Fíóna NicGearailt 👻 Stay safe 😷

@anniewestdotcom Brilliant, thanks Annie, for retweeting this. Love it.

April 16th 2024. @SimonHarrisTD said that he would make sure no child finds themselves waiting in pain and agony. Why on 17th April 2026 is my daughter waiting in pain and agony. #morefalsepromises gofund.me/d9e00a9a1

Here my mother is feeding my sister Yolanda as a baby. My mother nurtured us with love, care, and intention. Black mothers have long nurtured their children, families, and communities with extraordinary strength. During Black Maternal Health Week, I am reflecting on both the beauty of mothering and the urgency of protecting Black maternal health. Black women are still more than three times as likely to die from pregnancy related causes, and more than 80% of those deaths are preventable. We must do more than acknowledge these disparities. We must support Black maternal health advocates, listen to Black women, and demand systems of care that protect Black mothers before, during, and after pregnancy. #CorettaScottKing #YolandaDeniseKing #BlackMaternalHealth #BMHW26

@sueinphilly @pastarchive I did. The QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow expert typers down because manual typewriter keys would get stuck together otherwise. Then people got used to QWERTY & didn't want to change when it went digital.

@pastarchive Children need to know what life was like before all this technology that they were born into Like did you know the QWERTY keyboard has been around for well over 100 years?

This is where “uppercase” and “lowercase” came from. In the early days of printing, capital letters were kept in the upper compartments of the type case, while the smaller letters were placed below for easier access.

Should we have a “Space Day,” where city lights are turned off so everyone can experience the starry night sky?

@TheDilemmaLama @Nithya_Shrii My local library is full of students studying, & is open until 20:00. Job seekers get help & web access there. They loan out radon monitors. They have rooms free for community use. Regular talks, workshops, exhibitions & a repair café. My last library had 3D printers available.

@Nithya_Shrii No. Those places are all overrun by middle aged women and pensioners because they are the only ones not at work for the three hours the library is open every day. So the book collections in libraries are utter trash. You become dumber reading in a modern library.

The only data centers that communities actually need are PUBLIC LIBRARIES.

@VisionaryVoid I'm trying to picture how this choir loft was built if there wasn't any way to reach it.

The Staircase That Defies Physics. In the 1870s, the Sisters of Loretto in New Mexico needed a way to reach their choir loft. The chapel was too cramped for ordinary stairs. A quiet stranger appeared and offered to build it. He worked alone for months with simple tools. When he vanished without payment, the nuns discovered something astonishing. The staircase rises 20 feet in two full 360-degree turns, with no central support column and no nails in its main structure. It is a self-supporting double helix made of spruce wood, held together only with wooden pegs. Popular legend says the carpenter was St. Joseph. Historians believe it was likely a skilled French woodworker named François-Jean “Frenchy” Rochas. The staircase has survived earthquakes and more than 140 years of daily use. Engineers still study it today because its helical geometry perfectly distributes weight outward to the walls without any central pole, an elegant solution that modern replicas usually require hidden steel reinforcements to achieve. It remains one of the purest examples of 19th-century woodworking ingenuity.

@ricciffar @Megalithic12000 I'm reading a story about Herculaneum where the ancients refer to portents of giants walking, both in the sky & on earth. I took this as a metaphor for earthquake tremors and volcanic rumblings.

@Megalithic12000 Fiction was invented after the Middle Age. Every myth has roots in previous human experience. They can be exagerated but do never come out of nowhere.

Geologists confirm Ireland and Scotland were once connected by land. The Irish have been telling that story for thousands of years. 🔹Ireland and Scotland joined during the last Ice Age 🔹People hunted on what is now the Irish Sea floor 🔹Finn McCool built a bridge to Scotland in myth 🔹The sea swallowed that land bridge long ago The legend says the giant Finn McCool built a causeway of stepping stones stretching from County Antrim all the way to Scotland. When his rival retreated, he tore it up behind him, leaving only the rocks we see today at the Giant's Causeway. Some researchers believe ancient stories of giants walking across the Irish Sea may be something far more remarkable than mythology. Distant memories of a real landscape, passed down through oral tradition across hundreds of generations. If that connection is real, we may be looking at one of the oldest stories ever told. How many other myths are we dismissing that are actually memories?

@DaveToau @NatureUnedited Not in Ireland. Basking sharks, sometimes, but they're harmless.

@NatureUnedited No sharks or crocs, huh?

Cows are actually really good swimmers and in Ireland they’re taken by boat to graze on offshore islands

@lapsedmethodist @Care2much18 No, they were killed because some people deliberately planned and set off 4 car bombs to murder innocent strangers. And whoever they are, they seem to have found a haven elsewhere. There is no excuse for their crimes.

@Care2much18 These people died because the Republic was seen to be a haven for the PIRA who carried out slaughter like this for years.

