I like how from the perspective of a follower someone getting their life together to the point that they no longer post is exactly indistinguishable from them getting killed by a gas explosion

the neat thing about opposition to nuclear power is that it offers global warming sceptics a convenient way to shift their position without needing to change their dislike of environmentalists

Dumb Post About Harris’s Hawks

Intelligent, deadly pack hunters: raptors. 

No, not those girls.

These girls.

Harris’s Hawk is the only raptor (i.e., bird of prey) that hunts together as a pack using teamwork to take down their prey. Most birds of prey are solo hunters, and if they’re social at all, it’s limited to mated pairs getting together to raise their young before going their separate ways.  Even Bald Eagles (the America Bird), who are monogamous and will raise children with the same mate year after year, are pretty much loners most of the time. They get together in the spring, have some chicks, and then fly away like “see you next year, honey.” So while it’s remarkable that they’re able to find their mate again every year and they’re great parents, they’re not really that social. 

(These lovebirds do win the prize for best at long-distance relationships)

Harris’s Hawks, on the other hand, are always together. Living and working together to survive. That’s pretty amazing. Not only are the coordinating hunting together, but they’re also coordinating their attacks from the air. 

(literal wingman) Harris’s Hawks live in South America, Central America, and the South Western US (Arizona and Texas). Since they aren’t that big, they eat a lot of little things, birds, lizards, small mammals, and giant insects. But because they have figured out how to hunt in groups, they can take down larger prey. In fact, in the Northern part of their range (Arizona and Texas), their favorite food is the desert cottontail, which weighs about 1.8 lbs. They’ve also been known to take down prey weighing over 2lbs like jackrabbits (which weigh from 3 to 6 lbs and can run up to 40 miles an hour).

( Run Rabbit, Run Rabbit)  Why is that so impressive? Well, the males only weigh about (1.204 to 1.874 lb), while the adult female average is (2.269 lb). 2lbs max is pretty small. That rabbit they’re chasing weighs about as much as they do or more and is hella fast. Imagine killing something that’s almost the same size as you are or bigger using only your feet. That’s hard. 

They have the tools to do it, bigger powerful beaks and large deadly claws:

(look at the size of its claws compared to the rest of its body)

(just like it’s distant dinosaur ancestors: murder feet) However, as with Jurassic Park’s fictional raptors, what makes these girls dangerous is the power of teamwork. The first Hawk flies right for the prey. It sees the danger, it runs, and that’s when the attack comes, not from the back but from the side and the other raptor it didn’t even know was there. (Wanna see?)

(clever girls) Often called the “Wolves of the Sky,” the Harris Hawk not only hunts in packs like wolves but lives in family groups. The “alpha” hawk as it were (alpha theory of dominance isn’t real) is the big female, or you know mom. 

(Mom raises her babies with the help of her family, in their Sonora-Arizona range they nest in cactus) The babies don’t “leave the nest” as soon as they outgrow their fluffy murder muppet stage. The young from previous years stick around and make up the pack. The hierarchy goes Mom, Dad ( other Dad if she has two male mates) older siblings, and younger siblings.

(They also like to stand on top of each other to form a hawk family tower) 

The pack size ranges from 2 - 7 birds, and this family not only hunts together but takes care of the nest as a team with siblings looking out for their new baby brothers and sisters. While the babies will be ready to fly in about 2 months, they will stay with their parents pack for up to three years before heading out to start families of their own.  Because these hawks are intelligent and social, they have become super popular among falconers. 

(see what I mean about them being small, if the Bald Eagle is the T-Rex of the skies, these really are the raptors) Also, the babies are adorable:

(well I think they’re cute anyway) These hawks are the closest you’ll get to Jurassic Park. Intelligent, pack-hunting raptors. If you’d like to see them in action, you can visit a pack at the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum, which has flying demonstrations daily in the winter (you know, when the pandemic is over *this post is from 2020*). Just remember: 

They Stack

They Attack 

And most importantly: They Hunt with the Pack

god this is going to make me fucking insane

of course gender affirming surgery is cosmetic! "really hating your body" has serious effects on your mental health, and while this massively disproportionately affects trans people, it's not like it never happens to cis people

there is no magical ontological difference between a trans man getting top surgery and a cis woman getting top surgery/breast reductions, and the same is true of a trans woman getting implants and a cis woman getting implants.

you know who's currently doing the "make a list of bad doctors and shun them from society" thing? transphobes! anti-abortion activists! it's an extreme reactionary tactic!

