Victoria Amazonica Water Lilies can be up to 3 metres in diameter and can support the weight of an adult. They stay afloat because of the web-like structure of veins which are filled with air.
So apparently last year the National Park Service in the US dropped an over 1200 page study of LGBTQ American History as part of their Who We Are program which includes studies on African-American history, Latino history, and Indigenous history.
Like. This is awesome. But also it feels very surreal that maybe one of the most comprehensive examinations of LGBTQ history in America (it covers sports! art! race! historical sites! health! cities!) was just casually done by the parks service.
This is a wild story about a French book about horses, Facebook’s filters blocking it and suspending sharing (presumably on grounds that it contained sexual content?), and the power of the internet to get a book publisher to change a questionable illustration.
are you ready for the latest in research-based [ingroup] demographic stereotypy? this one’s a doozy.
In our clinical practice, adults with IQ scores in and above the superior range have sought evaluation and treatment for chronic difficulties with organizing their work, excessive procrastination, inconsistent effort, excessive forgetfulness, and lack of adequate focus for school and/or employment. They question whether they might have an attention deficit disorder, but often they have been told by educators and clinicians that their superior intelligence precludes their having ADHD.
Typically, these very bright individuals report that they are able to work very effectively on certain tasks in which they have strong personal interest or intense fear of immediate negative consequences if they do not complete the task at once. Yet they are chronically unable to make themselves do many tasks of daily life they recognize as important but do not see as personally interesting at that moment. When provided treatment appropriate for ADHD, these very bright individuals often report significant improvement in their ability to work effectively while their medication is active.
yes. so. how would you like a summary of my educational career?
Clinical interviews with patients in this study indicated that individuals with high IQ who have ADHD may be at increased risk of having recognition and treatment of their ADHD symptoms delayed until relatively late in their educational careers because teachers and parents tend to blame the student’s disappointing academic performance on boredom or laziness, especially as they notice the situational variability of their ADHD symptoms.
Like most others with ADHD, these individuals have a few specific domains in which they have always been able to focus very well, for example, sports, computer games, artistic or musical pursuits, reading self-elected materials. Parents and teachers tend to assume that these very bright persons could focus on any other tasks equally well, if only they chose to do so. These observers do not understand that although ADHD appears to be a problem of insufficient willpower, it is not (Brown, 2005).
Many also reported that they often demonstrated considerable prowess in performing specific tasks in which they had little positive personal interest but did experience considerable fear of immediate negative consequences if they did not complete that particular task by some external deadline. Often subjects described this as a character trait, “I’m just a severe procrastinator” or “I always work best under pressure.”
that’s not all.
In an unpublished study of 103 treatment-seeking adults with IQ 120 or more diagnosed with ADHD, Brown and Quinlan (1999) found that 42% had dropped out of postsecondary schooling at least once, although some did eventually return to complete a degree. Those data together with this present study suggest that individuals with high IQ and ADHD, despite their strong cognitive abilities, may be at significant risk of educational disruption or failure due to ADHD-related impairments of EF.
and now?
Biederman et al. (2006) […] found that adults with ADHD who self-reported elevated levels of EF impairments on the CBS tended to be significantly more impaired on measures of global functioning, had more comorbidities, and held lower current socioeconomic status than did those with or without ADHD who scored below the median on that scale. […]
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Most of the time I’m like “well maybe I don’t REALLY have ADHD, I should just be more motivated/organized/etc and it’d be fine”
And then I read something like this and it’s like someone is talking about me, specifically, and I go oh.
This describes me exactly.
The link up there didn’t work so I went searching and found a journal article (ResearchGate link, otherwise it’s paywalled) with some pretty amusing figures:
I’m not even mad about the lack of error bars, those differences are so huge.
I made a thing. I drew it in response to this essay that Son of Baldwin posted on Twitter. Especially this line: “
In many ways, I believe ableism is the root bigotry of humanity.” So I took that metaphor and made it visual.
Image description: A black and white tabloid sized poster in the style of an educational diagram, showing a tree and its root system, combined with text.
At the bedrock level: “BIGOTRY: Beliefs and policies which work to exclude people from full membership in human society.”
In the root system: “ABLEISM: Judging the value of a person’s humanity on the basis of ability.”
The trunk has two forks; the left-hand fork is labeled “RACISM:” and leads to an example racist belief in its cluster of leaves: “Blacks are Less Intelligent than Whites, but they are More Athletic.”
The right-hand fork is labeled “SEXISM:” and leads to two clusters of leaves. The main cluster reads: “Women are Weaker, & Less Rational than Men;” the secondary cluster reads: “Gays are effeminate. Lesbians are emasculating.”
The top cluster of leaves, centered between these two branches, with a freely curving arrow pointing down to each half, reads: “Claims about Ability used to Pass Judgment on People’s Humanity (This is ABLEISM)”
Description ends.]
It may become part of a larger essay on how ableism 1) fuels other
bigotries and 2) impedes solidarity and resistance to oppression
(Consider this Fig. 1, out of X number of illustrative figures).
But I’m not sure how long it will take for me to write that longer essay, and I wanted to start the discussion now.
P.S.: If you repost this without the image description, then you’d be excluding people with vision and text impairments from the discussion. And that would be a schmuck, bigoted, thing to do. Don’t be a bigoted schmuck.
Another source for this compelling graphic – wouldn’t it be a great coloring book? –
But as it’s only one picture, wouldn’t it be a very short book?
–
I was also inspired by this line from Disability Rhetoric (Jay Timothy Dolmage, Syracuse University Press):
“Ableism … positively values and makes compulsory able-bodiedness.”
Because, yeah: “makes compulsory” – ABA, anyone?
Thinking about that is how I came to figure out the definition of “bigotry” as a means to exclude people from human society.
Which is why so-called “reverse racism” ain’t a thing. “All white people love mayonnaise” may be a racial stereotype, but nobody’s been denied housing or the right to vote because of it…
That is a Maned wolf and they are lovely bizarre creatures! They have long legs so they can see over the tall grass they live in, and tend to be very shy around humans (these are probably captive-born). Have some more pictures:
Walk Walk Fashion Baby
Here’s a baby!
Poofy!
Maned wolves are gorgeous. They’re also fascinating, because they’re not wolves and they’re not very closely related to any other species of canid – they’re actually in a totally separate genus, Chrysocyon.
They’re also nicknamed “skunk wolf” according to wikipedia, because of their odorous territorial markings, which is a distinct sort of stank I can personally confirm makes the appellation well earned.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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