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nookflex · 3 months

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Elaborate Website Blog

Bringing New Information to the Table: A Deep Dive into the World of Hard Facts and Concrete Data

Greetings, fellow knowledge seekers! Are you ready to embark on a journey of discovery? Get ready to have your mind blown with an abundance of new, polarizing, numerical, objective, and informative hard facts. Today, we are delving deep into the realm of concrete data, uncovering the truths that lie hidden beneath the surface. Join us as we explore the practical applications and real-world implications of these fascinating findings.

But first, allow us to introduce ourselves. We are NookFlex, an innovative technology company specializing in electronics. Our main goal is to fuel digital growth, and what better way to achieve that than by sharing enlightening, thought-provoking content? So, without further ado, let's dive right in!

Chapter 1: The Power of Numbers

Numbers have a unique ability to provide us with clarity and understanding, cutting through the noise and revealing the truth. Whether it's statistics, measurements, or calculations, it is through numbers that we can truly grasp the essence of a subject. Let's explore some fascinating examples:

In the year 2020 alone, the global online retail market reached an astounding $3.53 trillion, marking a significant increase compared to previous years.

A recent study conducted by scientists at the University of Oxford found that meditation can lead to a 10% increase in focus and productivity.

The average human brain contains approximately 86 billion neurons, each forming intricate connections with thousands of other neurons.

According to NASA, the average surface temperature of the Earth has increased by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century.

In the field of quantum computing, researchers have successfully achieved quantum entanglement between particles over distances exceeding 50 kilometers.

These numbers are just a glimpse into the vast universe of hard data that awaits us. Prepare to be amazed as we uncover more fascinating facts in the chapters to come.

Chapter 2: The Convergence of Science and Technology

Science and technology have always been intertwined, driving innovation and pushing the boundaries of what is possible. In this chapter, we will explore some cutting-edge advancements that are shaping the world as we know it:

1. Artificial Intelligence (AI): With recent breakthroughs in machine learning algorithms, AI has become increasingly capable of performing complex tasks that were once thought to be exclusive to humans. From autonomous vehicles to medical diagnosis, AI is revolutionizing various industries.

2. Genetic Engineering: Thanks to advancements in genetic engineering techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9, scientists can now edit DNA with unprecedented precision. This technology has the potential to cure genetic diseases, enhance crop yields, and even bring extinct species back to life.

3. Quantum Computing: Quantum computers harness the principles of quantum mechanics to perform calculations exponentially faster than classical computers. This technology has the potential to revolutionize fields such as cryptography, drug discovery, and weather forecasting.

4. Renewable Energy: As the world grapples with the challenges of climate change, renewable energy sources are gaining momentum. The efficiency and affordability of solar and wind power have improved significantly in recent years, making them viable alternatives to fossil fuels.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how science and technology are reshaping our world. The possibilities are endless, and it is through hard data and concrete facts that we can fully comprehend the magnitude of these advancements.

Chapter 3: The Impact on Everyday Life

Now that we have explored the world of hard facts and concrete data, it's time to take a step back and reflect on the real-world applications of this information. How does it affect our daily lives, and why should it matter to us?

1. Health and Wellness: The advancements in medical technology and research have led to improved healthcare outcomes, longer life expectancy, and a better understanding of diseases. From personalized medicine to wearable devices that track our health, science and technology are helping us live healthier and more fulfilling lives.

2. Environmental Sustainability: The data-driven approach to addressing climate change and promoting sustainability is crucial for ensuring a habitable planet for future generations. By understanding the impact of our actions through data, we can make informed decisions and work towards a brighter future.

3. Economic Growth: The convergence of science and technology has the potential to drive economic growth and create new job opportunities. From the rise of the gig economy to the development of new industries, such as space tourism, innovation fueled by hard data is instrumental in shaping our economic landscape.

By actively engaging with this information, we can become empowered individuals, capable of making informed decisions in our personal and professional lives. So, dear reader, we invite you to take an active role in this journey of discovery. Embrace the power of hard facts and concrete data, and let it guide you towards a brighter future.

In Conclusion: Reflecting on Our Journey

As we bring this elaborate website blog to a close, we hope that it has provided you with valuable insights and sparked your curiosity about the world of hard facts and concrete data. From the power of numbers to the convergence of science and technology, we have explored the vast realm of knowledge that awaits us.

Now, it's your turn to take the next step. How will you harness the power of hard facts and concrete data in your own life? Will you seek out new information, challenge existing beliefs, and make data-driven decisions? The choice is yours.

At NookFlex, we believe in the transformative power of technology and the importance of staying informed. As an innovative technology company, we strive to provide cutting-edge solutions that fuel digital growth. So, if you're ready to embark on a new adventure, explore our website [https://nookflex.firmx.co] for the latest in electronics and technological advancements.

Thank you for joining us on this journey. Remember, the world of hard facts and concrete data is always evolving. Embrace the power of knowledge and never stop exploring.

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theozgnomian · 2 years

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Jurassic Pigeon Anyone?

I'm torn. On the one hand I'm a science nerd, and this is cool as shit. And on the other hand, I'm all for undoing some of our stupidity during our tenure on this planet. Let's add the Passenger Pigeon, and the Carolina Parakeet to the list. However, on the gripping hand, I've seen Jurassic Park. While I don't think any resurrected dodos will break cage and start eating people, there are SO many ways for this to go wrong.

#science #extinction #biotechnology

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harrelltut · 6 years

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☥ abracadabra… abracadabra… abracadabra… I’mma Magically Engineer [ME = U.S. Michael Harrell = TUT = JAH] the War on TERROR in fallen america… on fallen america… AMEN ☥

#U.S. Michael Harrell #FUCK fallen white america #I Presidentially Sabotage ALL powerless TELEVISED govment politicians #I Algorithmically + Intentionally [A.I.] Sabotage ALL powerless TELEVISED temporal govment administrations on earth SOVEREIGNLY #My Triple 6 Terroristic Threats of Hellish 999 Powers by My Unseen [MU] Urban Street [U.S.] Spirits of SPIRITUAL SATAN [SATURN]#I Make My BIGGEST + BLACKEST + DARKEST [BBD = DEMONIC] TERRORISTIC THREAT that BEE So Technologically Magical #My Unseen [MU] Black Terrorism MAgick of Atlantis [MA]#I BEE A MOST HIGH [MH = JAH] NUBIAN WARLORD of QUANTUM Black Occult Technology [BOT] Ammunition #My QUANTUM Black Occult Technology [BOT] Intel Shall Algorithmically DESTROY ALL useless TELEVISED govments on earth #Prince Satan + Black Christ Intelligences of 9th Dimensional Melanin Physics #I BEE So Universally Sovereign [U.S. = UNTOUCHABLE]#I’mma Magically Engineer [ME = U.S. Michael Harrell = TUT = JAH] the War on TERROR in fallen america… on fallen america #Death of fallen america #mortal deaths on the rise #mortal Opioid Deaths [OD] on the rise #My HIGHLY Sophisticated Opioid Overdose Magick #I Vibrationally Emittin’ Unseen Sentient [U.S. = Invisible] Black Endogenous Opioid Neuropeptide [EON] Spirits #U.S. Double Black White House Illuminati #My Golden Black California Afterlife [CA] Illuminati of Lost Atlantis [L.A.]#Hidden Genetic Extinction Sciences #Apocalyptic Genetic Extinction [AGE] Constitution of Atlantis [CA]

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ruthlesslistener · 2 years

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Hagsfiend Origin Headcanons (AKA Give these poor birds a hug)

Hagsfiends/Abomination Birds, AKA Strixcorvus Abominatio/Owlcrow Abominations. (Abomination Birds are the name the scientists gave them. They had to classify them as something.)

Hagsfiends are an artificial species, made by humans, in an attempt to recreate the smaller species of dinosaurs. Specifically, they're a failed batch: they do display raptor-like traits, but their DNA is an unstable kludge of different species-Crows and owls chief among them. As such, they're very unstable, being prone to health defects and (in the most extreme cases) dying from their DNA falling apart.

Not all of the scientists treated them badly: most tried to make them comfortable, and treated them well. However, there were ones who wanted to study the collapse of their DNA, since they never had the chance to see that before, and they were around more than the nice ones.