Happiness research finds that almost nothing changes the happiness set point, but cosmetic surgery does. (Breast reduction more than enlargement iirc)

...I say that as if the replication crisis hadn't happened. I should look the relevant papers up and see if anyone has attempted replication.

yknow i, too, am generating letters in the most algorithmically probable order

*narrows eyes*

is that so

yknow i, too, am generating letters in the most algorithmically probable order

*narrows eyes*

is that so

squealing + giggling with delight look at this fat fucking beast

Compilation of people holding things that shouldn't be held, please add more if you have any

@chai-cow-ski

This is a bit of a hobby horse of mine, but naturally occurring isotopes of uranium are not extremely radioactive. The amount of radiation uranium emits is pretty low, and more importantly, uranium is primarily an alpha emitter. Alpha particles have an extremely limited range, so that chunk is only going to irradiate you in a dangerous way if you put it inside your body. People keep talking like “fissile” and “radioactive” mean the same thing. They don’t.

You absolutely should avoid handling uranium without gloves, or at bare minimum wash your hands afterward, but that’s because it’s a heavy metal poison and it can cause various forms of organ damage if you ingest the dust from it.

I haven't worked at a nuclear reactor, so I can easily accept that I'm less educated on this, but my worry (apart from the heavy metal poisoning) about handling a chunk of uranium ore would be trapped thorium-234 and protactinium-234. Otoh there shouldn't be much of that given the low decay rate maybe?

OK Maybe I'm too much of a scientist or something but like... where did the stereotype that volcanoes are a prehistoric thing come from? Different time periods have different levels of volcanism, but like, the Mesozoic wasn't particularly high or anything, frankly, a lot of volcanic activity that still affects us today was in the Eocene, 10 million years after the Mesozoic ended... where did this "Dinosaurs fight in front of volcanoes" Trope even come from like what there are still volcanoes today y'all know that right

It’s because volcanoes are badass and dinosaurs are badass so we put the badass things together to make it more badass

But sure, humans are logical actors who definitely can be trusted to run the planet

I have a serious Art Historian answer for this! Basically, it's because a lot of early paleoartists were primarily drawing from existing geologic images to imagine deep time. I work mainly with British and US American sources, so that is what I'm most familiar with, but people all over the place got interested in geology once the concept of geologic time caught on. Geology started to come into vogue and emerge as a distinct field in the late eighteenth century, and this resulted in the development of a new type of landscape painting, what Rebeca Bedell (an important art historian working in the area) calls geologic landscapes. Basically, these are landscape paintings that pay special attention to depicting rocks and geologic processes like erosion, sedimentation, glaciation, earthquakes and for our interests, volcanism. Geologic landscape is a deliberately broad term covering everything from Thomas Cole's 1836 The Oxbow to John Martin's 1851-53 Great Day of His Wrath

Many early geologists were inspired by Alexander von Humboldt's work from his 1799-1804 expedition to South America and got to surveying the areas where they lived, leading to plenty of fossil discoveries along the way. Most geologic landscapes are of ordinary cliffs and mountains and rivers in Europe. However, von Humboldt's work remained highly influential, particularly his 1805 Naturgemälde, a diagram of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, inactive and active volcanoes in Ecuador.

Plenty of artists and geologists put a little nod to von Humboldt in their work by including a volcano that looks an awful lot like that smoking top in the background of their paintings. Also, several notable volcanic eruptions happened in the early nineteenth century, most notably a volcano in Europe. Vesuvius/Mt Etna erupted in 1822 and six more times before the century closed out. So you have a situation where geologists were already interested in painting volcanoes, and then they got a whole slew of first-hand accounts of one erupting along with renewed public interest in them. Volcanes started popping up in all different kinds of places from the Paris salon's most lauded history paintings to shitty cartoons in newspapers. To that point, volcanoes became a kind of visual shorthand to indicate an active, changing earth. They showed up in art both from genuine scientific interest and because natural disasters are frightening and therefore draw attention.

Volcanoes and stripey sedimentary rock were simple ways to reference the idea of studying the earth, so lots of artists used them. Paleoartists looking for ways to reference the process of fossilization as well as the idea of geologic time drew on that existing visual language of geologic landscapes. At first, paleoartists were more likely to show a big storm in a seascape for many reasons including references to the biblical flood as well as since so many early big finds were aquatic animals. But volcanoes still cropped up pretty regularly. One shows up in Henry De la Beche's cartoon Awful Changes from 1830. (De la Beche was a geologist and paleontologist) Some anxiety about extinction mixing with the volcano there.

