I just saw a video title on YouTube that said something like “Why is glass transparent?” And that’s an interesting question and I’m sure it’s great that the video exists but my first thought was like “Because glass is terrible, obviously.” Because it’s unwieldy and let’s out warmth and needs to be heated to hundreds of degrees to be shaped and turns into hundreds of tiny daggers if you drop it. Why the hell would we bother with that if it didn’t have some magical quality like being totally transparent despite being solid? Glass is transparent because if it weren’t, we’d use something else.
looking through my “me” tag and this is apparently what I was thinking 3 years ago
If you’re still curious we did not start working glass for its transparency. It was most likely started as a sanitary concern. Glass is easy to clean with soap and water, once it’s cleaned out you can use it again for anything and no germs or flavor from the previous meal or drink will remain.
Other materials at the time, namely clay, would absorb flavors and germs meaning that if you ate beef off a clay plate your next meal with that plate could have beef flavor and microbes common on cow meat on it. That would leak out seemingly at random no less. Heck imagine a sick person coughing into their soup bowl and then months later their germs hiding in the clay would pop out to infect whole new people.
Also the earliest human use of glass we know of is for its sharpness. Pre-historic people would use volcanic glass as sharp knives for food preparation. Also beads. Pretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads.
The fact that it could become see through was a side benefit.
this is amazing and I’m really glad I reblogged that old bullshit post because I got to learn this
The bnha kids have a Homecoming/Prom and Deku and Uraraka are crowned king and queen! The girls and boys take reaction pictures! (Bakugo is there … he is creating the explosion in the boys photo 😂)
honestly merle engaging with pan and the whole pan faith in maybe unconventional ways vs what he normally had to do in the enclave is v important to me
he doesnt exalt his wildernessness at 10 am every day but he does pour an extra cup of coffee or booze or what have you and sets it next to his makeshift altar each morning
he prays to him when he can but sometimes its not just praises, sometimes he just talks about his day so far and complains about x or y and maybe he asks pan what kind of fruit or veggie he wants as an offering because hes going planetside to go grocery shopping and figured he should pick something up
merle rearranges the plants in his room and offhandedly asks if the bonzai should be by the lemon bush, sometimes he gets nothing, sometimes a leaf falls off the lemon and he complains that that tells him jack shit, and /then/ he feels a tremor in his wood arm and grumbles fine, fine, ill move it by the lillies. when hes done hes surprised because hey, that actually looks nice, and decides to leave an extra offering as thanks
merle has the entirety of a normal pan service memorized both from the clergys pov and the priests but when prompted to give a service or recite parts of it is more likely to give ad-libbed versions of holy verses and make jokes. if given a pan flute and told to play he COULD play one of the ten repeating but very pretty melodies he heard in church for 50+ years… or he could move to the highest-pitched note and blow so hard everyones ears burst. pan blessed him as he did it bc he laughed so hard he fell out of his holy throne
theclumsiestninja 