‘the human body is perfect god doesnt make mistakes’ what about wisdom teeth then. huh. gonna let those bastards grow in and fuck up your jaw for god. didnt think so
also the exploding appendix
there’s an entire book about all the ways the human body is fucked up, but the highlights I remember are:
-The blood vessels for our rods and cones in our eyes don’t run behind them but rather in front of them. It’s like putting the power cables *over* a camera’s lens
-the nasal sinus cavities fucked up during evolution. when our skulls shortened, we went from having a straight shot from one end to the other to having basically a basin which can collect mucus, which then has the actual exit for the chamber at the top of it. this normally isn’t a problem bc cillia can work viscous mucus up it, but when we get sick and produce super watery mucus, it no longer works, which is why our noses get stuffed up.
the book is called Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. I recommend it.
Most mammals can’t get scurvy. They make their own Vitamin C. But in primates, the gene to make it is broken. Normally, when an important gene breaks, the organism dies and has no surviving descendants, but when it broke a few million years ago, our ancestors were living in a lush climate with lots of fruit and survived the failure just fine.
Then humans invented fire and clothing, and moved to colder climates where fresh food was only available part of the year, and scurvy was born.
And our reproduction, oh heavens. There are SO MANY WAYS that human reproduction is fucked up that simply DO NOT APPLY to other animals, even the our nearest relatives, the great apes. When a gorilla is giving birth, she finds a nice hiding place in the trees, squats down for like half an hour, and pushes out a baby. Humans, not so much. In fact, the outcomes of unassisted childbirth in humans are so poor that most anthropologists agree that we must have invented midwifery in some form before we became fully human.
most of my scars are from skin picking which is funny to me because it’s like anti-tragic symbolism. i’m so self destructive that my body has to keep putting child locks on all my wounds.
no lie, the second half of this post really helped me put a different perspective on my life and greatly the decreased the anxiety i have about my life to come
“Sleep heavily and know that I am here with you now. The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first and settles in as the gentle present.”
The srbs on the space shuttle burned a combination of ammonium perchlorate and powdered aluminum which burned to produce aluminum oxide, aluminum chloride, water vapor, and nitrogen gas (the first two aren’t particularly GOOD for the environment but they’re not as bad as CO2)
And the RS25 main engines (the ones on the back of the shuttle itself) just burned liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to form water vapor which is literally just water
So yeah I’d say this would actually be better for the environment than her private jet
I’m so glad that the whole “The N*ght Y*rb was taken care of off screen and only improvised about” idea that people were talking about was fulfilled with the absolutely wild off screen npcs. RIP Balthazar, I wish the best for his 6 month old parrots who will have to grow up in a world with only his shadow to take care of them.
i know that when a book describes dragons picking up their riders they probably mean scruffing them by the neck in their mouths like a kitten, but i always imagine something like this
