green-217:

did-you-kno:

In a 1970s experiment, a Stanford
psychologist and 7 other mentally
healthy participants got themselves
admitted to 12 different psychiatric
hospitals across the US by pretending
to hear voices. Once inside, they began
acting normally, but all 12 hospitals
diagnosed each of them with disorders,
forced them to take drugs, and required
them all to admit they had a disease
before they could be released. Source Source 2

This was the study ‘being sane in insane places’ by David Rosenhan. The purpose of the study was to determine whether or not the staff of asylums could truly determine a person’s sanity after being admitted.

Rosenhan ans his colleagues did not pretend to hear voices, they pretended to hear a ‘hollow thud’- something with no basis in psychology. From the get go they were offering the doctors and nurses a chance to deny them entry, but despite the fact that the thing they were faking wasn’t even a real symptom, they were all admitted.

That very day, the moment of their admission, they went back to acting normal. They went about their day as normally as possible, and waited to see if the staff of each hospital they were in would notice. They stopped reporting hearing the noise that got them admitted.

The staff never noticed.

Some of the patients did.

Despite this, all of them were eventually released, but none were declared sane on release. Some were in the hospital for 2 weeks, one remained for over 50 days.

What the study proved was that it became impossible to establish sane from insane in the setting of a mental hospital. To retest, after Rosenhan came forward with his findings, he told asylums all over the nation that they’d be doing the experiment again, but with more participants this time. After a certain period, he would ask the head doctors of the ‘targeted’ asylums which patients they believed were faking it.

All of the hospitals reported at least one person.

No one was actually sent in.

This reiterated the original claim, proving for all that the perception of sanity is reliant on location and societal standards.

penny-anna:

lyra-nimloth:

penny-anna:

adamcansuckme:

gentlemaninred:

penny-anna:

acehobbit:

penny-anna:

another lotr thing I think about a lot: Legolas, in Minas Tirith during ROTK, trying to explain to people what he knows about hobbits

He’d probably answer any questions people had that he didn’t know the answer to with just blatant lies

Like “oh yeah and then when you feed them enough they split into two, it’s how they reproduce. But every seventh one is evil.” “Once a month Hobbits eyes glow red and their teeth become sharp.” “Bilbo baggins grows to seven foot tall when mad. You haven’t heard about it because he’s too polite to be mad often.”

Someone asks Merry about the ‘if you feed them enough they split in two’ thing and he’s like ‘haha yeah I ate too much and that’s how Pippin got made’

Pippin says that he was the original.

Who came first, the Merry or the Pippin?

Frodo: you misunderstand, there was no ‘original’. There was a single, large hobbit called Merrippin and one day he ate so much he split in two and Merry and Pippin were brought into the world

Beregond, hyperventilating: please tell me you’re joking

So hobbits are like Australians in the sense that any single one, without being told of the joke ahead of time, will emphatically agree that it is a thing in order to maximise the fun of fooling foreigners?

Did you ever doubt it

becausedragonage:

freshest-tittymilk:

princealigorna:

And this is why we used to make cars out of STEEL instead of FIBERGLASS! Sure, fiberglass is a lot lighter in weight and hence a hell of a lot better for gas mileage. But you hit anything at more than 20 mph and the entire body explodes off the fucking thing, and now you’re spending more to repair the car than it’s worth because you need a entire front end, read end, or side panel. They can’t just take the damaged section off, beat it out with a hammer, sand it, and repaint it.

Everything is made with the idea of it being easier to replace than to maintain, aka planned obsolescence. Thanks, capitalism

You guys are obscenely, dangerously wrong. 

It’s not planned obsolescence, it’s physics.

Modern cars crumple to absorb and distribute the forces of impact in an accident in an effort to protect the occupants. When cars didn’t have those crumple zones, the occupants, being the soft, squishy things they were, took those forces and were mangled or killed in horrible ways. Also, those older cars took hidden damage that often went unnoticed and made them very dangerous to drive. IT’s really easy to hide a twisted frame when all you need to do to make the car look okay is a bit of sanding and paint.

I recently watched a TV show where a small sedan was run over by the trailer of an eighteen-wheeler. Run. Over. They had to unwrap the crumpled ball of a car from the undercarriage of that trailer. Guess what? The driver suffered only minor injuries because the car collapsed in exactly the way it was designed to so that she, in the very strong frame surrounding the passenger compartment, was protected. 

And no, don’t thank capitalism for these modern cars. Thank Ralph Nader and countless other safety activists who worked tirelessly to make car manufacturers accountable for the safety of the people who drove their cars.