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My husband sent me some interesting facts about this bridge!

So, the 11 foot 8 bridge's main problem is that it's old, as the wikipedia page (link this:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norfolk_Southern%E2%80%93Gregson_Street_Overpass) explains pretty well - it was designed before trucks and busses got so tall, unlike the "racist bridges" of New York that Robert Moses had involvement with.The reason that it's known as the 11 foot 8 bridge but currently has more than 12 feet of clearance is also explained - after the website tracking its collisions had been up for about 11 years, the Norfolk Southern Railroad did a small project to increase clearance as much as they could without having to regrade extensive parts of the embankment that trains are on above the bridge on either side, gaining an extra 8" (https://11foot8.com/raising-11foot8/). However, you don't throw away branding when there's a number in your name just because the number changed, so the website stayed the same and I think sometimes brands as "11 foot 8 plus 8". It seems to have reduced the number of incidents a fair bit, though it didn't get rid of them. A single-level city bus needs about 10 feet of clearance, so would clear both generations of the bridge, while an intercity coach like a Greyhound or Flixbus or something is about 12 ft 6" and so wouldn't clear either version, and would have to use one of the level crossings of the same rail line either 500m west or 200m east.

was reminded of that youtube channel that records footage of that bridge that scalps trucks today. one of the fascinating developments that's happened since i last heard about it is that, in one of their many attempts to stop the trucks from being can-opened, they installed a traffic light that detects when a vehicle that's over the allowed height is coming and turns red so the driver can stop and hopefully notice the signage all around that's screaming "YOUR VEHICLE IS OVERHEIGHT TURN AROUND" and avoid an accident. However as a result sometimes drivers see the light turning yellow and IMMEDIATELY start flooring it to avoid having to stop, ensuring that the roof of their truck just gets fucking annihilated instantly. Really beautiful stuff you should check it out

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I got "Purgatory, Featuring Dante (Devil May Cry), Mistaken Identity", and I am choosing to imagine that my fanfic self was accidentally recruited to fight the multiversal forces of evil and rolled with it. Go forth and be cooler than me, other me.

Spin this wheel of ~300 AO3 tags three times.

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THE HAGUE, April 28 (Reuters) - A Dutch court on Friday ordered a man who judges said had fathered between 500 and 600 children around the world to stop donating sperm.

The 41-year-old Dutchman, identified by de Telegraaf newspaper as Jonathan Meijer, was forbidden to donate more semen to clinics, the court ruling said. He could be fined 100,000 euros ($110,000) per infraction.

The court also ordered Meijer to write to clinics abroad asking them to destroy any of his semen they have in stock, except doses reserved for parents who already had children by him.

The decision came after a civil case started by a foundation representing the interests of donor children and Dutch parents who had used Meijer as a donor.

They argued that Meijer's continued donations violated the right to a private life of his donor children, whose ability to form romantic relationships are hampered by fears of accidental incest and inbreeding.

Meijer's mass donations first came to light in 2017 and he was banned from donating to Dutch fertility clinics, where he had already fathered over 100 children.

However, he continued to donate abroad, including to the Danish sperm bank Cryos which operates internationally. Meijer also continued to offer himself as a donor on sites matching prospective parents with sperm donors, sometimes using a different name, according to the Algemeen Dagblad daily

???

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THE HAGUE, April 28 (Reuters) - A Dutch court on Friday ordered a man who judges said had fathered between 500 and 600 children around the world to stop donating sperm.

The 41-year-old Dutchman, identified by de Telegraaf newspaper as Jonathan Meijer, was forbidden to donate more semen to clinics, the court ruling said. He could be fined 100,000 euros ($110,000) per infraction.

The court also ordered Meijer to write to clinics abroad asking them to destroy any of his semen they have in stock, except doses reserved for parents who already had children by him.

The decision came after a civil case started by a foundation representing the interests of donor children and Dutch parents who had used Meijer as a donor.

They argued that Meijer's continued donations violated the right to a private life of his donor children, whose ability to form romantic relationships are hampered by fears of accidental incest and inbreeding.

Meijer's mass donations first came to light in 2017 and he was banned from donating to Dutch fertility clinics, where he had already fathered over 100 children.

However, he continued to donate abroad, including to the Danish sperm bank Cryos which operates internationally. Meijer also continued to offer himself as a donor on sites matching prospective parents with sperm donors, sometimes using a different name, according to the Algemeen Dagblad daily

???

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Real

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Baby red panda cub at Edinburgh Zoo!

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I don't necessarily agree with this but it has such a mathematical quality to it somehow

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I have a kitchen scale and also measuring cups and measuring spoons, because recipes have some ingredients by weight and some by volume.

So the thing with the US's awful units is like

So, my mom worked at NASA for some time before I was born and I asked her about the American use of US customary units when I heard about the Mars Climate Orbiter's crash.

