Sagrada Familia is one of my favorite things ever. Not only is it a basilica that looks like the offspring of Rivendell and a Dr. Seuss book, it’s still not finished. That’s how incredibly detailed and complex it is. They’ve been working on it since 1882, and it’s not projected to be finished until 2026.
Architecture VS. Fashion Illustrations by Shamekh Bluwi
Jordanian artist Shamekh Bluwi took the internet by storm with an innovative collection of illustration, which function as fashion and architectural designs. Bluwi creates stunning paper cut-outs, which outline the silhouettes of women’s garments and haute-couture gowns, which are filled by the scenery of the surrounding landscape and its architectural marvels.
i don’t understand why people don’t instantly respond to “what would your dream superpower be” with the ability to manipulate probability. think about it. what’s the chance someone will drop 1mil in front of me? 0%? let’s make that 100%. what’s the probability i’ll wake up tomorrow and be X gender? 100%. what’s the probability my bathtub is filled with mac and cheese? 100%.
as a casino employee I can confirm this would be terrifying as fuck
I still like teleport, no error, whether I’ve ever been there or not.
The superpower of
probability
is terrifying for other reasons.
what’s the probability my bathtub is filled with mac and cheese? 100%.
Consider all the unlikely things that must occur in just the proper sequence for this to happen. It’s not just wishing 50 gallons of mac & cheese into existence – that’d be a different superpower.
No, we’re talking about some serious reality bending here.
Like maybe: an 18-wheeler hauling a load of instant Kraft macaroni & cheese collides with a tanker truck filled with water outside your home. Both vehicles erupt into flame, which cooks the combined noodles & cheese mixture within a small non-nuclear mushroom cloud of an explosion.
The cooked mixture of mac & cheese (and burning fuel!) rises into the air on thermals a hundred feet above your house, exactly above your bathroom.
At just the right moment, as the starchy cloud of cheesy noodles reaches the apex of its hideous arc, a freak storm causes a lightning bolt to crash down out of the blue, blasting a hole in your roof above the bathtub.
Shingles and plywood explode away from the roof and are diverted to the side by sudden 50 mph crosswinds… which, because of freak weather conditions, are perfectly timed to whisk away the roof debris but stop just as suddenly before the descending cloud of mac & cheese can be blown aside.
Four seconds later there is a moist mighty THLUPPPPnoise as ~50 gallons of half-cooked, badly mixed mac & cheese & diesel fuel land in a soggy mess within your bathtub.
Ding! Your bathtub full of mac & cheese? Probability 100%.
Also: two dead truck drivers, untold collateral damage from the explosion, a wrecked roof, dangerous storms trashing the neighborhood, and a disgusting inedible mess in your bathroom.
Oh wait, you wanted it perfectly cooked, ready to eat? Too bad… you didn’t specify that. And if you had, imagine the FURTHER ridiculous unlikely events required to make that happen.
Because you’re not just wishing shit into existence. You’re shifting realities.
Which, if you’re selecting for a very improbable circumstance means moving a LOT of existing reality out of the way – which takes energy. Because reality has inertia & momentum just like a river does, and does not want to be diverted.
This might be the most terrifying super power ever, just from its side effects.
For the first time since 1941, anthrax has hit Western Siberia, with 1,500 reindeer dying and 13 Yamal nomads being hospitalized including 4 children.
This is because unusually high temperatures (it’s 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal) have melted permafrost containing the corpse of a reindeer that died of the bacteria 75 years ago.
Anthrax goes dormant when frozen, turning into a spore that reanimates when the temperature rises. Scientists estimate it can survive in this state for a minimum of 100 years.
In Siberia, dozens of herders have been relocated, a quarantine is in place and a state of emergency has been declared by the mayor.
This renews concerns that ancient viruses and bacteria could once again pose a threat, as the earth warms.
In 2014 scientists discovered that a Siberian virus, pithovirus sibericum, which lay dormant in permafrost for 30,000 years, became infectious again once thawed.
Although we linguists describe the basic units of speech sounds using the position inside of the mouth, sometimes we can see a little bit of what’s going on outside, too. Think about the different positions of your lips when you say “boo” versus “key”. Even if you don’t know what’s going on inside the mouth, you can see the difference:
– BOO starts with lips together and then when your lips open, they are close together and rounded. – KEY starts with lips apart (a little bit) and then turns into a bit of a smile
This is the basis of lip-reading. Unfortunately for lip-readers, a lot of the distinctions between sounds happen in the mouth where they can’t be seen easily, so there are many sounds that look the same. That being said, the vowels of English in particular are easy (or easier) to identify based on the position of the mouth and jaw.
Which leads me to the fun part: emoji!
Much has been said on the linguisticsandsemiotics of emoji, but something that I’ve only recently thought about is how the mouth shape of the different faces could correspond to sounds.
In this picture, one version of emoji (I think it’s Android’s version) is overlaid on a very rough approximation of the vowel space:
At the bottom, I added some bonus sounds, too.
And in this next one, I think it’s Apple’s version (plus some bonus ‘sounds’):
In both cases, you might be able to imagine mirroring the face that the emoji is making, and then making a sound. I suspect that the sound would correspond to the vowel that is in the chart. This has a lot to do with how open your mouth is to say sounds like the A in CAT ([æ]) versus the U in CLUE ([u]). Although this isn’t all the important information needed to identify or produce a sound, it seems like there’s a big enough range of expressions to make a pretty decent vowel chart!
This is the most promising proposal for writing in emoji that I’ve seen so far (and also the most hilarious).
cshappybeginning 