Eartha Kitt | 1960s

Eartha Kitt | 1960s

Quote, “I wouldn’t bother to describe me. I’m Eartha Kitt.”

Huldra by mjorf

"Inspired by Scandinavian folklore, Huldra or Skogsrå is a beautiful but dangerous troll woman. She’s the guardian of the forests and can grant boons to hunters who she favors although if you get on her bad side you just might dissapear for ever. She was also a highly sexual creature, stories are told about hunters or coalers who had affairs with her during their long periods in the woods. There is even to be found old legal documents about men being sentenced for having affairs with the Huldra. She is always told to look as a very beautiful woman but she always has something that tells that she is a troll and not a human. In some parts of Scandinavia she has the tail of a cow, in others it’s the bushy tail of a fox and sometimes the ears to. Where I grew up she was supposed to have a hollow back, like an old injured tree trunk.”

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.

Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)

OH WAIT LEMME TELL YOU ABOUT CECILIA PAYNE.

Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend money on her college education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge.

Cecilia Payne completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give her a degree because she was a woman, so she said fuck that and moved to the United States to work at Harvard.

Cecilia Payne was the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, with what Otto Strauve called “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

Not only did Cecilia Payne discover what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun is made of (Henry Norris Russell, a fellow astronomer, is usually given credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than Payne—after telling her not to publish).

Cecilia Payne is the reason we know basically anything about variable stars (stars whose brightness as seen from earth fluctuates). Literally every other study on variable stars is based on her work.

Cecilia Payne was the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within Harvard, and is often credited with breaking the glass ceiling for women in the Harvard science department and in astronomy, as well as inspiring entire generations of women to take up science.

Cecilia Payne is awesome and everyone should know her.

(via bansheewhale)

駕籠真太郎式・特殊美少女図鑑【水玉】

Ain’t Your Mama’s Tea Party

sweet jesus this makes my fucking skin crawl