Itâs not that kitty is saying she canât make the wheel go. Kitty is saying she wants to do the wheel WITH her person. Much the same way many cats wonât wat unless their person is eating at the same time.
This is a request for social togetherness and itâs incredibly sweet
Season 3 is now available to all btwâ hereâs a playlist of the entire series including the new ones! Thanks for watching, and please tell your friends to watch peopleWatchingâ ideally several million friends..! Or just enjoy it; i certainly enjoyed making it. -Wr
ReciproCard: âStart by searching for your home library above to instantly see every free reciprocal agreement you qualify for.â Use this to have more options for Libby ebooks.
We wouldnât be able to get a better look at the far side of the Moon until we invented a way to send cameras there. At the dawn of the Space Age, rockets gave us the ability to do just that. In 1959, Soviet engineers created a series of robotic probes, and launched them toward the Moon. One of these managed a lunar flyby, and was named Luna 3. Engineers equipped Luna 3 with a film camera, capable of developing the exposed film, scanning the images, and transmitting them back to Earth by radio.
âThe Extrapolated Futures Archive is a reverse-lookup for speculative fiction. Describe a situation you are facing, and find the SF stories that already worked through the implications.â
Neal Agarwal published another gift to the internet with Size of Life. It shows the scale of living things, starting with DNA, to hemoglobin, and keeps going up.
The scientific illustrations are hand-drawn (without AI) by Julius Csotonyi. Sound & FX by Aleix Ramon and cello music by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga calm the mind and encourage a slow observation of things, but also grow in complexity and weight with the scale. It kind of feels like a meditation exercise.
Basically the title. I gave him a âvacuumâ button because the vacuum is stressful for him and I wanted to be able to clearly communicate that the vacuum was going to happen and let him know âvacuum all done.â He definitely knows what it means because when the vacuum is running he will push âvacuumâ repeatedly and also add ânervousâ in there too. But now he has started spamming vacuum after I tell him no, like he is using it as a curse word. For example, he will ask for âsnackieâ when we JUST got done with snackie and I will say âsnackie all doneâ and then he will go spam the vacuum button. Yeah, ok bud, I hear you loud and clear that you feel âvacuumâ about âsnackie all done.â Or he snuck a lick from the end of my spicy curry dish (I did not authorize this, I looked away for ONE second), I could tell he regretted this (spicy), and then he went and pressed âsnackie vacuum.â Yeah, ok bud, that snackie made your mouth feel âvacuumâ.
I donât know what Iâm asking really, just commiserating. I guess maybe he needs a âmadâ button?
I doubt that the "mad' button would work as well as the "vacuum" button, for the same reason that curses is only a good curse in (ironic interpretations of) bowdlerized fictionâŠ
Greetings from your friendly neighborhood National Park Service worker.
The government wants you to think a shutdown is no big deal. Itâs is. They want things to keep running in the meantime. They will- but not safely and not paid. Because not everyone is necessarily aware what a shutdown means for Gov workers, this is how it worksâŠ
Employees fall into one of the following three categories:
Excepted: Unpaid, required to work (those needed to protect life and property).
Exempted: Paid, required to work (those funded by non-lapsed sources)
Furloughed: Unpaid, employees that are neither excepted nor exempted. These employees have been ordered to âexpeditiously complete orderly shutdown activitiesâ then head home. This may be a few minutes for some employees or a few days depending on their job duties and what it takes to perform an âorderly shutdownâ of their activities.
Who is furloughed? Legit everyone but âsafetyâ workers. So fees, maintenance, timekeepers, facilities, everybody. And no, those thousands of people will not be paid for whatever amount of time they arenât working.
Who is Exempted? In my neck of the woods (pun intended) itâs law enforcement, fire, ems, search and rescue and dispatchers. Hey that sounds like a lot? Guess what - almost all of the law enforcement in the park are simultaneously EMS, search and rescue and the Fire department. One person, four jobs. Thatâs the way⊠It always is by the way, which is HIGHLY PROBLEMATIC (but thatâs a different rant). We will keep doing those four jobs, unpaid and unsupported. When will we get paid for our work?- who knows. You may ask yourself - why do we have to keep working when everything is shutdown? Because theyâre not closing the national parks. Yeah. So people are going to keep coming, keep using the bathrooms that wonât be cleaned, keep using the roads that wonât be maintained safely, keep getting hurt and in trouble.
