This watercolor is from our Du Simitiere collection. Pierre Eugène Du Simitière (1737-1784) was a collector, artist, and historian, who opened the first public museum, the American Museum, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At the American Musuem, Du Simitière presented his many materials collected during his travels and from his collections.
sometimes I get so angry thinking about ‘The Imitation Game’ that I have to go in a little ‘upset big tantrum room’ in my head for a calm down
like, Benisnatch Cumberque played the same character he’s always plays as an asshole genius and we were all supposed to be okay with it, but it’s basically character slander
at different parts of the movie Turing is described as ‘arrogant, “inhuman,” “narcissistic,” and even “a monster,” in the film he goes against those around him and is shown to periodically ignore and belittle his colleagues
he was kind and geeky and awkward and gay, I don’t care if the whole of society doesn’t find that compelling, I don’t care if we don’t value kindness as an attribute in men, he deserved to be loved and respected as he was, not as we wish he was
I am so sorry Alan Turing, I am so sorry your story was not told with care and thoughtfulness, I am so sorry you didn’t get to be shown to be deeply in love with the men you loved, I am sorry your great and terrible tragedy was never unfolded as a kind and brilliant man abused by a horrible homophobic system
You are a hero that turned the tides of history like no other and I am so sorry
hey op if you’re looking for a kinder movie about alan turing, you should check out breaking the code (1996). breaking the code was originally a stage play, and this is a filmed adaptation. it’s more faithful to his personality, stars derek jacobi (who was also a gay man and plays the part with so much sympathy), and it doesn’t bungle historical details for the sake of adding more drama. here’s a link to a youtube playlist where you can watch it in full
He felt bad for the children who were stuck at bletchley park without their toys so he used spare paper from his office to make them a monopoly board by hand
He was also reported as having a goofy sense of humor where he used to make a show of saying goodbye to everyone at the party and then walk into the closet instead of out the front door
Plus, he was quoted as saying quips like “Beyond the way they speak, there is only one (no two!) features of American life which I find really tiresome. The impossibility of getting a bath in the ordinary sense and their ideas on room temperature.” — Alan Turing (1936)
He used to practice his Cambridge lectures in front of this stuffed bear he got in college named Porgy and was delighted when his mom sewed it a little outfit. He kept the bear with him throughout life.
You can buy cookies online from any troop with a page set up. People bought so many cookies from troop 6000 (who is based out of a homeless shelter in NYC) that is broke the counter on the website.
Here’s six troops from high poverty areas that may struggle to reach their goals. Individual troops list on their page what they’re doing with funds. for many of these its simple things like badges or craft supplies. Get yourself some cookies.
You can also just donate cookies on there and they’ll be distributed to the local community. (I work at food pantry here and clients are always excited to see cookies on the shelves)
You can look up your local troop by zip code on https://www.girlscouts.org/ If they’re similarly struggling to raise funds, reblog and add ‘em on to the chain.
Of this list, troops 3559, 31897, 70115, and 30349 have not met their goals yet! Most of them are not even close, so make sure to spread the love to these other troops too!
The eighth annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 10th March 2021.
After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.
If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, retweet this tweet, boost this Mastodon post, check out this post on Reddit, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks like Facebook. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 24,000 responses last year.
The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.
So I used to have a Russian friend who had a pretty thick accent and like a lot of Russians tended to eschew articles. She would say things like “Get in car.” And stuff.
Well one day this asshole who had been kind of tagging along with us asks her why she talks like that because it makes her sound dumb and I still remember her response word for word.
“Me? Dumb? Maybe in America you have to say get in THE car because you are so stupid that people might just get in random car, but in Russia we don’t need to say that. We just fucking know because we are not stupid.”
getinmyglitterpantsgetinmyglitterpants
One time I was proof reading a paper for a Russian student. As I was correcting her paper with her, the many mistakes in her grammar started weighing on her. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, almost sobbing,
“In Russian I am so intelligent and clear. In English I am like [an] idiot”
Respect to anyone trying to master a foreign language. I get so sad thinking about that student.
Full offense but people who make fun of someone else’s accent or belittle their limited vocabulary when they’re speaking a language not native to them are fucking disgusting and are just begging to be punched.
They’re speaking your language because you don’t know theirs. That’s not something they should be made fun of, it’s something that should be commended because learning a language is hard fucking work.
I would like to mention it’s only English speakers (usually American) and speakers of French who think accents in their language spoken fluently = not knowing the language.
It isn’t like this anywhere else in my experience, as I study several languages and remain a “beginner” and am always being told my speaking/writing is perfect and congratulated by native speakers and even thanked for saying basic phrases that I KNOW are poorly done.
