Han Shot First

hi, I'm Josh. I'm in Philly, and I can't be bothered with aesthetic so enjoy my boring ass dash. late 20s

[thememedaddy]

[podcastwizard]

"yeah i know it's bad for the environment but like so many things are so i just use it anyway" COOL I'M GONNA BITE THROUGH THIS TABLE

[crtter]

I mean, Josef Mеngеlе DID die here. Like, that’s something that happened. You know, the piece of shit Nаzі ““doctor”” who experimented on people? His bones are here. We’re using him as a practice skeleton for forensic medicine students at the University of São Paulo. I’m 100% serious.

[crtter]

For the record! We’re not fucking around with his bones just because. Technically, they should be given to his living relatives, but they really, REALLY don’t want him. Like, we’ve been asking them if we can mail him to them ever since he was identified in the 90s, and every time they’re like “hell no, fuck that guy” which is understandable but now we’re at this standstill in case a family member eventually does want him back, and we’re absolutely NOT burying a nаzі all nice and cozy in our soil if we can help it. So I guess it was decided that the best course of action was to fuck around with his bones. In the name of education.

[loth-caatgirl]

[beardedmrbean]

[charlesoberonn]

[charlesoberonn]

The Y-Axis isn't that bad. Plus they have precise figures for every 2 years on the graph itself. This isn't a misleading graph.

[charlesoberonn]

The improvement is actually greater than this graph shows, since while house fires more than halved, the US population increased by 51% from 220 million to 332 million.

The number of house fires per 1000 people per year went from 3.289 to 1.023, a 69% reduction.

[enthusispastic]

nice.

[scienceshenanigans]

nice

[ruffboi-mags]

nice

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

Peer review, this was also my experience

[portraitoftheoddity]

A HUGE part of this is also the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act passed in 1974. Scientific research paired with government action and regulation lead to a better understanding of the physics of fire, and how to prevent it. Establishment of the US Fire Administration meant actual data collection was done to understand how and why fires happened, better firefighting technology was developed (saving a LOT of firefighter lives!), and public education campaigns were were put into place, leading to the kind of PSAs about Stop Drop and Roll mentioned in the OP.

Really importantly though, this led to the widespread implementation of smoke alarms (which had been rare and prohibitively expensive in the 1960s), along with building codes that greatly reduced fire risk, and use of less flammable materials in furniture and construction so that when a fire did happen, people had more time to react and evacuate, reducing fatalities.

Science and Regulation. Saved. Lives.

(I cannot emphasize this enough in the face of the US's current political moment...)

[cheacegirl]

I made a bat comic and now you have to look at it

Edit: Apparently it's "not bad" so I changed the phrasing. Um hello thousands of people. You, uh, you really don't need to follow me over this one, uhh, it's not representative of my normal posting habits.

[newsandstuffisee]

[greenandhazy]

Okay I already put something in the tags but upon reflection I have something important enough for a comment, too.

Pennsylvania is currently working on its budget, and one of if not THE main sticking point is funding for public transit—all transit in the state, but mainly for SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, which serves Philadelphia and its surrounding counties and is facing a $213 million budget deficit. The PRT, which serves Pittsburgh, is also in danger.

As of this morning, SEPTA has to start the process of cutting services by 45%—canceling some train and bus lines entirely, implementing a 9pm curfew on subway lines, reducing frequency, and canceling sporting event services (all of our professional league stadiums are accessible by one subway line and a significant number of fans take it)—all because politicians in rural counties have been demonizing SEPTA as a “chauffeur service for city residents” that doesn’t benefit the rest of the commonwealth. I am not joking. A state rep literally sent a letter to constituents describing buses that way.

But what is so fucking infuriating to me is that at one of the rallies, I learned ONE SIMPLE FACT that, in my mind, should have ended the entire debate: Philadelphia and Allegheny Counties are the only revenue-positive counties in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The money to fix roads and bridges in every other county comes from Philadelphia’s economy, which is supported by the fact that people take the train in from collar counties to work here, and people go to sporting events here and spend money, and residents who are paying significantly higher rents than anywhere else in the state but still living in poverty can get to their jobs without having a car. (Not to mention the fact that our cash-strapped education department saves money by having kids take SEPTA instead of school buses.)

If no agreement is reached and these cuts fully go into effect—some of them are starting by the end of the month and a second round in January—it very well may cost thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue, which will have reverberating effects on every county in the commonwealth, including the poorest who are most reliant on state funding.

But, you know. Fuck cities.

