We Could Go Sailin' @captainbluelux - Tumblr Blog

mcgregor

LOTH CATS in AHSOKA, 1.01 & 1.02

aenslem

SPOCK in STAR TREK portrayed by Leonard Nimoy, Zachary Quinto & Ethan Peck

poketcg-art

Houndour -- nagimiso

thelilyknight

day 16 of tiny dragon age characters, sandal

marauders4evr

Since July is Disability Pride Month

(as opposed to every other month when we're all demure about disability rights /gentle sarcasm)

I wanted to highlight one of my favorite artists: Liberal Jane.

krysten-knitter

pressure-machine

You can't save the world with music. But I can try. I have the same job as Bruce Springsteen. I have to go as far as I can with it.

Happy Birthday, Brandon Flowers! (June 21, 1981)

homunculus-argument

I love how both corvids and parrots are in general highly intelligent, but where corvids generally have strict hierarchies, solve disagreements in the pecking order by fighting, and have a strong dislike for anything new or foreign until they figure out how to make use of it, parrots are just here to party.

The New Caledonian crow, who knows how to specifically build a tool in order to build another tool, never engages in play. These motherfuckers are smarter than some people with the right to vote, and they are Extremely Serious Birds. They don't have time to play, they got work to do and kids to raise.

And then there's the kea, straight-up titled "clown of the mountains", that has a specific vocalization for "playtime!". Scientists decided to try what happens if they play the Play Call for two fully-grown adult keas that are together in an area and can clearly see there is no other, third kea to make the call, and they just go "great idea, disembodied voice! it's TIME TO FUCKING PARTY!" and start wrestling.

Imagine working really hard in order to make it into a top university to study astrophysics, making it to your first Very Serious Class, sitting down full of serious determination, and the dude next to you is taking notes without using his hands, with a glitter pen he's shoved up his nose. And his notes are good.

homunculus-argument

It's your first day of Bird University and you already fucking hate this guy.

trixree

So there's this gene in humans called PLXNC1 or "Plexin", right? So Plexin is associated with increased neuron function and is generally thought to be correlated to human's increased cognitive ability for the use of language, i.e., "language learning". Super cool, right?

Humans aren't the only animals with advanced language learning that have Plexin in their genome. We can actually find homologous plexin between humans and PARROTS!

Using genomic alignment search tools, we can actually break down the sequence of human Plexin and directly compare it to the Plexin found in parrots. (This was actually a project I ran for an upper division genomics class, and running the program literally takes like... ten minutes.) I wanted to see how similar the plexin gene was between humans and parrots, so I queued up the human sequence against all of the available records from parrot genomes and sorted by greatest percent identity (i.e., which bird species had the closest plexin to ours?)

It was this funky dude right here:

THAT'S RIGHT BABY! The kea, notorious for being a straight up motherfucking prank god, carries Plexin with a 79.42% identity comapred to humans'.

THIS LITTLE ASSHOLE HAS A HOMOLOGOUS LANGUAGE LEARNING GENE WITH US!!!! A GENE THAT IS THOUGHT TO BE CORRELATED TO HIGHER LEVEL LEARNING AND INTELLIGENCE!!!!! AND THEY USE THEIR INTELLIGENCE TO WREAK HAVOC ON TOURISTS

Also these guys have been found to literally have predictive reasoning skills, which we consider REALLY FUCKING ADVANCED for a lot of animal species. They pass the Aesop's fable test with flying colors. They're so goddamn cool, I love them so much. The kea really said: "I will use my superior intelligence to have a good fucking time" and that's so powerful honestly

etraytin

One time at the zoo, a kea chewed a hole in my pants because I ran out of treats to give him.

#animals

turing-tested

D:

special-lucky-chosen-one

this is a legitimate problem in robotics.

like, if you're a bomb disposal guy and your team has a cool bomb-disposal robot which you've given a cutesy name to, you may hesitate to put that robot in harm's way, which is NOT OPTIMAL in the bomb-disposing field.

it also doesn't help if you hold funerals for the robots after they get exploded (this happens pretty regularly).

anyway nobody has worked out how to stop humans from pack-bonding with literally inanimate objects and they probably never will. (like even knowing it's a problem, I *still* think those EOD robots deserve funerals).

ronthedunedain

In 2007, the US military rejected a multi-limbed anti-mine robot because it's demise was too inhumane.

special-lucky-chosen-one

oh perfect, this is EXACTLY what I was talking about

headspace-hotel

fucks me up that by total coincidence the sun and moon's size difference is exactly matched to their difference in distance from us, thus making our beautiful total solar eclipses where you can see the silver threads of the sun's corona possible because the moon just covers the sun completely

The stars (literally) aligned just right for this experience to be possible. It's likely that aliens don't have this

uncivilliberties

The moon is also absolutely gargantuan by moon standards. It isn't the largest moon in the solar system, but it is BY FAR the largest in comparison with its planet. Ganymede is the largest satellite of Jupiter and the largest moon in the solar system. Its diameter is only about 3.8% of Jupiter's. Titan's radius is 4.4% of Saturn's. Callisto and Io are the next largest in the neighborhood, with 3.4% and 2.6% the diameter of Jupiter respectively.

Our moon is number 5. It is smaller in direct comparison to the above moons. The diameter of the moon is 3475 km. That is a full 27% of the diameter of the Earth. More than a quarter. That's ridiculous. It's unheard of. The universe is large enough that the word unique probably doesn't mean a lot, but this might be about as close as you get.

This has had a huge impact on our planet. Other things aliens might not have are significant tides. One of Mars's dumpy little potatoes wouldn't be able to move oceans the way our moon does.

Our moon has also stabilized our axis to a massive degree. Without her up there our axis would wobble all over the place and our climate would be far more chaotic. Aliens might not be quite so lucky.

I guess what I am really trying to say is that the moon is extremely cool. I like the moon.

willowdove

Just want to add that the reason we have such a large moon is because a whole planet crashed into proto-Earth. Theia (the planet) and Earth got so superheated by this collision that their component cores fused and the impact jettisoned a lot of material into space. That massive amount of jettisoned material became our moon. So Earth and the moon have very similar composition. This does not seem to be a common method of lunar formation.