One of the humps I had to get over learning languages was the idea that I shouldn’t speak to native speakers, because I wasn’t fluent yet. As that’s a very ‘English language’ concept. The idea that an accent or loosing unnecessary English words some how means a person is not “fluent” blows my mind. I’ve been studying for years, many languages, and I don’t know if fluency is ever in the works for me.
I speak both French and English as additional languages and I never realised this, but I should have. It’s very confusing because in my native language (Dutch) we just wade in and fuck around.
This is magenta, and not pink. Unlike pink, magenta doesn’t actually exist. Our brain just invents magenta to serve as what it considers a logical bridge between red and violet, which each exist at opposite ends of a linear spectrum.
Your brain is a badly-designed hot mess of bootstrapped chemistry that will tell you that all kinds of shit is happening that has no correlation to physical reality, including time travel. It just makes things up. Your brain is guessing about what’s happening when your eyes saccade, what’s happening in your blind spot, and what the majority of the visible light spectrum looks like, and you don’t know it’s happening because it doesn’t aid your survival to become aware that a lot of what you see is fake.
The human eye only has three types of color sensitive cones, which detect red, blue, and green light. Your brain is making up every other color you perceive.
Let’s have a little fun with that thought. This is the visible spectrum of light.
You will of course note that yellow is on the chart. Yellow has a discreet wavelength, and is therefore a distinct physical color. But we can’t see it.
“Sorry, what the fuck?”
What we call yellow is just what our brain shrugs and spits out when our red and green cones are equally stimulated. We have light receptors that can pick up on the physical spectrum of light we call yellow: that’s why yellow things don’t just look like moving black blocks to us. But your brain has no fucking idea what the color yellow looks like.
Some animals have eyes that can perceive the color yellow! Goldfish have a yellow cone in their eyes. If they could talk, they could tell us what yellow looks like. But we wouldn’t be able to understand it.
What your brain actually sees of the color spectrum:
We can measure the wavelength of light, so we know that when we see ‘yellow,’ we are seeing light in that 550-ish nanometers range. But we don’t have a cone in our eyes that can pick that up. Your brain just has a very consistent guess about what color that wavelength of light could be. We decided to name that guess ‘yellow.’ We can’t imagine what yellow really looks like any more than a dog can imagine the color red.
Here’s the funny thing: your brain is never perceiving just one photon of light at a time. Something like 2*10⁸ photons per second are hitting your retina under normal conditions. Your brain doesn’t individually process all of them. So it averages them out. It grabs a bunch of photons all coming from the same direction, with the same pattern, and goes, “yeah, that cup is blue, fuck it, next.”
That’s how colors blend in our eyes. So sure, if a photon of light with a wavelength of 550 nanometers bounces into our eyes, we see what we call “yellow.” But if we see two photons at the same time, coming from the same object, one of which is 500 nms and the other of which is 600 nms, your brain will average them out and you will still see yellow even though none of the light you just saw was 550 nms.
So how does magenta factor into this?
Well, as we’ve just established, when your brain sees light from two different slices of the visible light spectrum, it will try to just average them together. Green plus red is yellow, fuck it. If it’s more red than green, we’ll call that ‘orange.’ Literally who gives a shit, we’re trying to forage over here. There are bears out here and it’s so scary.
What happens if you take the average of blue and red light, which we perceive to be magenta? What’s the centerpoint of that line?
Fucking green.
Hey, that’s not gonna work? We live on a planet where EVERYTHING IS GREEN. If something is NOT green, that means it’s either food, or a potential source of danger, and either way your brain wants you to know about it.
So your brain goes, WHOOPS. Okay - this is fine. We already made up yellow, orange, cyan, and violet. We’ll just make up another color. Something that looks really, really different from green.
And so it made up magenta.
So, physics-wise, is magenta “real?”
No; there’s no single wavelength of light that corresponds to magenta. But you’re rarely seeing only a single wavelength of light anyway. And even when you are, every color other than RGB is a dart thrown on the wall by your meat computer. This is the CIE Chromaticity Diagram:
Explaining this thing is a little more than I want to take on on a Saturday morning, but I’ve included a link above that goes into it a little more. The point is that only the colors that actually touch the ‘outline’ of the shape actually correspond to a specific wavelength of light. All of the other colors are blends of multiple wavelengths. So magenta isn’t special.
Given that color is just a fun trick your brain is playing on you to help you find food and avoid danger, is magenta real?
Yeah, absolutely. Or at least, it’s just as real as most of what we see. It’s what we see when we mix up blue and red. It would be disastrous from a survival standpoint to perceive that color as green, so we don’t. Because it’s not green. Light that’s green has a wavelength of around 510 nm. Stuff that’s magenta bounces back light that is both ~400 and ~700. Your brain knows the difference. So it fills in the gap for you, with the best guess it has, same as it does with your blind spot.
The perception of color exists within your brain, and your brain says you see magenta. So you see magenta.