Printer Solistice: Poet, Mathematician and Meteorologist Wang Zhenyi (1768-1797)
Astronomer, mathematician, meteorologist & poet Wang Zhenyi (1768-1797), who left her impact on Qing era China during her short life. Raised by her father and grandparents, her ancestral home was in Anhui province. Her grandfather, Wang Zhefu, an avid reader and collector of books, was governor of Fengcheng County and the Xuanhua District. Her father, Wang Xichen wrote a 4-volume Collection of Medical Prescriptions.
While many Qing women were denied literacy and education, Zhenyi absorbed it all: astronomy from her grandfather, poetry from her grandmother Dong, medicine, geography and math from her father. When she was 9, her grandfather died and the family travelled to Jilin near the Great Wall to mourn and attend his ornate funeral. They remained there for 5 years and Zhenyi studied under the Lady of Bu Qianyao, and read her grandfather’s library of full 75 bookcases
She also learned to ride, do archery on horseback and martial arts & became an expert mounted markswoman. She travelled with her father and they settled in Nanjing. At 25, deemed late to marry at the time, she married Zhan Mei from her home province. Their marriage was happy but they had no offspring. She gained fame from her poetry, math & astronomy knowledge. She advanced weather forecasting for farmers. She even took on some male students, an extraordinarily uncommon thing for a woman scholar at the time. She wrote many books.
She simplified methods for multiplication and division and wrote math texts. At a time when many of her contemporaries would attribute an eclipse to anger of the gods, she bluntly wrote, “In fact, it’s definitely because of the moon” and famously demonstrated this with round table, mirror and lantern (as in my print) to represent Earth, moon & sun. She was a proponent of the Western sun-based, heliocentric calendar over the lunar calendar, for its precision and advocated for its adoption.
She wrote,
“It’s made to believe
Women are the same as Men;
Are you not convinced?
Daughters can also be heroic?”
She died at 29 having achieved so much. Read more
Stop Eating Boring Breakfast! 2 Healthy Baked Oatmeal Recipes That Are Better Than Dessert
▶ nouvel âge français ▶ visionary new age music from France, 1984-1994
The Donny Benet live experience
Donny is one of those iconic artists made to hear live. After seeing him in Melbourne I vow to go to every one of his future gigs, he was that good. This video is a little slice of what he’s capable of. He is my fav Australian artist along with King Gizzard and Amyl and the Sniffers – all three deliver legendary and wild live gigs.
Seeing The Light In Each Other, from Tara Brach
Quagga by Aloys Zötl
Aloys Zötl (1803-1887) was an Austrian master dyer who devoted over five decades of his life to creating the Bestiarium, an extraordinary collection of approximately 400 watercolour paintings depicting exotic animals from around the world. He worked industriously until just 18 days before he died, producing imaginative works about animals he had never clapped eyes on in real life, using extensively collected specimens and imagery from travel books as inspiration, not leaving his home in Austria to see them for real. Sadly the Quagga is lost to history, yet another animal hunted out of existence by selfish and disgraceful hunters. Via Public Domain Review
A Healthy Relationship with Others Starts with a Healthy Relationship with Yourself
Goobie and Doobie are always really great value in terms of advice and his talks always come with the most calming natural ambient sounds and visions as well.
Genetic Ancestry Doesn’t Tell Your Whole Story
If you’re looking for your genetic origin story, your DNA will only take you so far.
By: Carles Lalueza-Fox via MIT Press Reader
Genetic ancestry is a concept that has long captured people’s imaginations. It’s no surprise that it’s been turned into a booming industry by companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com.
Customers of genetic testing can now be delighted to learn that they’re “southern European,” “East Asian,” “British Irish,” “Greek and Balkan,” or “sub-Saharan African.” Others might be fascinated with claims of their “Viking” or “Yamnaya” roots and, upon discovering them, come to believe these revelations are central to their identities.
However, the inconvenient truth is that these labels and identities are, for the most part, meaningless in historical, cultural, and even genetic terms. Having ancestry found in Viking genomes does not really make you “part Viking.” The reason for this is simple: Population genetics is not a perfect science.
What we call “ancestry” is merely an approximation of genetic similarity to specific reference populations. These reference populations are artificial constructs used by scientists for modeling. They are often based on ancient genomes from different archaeological and chronological periods that are intended to represent particular populations (e.g., “Steppe nomads,” “Romans,” “Slavs,” or “Anglo-Saxons”). But these labels are neither universal nor objective; they’re selected arbitrarily and can, to some extent, determine the perceived outcome of the analysis.
Having ancestry found in Viking genomes does not really make you “part Viking.”
Perhaps the most significant issue with such categories is that they ignore the profound impact of human mobility over the last few hundred years, creating an impression of genetic fixation. These categories suggest that human populations stayed in place throughout world history, allowing each to develop highly distinct genetic compositions.