Right now, there is a massive rollover DUI car accident on one side of the park and someone just got gored by an animal on the other side of the park. So all of us (the three people on shift at the moment) will be figuring out which one to heading out to. We have to choose. And itâs going to be extremely dangerous when we do get on scene because those ânon-essential workersâ that were furloughed? -Those are the people we count on daily to go above and beyond their own normal duties and help.
Those are the people who manage traffic around the accident for us so we donât get hit. Those are the people that get extra resources for us (lights for night time, blankets, Gatorade if itâs a long extraction on scene). Those are the people that make sure we get paid for being called out in the middle of the night, the people that make sure all the protocols are being followed so everyone is safe, the victim advocates that talk to the families, they are the essential hands needed because- if you havenât all forgotten- they already gutted our limping agency staff by like 30%.
What can you do?
The usual things you see - pester your local and government officials. Pester your money makers though even more - the businesses that give money to your local officials. But more immediately? Please do not come here. Please do not further burden the system. Tell other people not to come. Donât let the government think we can make it work still- we canât. Do not make us have to function as if things were okay, because they are really really not.
Greetings from Week Five of the shutdown.
Whatâs new?
Well, for a small group of us first responders, the government has now ordered that we be paid⊠from our parkâs admission fee money fund. The admission fee money fund that is supposed to go directly towards improving the park â fixing roads, cleaning and fixing facilities, visitor experience stuff. The admission fee money fund thatâs supposed to cover those improvements for the entire year⊠Is now being used to pay us. So guess what happens when that runs out? A.) no more pay, B.) no improving the park.
But the parks are still open? So wouldnât the fees of people still coming in cover part of that? No. Because weâre not allowed to collect fees during the shutdown. The parks are open, not gaining any revenue, burning through their reserves, and becoming significantly more unsafe and generally trashed and destroyed, by the day.
What does that look like?
Last week it was very icy and a tour bus of 50 people slid partially off the road, blocking a whole lane of traffic. This was on the MAIN ROAD, on a blind curve, only 10 miles into the park.
We only have one remaining, non-furloughed plow/sander driver. For reference, we normally have 4-5. He was 50 minutes away (and then the sander broke so he had to go back to the garage for a bit to try and fix it.) The one remaining tow truck driver was almost 90 minutes away. There was only me and my coworker on shift to deal with traffic and we couldnât direct people around the accident because the road all around it was still icy because the sander hadnât gotten there and someone was bound to slide off again. So we had to just keep traffic stopped. For almost a two hours, every single visitor to the park was in stopped traffic. About 10 miles worth of cars just sat, parked in the road. Hundreds and hundreds of people.
Some of them turned around to go back to the entrance, but an RV slid off the road going the other way, so now traffic was blocked in both directions. Which meant when the sander WAS fixed, it couldnât get through the traffic. And because it was just me and my coworker, we didnât have anybody who could leave the scene of the accident to go down and clear that traffic for the sander.
As I stood there in the cold (thankful that I had pulled my yaktrax out of storage soon enough to use them for the occasion because the road was SOLID ICE) people kept getting out of their cars, coming up to me, and complaining. Iâm not allowed to give political opinions at work, but I was able to provide them facts:
Fact: We only have one plow truck driver, because everyone else has been furloughed. If we had our normal amount, all the roads would be sanded and this probably wouldnât have happened.
Fact: We only have two officers on right now. Usually, we can try to pull some people from other divisions to help with traffic- those people are also furloughed.
Fact: The reason you are in traffic right now is directly caused by the government shutdown.
The main thing I want to communicate to the general public, though, comes from the repeated question I got âWell, if the roads were so dangerous why didnât you just close the park?â
Maâam?
Fact: The administration has forbidden us from closing National Parks.
We were ordered to âContinue operations and services as normalâ⊠with at least 65% of our staff furloughed.