Nachmagen is magic from another dimension. The first Hagsfiend to use it just did so to make sure he and his Found Family (his mate and adopted chicks) didn't dissolve into a puddle of genetic sludge. (That is literal: he watched it happen to the most unstable ones.) Most Hagsfiends embraced it because they didn't want to die.

As time went on, and they slowly began to forget their origins, Nachmagen became intrinsic to them. This is also around the time they began to believe they were actual beings from Hagsmire. (They never completely forgot the horror of what was done to them, but the memories blurred from time and trauma, and their minds reinterpreted the trauma as them being wicked beings from Hagsmire. Because why else would they go through so much pain and suffering?)

They were generally a neutral species at first: however, centuries of discrimination after the extinction of humans led to them embracing a "Then Let Me Be Evil" mindset. (Not all are evil, but the ones that aren't always remain hidden and refuse to interact with the others.)

Kreeth's experimentation is based on human experimentation. She was only a chick when Humans went extinct, but she vaguely remembers them: she remembers the power they carried in the way they manipulated bodies and lives, so she seeks to replicate that power for herself. (She's also trying to harness the power for herself: she's one of the original batch, so she remembers the things the humans did to her when she was a chick. She never wants to be like that again.)

Hagsfiends made by Nachmagen are initially less unstable that Lab-made Hagsfiends, but their genetics are still a complete mess: if they live long enough, their genetics completely shift to that of their lab-made counterparts.

Hagsfiends are literally only held together by Spite™ and Nachmagen. Without them, their genetic structure would collapse and they'd die painfully and horribly.

That said: even post-series, there is still hope for Hagsfiends. After a joint Crow/Owl exploration force discovers the records of the Hagsfiends' creations, the two species begin to view them much more sympathetically. The surviving Hagsfiends even come out of the woodwork to relearn their origins.

The Crow who helped lead the expedition, a Collared Crow named Clarys, explicitly vows to the Hagsfiends that he'll learn this strange science to help stabilize them, even using a blood oath to solidify his promise.

Clarys has to learn genetic engineering from scratch using human books on genetics, college textbooks, and scientific reports. It's not easy, and it takes almost a decade of nonstop research by a bunch of Crows and owls, but eventually, he cracks the code and manages to create something to help stabilize the species, letting them be proper birds unburdened from the case of their genetics.

...

Okay this has been sitting in my inbox for fuckin forever bc I just don't know how to respond to it. This is a really cool theory but sorry my guy I am just not that super into Ga'hoole anymore because of how badly burned I got from the treatment of the hagsfiends

#guardians of ga'hoole #submission #reply #hagsfiend #hagsfiends #this is really awkward but i just dont have anything to say

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bookwyrminspiration · 3 years

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Theres no alicorns besides the family we know of, so, if the council wants there to be more alicorns, doesnt that mean Wynn and Luna will have to... have babies together?

excellent question, nonsie. The entire situation with the alicorns and trying to bring a species back from the literal brink of extinction does raise several questions and concerns, many of them more so as you get deeper into the science of how it might work.

cw: discussion and theories regarding animal breeding. inbreeding, hybrids, etc.

(Disclaimer: not an expert in any of this, I just briefly researched some of the science behind repopulation and tried to summarize it in the context of this question. Take everything I say with a grain of salt. You can also look it up yourself if you’re interested!)

long answer: alicorns have a basically 100% chance of extinction even though there are now double the number. Double sounds impressive, but they only went from two to four, which isn’t anywhere near the number needed to repopulate the species. There’s something called the 50/500 rule, meaning 50 members of the species is needed to help combat inbreeding concerns and 500 to “reduce genetic drift”. This has been applied to many different species but it’s always better to have the specific information from that species which we will not have seeing as this is a fictional species.

Even if the elves went the route of Luna and Wynn breeding, that would likely lead to genetic defects and complications. They aren’t perfect specimen. It wouldn’t work.

The elves would need to find several dozen more alicorns hidden around the globe to even have a chance at preventing extinction. They can’t do it the way things are right now. When a population dips below 1,000 there’s a high chance they’ll go extinct and right now it’s just one family of four.

however, it could be possible for hybrids to become a thing. There may be a species similar enough to the alicorns that breeding between the species could produce a fertile hybrid. Purebred alicorns would die out, but these hybrids could breed amongst themselves and whatever other animal they are part. My first instinct was to say unicorn but I have a memory of kotlc unicorns being very different than the unicorns usually shown in fantasy media. Unsure what is similar enough to an alicorn to effective reproduce with them and I doubt we’ll ever know the genetic makeup of fictional kotlc creatures so we can only speculate

short answer: there’s nothing the elves can do to prevent purebred alicorns from going extinct. They haven’t saved them. I’m theres just now a longer time before they’ll go extinct.

(tw, mention of religion and a few christian religious stories) so why say they’re saved? I think it’s likely this was included because it’s a middle grade fantasy series that’s already denounced human science, so theres no need to stick strictly to human reproductive sciences. Another thing, when we hear “two members of the same species are going to repopulate everything,” a lot of us probably think religious things, even if we weren’t raised Christian/catholic (I was raised bahai so I don’t know the difference between those or which one uses this story). It’s like Adam and Eve or all those animals on the ark. It’s likely based on subconscious religious stories that found their way into kotlc. Like I said, even people who have never been part of those religions (like me), know a lot about it. Regardless of Shannon’s beliefs, which I do not know and will not theorize on, growing up/living in America as a white person influences the religion she is exposed to.

I think I got way more invested into this question than you were expecting so I’ll stop here. But that detail has always bothered me so I enjoyed the opportunity to explore it and think about it from a more professional stand point. I hope that answers what you were asking, but if not feel free to send another ask!! This is a very intriguing topic and I’d love to talk more about it <33

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dimespin · 4 years

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If for example there was this endangered species that was going to die out and there was this scientist or whatever trying to preserve then in anyway possible, would it be reasonable/possible for them to have made the book animal spells?

The book animal cult predates modern science in their world, so by the time the spells are hidden, lost and destroyed and the method of writing them lost, recognition that species can go extinct wasn’t yet on anyone’s radar

(I haven’t nailed down the exact era of the book animal cult but I usually think of it as happening around 200 years before the “present” give or take. Not ancient history but long enough ago to be a mystery to anyone who doesn’t study history)

That does mean that sometimes there are book animals of endangered or even recently extinct species but this doesn’t really help the real animal at all, since genetically they are still human beings. It’d only serve to partially preserve the animal’s appearance. Sort of.

Basically, a book animal of a recently extinct or endangered animal would be like living breathing reproducing art piece depicting that animal. At best scientists could use them to help understand what animals that they have no other preserved specimens of looked like, like how drawings and verbal descriptions are used in conjunction with taxidermy mounts or pelts

But this also has limited utility because like, they are people - you gonna tell a book thylacine she can’t have children with her book fox husband because their kids will no longer preserve the extinct animal accurately for future generations? Unlikely that she will listen to you!

#book animal #Anonymous

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tomionefinds · 4 years

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Are there any tomiones that play in the future? Not modern day AU's but like a futuristic dystopy.

Hey Anon, so there are a couple that I’ve heard are in the works. Also I kind of opened up a whole can of beans looking into sci-fi because of this ask. Thanks to discord too for help. -JD

the price of water by peppershark

E/Ma | WIP | 34k

After a mishap in the Room of Hidden Things, Hermione finds herself in a barren, post-apocalyptic future where witches are all but extinct. The rare females are prized by desert traders and cloistered und The Heir From District 2 by PenelopeGrace Series: Tomione Hunger Games AU [1]

E/Ma | Complete | 16k

They thought he would win.

Hunger Games AU + District 2!Tom Riddle + District 12!Hermione Granger

A Time of Zombies by crochetaway

M | One Shot | 4k

Grindelwald’s death set off a massive curse across Britain. Every recently dead wizard has become decidedly undead. The world collapses and only a handful of survivors remain. Tom Riddle, Grindelwald’s lieutenant is one of them. As is Hermione Granger, Dumbledore ’s lieutenant. When they meet, sparks fly. Almost literally.