However, ancient genomics indicates that migrations have, instead, been constant throughout human history. From the Out-of-Africa migration 60,000-70,000 years ago to the Atlantic Slave Trade beginning in the 16th Century, mobility — not isolation — has always been the norm. Because of this movement and mixing, geographic connection to present-day individuals in a particular country can be deceptive. Genetic similarity might, then, reflect shared ancestry from hundreds or thousands of years ago, in a region far removed from where someone lives today.
At first blush, humans seem an incredibly diverse species. We vary in skin color, sex, sexuality, gender identity, hair and eye color, height, weight, limb length, face shape, and disease resistance, among other things.
Yet, despite our visible differences, you’ll be surprised to learn that we are among the least diverse species in the world. Humans share about 99.9 percent of our genomes, meaning that two randomly chosen individuals differ in an exceedingly tiny fraction of the chemical building blocks of our genome. Because of this overwhelming similarity, defining what constitutes a population is not easy. The boundaries can be expanded or contracted, making the concept notoriously difficult to pin down objectively.
In population genetics, a population is defined as a group of individuals that mate with one another and are, to some extent, distinct from other groups. These populations are sometimes characterized by their cultural or geographic traits (for instance, speaking a different language from neighboring groups, or being restricted to an island or to the boundaries of a nation).
However, in the case of humans, there are no truly isolated populations. For practical reasons, some scientists have chosen to work solely with nationalities, while others have chosen to work exclusively with cultural attributes. But each approach has its own limitations. (Imagine trying to compare individuals from Iceland, which is relatively small and homogenous, with a geographically immense and diverse Russia.) Ultimately, the different definitions of populations depend on the questions posed and the genetic data under review.
In the natural world, well-defined genetic populations are found. That’s because there are geographically restricted populations or species that are completely isolated from others. Examples include Madagascar lemurs and the extinct dodo from Mauritius. In these cases, known as “endemism,” the largest population of a species defines its range limit.
Yet that is virtually impossible to find in modern humans; we are all genealogically connected to some extent as we trace our ancestry back in time. And while people have adapted to specific environmental conditions in the last tens of thousands of years — producing geographic patterns of variation in traits like skin pigmentation or pathogen-resistance genes — that patterning is merely an illusion.
The very concept of race, for instance, arises from pigmentation genes, which are evident only because of how populations are distributed around the world. But these apparent patterns have been disproven by genomic studies. Indeed, whole-genome analyses indicate gradual variation across regions rather than fixed racial categories.
In genetics, scientists must analyze the genomes of millions, if not billions, of people, each carrying millions of variants. It’s an unfathomable amount of data. Which leads us to another central blind spot in genetic ancestry research: how we, as scientists, visualize the sheer scale and complexity of human genetic variation.
Traditional representations, such as phylogenetic genetic trees, shed no light on this crucial aspect of human genetics. This explains why some population labels have been progressively abandoned: According to the archives of the American Journal of Human Genetics, the use of “Caucasian” in papers declined from 12 percent around the mid-20th Century to less than 1 percent at the beginning of the 21st Century. Alongside this decline, continental labels have increased — for instance, the use of “European” surged to 42 percent of papers between 2009 and 2018.
Genetic ancestry is not a definitive marker of identity; it’s just one part of a much bigger puzzle,
Recently, instead of trees, geneticists have proposed representing genetic ancestry as overlapping circles. Starting with approximately 2.9 billion measurable nucleotide sites that can vary across the human genome, geneticists James Kitchens and Graham Coop, for example, analyzed a sample of 609 individuals from the Americas and found only 39 million observable variants. If they restricted the analysis to those genetic variants defined as “common,” the number of sites decreased to 10 million, an almost insignificant fraction of the potentially general number.
The researchers repeated the approach across different populations, invariably finding remarkably few variable sites relative to the total genome length. For instance, 99 Utah residents with northern and western European ancestry exhibited 5,726,377 variants, whereas 96 African Caribbeans from Barbados exhibited 8,018,649 (the latter likely reflects the greater genetic diversity in Africa). More importantly, across populations, the degree of overlap in common variants is enormous, which means human groups have few exclusive genetic variants. In fact, variants that are common in a single geographic region are usually not exclusive to that region; they are present at similar frequencies in other populations worldwide.
This is all to say that the complex interplay between ancestry and population differences undermines the idea of race as a real biological category. People don’t share a single, uniform genetic background with others in their community. Instead, populations — however we define them — have slightly different proportions of ancestry components.
Instead of imagining abstract models of past populations, ancient genetics allows us to refer to specific sites and archaeological time periods from which a particular skeleton originated. Genetic ancestry is not a definitive marker of identity; it’s just one part of a much bigger puzzle, offering what I believe is a richer foundation for thinking about our collective identity and shared past.
