My dad works in healthcare and he went to a conference this week. Someone said in a presentation, “The heathcare system is not broken. It’s working exactly the way it was designed, it was just never designed to benefit patients,” which I honestly am blown away by as the most accurate and concise description of US healthcare that I can’t believe I’ve never heard anyone say.
in an attempt to appeal to the pathos of my potential employers, i wrote my resume using the same format a no-kill shelter would use to describe a geriatric dog
i am a gentle, mild-mannered young man looking for a forever job to spend the rest of my years in. though i may not be the most talented and versatile person on the job market, i’m the perfect employee for someone out there, and that someone just might be you(r company)!
my fav paleontology fact is that the spikey bit on the end of a stegosaurus’ tail is officially, scientifically called the thagomizer because of a far side comic
Man found the stoplight cameras were activated during yellow lights and decided to cut the wires of it.
hero
STOP SCROLLING!!! Please take a moment to read the article about what this man is doing, the criminals he is exposing, and the deaths of so many poor and middle class families at the hands of the greedy. Yellow lights with Xerox cameras were shortened from 5 seconds to 3 seconds in poor and middle class neighborhoods to surprise drivers and generate more revenue. Many deaths ensued. This story is already a couple months old, but there isn’t enough talk about it. Please signal boost this.
I’m reading on old superstitions and:
“Do not go out collecting nuts on Sept 14th, holy Rood Day, as the devil will be out nutting too!”
September 14th: the day the Devil nuts
Fun family story: when my aunt was marrying her wife everyone was really excited but also dreading it because my aunt is known for her insanely long speeches so everyone knew her vows would be like 9 hours long so when it came time for her to say her vows she had a shit ton of cue cards in her hands and even her wife started groaning and my aunt took a deep inhale and then unravelled all the cue cards which were taped together and they all just read ‘HOT DAMN’ in giant letters and those were my aunts vows.
Science has an overview of Schweitzer’s work. You may recall that she published descriptions of cells and soft tissue imbedded deep in fossilized dinosaur bone. That work is much beloved by creationists (it means those bones must be young, they say), but despite starting out as a creationist, she does not support that claim of a young age. She’s a theistic evolutionist.
She went back to school at Montana State University in Bozeman for an education degree, planning to become a high school science teacher. But then she sat in on a dinosaur lecture given by Jack Horner, now retired from the university, who was the model for the paleontologist in the original Jurassic Park movie. After the talk, Schweitzer went up to Horner to ask whether she could audit his class.
“Hi Jack, I’m Mary,” Schweitzer recalls telling him. “I’m a young Earth creationist. I’m going to show you that you are wrong about evolution.”
“Hi Mary, I’m Jack. I’m an atheist,” he told her. Then he agreed to let her sit in on the course.
Over the next 6 months, Horner opened Schweitzer’s eyes to the overwhelming evidence supporting evolution and Earth’s antiquity. “He didn’t try to convince me,” Schweitzer says. “He just laid out the evidence.”
She rejected many fundamentalist views, a painful conversion. “It cost me a lot: my friends, my church, my husband.” But it didn’t destroy her faith. She felt that she saw God’s handiwork in setting evolution in motion. “It made God bigger,” she says.
I’ve read her papers, and they’re real head-scratchers. She seems to do good work; she documents everything carefully; she interprets the results cautiously. They don’t jibe well with expectations — chemistry ought to show more decay — but heck, data is data, if there are sound observations we’ve got to conform the theory to the evidence, not the other way around. She is reporting stuff that seems colossally unlikely, though.
Schweitzer’s most explosive claim came 2 years later in two papers in Science. In samples from their 68-million-year-old T. rex, Schweitzer and colleagues spotted microstructures commonly seen in modern collagen, such as periodic bands every 65 nanometers, which reflect how the fibers assemble. In another line of evidence, the team found that anticollagen antibodies bound to those purported fibers. Finally, they analyzed those same regions with Harvard University mass spectrometry specialist John Asara, who got the weights of six collagen fragments, and so worked out their amino acid sequences. The sequences resembled those of today’s birds, supporting the wealth of fossil evidence that birds descend from extinct dinosaurs.
It’s difficult to believe, but then there’s another dilemma: we expect extraordinarily strong evidence before it should be accepted, but how strong does it have to be? Is this too nitpicky?
She needs more fossils to quiet a continuing drumbeat of criticism. In addition to raising the specter of contamination, Buckley and others have argued that antibodies often bind nonspecifically and yield false-positive results. Critics also noted that one of the six amino acid sequences reported in the 2007 paper was misassigned and is likely incorrect. Asara later agreed and retracted that particular sequence.
“That’s worrying,” says Maria McNamara, a paleontologist at University College Cork in Ireland. “If you are going to make claims for preservation, you really need to have tight arguments. At this point I don’t think we are quite there.”
