If you want to see me being lot more vocal about politics, check @pandAcab.
For the ponies, go to @airheadandco.
I'm queer of gender (any pronouns) and sexuality, Black, vegan, school dropout, an aspiring writer translator and scenarist, and level 35 daydreamer.
You can call me Panda.
On Saturday I hung out with my 84-year-old ecologist great uncle and he stopped in mid-conversation (abt the return of the whooping crane) and very seriously told me that “you can go one of two ways, as a naturalist”; either you keep sight of the hopeful possibilities, or you don’t. I’m one of nature’s wretched little pessimists but when an old ecologist literally holds your hands in his and tells you, “don’t despair,” you have to try, I feel.
I’m immune to a lot of the “hopepunk” narratives about ecology but…
The Karner Blue butterfly was extirpated from Canada the year before I was born. He donated to one of the projects to bring it back for years, and even though the project he was working on fizzled out, I told him about the branch in Toronto, still going strong. They save every lupine seed they can harvest and germinate them carefully so that in 20, 30, 40 years we might have enough habitat to bring the Blues back. He was part of the first wave of that effort.
Fuck!!!! What do you do with that kind of care? You have to at least try to believe that better things are possible!
Okay something that bothers me is the fact physics is seen as the more prestigious of the three main sciences, with biology at the bottom and chemistry in the middle. Like. I doubt most people could name a famous biologist, but they could name 5 famous physicists. Why are Albert Einstein and Stephen hawking household names but Norman Borlaug and Jonas Salk aren’t?
Not to dismiss the accomplishments of Einstein or Hawking, or their genius, but their actual tangible contributions to society have been miniscule compared to that of Borlaug or Salk who have each saved LITERALLY hundreds of millions, if not billions, of lives each. Half the food on your plate was probably grown thanks to Borlaug and Salk is the reason half your siblings didn’t die of polio as a kid.
Sure Einsteins theory of relatively is important for modern satellite communications but really though how can it compare?
This is coming from someone who studied physics. I love physics, and years ago when i was at uni I looked down at biology and so did everyone else studying physics. And I know others did too. Retroactively of course I know this was so very wrong.
If society as a whole started treating biology with more respect then maybe more students would go into that field. If we had rockstars of medicine and agricultural science that were household names rather than just physicists? think of how many more lives could be saved, how many more lives could be improved.
I’m not saying physics isn’t important, and more scientists of any kind is always good, but proportionally I think societies priorities are a little skewd.
I think it’s because physocs explictly serves the current paradigm of progress above anything else and dominion over our environment. It’s not like the other two don’t it’s just “mastering the atom” is way more empowering than “surviving the plague”.
My bf studied japanese in high school and often says “gambate!” (not sure of spelling) to be like. encouraging. I think it means roughly “let’s get this bread.” However, as someone who took spanish in high school, it always sounds like a command to me. And as near as I can tell, in spanish it would mean “go shrimp yourself.”
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I’m definitely not a fluent speaker, so I could be wrong, but here’s how I got there:
In Spanish, some (informal, I think?) commands are formed by dropping the “r” from the end of an infinitive verb. (Every infinitive verb in Spanish ends in r.) For example, “to run” is “correr.” If you want to tell someone to run, it’s “corre.” If you want to tell someone to do something to something/someone, you append a little pronoun thing to the end. From “besar” (to kiss) we get “bésame” (kiss me). From “cocinar” (to cook) we get “cocínalo” (cook it). From “callar” (to silence) we get “cállate” (silence yourself/shut up).
So, “gambate” immediately reminds me of “cállate,” which is a rude command. It would be formed from the verb “gambar” and the second person object “te” for “you/yourself.” But “gambar” isn’t a word in Spanish. However, “gamba” is a word. It means “shrimp.” So while it isn’t technically grammatically correct, in the same way we “verb” nouns in English, the noun “gamba” is being used in the place of a verb here. “Gambate” (or more properly “gámbate” to maintain the correct stress for both the Spanish and Japanese). “Go shrimp yourself.”
Native spanish speaker. You’re quite right about your linguistics here, and spanish speakers love to make up new words by conjugating existing words (at the very least, my parents do)
My confusion stemmed from never having heard the word gamba before. To my knowledge the word for shrimp is camarón
So i looked it up and apparently gamba actually means prawn. So it’s actually go prawn yourself
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