Carles Lalueza-Fox is a leading research expert on the retrieval and analysis of ancient genomes, including extinct hominins, past human populations, and pathogens. He is Director of the Natural Sciences Museum of Barcelona and the author of several books, including “Identity: What DNA Can Tell Us About Ourselves,” from which this article is adapted.
Vegetable tagine by Nagi
Ingredients
Tagine spice mix:
- ▢1 tbsp cardamom powder
- ▢1 tbsp coriander powder
- ▢1 tbsp cumin powder
- ▢1 1/2 tsp ground fennel seeds / fennel powder
- ▢1 tsp cayenne (omit for non-spicy)
- ▢2 tsp turmeric
- ▢1/4 tsp ground cloves
- ▢1/4 tsp ground ginger
Tagine (Note 1):
- ▢5 tbsp olive oil
- ▢1/2 red onion sliced; (sub any type of onion)
- ▢1 garlic clove , finely minced
- ▢800g/1.6lb butternut pumpkin / squash (1/2 a small), peeled, cut into 2.5cm / 1″ cubes
- ▢1 small eggplant , cut into 2.5cm / 1/2″ cubes
- ▢1/2 cauliflower head , small, cut into bite size florets
- ▢1 capsicum / bell pepper , cut into 2.5cm / 1″ pieces (red or yellow)
- ▢2 tomatoes , seeds removed, cut into 1cm / 1/3″ dice
- ▢3 1/2 cups water
- ▢2 tsp salt
- ▢1/2 tsp black pepper
- ▢400g/ 14oz canned chickpeas , drained
- ▢200g / 60z green beans , cut into 3.5cm / 1.5″ pieces (~2 cups cut)
- ▢Zest of 1 lemon
- ▢2 tbsp lemon juice
Garnishes / for serving:
- ▢1/2 cup slivered almonds , toasted
- ▢1/4 cup coriander / cilantro , roughly chopped
- ▢Plain yogurt
- ▢Pinch of paprika or cayenne pepper
Instructions
- Combine Tagine Spice Mix ingredients.
- Preheat oven to 180°C/350°F.
- Heat 1 tbsp oil in a large, heavy-based pot over medium high heat. Add garlic and onion, cook until onion is wilted (~ 1 1/2 minutes), then remove to a large bowl. Scrape out any remaining garlic bits from pan (so they don’t burn).
- Add pumpkin / squash and cook, stirring, for 3 minutes or until lightly golden on most sides. Remove to same bowl.
- Add 2 tbsp olive oil. Cook eggplant for 3 minutes until tinged with gold on most sides, remove to same bowl.
- Add 1 tbsp oil if pot is looking dry. Add capsicum and cauliflower, cook for 2 minutes until the cauliflower is a bit golden on the edges. Remove into bowl.
- Add tomato and cook for 1 minute. Add Spice Mix, stir for 1 minute.
- Add all vegetables back to pot. Add water (it should just about cover the vegetables, they will sink), salt and pepper. Stir, bring to simmer on stove, then transfer to oven for 30 minutes. (Alternatively simmer on low stove, but stir gently otherwise veg may breakdown too much.)
- Remove from oven, add beans and chickpeas. Simmer for 15 minutes uncovered on stove on medium-low to cook the beans and reduce the sauce.
- Stir through lemon juice and zest. The idea here is that some of the veg (butternut, cauliflower) breaks down a bit to slightly thicken the sauce. It also gets thicker left overnight.
- For a traditional experience, serve over couscous. Otherwise, try white, brown, or basmati rice, or quinoa. Or, serve just as is like a chunky stew. For a low-carb option try cauliflower rice! I like to top mine with a dollop of yogurt, a sprinkle of almonds, coriander/cilantro and a pinch of paprika or cayenne.
This deep house set by David J Newton goes really hard
He’s got very few followers but he should have a hell of a lot more…this is epic AF
An ultra-steep hillside amphitheatre in Türkiye
Have a look at this ancient Hellenistic theatre at Pergamon, Türkiye, built in the 3rd century BC, alterations were made in the #Roman period. It’s one of the steepest known ancient theatres. The capacity was about 10,000 spectators. via Nina Willburger.
Goldfish by Henri Matisse
When Henri Matisse visited Morocco, he noted that locals were fascinated by goldfish in bowls. He brought the lush simplicity of this entrancing natural phenomenon into his own home in France and captured this as a painting in 1912. Four bright orange fish anchor the composition, vivid against a background of softer pinks and greens. He paints the fish from two perspectives simultaneously – from the top and the side causing a trippy mirror effect. A sense of colour and form harmony and balance prevails along with the joyfully immersive perspective that is in all of his more familiar paintings.
Did you enjoy this collection? let me know what you think of it below. Thank you for reading my dear friends!
Content Catnip 