The biggest problem, though, is this one: all these results come from one and only one lab.
But no one except Schweitzer and her collaborators has been able to replicate their work. Although the study of ancient proteins, or paleoproteomics, is taking off, with provocative new results announced every few weeks, most findings come from samples thousands or hundreds of thousands of years old—orders of magnitude younger than Schweitzer’s dinosaurs.
“I want them to be right,” says Matthew Collins, a leading paleoproteomics researcher at the University of York in the United Kingdom. “It’s great work. I just can’t replicate it.”
That’s something I wish the creationists who bring up her work could understand: we want her to be right. I want to be able to go to a databank and download protein sequences from T. rex. I want to see a molecular phylogenetics comparison of Stegosaurus and Hadrosaurus osteocyte proteins. I think it would be awesome to compare sequences from different ceratopsians and assemble a family tree.
What I want and what we’ve got are two different things, though, and if only Schweitzer has the magic hands to extract this information, I’m not going to trust it. I don’t reject it out of hand, but damn,
it really needs more replication. At this point I don’t want to see another paper from her — I want to see it coming from another, unaffiliated lab. That would be better confirmation.
french recipes: if you’re not making this in paris then what’s the point. fuck you
italian recipes: use the left leg meat of a pig from one of three farms in this specific area of tuscany, or from this day my grandmother will begin manifesting physically in your house
american recipes: buy these three cans of stuff and put them in a pan congrats you cooked
chinese recipes, as handed down from mother to child: season it with a pinch of this and some of that. you want to know the exact amount? feel it in your heart. ask the stars. yell into the void.
English recipes: boil and salt it. Okay that’s it enjoy
Greek recipes: You followed all the right steps but this isn’t quite right. I don’t know what to tell you.
Australia recipes: chuck it on the barbie
Latinx recipes: you will never make it better than your abuela, face the facts
Filipino recipes: add rice and soy sauce and some more rice MORE RICE MORE RICE MORE
Serbian Recipes: everything is salad. Ajvar? Salad. A single whole hot pepper covered in oil? Salad. Cabbage? Salad. Kajmak? Salad.
Lebanese recipes: If you don’t have at least 3 family members cooking this dinner with you than you aren’t doing it right.
Indonesian recipes: have you added spices? Add some just in case. Eat with rice. It’s not a proper meal until there’s rice in it. You just had bread/burger/cake/pizza? Eat rice anyway or you’ll die of starvation
Bonus Javanese recipes: Have you added sugar? What do you mean it’s meant to be salty/sour/spicy/something else? ADD SUGAR.TO IT
Canadian recipes: Well part of the directions are in metric but you have imperial measuring cups. I hope you like math because we’re going to find out how many gallons in a litre and how many millimetres are in a cup.
Swedish recipes: Assemble all the beige items you have in your kitchen. Great. now add raw red onions, dill and salt and white pepper. if u prefer it blander, don’t do the last things. consider serving it with jam
Norwegian recipes: listen after three days skiing uphill you will eat anything so stop complaining.
Indian recipes: spend two weeks digging the required spices out of your cupboards. Chop onions until you cry. Fry onions with spices until evey pore in your body is open, let the fragrance seep into your skin, become one with the curry.
german recipes: this meal isn’t what you think it is. it has 164 different names in different regions. it’s either made of potatoes, served with potatoes, or it’s cake. there’s a 50% chance it’s actually austrian, but don’t tell anyone.
belarusian recipes: “cook over a slow fire until done”. how many degrees is a slow fire? when is “done”? what am i even cooking there’s no picture and the only ingredients are honey and cornflower
turkish recipes: “if you do this, there’s really -REALLY- good change that you’ll die because everything is too spicy or too sweet but here we go”
romanian recipes: if you don’t already know the ingredients and directions by heart then what are we doing here
Malay recipes: If it’s not spicy enough, it’s not worth it. You don’t have coconut milk? It’s doomed
Irish recipes: Potatoes. All potatoes. If it’s not potatoes it’s not food.
Estonian recipes: if it’s not brown, doesn’t look like turd and has no blood in it, you’ve failed
Lithuanian recipes: the main ingredient is potatoes. well, only potatoes. and eat it with half a loaf of rye bread
Japanese recipes: if you didn’t add even just a drop of shoyu to this then you’ve brought dishonor on your house. Also where’s your fish grill? And your rice cooker? You don’t even have a tamagoyaki skillet? You’re a disgrace.
Icelandic recipes: take your salt fish and your sheep meat. Make a soup. make a sweater with leftover sheep wool. Don’t want sheep or salt fish? Try slátur. It’s still sheep, but like, inside sheep. Still no good? Raid a nearby island nation and trade your sheep for their strange food.