Fun epilogue to the story is that 2 hours in, just as the sander and tow truck finally arrived, another car went careening off the road about 30 miles from there, blocking traffic for both lanes. I left one scene and came to that one we discovered the drive was HURT, and needed an ambulance. My coworker and I are also the EMTs/ambulance drivers (and fire department and search and rescue andâŠ) so we had to have our dispatch center start calling people at home to come in and help. (Their overtime wonât be paid until the government restarts by the way).
Five people came in on their day off and we managed to transport to the hospital, do the crash report, clear the road⊠and deal with SEVEN MORE slide offs in the following two hours.
What are the takeaways from all this complaining Iâm doing:
Fact: 65% or more of National Park Service staff that are furloughed and have no income right now. They still have bills though, and some people are in significant trouble financially (because itâs not like they paid us much in the first place).
Fact: Coming to your national park right now is not only extremely dangerous for you, but also causing significant and irreparable damage to the park- to the actual natural resource, to our infrastructure, and to our facilities.
Fact: Parks were ordered to use the finances that we usually would put towards keeping up said facilities and infrastructure, to pay the people we are forcing to work right now. BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT HAS FORBIDDEN PARKS TO CLOSE THEIR DOORS AND SHUT THEIR GATES.
Please donât come here. Please contact your local representative. Please spread the word
Because it looks like itâs going to be another busy day.
Wikitok is my new favourite distraction. Itâs basically a continuous TikTok format that serves up endless random Wikipedia articles and oh boy it is ADDICTIVE. Iâve added it to my home screen as an app, and itâs a great way to scroll away a few moments. It was created by developer Isaac Gemal in ninety minutes, which is all kinds of ridiculous. I particularly like the fact heâs kept it genuinely random â âI have no grand plans for some sort of insane monetized hyper-calculating TikTok algorithm ⊠It is anti-algorithmic, if anythingâ â which makes it even more startling how certain topics appear over and over again. For example, it would appear that the majority of human knowledge revolves around defining species of beetle.Â
It was cocky and overconfident to call the Titanic âunsinkableâ but one thing thatâs overlooked is that she was genuinely really, unusually solid. She could float even with 4 compartments fully flooded, which even a lot of modern day ships canât do.
And itâs not like they were wrong about her being solid! Olympic, her identical sister ship, survived being torpedoed and then running over the U-Boat that fired that torpedo. Those ships were solid.
Itâs very clear that absolutely no other ship in 1912 would have been able to survive that collision, and itâs a testament to the quality of the ship that she didnât sink in a few minutes Empress of Ireland style. Part of what makes the Titanic such a tragic story is that it isnât a group of rich idiots locking themselves in a shoddy iron barrel to go 4km underwater. It was 2200 people, most of whom were poor immigrants, on a reliable ship on a commonly-made journey, and then something went horribly, unpredictably wrong.
There WERE gates seperating third class from the rest of the boat, but those gates were. Literally just waist high fences. They were just there to mark âhey youâre not allowed past hereâ in universal language, and that was it. It was physically impossible to trap third class passengers in the ship.
What DID happen with a lot of third class passengers was just a case of really unfortunate circumstances - they had the worst steward to passenger ratio, they were the furthest down in the ship, AND they had the widest diversity of languages, giving them the least time to get out, and the worst communication barriers. And even then, y'know what many surviving third class passengers reported?
People did not evacuate third class. They knew the ship was sinking, and they stayed put, because of an overwhelming amount of learned helplessness - for the majority of these people, their lives had NEVER been their own, they were always in the hands of greater powers. So they stayed put, they waited to be ordered to leave, and when those orders never came⊠they died. Which is fucking awful, but⊠yeah, not really a design flaw; just the nature of the tragedy.
Anyways, all that aside, I also hate it when people smugly talk about how mOrE LiFeBoAtS would have saved more people, like. Dude, holy shit, the Titanic actually sank EXTREMELY fast, boats that size normally took the better part of a day to sink, she was gone in about two hours. More lifeboats wouldnât have done anything. They didnât even have enough time to launch all the lifeboats they did have - Collapsible A was launched with the sides still down, so all passengers were sitting in ankle deep water all night, meanwhile Collapsible B was never launched at all - it was swept overboard and wound up upside down in the water (with the one surviving radio operator, Harold Bride trapped underneath). The survivors on Collapsible B were mainly men, who managed to climb on top of it, and under the command of Third Officer Lightoller (highest ranked survivor), the men standing on the overturned boat kept it balanced and floating all night, while towing more survivors in the water.
