goddamnshinyrock:

final thesis submitted, and four days ‘til graduation!

my mother keeps anxiously asking if I’m done with everything and then getting worried and saying ‘but you ARE graduating right? we’re not flying out there for nothing?’ when I equivocate and I was about to be indignantly like ‘when have I EVER not graduated on time’ but then I remembered they totally did come down for my graduation from undergrad and I still had one class left to do that summer so I did not…. technically graduate for another few months….

weirdunicorn:

trichofishomania:

aquaristlifeforme:

Zoos prevent extinction. This is why I support zoos. This is why the world should support zoos.

Meme credit goes to the zookeepers at www.facebook.com/ZoosSavingSpecies
@zoossavingspecies

Good zoos save species!!!

This is the kind of thing I tell people when they go off on me being anti-captivity towards marine amusement parks. Zoos and “amusement” parks are totally different things.

Zoos help animals by having breeding programs like those mentioned above, marine parks harm animals by treating them like circus animals and forcing them to do tricks under incredibly stressful conditions and breeding for profit not for saving the species.

Know the difference.

Source: aquaristlifeforme

ventureonwilderseas:

“Geoffrey Pyke, scientific advisor to Lord Mountbatten during world war two, […] had two apparently brilliant ideas – both of which came too late. One, approved by Winston Churchill was for huge torpedo-proof ships built of ice and powdered wood, twice the size of the 81,000 ton liner Queen Mary, to neutralise the submarine menace. “Pyke reasoned . . that ice was a much better material for large ships than steel. Any breach in the ship could be quickly repaired by making more ice”. A prototype vessel was built in Canada. But by the time it was ready the Atlantic submarine menace was over.”

— source

Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago.  I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes.  The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.

Will it be the same in the future?  Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before?  Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd?  Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog). 

1889: Jerome K. Jerome predicts the future of the antique market with pinpoint accuracy.