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ironychan:

It’s not uncommon knowledge that the sides of the Egyptian pyramids are aligned with the compass points: North, South, East, and West, which is mildly impressive since ancient Egyptians didn’t have compasses.

It’s a little more impressive when you stop to think about the fact that there was no north star back then, because over time earth’s axis wobbles with respect to the stars. We’re just lucky to live at a time when there’s a star in about the right spot.

It becomes incredibly impressive when you read the article in a 2000 issue of Nature, in which Egyptologist Kate Spence plots the errors in this alignment and shows that they drift on a predictable pattern. That pattern is the aforementioned polar wobble. This tells us two things:

1) Despite the lack of a stationary north star, the Egyptians used the stars to lay out the bases of their pyramids. They did this so carefully that we can see evidence of a 26,000-year cycle in the orientations of monuments built over a period of a few hundred years. Holy shit.

2) The start dates for the construction of each pyramid. The great pyramid of Khufu was begun in 2478 BC, plus or minus five years. Probably in October, which would have been the best time of year to make the measurement. HOLY FUCKING SHIT.

Dear Bilingual people

estoy-perdida:

lotrlocked:

kiokushitaka:

sirdigbey:

gabriellaxhemmings:

geooceanstorm:

What language do you think in?

I asked my mom because her first language is in Spanish and her answer was “I don’t even know. I don’t even know if I think”

I spoke to a neurologist about this, and he told me that bilingual people have a drastically different thought process than monolinguals. 

The way he explained it, monolinguals think in patterns that represent the words they’re thinking of, whereas bilinguals think in a completely different language (an internal ‘third’ language if you will) and then translate from that third language to either one of their native languages.

that makes sense. like… i think in concepts? then i have to decide what language to put it in, depending on the situation. that’s the only way i can think to describe it.

This is the coolest thing I have read in months. 

Been discussing this hardcore for years with friends and fam. 

feathersmoons:

prokopetz:

cheesedemon88:

prokopetz:

humanityinahandbag:

amuseoffyre:

10andthetardis:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

chaoswolf1982:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

doodlesanddiscord:

thommquackenbush:

jennlyons:

jadelyn:

Are you fucking kidding me? Like, no, Shakespeare wouldn’t tweet a sonnet cause 140 characters is a bit short for that. Wrong medium. But you know what he would have? A very active twitter FULL OF DICK PUNS AND YOUR MOM JOKES okay. (And probably also a blog for the sonnets and longer works, that cross-posts links to twitter anyway.)

Get out of here with that pretentious anti-technology bullshit.

He’d rock the fuck out of memes. Don’t deny it.

Exit, pursued by a doge.

much run wow 

I don’t understand people who try to make Shakespeare into a pretentious thing cause he was basically an uneducated dick-joke making dude for the common masses. His historical plays are straight up fanfiction. There’s a scene in Macbeth where two guards are having a conversation as a dude pees on a wall. Get out of here with your Shakespeare snobbery.

ALL OF THIS

Also, the comment ‘Exit, pursued by a doge’ alone makes this worth reblogging 😀

Heck, the line that’s based on, “Exit, pursued by bear”, only exists because Shakespeare couldn’t think of any other way to get rid of the character, so opted to have him attacked by a bear, which did not exist in the play before that moment.

He literally made a bear appear out of thin air, just to kill off a character, purely due to writer’s block.

“And then the bear gets him”

“…

…

The

The bear?”

“Yes the bear”

“Will

Will there isn’t a bear in this play

Where did the bear come from”

“A PLACE

And he exits the play pursued by it

It’s happening make me a bear costume”

“it’s happening make me a bear costume” lmao

Shakespeare even wrote Yo Mama jokes, like this delight from Titus Andronicus.

CHIRON: Thou has undone our mother.
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.

@dainesanddaffodils

On top of the yo mama jokes and random bears, we should also remember that Shakespeare loved crowd-pleasing special effects, and often made use of cutting-edge pyrotechnics to spice up scenes of battle or sorcery, as well as to herald the entrance of important characters. This is, in fact, what led to the ultimate fate of the original Globe Theatre, of which Shakespeare was part-owner. Ol’ Bill had the brilliant idea of using a fucking cannon to announce the King’s entrance in the 1613 premier of Henry VIII. Long story short, the cannon was improperly secured and bucked in its frame when fired, spraying sparks everywhere and setting the Globe’s roof-beams on fire; within the hour, the entire building had burned to the ground.

(Fortunately, no-one was harmed in the evacuation, save for one unfortunate audience member whose trousers were set ablaze by falling embers. He reportedly extinguished the flames with his beer.)

Source

Dick jokes and over the top special effects…Shakespeare was the predecessor to Michael Bay…

Shakespeare also loved over-complicated dialogue, obscure pop culture jokes, minor characters having lengthy conversations about nothing in particular, and self-referential navel-gazing that only massive theatre nerds would have understood even when his plays were contemporary.

(That last one is the the reason why one line of dialogue can require four paragraphs of explanation in modern editions.)

Shakespeare wasn’t his era’s Michael Bay.

He was his era’s Quentin Tarantino.

Except he decided over the top endless gore was boring after running with it for one play (seriously Kit, you need a new gimmick), and put in more dick-jokes and pop-culture references instead.