A Fall Through Time by orphan_account

E/Ma | Abandoned | 89k

A/U Tomione In a present day dystopian society, muggles and muggleborns are enslaved to their pureblood masters who greedily drain the earth of it's resources resulting in famines and plagues. Hermione, known to her master Draco as Sandy, must do what she does best-survive and adapt. Until that is, she is given an opportunity to go back to when it all started and rewrite history. ~Incomplete~Abandoned~Orphaned~If you are inspired to write something for this story or pick up where I left off--feel free~

my (edge) lord by tomioness

T+ | One Shot | 1k

After a fatal virus killed every person older than 21, the world is thrown into absolute chaos. Children and teenagers can only survive by coming together. Gangs of older survivors terrorize them by taking all reserves under control. Hermione, Head of the Mudbloods, puts all her efforts into taking care of her tribe. But everything seems at risk when the self proclaimed Lord of the Death Eater gang takes an interest in her and uses her love for her community to bend her to his will.

we'll sing in the sunshine by flosculous

M | WIP | 4k

Dystopia AU.

She was pushed into her cell with only one thought in her mind. Obedience, there's no such thing as love.

Was he born normal he would have felt something similar to empathy now, or maybe his chest would convulse with sympathy (...) but Tom was anything but normal.

Or Hermione is one of the Hollows and Tom is High General of Grindelwald's Followers.

Ad Infinitum by Speechwriter

T | WIP | 74k

As he forges inexorably toward the end of time, he may come to wonder if this is a world worth ruling. Science fantasy.

Black Mambo by Nekositting

M | One Shot | 6k

She sprung from where her legs had been rooted on the floor, running to the door at the end of the room. She pounded on its surface, blood rushing up to her ears.

The door refused to move.

“Open the god damn door,” she shouted, hysteria making her words crack at the end, but still, the guard outside refused to open the door for her.

Was he even still out there?

“They won’t come for you, you know.”

Types of Iron by knittedcoffee

M | WIP | 1k

A magic and sci-fi blend AU. A magical and medieval world is connected to a technologically advanced one run by robots, but they do not coexist under the reign of Lord Voldemort. Warnings: violence, death, language, involuntary self-harm. "As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive" Don DeLillo. Part 1/?

Locked Up by dhazellouise This is part 6 in a Series: Hermione's Harem [6]

E/Ma | WIP | 16k

As a result of genetic inheritance, the Purebloods and Half-bloods are considered prodigies. The Death Eaters and the Marauders are one of them. They excel in anything, even in music. And Hermione is among the finalists who will get to live with both the All-Male bands in a social experiment for three months. Yet not everything is as it seems...not when Death comes calling.

#tomione #sci-fi #fantasy #dystopian #magical au

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

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Scientists Did a Massive DNA Study on Global Weed Strains. Here’s What They Found

Cannabis sativa, the plant that has gifted the world hemp, pot, and countless other earthly delights, is a modern cash crop with a rich history of cultivation that dates back thousands of years. But even as new cannabis strains are constantly bred for psychoactive or medicinal effects, the origins of domesticated cannabis remain murky, in part due to legal restrictions that prohibit scientists from acquiring plant samples.

An international team of scientists has spent years overcoming the red tape on these green weeds in order to present “a unique global view of the domestication of C. sativa,” along with “valuable genomic resources” for research into its modern breeds, according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances.

By analyzing 110 whole genomes of C. sativa sourced from all around the world, the researchers traced the plant’s cultivation back more than 12,000 years. Their results reveal that four genetic groups of domesticated cannabis stemmed from a single ancestral origin in northwest China, which challenges a widely held view that C. sativa emerged from a Central Asian center of crop domestication.

The new research is “the largest survey with genomes from such geographically diverse origins and such diverse domestication types”—including feral plants, traditional landraces, and historical and modern cultivated varieties—”which is necessary for such a comparative investigation of the domestication origin of a cultivated species,” said senior author Luca Fumagalli, a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Lausanne, in an email.

Of the 110 genomes collected for the study, 82 were new samples sourced from field sites and commercial stores in Switzerland, China, India, Pakistan, and Peru, as well as from the Vavilov Institute of Plant Genetic Resources in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The team, which was led by Lanzhou University biologist Guangpeng Ren, also re-analyzed 28 publicly available genomes, most of which belonged to North American breeds.

“It is very difficult to obtain hemp and especially drug-type samples and feral plants” which are “ancient domesticated plants readapted to the wild environment” from “non-Western countries, due to legal restrictions,” Fumagalli noted. He added that the team “had to convince and establish collaborations with local scientists in several key countries” and rely on the Vavilov Institute “to get seeds originating from many countries where field collection of cannabis plants is difficult.”

“All in all, this took several years,” he said.

Fortunately, the team’s time and energy paid off, as the varied set of genomes tell a fascinating tale about the domestication and cultivation history of C. sativa. According to the study, two lineages diverged from wild cannabis plants about 12,000 years ago: Basal cannabis, which still exists as a feral species in China and the US today, and a second group that was probably bred as a multipurpose crop with textile, nutritional, and medicinal properties.

About 4,000 years ago, that second lineage split again into two distinct groups: hemp breeds that were selected for fiber production and marijuana breeds that were selected for the production of cannabinoids such as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the plant’s primary psychoactive compound. The fourth lineage identified by the team is a branch of the drug-type breed that went feral and now grows south of the Himalayas. Meanwhile, the ancestral wild cannabis plant that gave rise to these four lineages has likely become extinct.

Interesting insights were hidden in the genes of the hemp and marijuana groups, which both lost functional genes that had been present in their multipurpose ancestors as a result of their increasingly specialized use as either fiber source or as a psychoactive substance.

“This suggests an ancestral situation (in the wild species) with both genes in a functional state, an intermediate situation just before or after the beginning of domestication (similar to what observed today in plants from the Basal group), and a progressive loss of one or another gene after strong divergent selection started for either fiber-type plants or drug-type plants,” Fumagalli explained.

Perhaps the biggest surprise, however, was the discovery of the Basal group, which includes 14 feral plants and landraces collected in China and two feral plants from the United States that likely migrated across the ocean sometime in the 19th century.

“An unexpected result was the presence of this Basal genetic group, which did not comprise any of the domesticated plants we consider today as Cannabis sativa (hemp or marijuana),” Fumagalli said. “It’s a bit like discovering a dog breed unknown to date and genetically independent from the genetic cluster grouping all dog breeds described today worldwide.”

Previous studies based on feral plant studies have suggested that C. sativa was first domesticated by peoples living in Central Asia, but Fumagalli and his colleagues propose that the crop emerged from a fairly narrow region of East Asia in northwest China, where the elusive Basal group still grows. In addition to conducting further genomic analyses on this controversial, beloved, and increasingly influential plant, the researchers hope to track down the exact region where its many powers were first discovered and harnessed by humans.

“Clearly, this is a key geographical area, and future additional sampling here could more precisely show where plants from the Basal group are distributed,” Fumagalli concluded.

Scientists Did a Massive DNA Study on Global Weed Strains. Here’s What They Found syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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tseneipgam · 4 years

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“Many of our greatest challenges- climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, soil erosion, water depletion, declining fish stocks, pollution, antibiotics resistance and diet-related disease- stem from our failure to value food”

“Humans originally domesticated farm animals largely because the beasts could eat what we couldn’t, cows and sheep happily grazed on grass while pigs and chickens gobbled kitchen scraps; after a few years spent in fields, on hills and in backyards -during which the bovines and hens provided us with the added bonus of milk and eggs- we could eat them. Provided one was comfortable with the inevitable end game, it all created a beautiful, synergetic loop. Factory farming, by contrast, is almost comically inefficient. One third of global grain harvest is now fed to animals, food which, if we ate it directly could feed up to ten times as many people. Industrial meat production guzzles one third of all the water used in agriculture and is responsible for an estimated 14,5 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Add in the pollution from the football-pitch-sized pools of toxic slurry and the indiscriminate use of antibiotics and you’ve got a hefty pile of hidden costs. Although the negative value of such damage is hard to estimate, one study by the Indian Centre for Science and the Environment reckoned that, if you factored everything in, the true cost of an industrial burger would be in the region of $200, not the $2 we usually pay. The ethical downsides of industrial livestock production are just as troubling. If the term ‘factory farm’ doesn’t immediately arouse a sense of Orwellian disquiet, closer examination of the secretive facilities (know in the trade as concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs) soon will.”

