NiniaPimp Magazine

No matter how far back you go, dick jokes have been the driving force behind mankind’s sense of humor. Even ancient figures and civilizations we tend to think of as wise and dignified weren’t shy about whipping out some solid boner jokes, even when creating works of art for royalty.

Which is why we wound up with …

David Gaya

When we think of Medieval Italy, we think of what was arguably the cultural hub of the Middle Ages — the birthplace of the Renaissance, Machiavelli, Dante and da Vinci.

Their influence is still felt today.

Italy saw the development of some of the most enduring literature, sculpture and art the world has ever seen. It also produced a painting of a tree of dicks.

The Age
Pictured: a tree of dicks, and what appears to be Snoopy’s dog house.

Now before you light up the comments section claiming that this isn’t a tree of dicks but merely a bunch of dicks standing around a tree, take a closer look at the branches:

The Nonist
Boom. Dicks.

What’s going on here? Nobody really knows. Some think the dicks are meant to symbolize fertility, while others argue that the dicks are actually there as part of a political propaganda movement against a rival faction, because when you want to crush someone’s spirits, you make a crude painting of some dudes in a penis grove getting attacked by crows. We like to believe that the artist just got so tired of painting historical battles and scenes from the Bible that he went dick crazy.

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“To hell with Leviticus. The next 30 pages are all dicks.”

Medieval monks were even more dedicated than medieval painters. They would literally spend years hunched over their work in dimly lit scriptoria, slaving away to produce stunning illuminated manuscripts, painstakingly reproducing and illustrating the world’s knowledge so it wouldn’t be lost. Being the keepers of recorded human history combined with their devotion to religion tends to make us think of them as infinitely wise and spiritual, sort of like if Jesus and Morgan Freeman teamed up to open a library.

They’re basically the same person.

With all the limits their work and their religious vows put on them, the monks needed a way of entertaining themselves, and what they came up with was marginalia. Marginalia are little doodles at the edges of manuscripts, and they are not only irrelevant to the text, but also completely and utterly fucked up beyond anything that could be mistaken for rational thought. We can only assume that the monks either thought nobody would ever notice (since pretty much the only people who could read and write back then were other monks), or they just didn’t give a shit.

Here we have a stork with a man-ass and a giant dangling scrotum shitting out Ernest Hemingway:

BiblioOdyssey
You describe it better.

And here’s a goat farting diarrhea at a squire:

The Medieval Bestiary

There are hundreds of these drawings, and each one does its best to defy any kind of explanation.

They’re essentially the medieval equivalent of a Monty Python cartoon.

Since he’s widely considered the greatest writer in the history of the English language, we tend to think of William Shakespeare as well-educated and dignified, a true master of his craft. However, what you might not have realized is that he liked to toss F-bombs around like Tony Montana breaking his foot on a trampoline.

“Motherfucking cocks. Verily.”

Here’s an excerpt from Henry V, Act IV, Scene 4, wherein the awesomely named “Pistol” tells a French prisoner, in clever alliterative language, that he’s going to rape him.

PISTOL Master Fer. I’ll fer him, and firk him, and ferret him. Discuss the same in French unto him.

If you think “firk” sounds like “fuck,” it’s because it totally does and that’s totally what it means. Shakespeare’s heroes didn’t just like to declaim odes about bands of brothers. They also liked to tell prisoners of war they were going to straight fuck them in the ass.

Also, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, one of the characters inquires:

SIR HUGH EVANS Leave your prabbles, ‘oman. What is the focative case, William?

Yep. “Fuckative,” a play on words, since Sir Hugh is actually referring to the vocative case of the Latin language.

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“Fuckative you, ma’am.”

It’s worth bearing in mind that these plays were performed in front of an audience that didn’t have a script to follow. Exchanges like these would easily be lost among the massive amount of other lines being delivered, and anyone who caught them would probably just assume that they’d misheard. But Shakespeare knew, and the actors knew, and it must have been fun to know they were being paid to stand up and yell “fuck” to an audience that often included the royal family.