The thing to keep in mind with this is that in many cases, especially with early images, the artist and the scientist were the same person. It wasn't that artists were ignoring scientific accuracy for the sake of a picture, it was that they were trying to present the processes they were studying. Even in many cases where a lay artist was hired to illustrate a book, they worked closely with the scientist to ensure accuracy, or they lost that commission.

Paleoart scenes and more broadly pictorial restorations were mostly made for publication alongside books are articles for a lay audience rather than for scientific journals. Images are expensive to print, especially something as complex as a scene with multiple figures and a fully realized landscape, so authors and publishers had to make decisions about what to show. You get a frontispiece and maybe three to six more full-page illustrations if you're lucky, so you gotta make them good, you gotta cram as much as possible into each image, you gotta make the pictures a little spectacular.

Action, storms with lighting and huge waves, big strange-looking creatures, and volcanoes all make for a nice spectacle to go along with an educational text.

So you get to the late nineteenth/early twentieth century and Mesozoic animals, more specifically dinosaurs have a bit of a boost in popularity. Museums, natural history magazines, book publishers all started hiring professional artists to create restorations of dinosaurs. Restrictions to printing images still apply, plus there's a whole catalogue of around a century's worth of paleoart to look back on for inspiration. Artists like Charles Knight were looking at existing paleoart as well as fossil sources to flesh out their paintings, which meant they saw the volcanoes in paleoart as well as in landscape painting.

There's a volcano in the background of Charles Knight's 1897 Leaping Laelaps

and Several in Rudolph Zallinger's 1947 Age of Reptiles Mural in the Yale Peabody Natural History Museum (I could not find an hq image of this one)

Volcanoes were already an established part of depicting geology by the time paleoart became a thing in the early-mid nineteenth century, and since paleontology was not at all distinct from geology at the time, they naturally became part of paleoart as well. They were already part of the established iconography of paleoart by the time the twentieth century came around to the point that volcanoes got picked up as part of the image of the Mesozoic by artists who weren't at all interested in education, but in entertainment. And volcanoes are a spectacle.

TL;DR: Volcanoes started appearing in landscape paintings depicting geologic processes as a result of scientific interest in geology. This carried over into paleoart, along with depictions of sedimentation and the like and stayed around because natural disasters are scary and interesting and hold people's attention. Dinosaurs and volcanoes became linked because scientists both wanted to demonstrate their knowledge of their field and convince the public their field was worth knowing about. Artists who were/are hired to make an attention-grabbing picture rather than a scientifically rigorous one pick up on the more bombastic parts of the established norms of paleoart and here we are.

Tag yourself which official Bad Art trait are you

when you are done with a tab you can close it. every browser in the world has a feature that lets you open recently closed tabs. also there is browsing history. need to visit a webpage often? may i introduce you to the bookmarks feature. there’s no reason to leave your tabs open. hoarder behavior.

OP I’m hitting you with a shovel

Anyway tag this with however many browser tabs you currently have. I have 40.

Thanks in part to you I now have a comprehensive categorization of types of people based on number of tabs they have open:

1-9: Kindred spirit. I am kissing you on the mouth

~10-25: Normal. This is more tabs than I would have open in most situations but it is not an unreasonable number.

~26-70: Woah there, partner. I don’t agree with this lifestyle but I understand it is normal for many people. Are you sure you need that many open though? Right at this very moment? Surely you can prune a few here.

~71-99: Okay calm down. You definitely don’t need that many open. When’s the last time you actually opened half of these, really?

100+: Official freak. This is too many. There’s no way you even remember which ones you have open. How are you supposed to find any of them?

1000+: Listen, I know I made a joke up there, I said “hoarder behavior,” but I think you may actually have a problem. With your browser tabs. You might as well have a maze of 50-year-old newspapers to navigate through to get to a youtube video. It’s time to re-evaluate the way you use the internet. I’m serious on this one.

The way you find any of them is you get the tree style tabs addon and then they're grouped by parent tab. Currently I don't have that many tabs open but at one point I had over a hundred just dedicated to individual lego pieces and that was entirely navigable because I didn't see any of them when the ancestor tab was folded shut.

