law, Ampere’s Law, and Faraday’s Law. Each named after it’s relevant scientist. Most physicists at the time could tell that there was some fundamental relationship between these laws, but it was foreign and counter-intuitive to human perception. Faraday took his observations to Maxwell and Maxwell, information in hand put in the final pieces. He saw how electricity and magnetism were tied together, how to write it with mathematical formalism, and how it could be manipulated in an arbitrary case.
Note that phrase, arbitrary case.
Maxwell’s equations, as they were soon to be known, could be rewritten and applied to anything with electrical charge. Even things that hadn’t been built yet.
Like electric generators.
Or computers.
This final set of equations held up largely unaltered until the advent of quantum mechanics, and even now is all you need for most electricity and magnetism problems. Nobody familiar with the story applauds Maxwell for doing all of it by himself. Maxwell was lauded because with his contribution the damn thing was done.
Which brings us to the crown jewel of this this train wreck:
Darwinian evolution
Darwin did not invent evolution. He wasn’t the first to suggest it by a millennium. So why did he get the credit/blame for it?
Because everyone seems to forget what was really revolutionary about his ideas:
Natural selection.
He suggested or noted several narrower points, most of which were available from other sources:
- Organisms produce more offspring than are necessary for replacement (Malthus)
- There is variation among those offspring (Whatever Sumerian invented animal husbandry)
- That variation is hereditary (Mendel)
- The variation that is best suited to survival will keep those individuals alive preferentially, and so be more represented in subsequent generations.
- Over many generations, species will thus adapt to new environments (Darwin)
- And so new species will form (Ibn Khaldun)
Darwin’s legacy was not his insight, but his synthesis. He gave us a reason why evolution was happening that held up to criticism and the data he and others had gathered.
And that is the essence of science. Using what you already know and what people have discovered before you to avoid literally reinventing the wheel every 20 years, while critically analyzing those same sources to make sure no one missed anything.
The contributions of non western scientists need to be taught better, but don’t act as though it is being hidden from you. The proper way to fix this is to share information and sources to help people understand the world around them and the history that informs it, so that everyone can stand on the shoulders of giants.
Reblogging for that last comment about Darwin. Because what Ibn Khaldun said it’s different from darwinism. It’s a base of ONE of the ideas for the explanation of evolution, but not at all what it is.
I agree tho that we should be taught those bases first so we can learn better.
- Organisms produce more offspring than are necessary for replacement (Malthus)
My boyfriend just woke up, mostly still asleep and told me “don’t worry, it’s getting better” in a heavy, American accent, which is unusual for an Australian man.
“Why are you American?” I asked, to which I got:
“Sorry, it’s getting better” in a stereotypical posh English accent.
“Why are you English?” I asked, amused.
“What is he normally?” He managed to ask.
“He? You’re not anyone else, you’re you.”
“Ugh, me” was the last thing he said, in a right proper Aussie accent before he fell back into proper sleep.
Bitch just thwarted a ghost possession by judging his accents
so in psychology class we got to learn why foot fetishes are so prevelant! basically your brain stores the structural information for your body generally in the correct order (i.e. the info for your ears is stored next to the info for the head, which is stored next to the neck, etc.) BUT. The info for the feet is stored right next to the info for the genitalia and so sometimes these two sections of information can overlap and make you wanna lick some toes
thanks, i hate it
Normally when y’all post this kinda shit it’s blatantly incorrect, but I’m angry to say that this one is absolutely factual
honestly missionaries are evil. the idea of traveling the world to tell people Who Didnt Fucking Ask that their beliefs are wrong in the hopes that theyll adopt your beliefs seems sinister
The Christians in the notes whining are so absolutely stupid
I don’t even want to talk about how they specifically target poor people and hold basic necessities over their heads in exchange for faith.
Found on FB
*******PLEASE DON’T LEAVE DISHES OF SUGAR WATER OUT*******
Post from a beekeeper
Oh dear - I keep hearing tips about leaving bowls of sugar water out to “help” keep bees hydrated. Please, please, please DON’T. Bees are really good at finding what they need and there are so many reasons not to do this. The MOST IMPORTANT reason is that if you within 3 miles of some hives (and most people are) if the bees find the sugar water they’re going to think its a great source of easy food, go back to the hive and recruit more bees to come and collect the “food” and before you know it you’ll have 1.000s and 1,000s of bees descending on your garden/balcony - a very scary sight. This is known as robbing and as beekeeper I’ve seen this a couple of times - once started it is impossible to stop until the source of the “food” has gone.
Other reasons not to do this are - sugar water is essentially “junk” food for bees. Its full of carbohydrates which will give them an energy burst, but has no other nutritional value unlike the food they should be having i.e. nectar.
Honey bees will store this as honey in the hive. The beekeeper unknowingly may end up extracting and selling this as honey later in the year. You don’t want to buy sugar syrup and the beekeeper doesn’t want to be prosecuted for selling a product which isn’t honey.
This is also an easy food source for social wasps.
By all means give a tired bee a drink of sugar water on a spoon, but please don’t leave it out for them.
If you want to help bees there are lots of ways you can do this from planting nectar rich plants or leaving out bowls of water with gravel/small pebbles in so they can access the water which they would be very grateful for.
PLEASE SHARE THIS AND TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS
Edited - It appears that a lot of the advice I have seen about leaving out sugar water stems from advice from DAVID ATTENBOROUGH. He was absolutely right in his advice, but his advice was if you see a struggling bee to put some sugar water where the bee could reach it - not to leave out bowls of sugar water. Unfortunately it seems like, as usual, media publications have misquoted advice and not done their research
Also please don’t feed bees honey. Surprisingly they don’t eat honey - they eat nectar. Honey bees make honey for their own use during the winter months, but bumble bees collect and use nectar as and when they need it.
Feeding honey can spread disease between bees.
Reblog for a tired bee
here’s a new ideological movement for you: internet iconoclasm
- stop putting random internet people on pedestals because they’re funny or quirky or for any reason at all actually
- self examine and self criticize: are you putting too much stock in parasocial internet relationships? are you being mindful of the humanity of others?
- never lay down your pride to defend someone you’ve never even talked to
- remember that the person and the persona can be very different
- if an online celebrity or influencer deserves to be torn down, then let them be torn down.
- stop putting random internet people on pedestals because they’re funny or quirky or for any reason at all actually
^ From a therapist-friend, in case any in-therapy-friends ever worry about this.
Aces will always be part of my community.
Ace, aro, and aroace people are part of my community.
Advice I wish I would’ve followed or been given.