When we think of ancient cathedrals, we tend to picture massive ornate buildings constructed with absolute care and precision and decorated with intricate paintings, tapestries and stained glass windows. The Bayeux cathedral in France is no different, and when it was built in the 11th century it had its very own tapestry to go with it.

It also has a pool table.

The Bayeux Tapestry is an absolutely massive, graphic-novel style depiction of the Norman conquest of England in 1066 that measures almost 70 meters long and is embroidered in careful, minute, painstaking detail. It is a wonder of medieval art and justly famous for being an almost perfectly accurate historical representation of what happened during the conquest.

And then we get to this panel:

Bayeux Tapesty

Here we see Harold (King of England) and William (soon-to-be William the Conqueror) arriving in the city of Rouen. Seems normal, right? Take a closer look at that guy on the right, next to the rocket ship:

Got Medieval

There are two things to notice here. First, that’s a priest punching a woman in the face. European history wasn’t exactly kind to women, so this normally wouldn’t be too shocking, but this dude literally has nothing to do with the story whatsoever. The caption to the image, loosely translated, reads, “Here’s a priest smacking a woman.” Also, some scholars theorize that the woman’s name as it is written is actually medieval slang for “babe.” So essentially, the caption reads, “Here’s a priest smacking some broad.”

But then we have to look below her, to the left:

Got Medieval

Nobody knows who the hell this naked guy pointing at his swinging man-salad is, or what he’s doing there at the bottom of the tapestry. It’s like whoever made it simply thought, “This son of a bitch is 70 meters long, who the hell is going to notice one tiny naked boner?”

Us, history. The answer is us.

Getty
We’re professionals.

There’s a scientific field called biomimetics that is all about studying nature and stealing its technology. That makes sense — if you want to build a flying machine, you start by looking at birds. But the more we study, the more we find that biomimetics isn’t just about building a more fishlike boat. Even the smallest, slimiest creatures employ tech that will some day revolutionize everything from solar panels to TV screens.

Just consider the fact that …

The bombardier beetle is one badass motherfucker. If you mess with one of these beetles, you can expect to get sprayed with a 212-degree blast of burning, noxious chemicals from a turret on the end of its abdomen. It’s like a little chemical warfare tank that will go off with just the slightest bit of provocation.

Via Apologeticspress.org
“Oh, shit. Honey, I swear this never happens.”

If you think it’s amazing that a lowly bug evolved to do that, it’s even more remarkable when you consider the complexity of the mechanism that makes it happen. Inside, it has two different chemicals and a mixing chamber. The chemicals react and get so hot that pressure builds in the chamber, which is then released through the openings on the beetle’s abdomen. It can squirt the burning jet up to 20 centimeters.

Via Gotweird.com
“Shit! Did I get it in your hair? I promise I wasn’t trying to do that.”

Lots of animals squirt poison. The bombardier beetle, however, shoots quick-fire pulses like a machine gun — one that can fire up to 500 times a second. For the sake of context, a top-of-the-line minigun on its fastest setting will fire about 100 times a second. The beetle is able to do all of this thanks to a remarkable system of internal valves that are way more efficient than what us humans have been able to build.

How We Can Steal It:

Keep in mind, all sorts of technology requires the misting and mixing of chemicals — everything from car fuel-injection systems to the nebulizers that asthma sufferers use. Come up with a better misting system and you can change the world.

That’s why researchers took the bombardier beetle’s design and used it as the model for uMist. It’s here that we should point out that, in order to mimic what the beetle is born with, it takes a machine that freaking looks like this:

Via Swedishbiomimetics.com

As you can see, mimicking the beetle’s tech isn’t easy. But it’ll be worth it — the beetle design allows us to control the temperature, velocity and size of the droplets being sprayed, which means the potential applications are nearly endless. We’re talking about better fuel efficiency and lower emissions in vehicles and a new type of gas-turbine aircraft engine that can reignite in mid-flight if it loses power. Oh, and get this: the technology could even create needle-free injections, or as all the Trekkies out there would call them, hyposprays.

That’s right. The bombardier beetle doesn’t just hold the key to advanced aeronautic systems; it could also give us Star Trek medical technology.

