"Mini rope bridges" are being installed in England's ancient forests, writes the BBC, to help hazel dormice travel around the treetops. Two tiny 65ft bridges have so far been installed in the Forest of Dean, where the mice's habitat has thinned due to ash dieback. — Read the rest
The post Tiny tree bridges help dormice get around ancient English forest appeared first on Boing Boing.
According to the Twitter user who posted this video, "Ukrainians put a door bell on a tree in the forest and leader of russian recon group rang it exploding on the spot with many of his fellow soldiers."
Here's a poor-quality AI translation from Ukrainian into English:
Speaker 1
Well of course, probably the stupidest stretch in the entire history that I know of is a doorbell in the forest on a tree.
The post If you see a doorbell in the forest, don't push it appeared first on Boing Boing.
Thanks to social media, one can make a fortune through shameless publicity stunts and infamy. In any other era, Danielle" Bhad Bhabie" Bregoli couldn't have built a multi-million dollar empire by threatening to beat her mother on live television. Novelty fame/infamy isn't as fleeting as it used to be. — Read the rest
We wouldn’t blame you for feeling a little forlorn in the face of the pandemic and the humidity, and we also wouldn’t suggest for a minute that laughter is the best medicine. If it were, we’re pretty sure Boris Johnson would have claimed the British invented it.
What we do believe is that everybody deserves a break from time to time, and that reading our 25 favourite tweets of the week is a great way to spend yours. Maybe with a cup of tea and a biscuit or two.
1.
If you look around the table, and you can't work out who the idiot is, then the idiot is probably Dave from Accounts.
— Richard Osman (@richardosman) July 19, 2021
2.
inside you there are three women pic.twitter.com/6Ex3KwgX8q
— sarah m. albers
(@sarahmalbers) July 21, 2021
3.
My brain to the name of the person that just introduced themselves to me pic.twitter.com/dU803a6sc8
— ThickyRicky (@theeRicoTaquito) July 21, 2021
4.
At no point in this headline did I know what the next word was going to be pic.twitter.com/b2D6nEm119
— Jimmy—#SaveSilwan—Rothschild (@Pale_0ntologist) July 17, 2021
5.
Henry VII sitting at his computer thinking up some great tweets. pic.twitter.com/JxFXyXCiWj
— Sooz Kempner (@SoozUK) July 18, 2021
6.
18 years ago I dreamt that my eldest daughter graduated and I wasn’t there. It was the trigger that helped give up smoking. Now, she’s only gone and failed her degree, what a waste of my time.
— Martin Rossiter (@MartinRossiter) July 16, 2021
7.
in my experience the best way to quickly recover from a cold is to spend $47.59 in the cold/flu aisle of your local pharmacy then leave the bag in your car or unopened on the kitchen counter overnight
— Sweatpants Cher
(@House_Feminist) July 22, 2021
8.
I’m in a really bad place at the moment. Not mentally, I just live in the UK.
— Tom Knight (@TJ_Knight) July 18, 2021
9.
JELLYFISH
99% Water
110% Bastard— trouteyes (@trouteyes) July 21, 2021
10.
I have nothing in common with people who answer “how are you”, with “can’t complain.”
— Brokengirl (@SarcasticSadOne) July 20, 2021
11.
Ooh, baby, do you know what that's worth pic.twitter.com/MebUXAuHMs
— Friz Frizzle (@FrizFrizzle) July 22, 2021
12.
going back in time and giving this thing a hard slap on the nose with a rolled up news paper pic.twitter.com/J03CTktlri
— ko (@makjako) July 19, 2021
The post Our 25 favourite funny tweets of the week appeared first on The Poke.
When my father-in-law's beloved Volvo began running roughly, he brought it into the shop. The technicians discovered rats had been chewing through the wiring. This puzzled my father-in-law, as over the years he'd parked other cars in his driveway, and none of them had attracted rats to the wiring; why the Volvo?
He subsequently learned that Volvo had switched over to an eco-friendly, biodegrable wire coating made from soy. As it turns out, this soy coating is apparently quite tasty to rodents. A Forbes article on the subject reveals that some owners of late-model cars made by Volvo, Honda, Mazda and Toyota have experienced the same problem. "The common denominator appears to be soy," the article states, noting that lawsuits have been filed. "Alas, no green deed goes unpunished."
The article reveals that owners of the affected vehicles have been taking matters into their own hands:
"[Volvo owner] JoAnn conducted an exhaustive Google search and discovered a new rat repellent: Coyote urine. She bought a supply of the Coyote formula from Home Depot for $24 -- plus shipping. Every night, JoAnn pours a little coyote piss around her tires. 'I dot my driveway with some too,' she says. She also places a Coyote urine-soaked sponge inside a tin pan near the car. She's not sure it's working yet and does not want to take her car in for any more repairs until she's rid of the rats once and for all."
Any manufacturers reading this: Please consider my wife's suggestion, which is to offer in-car snakes as an option.
While looking at these fails only one question comes to mind: “What the hell were they thinking?!”
Yes? No? Stay? Go? Zwei britische Wissenschaftler streiten über den Austritt ihres Landes aus der Europäischen Union. mehr...