[segamascott]

[sportsandlaughs]

[patheticperipatetic]

DuckDuckGo now lets you hide AI-generated images in search results | TechCrunch

DuckDuckGo's new search feature comes as the internet is being flooded with AI-generated slop.

The filter relies on manually curated open-source blocklists, including the ‘nuclear’ list, provided by uBlockOrigin and uBlacklist Huge AI Blocklist,” DuckDuckGo said in a post on X. “While it won’t catch 100% of AI-generated results, it will greatly reduce the number of AI-generated images you see.

Left: AI filter is off Right: AI filter is on

[rhetoricandlogic]

Another tip for DDG - if you want to permanently get rid of DDG's AI features (which you can turn off in settings, but only temporarily) - for now you can just use noai.duckduckgo.com as your search engine. Works as advertised in the name.

[arianod]

[sacred-portal]

[foodforthot]

did trilobites walked among flowering plants

[foodforthot]

life could be dream…

[sizzlingcandyjellyfishhhhhh]

never kill yourself

[draconym]

I had planned to do something totally different with my day but instead I made a whole bunch of pride birds! I plan to put them on Redbubble asap.

Lesbian: pink-headed warbler Gay: eastern rosella Bi: varied bunting Trans: lilac-breasted roller Genderqueer: woodstar Aro/ace: pink-headed fruit dove

[draconym]

ADDITIONAL BIRBS

Pansexual: oriental dwarf kingfisher Nonbinary: gouldian finch Asexual: purple-crowned fairywren

[draconym]

Sapphic: red-tailed comet Aromantic: dusky-headed conure

I couldn’t resist making more pride birds today, especially after I discovered that the scientific name of the red-tailed comet is Sappho sparganurus. Sappho, you guys!! This bird is named after her!!

[draconym]

Guess who! Lesbian cockatoo. :)

Redbubble has buttons now!

[draconym]

Happy pride month everyone!!! Have a bronzewing pigeon. :) (Redbubble)

[draconym]

Finally! The Vosmaeri eclectus for the polyamory flag. While not an orientation or gender identity, the polyam flag is still very popular at pride events.

I thought the eclectus was perfect for this flag because unlike other parrots, they’re nonmonogamous. What a fun coincidence that they happen to match the flag so well and to be a personal favorite of mine.

(Redbubble)

[draconym]

Genderfluid violet-backed starling! I had a lot of fun drawing this one; I’m getting less afraid to draw iridescence on birds.

Despite all the frustration they cause for American naturalists, starlings are delightful, intelligent creatures. (Redbubble link)

[fryingpanwithaplan]

God should release new birds that look like this as an apology for making this fucking pandemic.

[draconym]

Good news: these are all real birds that already exist!

Tumblr won’t let me add any more photos but please!!! look them up. The real birds are more beautiful than my pictures.

[draconym]

Adding the MLM bird again because he got missed by the reblog train last time. (Here’s the post where I added him.) And, at long last, the bird for the intersex flag!

MLM: purple gallinule (redbubble) Intersex pride: purple throated euphonia (redbubble)

[ilhoonftw]

[z-a-d-i-e]

i see posts here about how people are so mortified when they are acknowledged as being a regular customer somewhere that they never return. cowards. the employees at taco bell treat me like a celebrity. like royalty. i am their strange little pet customer who gets traded along as staff comes and goes. they know my car before i even speak in the drive-thru speaker. today i was 2 hours late and she ran over and squealed that she "thought i'd left them!" and that she "made my order with extra love!" and you what, she did

[z-a-d-i-e]

it's funny that this is getting notes again, because last night i went to the thai place in my neighborhood. it's run by a family and during covid times i ate there literally almost every day. later i cut back on eating out so much and hadn't been there in two years but last night we went and ate inside for the first time ever and the owner ran over to say hello and ask how i was, and repeated our old regular order. it was sweet. it's so easy to feel like you are an island, but stuff like this reminds you that you are part of a community.

[ealasaidh]

Being a regular is fucking awesome. I've only had that status a few times, but I always feel kind of honored. These people see humans all day every day, and they remembered me?! And not for something bad (as far as I can tell)! I'm flattered af!

[swordshapedleaves]

Watching Jurassic Park and I have Opinions on this place as a zoo. Feeding the predators live prey?? There's other ways to provide enrichment! Also that enclosure is way too small for multiple large animals like that! Electric fences? Ha! Electric fences won't stop a fucking goat! Where's the zoo experts? Who designed these enclosures?? Were all zoos this shitty in the 90s???