All things being equal, mostly everybody in Ireland maybe should know who this young woman was. The reality is hardly anybody would be able to name her, which is quite sad, but hopefully by the end of this thread a few more people will be able to. Her name was Siobhán. /1

@Jenniferreece98 @DrSuneelDhand You can get a different prescription - there are so many and some will disagree with people's digestion. I was fine but my cousin happened to have the same Rx and she found that probiotics really helped her, once she had her appetite back.

@DrSuneelDhand Just the guts suffer for so long after. 😭

I am in total awe of antibiotics every time I prescribe them for a serious condition. I see people all the time, literally at death’s door with sepsis, getting admitted to hospital. Within 24 hours they are up and talking and feeling better after being loaded with targeted intravenous antibiotics (and of course fluids). We are damn lucky to be living today because for most human history a simple bacterial infection would kill people. In my opinion, antibiotics have been the biggest gamechanger for humanity in the last hundred years. We must never take these miracle drugs for granted.

@Randoms404 @theactualrob @DrSuneelDhand I have known 2 relatives who had to take an antibiotic for a bacterial infection. They also had flu. People can suffer from two conditions at once.

@theactualrob @DrSuneelDhand Every doctor will tell you the flu is viral and antibiotics won’t help. I think some people take Tamiflu but that’s the only prescription I’ve heard of for the flu.

@Jesuswept2 @KeruboSk She said "to my car." You misread her post.

Anonymous: Last night I was out with a friend of mine who had too much to drink!! As I was helping her walk back to my car a young lady stopped us and asked me if I needed help.. She then politely asked me what was my relationship to her…I told her she was my long time friend and that she had too much to drink so i was helping her get home!! She then proceeded to ask me if I had any pictures of us in my phone. So I went ahead and showed her a few pictures of us and I even let her see our text message thread making plans to meet up.. She was just watching out for her and wasn't trying to be rude or nosey but protect her..She then helped me walk her to the car. I don't think everybody would be cool with this but it’s certainly nice to know that there is someone out there looking out for another person who was not in their best state or able to defend themselves!

@histories_arch Where is the stone in the image? Also, who did Cinéad marry?

The Picts did not fall... That is the strange thing at the centre of their story. They were not conquered by Rome, though Rome tried. They were not destroyed by the Angles or the Vikings, though both pressed hard against the edges of their world. They did not end in fire or massacre or the kind of catastrophic military defeat that closes other chapters of early medieval history. They simply stopped being Picts. By the middle of the 9th century, the people who had controlled much of northern Britain for five hundred years had merged with the Gaelic kingdom of Dalriada to form the kingdom of Alba, the political foundation of what would eventually become Scotland. The merger was not sudden. It was not clean. Historians argue about whether it was primarily political, cultural, or dynastic, whether the Picts absorbed the Gaels or the Gaels absorbed the Picts or whether something genuinely new emerged from the collision of the two. What is harder to argue is the outcome. Within a few generations, the Picts had become invisible. Their language disappeared, leaving almost no written record. The few Pictish words that survive come mostly from place names and the names of kings preserved in later lists, scraps of sound without enough context to reconstruct what surrounded them. No Pictish manuscript tradition survives. No law codes. No literature. No religious texts in their own tongue. A people who had maintained their independence against the most powerful empire the ancient world produced left behind less written evidence of themselves than almost any comparable culture in early medieval Europe. What they left instead were the stones. Hundreds of them, scattered across the Highlands and islands of Scotland, carved with a visual language that nobody has fully decoded. The symbols appear again and again across different stones and different centuries with a consistency that speaks of meaning, of a shared system understood by the people who made them, but the key to that system did not survive the merger that ended the Pictish world. Spirals and crescents. Stylised animals of extraordinary elegance. Geometric designs of a precision that required both skill and intention. The stones are clearly saying something. We do not know what. This is what makes the Picts so compelling and so frustrating in equal measure. They were not a marginal people. From roughly the 3rd to the 9th centuries they controlled most of northern Britain, built fortified settlements, engaged in complex diplomacy with their neighbours, and maintained a cultural identity distinct enough that everyone around them recognised it. Roman writers noted them. Later Gaelic and Northumbrian sources noted them. Medieval chroniclers recorded their kings in lists that suggest an organised and continuous political structure. They were present, powerful, and noticed. And then the noticing stopped. The kingdom of Alba that emerged in the 9th century was in many ways a Pictish kingdom wearing Gaelic clothes, or a Gaelic kingdom built on Pictish foundations, depending on which thread you pull. The kings of Alba traced their legitimacy through lines that included Pictish royal blood. The territory was overwhelmingly what had been Pictish land. But the name was gone, and with the name went the identity, at least as a distinct category that the people themselves maintained or that outside observers continued to apply. What drove the transformation is still debated. A dynastic union under Cináed mac Ailpín, known to later tradition as Kenneth MacAlpin, is the conventional starting point, but the conventional starting point has been questioned and complicated by subsequent scholarship. The reality was probably messier and slower than a single king and a single moment of unification. These things usually are. #archaeohistories

@aishdesign @historyinmemes @grok Perfidious Albion? I think the Heptarchy of 7 kingdoms wasn't formed until 700 AD?

