Hi there. My name is Luke Theuma, a 20 year old human from Malta going to school in Washington, DC. Cats, Programming, and good food are essential. Good poetry, podcasts, and long walks keep me sane. I reblog anything from good tv shows, to deliciously beautiful pictures, to sappy poetry. Feel free to reach out and chat, or just observe quietly from your screen.
If Ewan isn’t already banging on this guys door, wearing his own Obi-Wan costume and carrying his own light saber, ready to *go*, I will be very surprised.
He’s just going to show up on set and ask if they’re ready to start filming.
In 1972 biologists Colin Tayler and Graham Saayman were observing a group of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins in a South African aquarium. One of them, a 6-month-old calf named Dolly, began to seek their attention by pressing feathers, stones, seaweed, and fish skins against the glass of the viewing chamber. If they ignored her she swam off and returned with a different object.
At the end of one observation session, one of the investigators blew a cloud of cigarette smoke against the glass as Dolly was looking in. “The observer was astonished when the animal immediately swam off to its mother, returned and released a mouthful of milk which engulfed her head, giving much the same effect as had the cigarette smoke,” the biologists reported. “Dolly subsequently used this behaviour as a regular device to attract attention” from the scientists!
In 1992, a man named Wu Anai, near a Chinese village in Longyou County, based on a hunch, began to pump water out of a pond in his village. Anai believed the pond was not natural, nor was it infinitely deep as the local lore went, and he decided to prove it. He convinced some of his villagers and together they bought a water pump and began to siphon water out of the pond. After 17 days of pumping, the water level fell enough to reveal the flooded entrance to an ancient, man-made cave!
The cave has twenty-four rooms. There are pillars, staircases, and high ceilings over 30 meters (98 ft!) up. The work was done by humans, we know, because they left visible chisel marks in uniform bands of parallel groves. With over 30,000 square meters of space, all meticulously chiseled, this would have been a huge undertaking. Even if people were simply enlarging caves which already existed, it would still have required a lot of manpower working in a coordinated system for a long period of time.
Since the project would have been so large, it seems amazing that no record of it exists in China’s extensive written history. But there is not a word. Based on the cave alone, it is estimated to have been completed around 200 BCE, near the Qin Dynasty or Han Dynasties.
"The structures of a culture do not circumvent nor excuse self-evident injustice or inequity. The status quo is not sacred, not an altar to paint in rivers of blood. Tradition and habit are not sound arguments—"