[swordshapedleaves]

This t-rex is so happy to be tearing a car apart and pushing it over a cliff! She's got so much energy! She needs healthy outlets! Where the fuck is her enrichment team???

[ruffboi-mags]

#i love this post #both because it's funny and good #and because it gets right to the heart of the problem #jurassic park wasn't designed as a zoo #it was designed as a theme park #the amazing scientific advances? #the miracle of real live dinosaurs? #it meant nothing #the lives of the creatures themselves were nothing #just the means for a rich old white man to get even richer #hammond was never doing it for the children #the kindly old grandpa facade was a lie #he was a billionaire doing what billionaires do #and this is way too much rant for a post that made me laugh #but here we are 

ok but these tags tho

[luxlightly]

This is actually a big part of the book! The fact that the people designing and working with the animals aren’t considering the inherently chaotic nature of living things, they overlook obvious and simple mistakes that cause huge problems. They just expect everything to “work” and be normal and don’t take into account the vast differences between the park and a zoo and between a place of entertainment and a place meant to properly house and care for animals. That’s why Malcom being a chaos theory scientist is so relevant. 

In the book, Hammond is a much darker character, as well. Movie Hammond is misguided and sort of buying his own sales pitch about this place being so magical and that leads him to overlooking or ignoring the danger out of a sort of naivety. Book Hammond is just kind of an awful person. He rejects all advice and warnings from everyone even when the danger becomes very apparent to others. He wants to control every aspect of the park and it’s just not possible,especially since he also wants everything to be automated for ‘effiency’. He makes the classic mistake of thinking that containing animals is making sure there’s “no way they could possibly escape”, which anyone who works with animals knows is not possible to achieve, instead of “make it so the animals are contented and happy and don’t feel the need to try to escape”.

[rhysintherain]

"Look at this really badly run zoo" could have been the subtitle of the book, honestly. That's the premise behind most of my favorite moments in the books.

Velociraptors are social animals, with learned traits they didn't learn at the park. The park's raptors don't know how to work as a team or live in a pack, because they had no adults to teach them. That's why you have adult raptors keeping the juveniles away from the food, or attacking baby raptors.

The deterioration of the 2nd island's dinosaur population was due to a prion disease. Park organisers bought the cheapest feed (derived from scrapie infected sheep) without considering the consequences, and the populations were collapsing because a prion disease called DX had become endemic.

None of the people running the park understood the biology of the animals they were keeping. They were concerned with having a static, point-in-time population, not a functioning ecosystem. So when the dinosaurs started breeding, they had no idea what to do.

Similarly, they were more interested in the environments as dioramas for visitor viewing than as ecosystems for the animals. They kept predators isolated and tossed all the herbivores together ("it's not like they're gonna eat each other!") rather than studying their behavior to decide which dinosaurs to put where.

They picked plants based on the prehistoric aesthetic they wanted rather than their actual properties. Remember the sick triceratops? It was sick because it ate a poisonous plant. Ellie figured that out because her area of study was paleobotany. She also figured out that some of the plants around the family-friendly swimming pool were highly toxic. Nobody double checked the plants they used for their impacts on visitors or the dinosaurs.

They had hundreds of animals and no staff ecologists. They had 1 veterinarian. Instead of having paleontologists on staff, they had a big game hunter. All their biologists worked in the lab. They built everything like theme park rides because automation kept labor costs down and made secrecy easier.

The whole point was to demonstrate how spectacularly a project can fail if new scientific advances are used for profit before they're properly understood. That said, you could make an argument for dinosaurs being a novel way to highlight the shortcomings of for-profit zoos in general. A tiger eating the visitors isn't as headline-grabbing as a T-Rex, but it's still very much a possibility if you decide to show tigers without any understanding of their behavior or ecology.

[byjove]

The thing about the Epstein list is that we know Donald Trump is a rapist, he has been found criminally liable for rape, has multiple accusers, some were underage at the time they said they were assaulted. We know he was friends with Epstein. They’re in MULTIPLE, VERY CHUMMY photos together and we know Epstein used Mar-a-Largo as a hunting ground. And yet these conspiracy minded right-wing twats are baffled and mystified about there not being a client list. They won’t believe it until it’s in front of them. Actually I think if the list leaked they’d find a way to justify it. He is a predator. You knew he was a predator when you voted for him twice. Why is this something you’re worried about now?

They’re obsessed with Epstein but not child trafficking as a whole, definitely not protecting girls or helping victims. It is just Jeffrey Epstein.