This obviously had high casualty rates, but one of the survivors they towed in the water was the ships head baker Charles Joughin, the final person to leave the Titanic, as he managed to climb up to the top of the stern as it tipped, and calmly rode it down like an elevator while people were panicking and jumping; Joughin didnât even get his hair wet (the Titanic movie also lied about the ship 'sucking people down with itâ btw). Joughin also spent the entire sinking drinking heavily, which probably helped him stay calm, and when he was rescued his only health concerns were mild frostbite in his feet, and a raging hangover, god bless.
Anyways as for the lifeboats not being fully loaded, that WAS a mistake, but not the crews fault - that was STANDARD PROCEDURE in the day, lifeboats were NOT meant to be fully loaded while still in the air, you were supposed to put some people in, send them down, the load the rest in the water; loading them in the air would cause their hulls to break from the weight. Now, the lifeboats on the Titanic DID have reinforced hulls, so they actually could be fully loaded in the air, which had held up in testing⊠but the crew and officers had NOT been informed of that fact. When they were launching full lifeboats near the end, Lightollerâs admitted in his inquiry testimony that it was an extremely reckless choice being made out of desperation.
Anyways, if you are also a nerd and want to know how the Titanic sinking actually went down first hand, why not get it right from the primary sources? There was a US Senate Inquiry that began literally the day after the Carpathia arrived in New York, the British held their own inquiry later, and the full transcripts of both can be found here. Extremely interesting stuff - during Gugliemo Marconiâs testinmony on the first day, you can literally see the inquiry realizing in real time that hey, why the FUCK isnât it mandatory for ships to have someone at the radio at all times in case of emergency? Really neat stuff.
Hello rest-of-the-world-that-isnât-Australia-or-New-Zealand! My second book, Detective Beans: Adventures in Cat Town, comes out next week! Woohoo! Available at your local bookshop :D
The public domain is also a wellspring for creativity. You could think of it as the yin to copyrightâs yang. Copyright law gives authors important rights that encourage creativity and distribution â this is a very good thing. But the United States Constitution requires that those rights last only for a âlimited time,â so that when they expire, works go into the public domain, where future authors can legally build on the past â reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs and movies. Thatâs a good thing too! It is part of copyrightâs ecosystem. The point of copyright is to promote creativity, and the public domain plays a central role in doing so.
How does the public domain feed creativity? Here are just two examples from 2024. You may have enjoyed the film Wicked in 2024. Like many of its predecessors, it is based on L. Frank Baumâs The Wonderful Wizard of Oz books, and it offers origin stories for the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good. From the literary realm, Percival Everettâs 2024 novel James reimagines Mark Twainâs Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, Huckleberryâs friend who is an escaped slave. The novel won the 2024 National Book Award and Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the Booker Prize. As summed up by a New York Times review: ââHuck Finnâ Is a Masterpiece. This Retelling Just Might Be, Too.â Mark Twain famously wanted copyright to last forever â if he had his wish, would his heirs have sued Everett? Thankfully, we did not have to find out, and Everett could publish James without such litigation.
I must have been absent from anatomy class my first year of med school the day they discussed this anatomical feature, found in â believe it or not â 10% of all humans around the planet.
Better late than never.
I first learned of Darwin's point (aka Darwin's tubercle) in Melinda Beck's February 23, 2010 Wall Street Journal story about vestigial traits.
Darwin's tubercle [also known as the plica semilunaris] is a congenital ear condition which often presents as a thickening on the helix, at the junction of the upper and middle thirds.
The feature is present in approximately 10.4% of the population.
The acuminate nodule represents the point of the mammalian ear.
This atavistic feature is so called because its description was first published by Charles Darwin in the opening pages of "The Descent of Man," as evidence of a vestigial feature indicating common ancestry among primates.
However, Darwin himself named it the Woolnerian tip, after Thomas Woolner, a British sculptor who had depicted it in one of his sculptures and had first theorized that it was an atavistic feature.
The gene for Darwin's tubercle is inherited in an autosomal dominant pattern, and has incomplete penetrance, meaning that those who possess the gene will not necessarily possess the ear tubercle.
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