“In a post-industrial society it is virtually impossible to lead a truly good life, since, merely by existing, we participate in a host of social, political and economic systems that, among other things, oppress workers, abuse animals, poison oceans, destroy ecosystems and churn out greenhouse gases like there’s no tomorrow. Heaven help you if you drive a car, fly on holiday, eat steak or own a smartphone. Almost every move we make in the modern world has some distant, negative impact. Just engaging with life’s multiple dilemmas requires vast knowledge and effort, as we examine all the implications of our actions on countless people, creatures, structures and organisms, most of which we barely know exist. Needless to say, few of us are equipped for such a task.”

“Our modern lives are best by paradox. Our technical capacity is mind-blowing, yet we seem unable to match our skills at, say, genetically modifying sheep, landing probes on comets or making robots serve sushi with non-technical challenges such as creating equitable societies, agreeing to disagree on God or coexisting with fish.”

“In order to live we must eat; in order to eat, we must take life. This circularity may seem remote when most of our food comes ready-cooked in boxes, yet it’s logic underpins our very existence. Whenever we eat, we make an implicit value judgement: that human life is worth more than that of, say, a leek.”

“In Aristotelian terms, contentment (comfort) is the goal of the human hedonic cycle: the mean between desire and excess that our reward systems are calibrated to deliver. But here’s the rub: if joy is what we seek rather than comfort, we must allow our arousal levels to build, since our greatest pleasure occurs just as they border on the unpleasant. First noted by the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt in 1874 (and thus known as the Wundt curve), this phenomenon graphically illustrates our modern dilemma. In order to enjoy life to the full, we need our wants to be postponed, rather than instantly gratified: to experience pleasure at it’s peak, we must work towards it and look forward to it. However, as Scitovsky notes, such postponement is the opposite of what consumerist culture is geared up to provide. We miss out on joy, because our needs are met too easily. Comfort and joy, it turns out, are to some extent mutually exclusive. If we want to experience joy, we must be prepared to sacrifice some comfort, yet our very idea of the good life- embodied in the notion of progress, is to ratchet up the latter. In a consumerist society, said Scitovsky, we are constantly forced to choose between comfort and joy, yet this isn’t always clear to us, since our gains in the former (such as when we snack) are often present and immediate, while the consequent loss (no appetite at dinner) only becomes apparent later. Instinctively, we accept ever-increasing levels of comfort, without realising that we are pushing joy ever further away”

“Early farming was much harder work than hunting and gathering had been; indeed, the very concept of work only appeared when people started to farm. Among contemporary hunter-gatherers, who may spend as little as twenty hours a week actively hunting or foraging and for whom such tasks are embedded in everyday sociability and ritual, the concept is virtually unknown. For such people work is simply life”

“the nature of home is shifting. Once a productive hub where families lived and worked together, it is now the primary locus of individualised consumption. From the comfort of our sofas, we can shop, order food, socialise and be entertained; home, for most of us, is merely a plug-in to the global supply chains that keep the capitalist circus on the road. For many, relaxing at home is a reward for doing jobs that we’d rather not do- a deal that none of us signed up to, yet is fundamental to how modern society works”

“A 2018 study by Oxford Economics, for example, found that the more we eat together, the happier we’re likely to be, and that regularly eating alone is more strongly associated with than any other factor apart from mental illness”

“Fifty years ago, the majority of jobs still involved making something, whether it was clothes, cars, ships, furniture or food. Although such jobs were industrial, many preserved some of the qualities of the pre-industrial workplace, requiring a degree of teamwork, knowledge or skill. Housework half a century ago was more craft-based too: most housewives could make pastry, bake and sew, while cars were still mechanical enough to allow those so inclined to mess about under their bonnets. Today, by contrast, few of us know how to make or mend anything. Most of us buy the things we need, and most everyday objects have built-in obsolescence.... our throwaway culture damages more than our planet; it threatens something essentially human. As Crawford notes, the kind of creativity require to mend things involves a highly sophisticated cognitive effort that brings its own special reward. The fact that our brains our wired to get pleasure out of such manual tasks is hardly surprising: we have, after all, been co-evolving with tools for some 3.5 million years”

“The Greeks believed that a good life required struggle, without it, they thought, being human had little meaning. They admired hard work and frugality because they were necessary to becoming a good citizen. From modern political rhetoric in the UK and US, you would think that we thought the same -’hard-working families’ are constantly cited as ideal- yet it is wealth we dream of these days..,.It’s only human to want an easy life. Yet, as our leisure choices betray, we contemporary urbanites yearn for some sort of action or challenge. We regularly go on adventure holidays or abandon the comfort of our homes to camp under the stars, light fires, catch fish or just barbecue sausages in the rain in order to remind ourselves what it means to be alive,”

“What implications do (such) economic structures have for our chances of freedom, opportunity and justice? How, in the modern world, can we perceive the power structures that govern us, let alone challenge them? The spacial transformations wrought by industrialisation have been augmented by a digital disembodiment that renders power and influence all but invisible. So rapid and radical hast this transformation been that we are only just starting to grasp its implications, The very nature of the public realm is shifting, and with it the exchange of ideas and goods at the heat of society. Once a physical place where anyone was free to act, public space was essential to the evolution of democracy”

“Populism and nationalism are gaining ground, as people react to the failed promise of capitalism and blame migrants for their fate. The irony is that low-paid migrant workers are themselves the product of capitalism, fulfilling the roles once performed by slaves. If we are to build a society fit for the twenty-first century -which is to say one based on collaboration not exploitation- we’re going to need a better mechanism for sharing”

“Abstract and impersonal, it (money) took the agony out of exchange, relieving us of the rituals and obligations that once bound people together. Social bonds, although essential to our well-being, are antithetical to economic progress, getting in the way of its core goal of efficiency”

“This ‘trickle-down’ theory, the idea that all wealth is good, since it will find its way into the parts of society that other economies can’t reach- is a central tenet of capitalism. It’s flip side is the need for consumerism, since factory owners can’t expand unless people buy more of their stuff. Fortunately, Smith observed, our appetite for the non-essentials of life was insatiable”

“When the owners raised wages to encourage people to work longer hours, it had the opposite effect: the workers simply went home even earlier. Mill owners thus took the only alternative open to them, slashing wages to the point where workers could only survive by working all the hours available. A principle was established that remains central to capitalism: when starvation is the alternative, people will work for almost nothing”

“The parallel tragedy of Brexit is that many of those who voted for it -people living in deprived ex-industrial regions-are precisely those whose livelihoods were destroyed by the free-market ideology of their Brexiteer champions”

“The question that few are yet asking is what will happen when the industrial cycle goes full circle and those who currently produce our trainers and tiger prawns decide that they’d like to stop making stuff too, as is already happening in China. Who is going to make our takeaway food and throwaway clothes then? Robots? And, if so, what are the ten billion or so people projected to be living on earth by 2050 going to do all day? Sext one another and play computer games?”

“While all pleasures were excluded from work in the name of efficiency, workers were expected to compensate by spending their wages on pleasure in their leisure hours.... The absurdity of this, said Schumacher, is that ‘man-the-producer’ and ‘man-the-consumer- are one and the same person, who happiness could be just as easily secured at work as at home. He cited an industrial farmer who admitted he wouldn’t dread of eating his own food and felt fortunate to be able to buy organic produce grown ‘without poisons’ instead. When asked why he simply didn’t grow organic food himself, the farmed replied that he ‘couldn’t afford it’.”

“we should treat nature as beyond price -’meta-economic’- as though it were sacred”

“When he buy hand-reared organic produce, it seems expensive because it reflects the true cost of producing good that is good in every sense: nutritious and tasty as well as ethically and ecologically produced. The trouble is that this is the only sort of food that reflects its true cost. The other sort- the industrial food that supplies more that 95 per cent of our diet- is artificially cheap due to the systemic externalisation (often through government subsidy) of the true cost of producing it. Many of the costs of industrialised food- deforestation, soil erosion, water depletion, exhausted fish stocks, pollution, biodiversity loss, rural depopulation, unemployment, obesity, chronic disease, climate change and mass-extinction- aren’t counted in the price we pay in the shops”

“In reality ‘cheap food’ is an oxymoron- an illusion created by industrial producers and governments keen to disguise the true cost of living. While externalities such a deforestation, pollution and climate change are accounted for elsewhere, industrial farmers who would otherwise struggle to make a living from the low prices we pay for food are subsidised by the state. So what might the world look like if, instead, we were to internalise the cost of our food? The answer is that industrial farming would rapidly become unaffordable, while ecologically produced organic food would emerge as the bargain it has always been. Buying food would become a virtuous circle, in which the market would favour foods that nurtured nature, animals and people.”

