Today I learned

That unusual therapy is all very well—or perhaps not—but its existence among some pre-Columbian peoples of the Western Hemisphere and some post-Columbian peoples of eighteenth-century Europe does little to explain why the slang expression "blow smoke up [someone's] ass" emerged only in the 1940s or later. My guess is that the historical practice is only coincidentally related to the modern expression.

But if the weird medical practice isn't the source of the slang term, what is? I suspect that the answer is amplification: sometimes a slang term that has been around for a while acquires new cachet thanks to a snappy word replacement or an edgier extension. But if this simply a case of amplification, a couple of other phenomena are likely: (1) we might see alternative extended versions of "blow smoke"—especially in the period before "blow smoke up [someone's] ass" comes into frequent use—that use less startling words than "ass"; and (2) we ought to see "blow smoke up [someone's] ass" being used not just for "blowing smoke" definition 2 above, but for definitions 1 and 3 as well.

I never went as far as to defend Gwyneth Paltrow, but after her Hot Ones appearance I created a post (which I will link in the comments) where I suggested that she's done no more harm than male grifters and that the dislike of her as a person was primarily due to misogyny. That's before I learned about her promotion of these unproven "vampire facials". Now an unlicensed clinic performing this procedure has given at least three women HIV. You guys were right and I was wrong.

This is illustrated by getting elected on a platform of erasing student loan debt and then pretending that you can't do anything about it, or claiming to be against genocide and drawing out or never performing the process of pulling financial and political support for an ally who's committing genocide.

Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, manuscripts in Aramaic, Arabic, and Hebrew, the illuminated Christian Gospels, the Talmud, the Koran—with these forms and collections of writing came the expectation that a person would read them out loud and would, in a manner of speaking, conjure their reality. In his book A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel points out that Aramaic and Hebrew, the “primordial” languages of the Bible, draw no distinction between reading and speaking. The same word stands for both. Buddhism and Hinduism also give an exalted place to the spoken word.

The opening words of The Odyssey—“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story”—make this clear: The storyteller is acknowledging at the start that the tale he tells is not his own, and that he hopes for divine assistance in telling it well.

I think it is pretty interesting that people engaged with reading this way. The author of this article notes that it becomes a living story. This also had the benefit of reaching persons that could not read. I wonder if the content was remembered more vividly through both seeing and hearing the words.

Men’s buttons are on the right to make it easy to do up with one hand for right-handed people.

When buttons were invented, only the wealthy wore them. Wealthy women had maids who would do the buttons up for them, and so the buttons are on the left so that they are easier for someone facing you to do up.

This forum answer included these cool graphs and a good explanation.

https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/12824/how-long-does-a-sunrise-or-sunset-take/13053#13053

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2879916

TL;DR for the title:

Employees [from this investigation] can be seen removing the intestines of dead, disease-infected piglets and mixing them with piglet feces in a blender — a mixture to be fed to the adult breeding pigs — causing one worker to gag.

The practice, called “feedback,” is common in the pork business (or “controlled oral exposure” in industry jargon).

The article itself goes into more depth about all the horrific things in the pork industry such as these

The pork industry has pushed pigs to their biological limits, leading to many bizarre practices beyond feedback, many of which are inhumane. To name one example recently in the news: There are horse farms that impregnate horses, extract their blood for a serum, abort their pregnancies, and then sell the serum to pig farms to induce puberty in young female pigs and produce larger litters. Holden Farms, like most pig breeding farms, confine pregnant pigs in gestation crates, cages so small they can’t turn around for practically their entire lives.

The Article is paywalled. Sorry for that

• There are no circulating copies of the album online and it cannot be commercially exploited until 2103, but it can be played at listening parties.

• It took about six years to record, with features from the entire Wu-Tang Clan, Redman, Cher, and even FC Barcelona soccer players and a Game of Thrones actress.

• The album is unique with only one physical copy in existence, making it the most expensive work of music ever sold.

• The album was bought by Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO, Martin Shkreli, for $2 million, who later lost it when his assets were seized following his conviction for securities fraud.

• In 2021, it was bought by PleasrDAO, a non-fungible token (NFT) collectors' group, for $4 million to cover Shkreli's debts. PleasrDAO hopes to make it more accessible within the confines of 'listening parties'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper-atmospheric_lightning

Lightning sprites literally look like something out of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and they're frankly horrifying! I can only imagine what ancient civilizations must have thought.

When a brandnew sub opens on another Lemmy instance, your instance doesn't know about it, thus you can't search for it from your own instance.

TIL how to "tell" my instance that this remote sub exists.

• Go to "Communities" in the Lemmy Web Interface
• Search for !community@instance.something. For example !todayilearned@lemmy.ml
• Now do another search for "todayilearned"
• Done. The sub is now searchable for everyone on your instance and you can subscribe to it.

mander.xyz is a pretty small instance devoted to science and nature communities. It's relatively tiny compared to lemmy.ml and beehaw.org. In order for a community to appear in the smaller instance's community list it must first be "fetched". To do this, you have to enter the full url for the community you want to fetch into the community search bar.

So for example, I was trying to find !nfl@lemmy.ml and it just wasn't coming up in the mander.xyz community list. I tried entering "nfl", "!nfl@lemmy.ml" into the search bar. I even navigated to https://mander.xyz/c/nfl@lemmy.ml which was giving me a 404 at the time but is now working after the fetch.

So if you're on a smaller instance and aren't seeing communities from larger instances, try entering the url of the community as it would be hosted from the larger instance. Hit enter to do a fetch, then try typing the name of the community again to execute the search.

PS: I had to do the same trick again on mander.xyz to find this community.