Turkish artist Huseyin Sahin creates beautiful, surreal scenes using photographs.
I just discovered Factinate this morning. As always, be skeptical of any "facts" you read on the Internet but this does look interesting and I noticed that they did get at least one thing right that often misleads people, about life expectancy in ancient times and how it's skewed by the higher number of infant and maternal deaths.
Black and WTF is a Tumblr devoted to odd old black and white photos.
I made this raspberry sour cream pie. I halved the recipe to make only one pie.I wouldn't say it was the best pie I've ever tasted but it was yummy and I will be making again sometime.
the life expectancy one I always talk about in ecology and they are right: infant deaths, childhood deaths (no vaccines or antibiotics back then), and young-maternal deaths skew the numbers downward. Life expectancy should PROBABLY be called "average age at death" but that's maybe too morbid.
ReplyDeleteA brainteaser I use in class: "The life expectancy of a newborn is currently 74 years (or whatever the current number is), but they say that someone who has reached 70 can expect 15 more years of life, why?"
I USUALLY get the "OMG OBESITY" or "people are less healthy now" answers, but once in a while someone figures out: well, a lot of people die in car wrecks in their 20s (I bring up the issue of insurance rates) and also there ARE still childhood diseases. Also, someone who makes it to 70 probably has a slightly more healthful lifestyle - at least, they didn't live fast, die young, and leave a bloated corpse....
This issue is particularly annoying to me because every time someone in an online discussion says something about how sad it is that Mozart died so young it's inevitable that someone pretending wisdom that they don't have replies something about life expectancy in those days being only about 35 to 40 so he "really lived a normal lifespan for that time".
DeleteBut he accomplished a hell of a lot in that short time frame. (Tom Lehrer: "It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.")
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