“In China, as elsewhere, the march of progress usually consists of swapping an arduous life toiling in the fields for a similarly arduous existence working in a factory, trading a tight-knit if remote community for the isolation of a flat in a dormitory district. Whether the former is less ‘worthy of human beings’ than the latter is moot, and since knowing the smell of the earth after rain and the names of birds and trees are ‘goods’ of a totally different order to those of owning a flat-screen TV or Nike trainers, the jury is likely to be out of some while yet...Rural life is undervalued partly because it neither offers not relies upon (such) growth. Indeed, the natural state of rural communities is steadiness. Agricultural yields may rise over time, but will never generate the heady profits to be made from, say, drilling oil out of the ground or clearing rainforests for carrots, an entirely city-led operation”

“At the start of the twentieth century 38 per cent of the population were farmers, and small town America thrived. Today, less than 2 per cent of Americans live on farms, and the US has the most industrialised, consolidated food system on earth. The results have been the highest levels of poverty in the developed world and a depressed, drug-dependent, obese population. Those living in rural areas, who represent the fervent core of Donald Trump’s base support, are so despairing that suicide rates are three times higher than the national average”

“In the space of just six years, while attending to the pressing matter of defeating Hitler, Britain transformed itself from an informed, poorly fed, heavily dependent food nation into a knowledgeable, healthy, far more resilient one. We managed it, of course, because our lives were on the line, which is in effect where we are again, although today we face a common threat far more lethal than a genocidal facist. In order to survive, we need to transform ourselves into an engaged, egalitarian force of motivated, self-reliant citizens. Can we do it? Since the British invented the industrial capitalist model that got us into this fix, one might call it our moral duty to at least try”

“the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!”- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“control of food is power, a basic truth we seem to have forgotten. If we want a free society - a democratic global village- it follows that we need a different food system: one characterised not by monopoly but connectivity”

“Living in more locally productive, interactive, societies would make us healthier and fitter. The creation of local farms and gardens would result in more beautiful, greener environments, which would be beneficial to our wellbeing. We’d be less worried about climate change and would live in a fairer world, something also known to be central to happiness. Last but not least, we would regain some of the agency over our lives that the digital era has progressively eroded... Gardening is the opposite of consumerism: one must be active, engaged, patient, observant, empathetic, and, above all, in synch with nature”

“We live in perplexing, perilous, exhilarating times that call for bold ideas and steady heads. Extraordinary new technologies will undoubtedly bring us remarkable capacities in the future, but without similarly daring and innovative social, economic and spatial evolution, they will be worse than useless. It is in this context that food has so much to offer. No matter how thrilling and distracting our digital lives become, food can keep up grounded, reminding us that our fate will always depend on nature, and on how we share it. The way we eat in the future will not only share our fate, but that of every other species.”

“Foraging, it’s becoming clear to me, is more than just a way of getting some free food; it’s a state of mind. We humans are natural gatherers, Robin explains: our ancestors foraged all year round, knowing that, once they had harvested one crop, others would come into season. Following natures’ fruitfulness created an ‘abundance mindset’ in them, while farming, which often relies on one crop that might easily fail, engenders a fear of scarcity.”

“The millions of familiar creatures with which we coexist or unknown critters that may vanish before we ever clock their existence aren’t just handy workers or essential links in the food chain; they are our greatest repository of intelligence about how to live on earth, collated over almost four billion years. All our foods and medicines come from nature and nobody knows what may yet be out there; chemicals extracted from sea slugs, for example, are currently being tested as a potential cure for cancer. Biodiversity matters because it represents an interconnectivity we don’t fully understand.”

“Our bodies contain some 100 trillion of them (microbes), the cells of which outnumber our own by at least three to one. With statistics like that, it’s fair to wonder just how human we really are”

“Microbes are ubiquitous, so what are they actually doing? The answer is that they’re doing just the same as you and me: trying to thrive in a complex, competitive world. They’ve been at it far longer than us too: the first earthly life forms, microbes are thought to have emerged around 3.85 billion years ago, when charged sea particles swallowed some mineral ‘soup’ belched forth by a hydrothermal vent (a volcanic fissure in the ocean floor) to form single-celled bodies known as archer. By eating the world’s first meal, therefore, archaeologist, our common ancestors, kick-started life on earth, using chemical energy to process carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen to form amino acids, the building blocks of life. For a billion years or so, archaea ruled on our acidic, sulphurous planet, but around 2.7 billion years ago, some deadly rivals came on the scene. Cynobacteria, or blue-green algae, began proliferating in the oceans, using solar energy to absorb hydrogen from water, expelling oxygen as waste. This process- a primal form of photosynthesis- transformed our planet. A highly promiscuous element, oxygen combined with everything in sight, not least with iron to form the world’s first rust belts. For the archaea, this spelled catastrophe: since oxygen is a deadly poison to them, our most distant ancestors either died or disappeared underground. Their exile proved permanent: when the oceans became saturated with oxygen, the gas began leaking into the air to create the Great Oxygenation Event, the basis of our modern atmosphere. Once oxygen levels had stabilised at 21 pert cent around 0.9 billion years ago, the stage was set for complex life to evolve, and for animals like us to walk with earth”

“For the industrialists, nature is split into two halves, a domestic part, that we should exploit to it’s limits, and a wild one that we should leave well alone. Access to wilderness, for this group, is a luxury we can no longer afford. For the organic school, on the other hand, nature is a continuum whose wild and domestic parts intermingle. Closeness to wildness is part of this group’s aim, not least be incorporating more of it into farming. Lurking beneath this philosophical divide, you may perceive, lies another one, over the question of whether humans are capable of looking after nature. While the industrialists argue that we can’t be trusted and must therefore withdraw from the wilderness, the organicists contend that greater engagement with the natural world fosters better behaviour.”

“The French anthropologist Philippe Descola argues that first we need to recognise that our very concept of nature is a cultural construct. This is hard for us to accept in the West, says Descola, since we believe that we view nature with objective, scientific clarify, which in turn makes us see nature and culture as mutually exclusive opposites. Nature, for us, is a sort of neutral backdrop against which various cultures play out. This view led early-modern European voyagers to dismiss indigenous peoples who invested nature with spirits, as mere savages mired in so much mumbo-jumbo. The idea that their own view of nature, with its abstract space and machine-animals, might itself be cultural never occurred to them.”

“When we are in the forest, said Emerson, we experience the ‘occult relation between man and the vegetable’ so regaining the wonder of childhood that is the basis of ‘all reason and faith.’ Nature, in summary, was the antidote to civilisation. ‘To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company,’ Emerson declared, ‘nature is medicinal”

“By worshipping wilderness at the expense of domestic nature, Cronon argued, American Romanticism induced a form of self-loathing that made people evade responsibility for the lives they really led. While few people would disagree with the need to preserve wilderness, Cronon said, it is vital that we recognise that all landscapes form a continuum that is our home. Only when we can marvel at a humble shrub in a garden as we do a giant redwood in the forest will we have understood where our true place in nature lies. Thoreau was right: wildness (as distinct from wilderness) is the preservation of the world, yet we don’t have to hike to high in the sierra to find it, since it is all around us, in our cities, parks, homes, gardens and even in our own bodies”

“our task at this pivotal moment in our evolution is not just to reconcile ourselves with nature or to save the world by carving it up like some colossal pie, but to recognise ourselves as creatures of the wild. In an age of rampant urbanisation and technical mastery, this may seem like a strange way to describe ourselves, yet that is the whole point. What our reawakened sense of deep connection with nature shows us, above all, is just how deadly the deal we have struck with it really is. If we are to have any chance of thriving in the future, we need to recalibrate that deal, and fast. How then might we eat, live and think like creatures of the wild? Most obviously, it means respecting and preserving the world’s great wildernesses, which in turn means knowing what not to eat. Obliterating rainforest for palm oil or bottom-trawling the seabed for fish (the underwater equivalent of dragging a 30-tonne, 150-metre iron bar across the countryside) are simply not behaviours of civilised beings”.