And what she told me — which was surely a simplification somehow, I was a child at the time — was that periodically, someone would push for this within NASA, and then they would do a study to explore the possibility of forcing them and all the various contractors to use metric, and they would come up with a number which was the cost of doing that and replacing all the non-metric tooling, and then they would shelve the proposal.

So, my point is: before that I thought of the unit thing as like an American culture thing. Like Americans are set in their ways and conservative and arrogant, or whatever. After that, I thought of the unit thing as a state capacity thing. Americans simply can't do a lot of stuff, and when they can't, they puff themselves up defensively, like what they're forced to do is the best way to do things anyways.

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More bead sets from Gotland. 

The first set is from a hoard find in Petes, Linde, Gotland, dated to the viking age.  The second image is a close up on the three gold beads, as the work really is brilliant and I’m always glad to see how much detail can be preserved.

The second is from Grötlingbo, Gotland, dated to the viking age as well. The original is held in the Historiska Museet in Sweden. For fun, in my search for simple fish-tailed beads as you can see in the lowest and fourth strand of beads attached to this separator, I was linked to a replica made by the artisans at Perlenschmiede in the same dimensions as the original, showing how this could have looked in its prime. 

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The three-ring binder is the apex of book technology, by the way. All the advantages of a codex, plus you can add, remove, and reorder pages at will - pages which you can furthermore protect from damage in transparent sleeves, and store commentaries, notes, and other paratextual addenda behind them without obscuring the primary content. Truly the queen of codices. Reblog if you love the three-ring binder.

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I closed my ask box and then got spam in my submissions box. Closing that too. Spammers, make better choices.

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#I've seen some people react the same way to second-person stories #which. Okay. on a grammatical level that at least makes more sense than reacting this way to first-person narration #but on a reading comprehension level... mentally sentencing you to go read Homestuck.

I didn't have this problem with Homestuck, though I do occasionally have it with other works. But the worst thing is when there's a regular first person narrator but the turn to look at the camera and go "now, dear reader, I can tell that as you're reading this you're thinking and feeling that Blah Blah Blah" and no I fucking am not. Which is admittedly less of a grammatical/stylistic objection and more of an "I hate the narrator as a person" objection.

wait do people read first person stories and think they're the ones in the story???

Saw people talking about not liking first person, which is fair, but their reasoning was like "I would not do that" and I don't understand that mindset.

First person stories are still about a character. A character making their own decisions. First person isn't about you???? At least I thought it wasn't. What am I missing? I've always seen first person as just a more in-depth look into a character's mind and stricter POV. Not as a reader stand-in.

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kungfu movies definitely send mixed messages on the virtue of effort, like if you train for twenty years you’ll probably be able to learn how to fly and do cool tricks with your sword but still get trounced by some asshole with good genetics who was blessed/cursed by the gods and fell into a cave and stumbled on the manual of doom and picked up the forbidden secret of being awesome without any effort whatsoever.

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Twisted Spiral. Ballpoint 16x10” A3

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imagine you're a mechanic in the Transformers universe and you have a car come in with engine trouble so you open it up and the engine is just full of some kind of weird fast-spreading rust. never seen anything like it before

so you're like. hmmm. and you call the Autobots like 'hi I know this number is supposed to be for reporting possible Decepticon activity but I've got some kind of alien bullshit going on and I don't know who to ask'. they hand you over to Ratchet and Rachet is like 'hm I think I know what that is but let me come run some tests'

SO Ratchet comes over and has a look at the engine and is like yeah as I thought. its crotch rust. and you're like 'crotch rust??' and he's like yeah its crotch rust. its a. well I think humans call them STIs? its like that.

so you're like '..........are you telling me a Transformer fucked this car' and he's like yeah. looks that way. and you're like 'what in the world' and he's like I don't know. people are freaks. anyway we don't want this stuff spreading so I'll be back tomorrow with the right nanites. keep it away from the other cars.

he comes back the next day like okay so I have good news and I have bad news. you're like 'well what's the good news' and he's like WELL I spent last night testing all the autobots for crotch rust and they're all clean. so you're like 'does that mean the car wasn't fucked' and he's like oh no the car was definitely fucked there's no other way this could have happened.

so you're like 'wait. are you saying a Decepticon fucked this car?' and he's like yes. we have a Decepticon fucking cars. and they are giving the cars STIs. thank you for bringing this to our attention here are the nanites goodbye.

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Over 10 years ago I drew this mother naga with her kid and a bowl of gulab jamun, and I was blown away to see people still reblogging it and saying kind things here. I decided to draw a sequel, the PTA (People That are Anacondas) meeting is over, and she finally gets to have some gulab jamun. c: I really hope this cheers you up some.