Fun Fact, thats, more or less, something that wealthy people in China and Japan did, they were called “musical floorboards.” Designed to squeak when stood upon. A person could make noise all the way down a corridor.
The residents and servants knew which floorboards made a sound and avoided them. But a burglar, or assassin didn’t. If you heard the creaking of floorboards, you knew danger was coming.
Even better, despite what movies may show, a lot of the old west was founded by Chinese immigrants, so there could have been carpenters around who knew how to make the musical floorboards!
In Japan these are called “Nightengale Floors,” which I love.
i mean that just sounds like a good excuse for a round of ‘the floor is lava’ tbh
Catch me scaring the shit out of someone who pissed me off by purposefully stepping on the musical floorboards at 4 am.
i learned that Binghamton University researchers have been working on a self-healing concrete that uses a specific type of fungi as a healing agent. When the fungus is mixed with concrete, it lies dormant until cracks appear, when spores germinate, grow and precipitate calcium carbonate to heal the cracks (x)
What could possibly be more cursed than mushrooms growing bones to heal the chasms in the road
What could possibly be more blessed than mushrooms growing bones to heal the chasms in the road
Everybody in the notes: BuT HEalTh cOdES eXist For a ReSason
Yes. For corporate billionaires trying to cut costs but selling us disease ridden caddle. Not the 5 year old selling sugar water with a little bit of lemonade powder.
no but seriously I still get chills thinking about turning off my headlamp in the cave and The Hand That I Did Not Actually See, and it’s been twelve years since it happened
it’s such an unreal experience
like
you turn off your light in a cave and wave your hand in front of your face
and
you can see this shadowy thing moving in the black space where your hand is
it looks like the same shadowy thing you would see in your room at night if you waved your hand in front of your face, it’s there and vaguely hand-shaped, and your brain recognizes it as your hand because your brain is aware of where your hand is and what it is doing
But You Are Not Seeing Anything
Inside a cave, there is No Light. No matter how far your pupils spread, there is no light for them to draw in, no light to put an image on your retina.
But your brain just Fucking Assumes that because it knows where your hand is and what it is doing, clearly it can see it.
So it creates a shadowy thing for your eyes to be seeing.
Brain is like “there’s a hand there”
Eyes are like “yup sure thing brain I can totally see it”
Brain is like “nice”
but there is no hand, you cannot see the hand, you are seeing a literal actual hallucination in the cave because your brain thinks it knows best
Caves are awesome, but also terrifying. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
we once went spelunking, and a our guide said that once he was in a cave with a stream, so he could hear running water, and his brain was like ‘oh, running water? that means there must be Ducks out there’. and he saw like…low light shadows of ducks. that his brain just Put There.
Alice Goodridge using a sledgehammer to break up the ice at Loch Insh in the Scottish Highlands before her morning swim. Photo by Euan Cherry, February 2019.
God could you imagine not giving a fuck about anything
ifesbob 