“The wild berries the Hadza eat, for instance, have between ten and a hundred times the nutritional content of blueberries bought from Also or Asda. Instead of breeding such wildness out of plants in order to achieve higher yields, therefore, we might start farming in such a way to preserve their wildness”

“One US programme called Coping with Cancer found that, when they were given the necessary support to consider their options, many patients chose to let death run its course rather than fight it, giving up treatments and entering a hospice earlier. As a result, says Gawande, they ‘suffered less, were physically more capable and better able for long periods to interact with others. In addition, six months after these patients died, their family members were markedly less likely to experience persistent major depression....patients who received palliative care early in their treatment not only tended to suffer less at the end of their lives, but also lived on average 25 per cent longer. As Gawande remarks such a finding seems ‘almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer’ ”

“Indigenous cultures generally had two essential measures of time: the cosmic rhythms of seasons and days and those associated with specific events such as harvesting and milling or domestic tasks such a making bread. Activities often stood for time itself. In Madagascar, for example, ‘rice cooking’ meant half an hour, ‘maize roasting’ fifteen minutes and ‘the frying of a locust’ a brief moment in similar to our ‘twinkling of an eye’.”

“as the anthropologist E.E Evans-Pritchard explained: The Nuer have no expression equivalent to ‘time’ in our language, and they cannot, therefore, speak of time as though it were something that passes, can be wasted, saved and so forth. I do not think that they ever experience the same feeling of fighting against time or of having to coordinate activities with an abstract passage of time, their points of reference are mainly the activities themselves, which are of a leisurely character’ ”

“Western society is arguably the least stoical in history; our comfortable, risk-averse consumerist culture is aimed, after all, at removing all pain, suffering or effort (even that needed to peel a potato) from our lives, and thus any need for forbearance. Yet, as we have seen, the attempt to edit out such exertions and negatives hasn’t made us any happier. On the contrary, the expectation of a pain-free, serene existence merely prevents us from taking much pleasure in the comforts we enjoy. When did you last sigh in gratitude when you turned on a tap or flushed the loo? We’ve forgotten the cushion of convenience upon which our lives rest, and the fact that pain and effort are necessary conjuncts to joy and fulfilment”

“he suggests we accept the absurdity of our condition and learn to laugh at it. One way of doing this, he suggests, is to recognise that our human era is a mere ‘scintilla of geological time’ that in cosmic terms is insignificant. ‘From the point of view of the entropy at the end of the universe,’ he asks, ‘who cares about the Anthropocene?’ Climate change is a catastrophe, says Morton, but it is only the latest of a series of ‘nested catastrophes’ stretching back in time. It comes after the Ice Age, which succeeded the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, which followed the Great Oxygenation Event, the formation of the moon, and, back at the start of time itself, the Big Bang. All these events are still playing out, our planet moves in the Big Bang’s aftermath, just as the air we breathe is made by the ongoing Great Oxygenation Event. Time is a series of nested events that form one long, ongoing present. It isn’t linear, therefore it’s concentric. Morton’s suggestion echoes Seneca’s advice that we imagine ourselves in the ‘vast space of time’s abyss’. Playing with our sense of time can help us accept our own mortality and the eventual demise of our species”

“Under certain circumstances -performing music, climbing a mountain or building a ship in a bottle-time can seem to stand still. This is what, as we have seen, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flows- the secular counterpart to meditation. Time stands still when we’re engaged. Rather than measure out our days against a ticking clock, therefore, we’re better off pottering in the garden, painting a picture, or baking a cake. ‘But’ you might objects, ‘what about all the stuff we’ve got to do? What about work?’ That, of course, is precisely what Schumacher was trying to address when he railed against the arbitrary temporal divisions of capitalism. When work is meaningful- when it is task-oriented and social- it helps us transcend time, because it engages us. For this reason, time spent at home, where non-economic work such as cooking and gardening takes places, can be a haven of creative engagement. Because it lies outside the cash economy, domestic life transcends commodified time.”

“the expansion of leisure likely to result from the robotisation of work could be (so) problematic. As creatures of late capitalism, few of us have the skills to deal with endless leisure -after work, most of us spend our time consuming the rewards of our labour in the form of ready-cooked meals, shopping and entertainment. Yet no amount of consumption can make up for a meaningless life. In order to flourish, we need to feel useful, which means that we need to perform helpful tasks and create things.”

“Happiness is ephemeral; like time, it is not a commodity. If we are to find happiness, it follows that we must reset our temporal horizons: find some way of reconciling human and cosmic time. And I believe that one thing that can help us do this is staring up at us from our plates. The substance that connects us to one another and to our world, food is the ultimate timekeeper. The product of living, breathing creatures that evolved to the rhythm of tides and seasons, it is the daily dose of biochemical energy that fills our bodies with life. It is also the focus of the single ritual that every one of us still performs. It is this last aspect of food -its ritual power- that is key to all the rest, since, if we really want to learn to live in time, ritual is what we need. Ritual, as Mircea Eliade explained in The Sacred and the Profane, is human life experienced between two orders of time. The momentary performance of saying Mass, founding a building, blessing a baby, carving a joint, saying grace of singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is an act that carries all other previous such actions within itself: it is the living embodiment of nested time. Before technology allowed humans to travel beyond the speed of sound or ping dinner invites off satellites, ritual was the means by which our ancestors transcended time. By combining the secular and sacred temporal orders- for example making a sacrifice before sharing a meal- rituals were the means by which people situated themselves in time. When we repeat such acts from our distant past, we unify the present with a vaster, cosmic order.”

#book

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wandering-dracagian · 4 years

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Okay so- I literally spent a solid 10 minutes just infodumping about my science fantasy concept on how magic dragons could work and I- I’m actually really proud of it?

Basically the concept is that like- a long while ago there was a flower species that, when consumed, processed, and regurgitated, could allow the consumer to produce a substance that, when interacting with the air in its purest form, creates different forms of magic. There was a period in time where this was fairly common, dragons (everyone is a quadrupedal and sentient dragon here) were doing magic this way.

Out of nowhere, a mutation occured where the organ lining (There was a specialized organ for processing the flower) was able to withstand it without the consumer suffering from indigestion.

This would then lead to it mutating again to become capable of producing the chemical needed for magic on its own!

So basically, the reason for its existence was to protect these dragons, who usually were physically defenseless (no scales, spikes, or firebreath) from dangers (hunted for awhile before they ended up killing the predators with the magic and became the dominant species).

In this one city, there was a period in time where magic users were actually murdered on sight (Magic would be seen being performed from a young age) until barely anyone was left. The plant that produced the magic was destroyed, leading to a near-extinction of magic in that area. Mutations occured where the chemicals grew stronger, more controlled, able to be hidden easily. It soon evolved to become cloaked from dragons with no magical abilities as a defense mechanism.

Physical spells (Spells that are visible to everyone and affect someone else physically) are done by movements of the hands. Due to their production of the chemical, they can effectively “sweat” out the chemical and use it to create the effects you see. It interacts with the air depending on the minute differences in chemical structure and can produce things such as electricity, sparks/embers, water, bursts of fire, lightning, and other physically affective spells.

Non-physical spells (Shields, invisibility spells, local weather-altering, sound acuity, night vision, etc.) can’t be seen by non-magical users, but only by magical ones. This is due to them being able to detect the magic through subtle pits on their faces the size of pores that absorb the chemicals, allowing them to see it happening easily. Non-magical creatures lack this structure, making it hidden.

Runes are created to activate non-physical spells. They basically manipulate the environment to make the spells. They produce the chemical, carve or draw the rune, inject the magic into it, pat it, and it creates the spell and covers up the destroyed area with the surroundings again to hide it.

Staffs exist too! They’re injected with the chemical, allowing them to create both runes in the air and also direct/concentrate the physical magic. They’re rare and not used as often due to being pretty useless. They can produce both physical and non-physical magic but have a limited supply of it due to the limited supply of the chemical inside it.

Clothing articles can be blessed or cursed and injected with magic to have desired effects. This can include bursts of strength caused by extra magic that encourages the production of adrenaline and energy-producing chemicals, along with different abilities of multiple kinds. They’re usually costly and rare, usually being normal clothing articles (optional items) with no magical effects being the norm.

Modeled after schizophrenia, it affects 1/10,000 people, or about 1% of the population. Unlike most people’s beliefs, magic can’t actually produce any natural resources such as metals of any kind, crystals, etc. It can only make things out of the interaction of the chemical structure with the air, water, or surrounding foliage.