I have also realised that the ultimate enemy of self-sabotage is looking after your mental and physical health
Recently I have found myself having trouble with deadlines and big decisions – and it is a pattern of behaviour I recognise.
Handing things in late always fills me with insurmountable fear and self-loathing – but I do it all the time. I piss my plans up the wall and wreck my well-thought-out ideas on a near-daily basis; I knock back tequilas when a deadline is looming, I blank important emails, I test the strength of my relationships, and shrug sleep away at 3am when I know I have to do something that scares me the next day. If everyone abandons me, if I get fired, if I miss my meeting, then it proves what I suspected all along: that I am totally inadequate.
Continue reading...The artist on swearing, her best kiss and what keeps her awake at night
Born in Essex, Rachel Whiteread, 54, studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic. She went on to do an MA in sculpture at the Slade. In 1993, House, her life-size cast of the interior of a terrace house, was the first work by a woman to win the Turner prize. Her major public projects include the Holocaust Memorial (1995) in Vienna, Monument (2001) in Trafalgar Square and Cabin (2016) in New York. A retrospective of her work is at Tate Britain, London, until 21 January. She has two sons with the artist Marcus Taylor.
When were you happiest?
When my children arrived.
Die rumänische Regierung will die Kompetenzen der Anti-Korruptionsbehörde beschneiden. Ein großes gesellschaftliches Bündnis protestiert. mehr...
Denouncing Nazis and the KKK and violent white supremacists by those names should not be a difficult thing for a president to do, particularly when those groups are the instigators and proximate cause of violence in an American city, and one of their number has rammed his car through a group of counter-protestors, killing one and injuring dozens more. This is a moral gimme — something so obvious and clear and easy that a president should almost not get credit for it, any more than he should get credit for putting on pants before he goes to have a press conference.
And yet this president — our president, the current President of the United States — couldn’t manage it. The best he could manage was to fumble through a condemnation of “many sides,” as if those protesting the Nazis and the KKK and the violent white supremacists had equal culpability for the events of the day. He couldn’t manage this moral gimme, and when his apparatchiks were given an opportunity to take a mulligan on it, they doubled down instead.
This was a spectacular failure of leadership, the moral equivalent not only of missing a putt with the ball on the lip of the cup, but of taking out your favorite driver and whacking that ball far into the woods. Our president literally could not bring himself to say that Nazis and the KKK and violent white supremacists are bad. He sorely wants you to believe he implied it. But he couldn’t say it.
To be clear, when it was announced the president would address the press about Charlottesville, I wasn’t expecting much from him. He’s not a man to expect much from, in terms of presidential gravitas. But the moral bar here was so low it was on the ground, and he tripped over it anyway.
And because he did, no one — and certainly not the Nazis and the KKK and the violent white supremacists, who were hoping for the wink and nod that they got here — believes the president actually thinks there’s a problem with the Nazis and the KKK and the violent white supremacists. If he finally does get around to admitting that they are bad, he’ll do it in the same truculent, forced way that he used when he was forced to admit that yeah, sure, maybe Obama was born in the United States after all. An admission that makes it clear it’s being compelled rather than volunteered. The Nazis and the KKK and the violent white supremacists will understand what that means, too.
Our president, simply put, is a profound moral shambles. He’s a racist and sexist himself, he’s populated his administration with Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists, and is pursuing policies, from immigration to voting rights, that make white nationalists really very happy. We shouldn’t be surprised someone like him can’t pass from his lips the names of the hate groups that visited Charlottesville, but we can still be disappointed, and very very angry about it. I hate that my baseline expectation for the moral behavior of the President of the United States is “failure,” but here we are, and yesterday, as with previous 200-some days of this administration, gives no indication that this baseline expectation is unfounded.
And more than that. White supremacy is evil. Nazism is evil. The racism and hate we saw in Charlottesville yesterday is evil. The domestic terrorism that happened there yesterday — a man, motivated by racial hate, mowing down innocents — is evil. And none of what happened yesterday just happened. It happened because the Nazis and the KKK and the violent white supremacists felt emboldened. They felt emboldened because they believe that one of their own is in the White House, or at least, feel like he’s surrounded himself with enough of their own (or enough fellow travelers) that it’s all the same from a practical point of view. They believe their time has come round at last, and they believe no one is going to stop them, because one of their own has his hand on the levers of power.
When evil believes you are one of their own, and you have the opportunity to denounce it, and call it out by name, what should you do? And what should we believe of you, if you do not? What should we believe of you, if you do not, and you are President of the United States?
My president won’t call out evil by its given name. He can. But he won’t. I know what I think that means for him. I also know what I think it means for the United States. And I know what it means for me. My president won’t call out evil for what it is, but I can do better. And so can you. And so can everybody else. Our country can be better than it is now, and better than the president it has.
An economics journal has corrected a paper for the second time for failing to cite previous studies — and said in a separate note that it no longer plans to publish similar errata, with rare exceptions. In September 2015, we reported on the first erratum for “Incentives for Creativity” — a paper that analyzed ways […]
The post We’re not “citation police:” No more errata for omitted citations, says economics journal appeared first on Retraction Watch.