Via Sweedishbiomimetics.com
“Of course I still respect you. Yes, I’ll call you tomorrow.”

The sea mouse’s scientific name is Aphrodita aculeata, after the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite. Not because it’s a lovable creature, but because if you look at it from the underside it supposedly looks like a vagina.

Via The Featured Creature
The scientist that named this animal has obviously NEVER seen an actual vagina.

No, we don’t know why they call it a mouse when it’s clearly a worm. That’s not important. What is important is that the sides of the sea mouse are covered in thin hairs, called setae, that will glow red, blue or green depending on how the light hits them.

Via BBC News

That’s cool and all, but it’s not until you get them under a microscope that you realize what a mind-blowing job evolution does of beating even our most state-of-the-art technology.

How We Can Steal It:

You probably know that the fastest communication cables are the fiber-optic lines that zip light along a series of thin, perfectly clear glass hairs. The tech took 170 years to perfect, and manufacturing fiber-optic cables is so complicated it would take the rest of this article to explain it.

Via Wikipedia
Well, yeah, of course we make it like that.

But the little clear hairs that grow on the back of that tiny sea worm thing? They’re much, much more efficient than the cables we’re using. All fiber-optic cables (and in fact, all cables of any kind) lose some of their signal over a distance. Fiber optics work by controlling the reflection of the light so that it bounces perfectly along the length of the cable, but the world is an imperfect place, and no medium we’ve come up with doesn’t lose at least a little bit of the light over distances. No surface is perfectly reflective, after all.

But the sea mouse comes pretty freaking close. Its survival depends on its ability to light up its coat — that’s how it wards off predators. And its coat won’t light up without exterior light hitting it. And it lives thousands of feet under the surface of the ocean, where virtually no light can reach. Therefore, millions of years of not wanting to die has allowed it to evolve spines that are nearly 100 percent efficient in their ability to reflect light.

Via Phys.ntnu.no

Scientists are examining the mouse, not just so that we can steal the design of its super-efficient photonic fur, but so we can learn to actually “grow” the stuff the same way the mouse does. We’re not sure why they can’t just shave a bunch of the mice and glue the hairs together end to end, but they probably know what they’re doing.

When you hear the word “butterfly,” most of you probably think of words like “graceful,” “beautiful” or, if you’re a fan of chaos theory, “hurricane.” But if you happen to work for Qualcomm, then you’re probably thinking about energy-efficient display screens right now.

Via Wikipedia
“Turn it to the right and see if it gets the Bears game.”

The first thing you notice about the Blue Morpho is that it seems to have given itself the gaudy iridescent paint job of a customized Honda Civic.

Via TheBlogAboutCars.com

How it achieves that color is kind of amazing. Normally, color works like this: The surface of whatever you’re looking at reflects light of a certain color and absorbs all of the other colors. For instance, plants are green because the pigment absorbs all of the colors of the spectrum except green. Green is reflected back, so the plant looks green to you.

The butterfly, however, achieves its holy-shit-what-is-going-on-am-I-on-LSD-question-mark iridescent color because its wings are covered in layers of semireflective scales. Their “color” is determined by the wavelengths of light interfering with each other. So, the brilliant blue is actually every color in the spectrum being reflected in a particular way so that blue is amplified. The result is a blue that makes all of the other blues you’ve seen in your life look like bullshit.

Via Wikipedia
Of course, you’re seeing this on a monitor, so there’s that catch-22.

How We Can Steal It:

Qualcomm studied the butterflies and came up with the mirasol display for televisions, which are so energy efficient that you can’t help but suspect witchcraft. They mimic the butterfly with two reflective layers with a very small space in between. The top layer reflects some light and lets the rest through to be reflected by the bottom layer. Adjust the distance between layers by microscopic amounts and you can produce mind-blowing colors using just the ambient light in the room.

Obviously, since they don’t have to produce their own light, the displays are massively more efficient than the screen you’re looking at now (in fact, if the image on the screen is static, almost zero energy is used). And, by the way, it gives you a much more vivid image to boot.