@historyinmemes what was the UK called at that time? @grok

This is the map of Europe 24 years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD.

@lexcroucher How quickly they appear & vanish! Drove to a friend's last spring & we passed a young fox on the grass verge - he promptly lay flat & disappeared in the grass. Good that they're wary of humans.

alert alert my parents have six-week-old fox cubs in the garden fresh from the den and one apple tall!!!!

@DrNWLuna @SketchesbyBoze Some practical things are better demonstrated, but the more you read, the faster you can read. Or go straight to the transcript & search. I like creators who itemise their tutorials so we don't have to rewatch the whole thing when we only need to replay that one part.

@SketchesbyBoze Or the dumb advice to "just look on YouTube for a video." I do not want to sit through a 10-minute video when I can read the same information in 2 minutes!

In my experience it’s typically the dumbest people who say, “Why read books when you can just google things?” The most in-depth learning can only be done through reading. And that’s not to mention the wisdom and pleasure that fiction brings. You have to read.

@quotesdaily100 10. is wrong. All IKEA stores in my country have shortcuts. They even have a map of them every few rooms, with the measuring tapes and pencils. You can cut straight back to the café & enjoy free coffee refills.

20 DARK PSYCHOLOGY TRICKS USED ON YOU EVERY SINGLE DAY: 1. Supermarkets pipe in the smell of fresh bread artificially,even when nothing is baking, because the scent triggers comfort emotions that make people spend more. 2. Prices ending in .99 are not about saving you money, they exploit a brain quirk called "left digit anchoring" where your mind reads $3.99 as closer to $3 than $4. 3. Casino floors have no clocks and no windows deliberately removing all time references causes people to lose track of hours and stay gambling far longer than intended. 4. Pharmaceutical ads list side effects in a calm, soothing voice over happy imagery because the emotional tone of visuals overrides the alarming content of words in human processing. 5. Social media notification icons are red for a specific reason red triggers the same neurological alert response as physical danger, compelling you to check immediately without thinking. 6. Luxury stores play slow music deliberately studies show slower music causes customers to browse longer, touch more items, and spend significantly more per visit. 7. The decoy effect is used in every pricing menu a middle option priced just below the expensive one exists solely to make the premium option feel reasonable by comparison. 8. Politicians repeat the same phrase multiple times in speeches intentionally repetition creates a psychological phenomenon called illusory truth where familiar statements feel factually correct. 9. Free trials are designed around one psychological principle the pain of loss is twice as powerful as the pleasure of gain, making cancellation feel worse than just paying. 10. IKEA layouts are deliberately maze-like with no shortcuts forcing customers through every department triggers unplanned purchases that account for the majority of their revenue. 11. Dating apps deliberately suppress your matches on day one then release a flood of likes after 24 hours to create the illusion of sudden popularity and keep you emotionally hooked. 12. Hospitals and offices use specific shades of green and beige because color psychology research shows these tones suppress agitation and reduce the likelihood of confrontational behavior. 13. The phrase most people choose in any sales context is manufactured social proof, it exploits herd mentality to make independent decision making feel risky and abnormal. 14. Fast food restaurants use hard seats and bright lighting deliberately not for aesthetic reasons but to increase customer turnover by making long stays physically uncomfortable. 15. Charities show one suffering child rather than statistics about millions because the human brain is wired to feel empathy for individuals and becomes emotionally numb to large numbers. 16. Negotiators are trained to make an extreme opening offer deliberatel, it shifts the entire conversation's reference point so that any middle ground feels like a generous compromise. 17. Your phone's infinite scroll was modeled directly on slot machine mechanics, the unpredictable reward interval, not the content itself, is what creates compulsive checking behavior. 18. Perfume is placed at department store entrances because scent bypasses the rational brain entirely, it travels directly to the emotional memory center before conscious thought can filter it. 19. The Ben Franklin effect means asking someone a small favor makes them like you more not less. The brain resolves the contradiction by deciding you must be worth helping. 20. Every limited time offer you have ever seen was designed around one thing manufactured urgency that shuts down deliberate thinking and forces decisions before rational evaluation can occur.

The opening of a new bookstore is always a cause for rejoicing! Seattle, and Pike Street, you are in luck. Save the day (May 6) and join me to cut the ribbon on a new Barnes and Noble Store! Ribbon-cutting and Signing with bestselling author Robin Hobb!

@KenlisViewFarm @TerribleMaps As George R R Martin explained, "The Wall defends itself." 😉

@TerribleMaps built hadrians wall to keep that weather up there with the barbarians

Hundreds of years of expansion, then the Romans experienced the weather here and called it a day

@scruffy_jack @TerribleMaps Socks, even 😅 Mind you, I've never met a Scotsman who couldn't knit. The Romans couldn't adapt. I think their traditional army pension was farmland on conquered territory - stopped them doing too much damage. But none of them wanted to settle on a cold mountain.

@TerribleMaps Letters found from Hadrian’s Wall asking for more docks cos it was so cold and wet 😹