Firebreath is a rare mutation created by the magical users sometimes. Unlike normal magic users, firebreathers must consume flammable tinder in order to produce the flames, usually needed even in normal fire-producing users.

Purely genetic, it has a 10% chance of being passed down by a first degree relative and a lower chance in each generation. Identical twins have a 50% chance of passing.

In the specific town where the roleplay (this was born through a roleplay with close friends!) takes place, there’s EXTREME prejudice against magic users due to the old history. They’re seen as dangerous and aggressive tricksters malicious and cruel. This has lead to magic users either suppressing their abilities in public or running off to communities with only magic users.

With magic, it’s either you do or you don’t have magic. There isn’t any way to have partial magical abilities since the chemicals produced are fairly similar. It’s either slightly weaker (less production) or strong (more concentrated production that leads to an overuse of magic). Having too much produced magical chemicals actually causes physical symptoms. The chemicals are produced quicker when the organ is empty, then slows down as it reaches 50% capacity (the required magic content is 5% to make most regular spells and 10% for huge spells). Since it’s so concentrated, less of the chemical is needed to produce magic.

Dragons are the only top species on the planet, humans not existing after they started to hunt them, leading to the development of magic in the first place. The tech of the planet is advanced, rarely having electronic devices, but not advanced enough to have space travel.

This is a mixture of sci-fi and fantasy if you couldn’t tell haha.

Either way! That’s my grand idea/history for science fantasy from a roleplay!

Any suggestions?

#Magic #Science fantasy #Sci-fi #Fantasy #Dragon #Dragons #Writing #Stories #History #Lore

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engineeringecosystems · 4 years

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One mussel, two mussels, brown mussels, blue mussels

Walking through a meadow calling the plants by name is like entering a room of friends instead of strangers. -John Hildebrand

Taxonomy is the science of classifying organisms based on their shared characteristics. Although we probably started purposefully grouping things together around the same time that we developed language, the first physical record of classification dates to around 3000BC in China, with the Father of Chinese medicine, Emperor Shen Nung. It wasn’t until the 1700′s when a Swedish botanist came along and developed the system of classification that we use today. Known as the “father of modern taxonomy”, Carolus Linnaeus dedicated his career to classifying plants and animals (and minerals). Carl’s catalogue was a continuous piece of work, constantly being added to and revised as he identified and classified new organisms. In 1758 Carl published the 10th edition of his massive taxonomic collection in a book titled Systema Naturae - and I mean truly massive, by its 13th edition it was 3000 pages long!

With the introduction of animals, the 10th edition of Systema Naturae is widely accepted as the start to “modern” taxonomy. Carl classified organisms into a hierarchy - which we know as the Tree of Life. From trunk to leaf, least to most exclusive, it goes: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species. Carl also developed and popularized the use of binomial nomenclature which shortened long-winded Latin names down to two terms, the first denoting the genus and the latter the species. However, circumstances of the time heavily influenced Carl to describe the world as created by God which led him to classify organisms based on morphological features, such as the shape, size and placement of bones in a skeleton. This was very helpful at the time because until then we thought whales were fish! But, as technology has progressed, especially in the field of genetics, we began to learn that just because two organisms look alike or behave in a similar manner doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the same organism, or even closely related, if at all. This, of course, led to a reorganization of Carl’s work (and occasionally to the dismay of stubborn scientists). If you’re keen to learn more about Carl or taxonomy check out this video.

As useful as it is, identifying and classifying organisms can get a bit overwhelming, especially when everything looks the same (yeah, I’m talking about you mussels!). I am going to do my best to break this post down into bite sized pieces. So, without further ado, lets classify some mussels.

I figured it’s probably best to start with the common blue mussel, Mytilus edulis (credit: British Antarctic Survey), first described by Carl in 1758.

Quick shell fact: although all Mytilus edulis, the shells above are from high to low latitudes (left to right) and show subtle morphological changes due to environmental factors like temperature and salinity.

Despite looking like a rock (there, I said it first so you don’t have to feel bad), Mytilus edulis is an animal, and therefore in the kingdom Animalia. Like many members of the phylum Mollusca, from squids to snails, Mytilus edulis has a radula, a mouthy bit that creates a current drawing in water and food, a fleshy covering that holds their body together called a mantle, and a shell made mostly of calcium carbonate. Mytilus edulis has two shells, or valves, which are held together by a strong muscle called a foot (which also makes them so dang hard to open and eat), situating it among others like clams, scallops and oysters, in the class Bivalvia. We are first introduced to the “true” mussels in the order Mytilida, which are characterized by having long asymmetrical shells covered by a thick, adherent layer of “skin” called the periostracum; they attach themselves to solid substrate, like rocks, rope, or piers, using a secreted bundle of filaments, referred to as a byssus or byssal threads. The only extant (not extinct) family in this order is the family Mytilidae which contains some 52 genera. One of these is the genus Mytilus which contains most of the edible marine mussels. Finally, we arrive at our friend the common blue mussel or the Atlantic blue mussel, known by its species name Mytilus edulis.

And there you go.

Mytilus edulis occupies the coasts of the North Atlantic, including the United States and Canada, as well as France and the British Isles across the pond. When its range overlaps with others in its genus, like Mytilus galloprovincialis in the Mediterranean or Mytilus trossulus in the northern parts of the North Atlantic, Mytilus edulis will sometimes form a complex and hybridize with them.

Other members of the genus Mytilus include:

Mytilus californianus, the California mussel (credit: Sharon Mollerus)

Mytilus coruscus, the Korean or hard-shelled mussel (credit: Conchology, Inc.)

Mytilus galloprovincialis, the Mediterranean mussel (credit: Andrew Butko)

Mytilus planulatus, the Australian blue mussel (credit: Javier Couper)

Mytilus platensis or chilensis, the Chilean blue mussel (credit Schnecken & Muscheln)

and Mytilus trossulus, the bay or foolish mussel (credit: Conchology, Inc. ).

I imagine many of you are looking at these mussels and thinking, “yeahhh uhhh Matt, they all look like the same”. Maybe with this face

(or maybe even this one).

But stay with me.

You’re right, they do look very similar, which is why classification can be troublesome when it’s based off how an organism looks. Classification based off morphological features can be useful, but up to a point, and may be useless at finer-species level-scales. But advances in science and technology have led us into the new age of taxonomy - classification based on genetic sequencing, using a technique called Polymerase Chain Reaction or PCR. Like reading a recipe, scientists can sequence the genome of an organism and reveal hidden secrets like the evolutionary age of an organism, which can help us construct a more accurate representation of the Tree of Life. Along with advancements like data storage, genetic sequencing has revolutionized the way we classify organisms. And it’s showed us that there is in fact a difference (albeit small) between the members of the genus Mytilus.

I hope you learned a lot this week! I really enjoyed putting this post together, even though I didn’t cover all the mussels that I wanted to. And I know I promised y'all last week that we would visit the some of the deepest parts of the ocean and we will! Next week will be less lecture and more *let me show you all the pictures of my children that you didn’t ask to see*. Until then, try to be a little less selfish and more shellfish. Cheers, y’all!

#mussels #linnaeus #conservation #ecosystem engineers #engineering ecosystems

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harrelltut · 6 years

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☥ ScorpioSunScorpioMoon Say I Electrophysiologically [Spiritually] Fear nothin’ on earth… ‘cause I BEE A HIGHLY ARROGANT [HA = HARRELL] Black Scorpion KING wit’ A Triple 999 [TORTUROUS] Death Sting of Venomous Anger I Alkhemically Intermix [A.I.] within your fragile mortal bodies of artificial genetic blood substances I Meditatively Encoded [ME = U.S. Michael Harrell = TUT = JAH] II permanently inflame your internal tissues & organs of prerecorded time release combustion energies ☥

#U.S. Michael Harrell #ScorpioSunScorpioMoon #ScorpioSunScorpioMoon Say I Electrophysiologically [Spiritually] Fear nothin’ on earth #I BEE A HIGHLY ARROGANT [HA = HARRELL] Black Scorpion KING wit’ A Triple 999 [TORTUROUS] Death Sting of Venomous Anger #your fragile mortal bodies of artificial genetic blood substances #I'mma permanently inflame your internal mortal tissues & organs of prerecorded time release combustion energies #Aboriginal Black American Occult Illuminati of Congo African [CA] Astrophysics from Lost Atlantis [L.A.]#U.S. Double Black White House Illuminati #Alpha Draconis Mama of Ursa [MU] Major Magick #Primordial Black Draconian Gods of MARS #Hidden Genetic Extinction Sciences #Apocalyptic Genetic Extinction [AGE] Constitution of Atlantis [CA]#I BEE HIGHLY Official… U.S. MU:13 Illuminati [Underworld Shadow Government] from Lost Atlantis [L.A.]

