Octopus Are Wild!

The 'witch' who protected a village from genocide

Zura Karuhimbi had only her wits to protect the people she hid during the Rwandan genocide.

This s the obituary of Zura Karuhimbi, who may have been over 100 years old when she died and protected hundreds of people during the Rwandan genocide. 

She did it by pretending to have magic powers. 

Picture with me for a moment the sheer gall necessary to do this. An old woman, living alone, stuffs her tiny house with people running from militias. And when the militias show up at her door covers herself with irritating plants, so that when the militia try to manhandle her it ‘burns’ and proves her powers. 

We’ve lost a legend.

Raindrops, Flashcards, summaries, knitting and ginger tea.

The Royal Institution: Eugenia Cheng — “How to Think Like a Mathematician”

this morning NASA abandoned their mars rover Opportunity (aka Oppy) because it (she) got hit by a storm on Mars and it knocked her camera and wheels out and her last words to the team were “my battery is low and it is getting cold”. I know she’s a machine but I’m devastated. Oppy is the one who discovered water on Mars. RIP oppy ily space baby

Alejandro Guijarro photographs the chalkboards of some of the brightest minds in quantum physics for his continuing series Momentum. He went to research facilities like CERN and many of the top universities in the world to find them.

No. 448

A new geometric design every day

The Fab Five travel through time, space, and genre to help Professor Flitwick get his groove back

It’s disturbing how often we go into the biographies of famous and revered men and find: he was a serial cheater; he was a sexual predator; he abused his wife and abandoned his children; or even simply–he never did an ounce of domestic labor, and relied on the servitude of the women around him to support his enlightened endeavors. These are kind of viewed as unfortunate blemishes on the oeuvre of an otherwise great man…“acceptable signs of wear,” so that we will still buy and endorse the product with no remorse. Now I’m all for learning great lessons no matter where they come from, and for learning about any person who has changed history, but we as a culture are right to have started a movement toward using these men’s behaviors to shine a critical light on their work. We should think critically about how these men’s misogyny, interpersonal callousness, and entitlement constitutes a fundamental flaw in their understanding of reality, and therefore a fundamental flaw in their overall thought. And we should keep asserting that women are not cannon fodder for men’s glories, and that we should not have an automatic “acceptable casualty” perspective when it comes to women.

Water calms me down for some reason