Oh also get AutoTabDiscard so your RAM doesn't melt into the motherboard.

just saw a post about how normal people aren't equipped for internet fame, no one teaches you how to deal with going viral, ordinary bloggers don't have PR teams, etc

it was a nice post, but it drove me nuts in the same way that otherwise empathetic disability posts that posit [some mythical neurotypical that doesn't have those issues at all] drive me nuts – actually famous people are not equipped for internet fame. You could be the richest person in the world and the harassment of millions will drive you almost literally insane. Check out this not-even-that-famous guy's account on what his life became:

internet hate is utterly unsolveable and horrifically bad, and the implication that it's okay to do it to people "if they have a PR team" disgusts me. Unless you have an atypically strong personality, material resources won't make more than a big dent. There's no fucking follower count after which psychotic treatment of them becomes fine

The notion that any material or human resource can protect you from the downsides of visibility-to-millions is fantasy. The notion that we can do it to other human beings without guilt is an even uglier fantasy.

If you have a public figure you loathe, and it seems fine and good that they get death threats for their repulsive behavior, I believe you've made them worse.

I agree with all this, and yet...

There are few people whose struggle with fame I have less pity for than Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss is basically the codifier of the passive income grift. If you do the meta-grift of setting people up to grift, I really think your claim to pity for extreme audience reactions is let's say somewhat diminished.

Maybe I should clarify my position here a little: People do not mete out horrific treatment of famous people measured to their moral worth, and thus we should try to get people to stop, even when the target deserves it as much as Tim Ferriss, because people will not stop at the people who deserve it, or at the amount they deserve. I am not in principle against retribution, but this is too erratic a way to enact it.

the rammies. the repurcussy

like. facebook's content policy (fucking obviously) bans the uploading of CSAM. and yet it is fucking infested with it, not because facebook allows or wants it but because in 2013 there were 350 million images being uploaded every fucking day--there probably far more now! and the workforce that facebook uses to judge the several million reports of CSAM made every year is horrifically exploited (warning, this article is a very harrowing read)--they do an incredibly traumatizing job with awful fucking pay and conditions, and increasingly this kind of moderation work is outsourced to the global south (this one too jfc) where workers can be even more severely and brutally mistreated.

and this is not a unique failing of facebook! the exact same problems, both the proliferation of CSAM and the nightmarish exploitation of people in the global south in order to combat it are a problem faced by TikTok, YouTube, Twitter--under capitalism the userbase of any popular website that allows its users to freely upload content is going to extremely rapidly outpace the website's ability to effectively moderate, and all the most cost-effective (and therefore desirable) moderation strategies rely on the aforementioned exploitation.

so, like, whatever content one finds it morally objectionable for ao3 to allow to be posted and tagged (not interested in doing discourse about what content this might be or if the objection is reasonable or not because that conversation on here is so fucking tedious)--to implement a content moderation policy about it and actually enforce it means a lot of people reading a lot of words (consider that in 2020 there were 10,000 chapters of fiction uploaded a day)--and there is no financially viable model for moderation on that scale that doesn't involve exploitation.

(of course you could argue, and i'd agree, that moderating text-based fiction is significantly less traumatizing than having to look at real video of children being abused and people being murdered--but i think that 'there is content on ao3 that is so morally objectionable by nature of its existence that it is an ethical imperative for the site to remove it but it would be fine for people to be paid $2 an hour to do nothing but read it 10 hours a day' is an incoherent and indefensible position)

and i mean i think you can take the position that 'if the moderation problem is so intractable then these websites genuinely shouldn't exist', and i'm pretty sympathetic to that viewpoint tbh. but people seem to want something of the scale and user-contributing capability of ao3, just with a particular set of actively enforced content moderation policies, and i just don't think that's a thing that can exist under capitalism, at least not in any way that would make the platform more ethical

digital labour is so invisibilised that people will say 'well they should simply moderate the content on their website' and not actually think about who the 'they' in that sentence is or what the actual labour of 'moderating content' entails !

I think the 'under capitalism' can probably go, I don't really see how you would solve this under different economic constraints because moderation of user-generated (or worse, AI-generated) content is fundamentally (as opposed to just monetarily) a low-value activity, and the calls for it, as op correctly points out, stem from not understanding what the cost is.

The capability to upload art is valuable in a way that is badly understood by capitalism, but any individual artwork not so much (on average), and so moderation of it even less.

(The only way this can really work is with much better AI, but I worry that for every future where AI tools solve the moderation problem properly there are 10 where you get some horrendous censorship regime instead.)

fuck it

wyd after smoking this

inspired by my i love you [beverage] post… reblog for sample size reasons <3

easy, advil

Eye-byou-PRO-fin

I have never heard anyone say the second syllable as either "bee" or "buh".

EYE-byou-pro-fen

EE-buh