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the-enemy-of-satan · 4 years

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From khalifa of Allah over the worlds to Xi Jinping president of China

Imam Nasser Mohammad Al-Yemeni

29 - Ramadan - 1441 AH

22 - 05 - 2020 AD

12:20 pm

(According to the official time of [Mecca] mother of towns)

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From khalifa of Allah over the worlds to Xi Jinping president of China

..In the name of Allah the All Merciful, the Most Merciful, and peace be upon the messengers, and praise be to Allah Lord of the worlds, after this

O my beloved best foremost supporters in various regions of the human countries, listen and comprehend that for each incident there is a speech, let the focus be only exclusively over the corona explanatory-statements and the focus on concentrated form at these days over publishing the explanatory-statement which we wrote it by the title: (Coronavirus and the decisive explanatory-statement, and it is not a joke..), title of the statement has ended, you should know the sure knowledge that therein a healing to what's in the chests, (also in it) guidance and mercy for the believers, and Allah is witness and guardian over what I say, only who is arrogant after the truth got cleared to him then do not grieve over the arrogant criminal people. Indeed, away to the unjust people who if the true path to their Lord has cleared to them they do not take it as a way out of arrogance and conceitedness and they will soon say: let there be a strong shelter, then they will pray for extinction, and by no means and can never find a loyal friend nor a supporter beside Allah to remove His chastisement away from them while they are haughty above the global caller to Allah to follow His book the grand Quran, a mercy for the worlds, so whoever refused Allah’s mercy because of arrogance against Allah’s khalifa and His servant the Imam Mahdi Nasser Mohammad Al-Yemeni the gran khalifa of Allah in the Book; it is then he has the severest chastisement from Allah; how can they get arrogant against khalifa of Allah? Such ones will befall them a share of chastisement, who are conceited by their arrogance while with Allah they are humiliated-trifle have no weight. Confirming with the word of Allah the Most High: {Is he who was dead, then We raised him to life and made for him a light by which he walks among the people, as him whose likeness is that of one in darkness from where he can not come forth? Thus their doings are made fair-seeming to the disbelievers.(122) and as that We have made in every town the leaders of its guilty ones, that they may make plans therein. And they plan not but against themselves, and they perceive not.(123) And when a message comes to them they say: We will not believe till we are given the like of that which Allah’s messengers are given. Allah best knows where to place His message. Humiliation from Allah and severe chastisement will surely befall the guilty for their planning.(124) }Truthful Allah the Great [Al-An`ãm] 6:122-124

{ أَوَمَن كَانَ مَيْتًا فَأَحْيَيْنَاهُ وَجَعَلْنَا لَهُ نُورًا يَمْشِي بِهِ فِي النَّاسِ كَمَن مَّثَلُهُ فِي الظُّلُمَاتِ لَيْسَ بِخَارِجٍ مِّنْهَا ۚ كَذَٰلِكَ زُيِّنَ لِلْكَافِرِينَ مَا كَانُوا يَعْمَلُونَ ﴿١٢٢﴾ وَكَذَٰلِكَ جَعَلْنَا فِي كُلِّ قَرْيَةٍ أَكَابِرَ مُجْرِمِيهَا لِيَمْكُرُوا فِيهَا ۖ وَمَا يَمْكُرُونَ إِلَّا بِأَنفُسِهِمْ وَمَا يَشْعُرُونَ ﴿١٢٣﴾ وَإِذَا جَاءَتْهُمْ آيَةٌ قَالُوا لَن نُّؤْمِنَ حَتَّىٰ نُؤْتَىٰ مِثْلَ مَا أُوتِيَ رُسُلُ اللَّهِ ۘ اللَّهُ أَعْلَمُ حَيْثُ يَجْعَلُ رِسَالَتَهُ ۗ سَيُصِيبُ الَّذِينَ أَجْرَمُوا صَغَارٌ عِندَ اللَّهِ وَعَذَابٌ شَدِيدٌ بِمَا كَانُوا يَمْكُرُونَ ﴿١٢٤﴾ } صدق الله العظيم [ الأنعام ].

Allah’s hidden soldiers are still launching their global war continuing night and day for twenty-four hours without rest, and it does not get weak, surely it is from His hidden soldiers, unseen with the naked eye for its small size, and it's what you call it coronavirus, yet it is not a corona, only has deceived them initially the outer form has similarity with the known viruses that they have previously of which they know, but it’s genes and its behavior is different altogether, but its first name corona as they thought initially is being issued in the entire means of media and by the tongues (languages) of the world; [Corona] although it is completely different than the entire viruses, and only got similar with it formerly initially yet it differed genetically. In fact; by Allah Who there is no God other than Him, the One, the Subduer, indeed it is a living organism broken apart and been split, yet what’s coming next is calamitous, most bitter and a wide spread evil, and the entire physicians of humans will turn their backs (fleeing).

And it is a living organism new for humans and breaking the entire scientific medical physics, and it will indeed make humans’ science about what concerns scientific medical physics (0) zero at the left for the fact they originally do not compass knowledge about it.

But the upcoming strong virus is the most powerful and the strongest impact in chastisement lo and behold they will despair from it, and it is not only at the level of the respiratory system, in fact there is no room for a comparison between covid 19 viruses and the upcoming strong virus — O Xi Jinping president of China — O who claim that they controlled chastisement of Allah Lord of the world, glory be to Him the Exalted most High beyond measure, yet they know that they are indeed liars

I announce to the atheists in china and criminal leaders of humans of their ilk altogether, and the entire unjust mischief makers, — a new species of viruses which is the strong striking virus worst of the viruses and the most impact and the strongest in sabotaging; in fact there is no room for a comparison between it and what you call it covid 19, it is the one that the scientists of medicine will turn their backs in flight from it and the army of physicians of humans would not return back, being defeated from their forefathers then the global health organization would collapse their high structure is being vacant and they could never avail a thing away from you from Allah’s chastisement. In fact, by no means and they could never be able to help you nor help themselves.

Verily, listen, comprehend and understand to what I will say to you: Indeed, there is a Great Leader for these recent viruses you are not of His proportion nor you are equivalent to Him and His tiniest soldiers receive orders directly by revelations from Allah, so they would do what they are commanded from source of operations for the Highest Leader, that is your Most High Lord in the kingdom — reveals directly to His tiny soldiers what to do so they would do what they are commanded and He is with it by words of His absolute-ability — glory be to him, that is Allah Lord of the worlds that you violate His sanctity (denying His existence) — O Xi Jinping the Chinese president who declared war against Allah, His religion, His Quran and the Muslim Chinese openly (in broad) daylight against the Muslims in China and shut-down Allah’s Houses (of worship) in China. In fact, he prohibited the Muslims to even pray in their houses and took Allah’s Book the grand Quran and burned Allah’s Book the grand Quran as transgression and oppression.

You must listen and comprehend what will I say it with Truth: O you the Chinese president Xi Jinping, I swear by Allah the Great, surely you will open houses of Allah while you are of the humiliated-trifle ones also the entire those who wronged themselves that shut-down Allah’s houses (of worship) with the pretense of prevention they will definitely open it and to it they will escape, and we surely truthful, and you surely will know.

Anyway, — O community of best foremost supporters from various regions, let the focus be accomplished exclusively on publishing three explanatory-statements at the first level, the explanatory-statement that we wrote it by its title that follows: (Coronavirus and the decisive explanatory-statement, and it is not a joke..), title of the explanatory-statement has ended. You must know the sure knowledge that there is in it a healing to what’s in the chests, guidance, and mercy for the believers. And peace be upon the messengers, and praise be to Allah Lord of the worlds.

.Allah’s servant and His khalifa; the Imam Mahdi Nasser Mohammad Al-Yemeni

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