Life as it is

It doesn't get much better than this.

[beardedmrbean]

[gonzos-humansona]

my hips don't lie but they will exaggerate details, misrepresent the facts, and on occasion deceive via omission of crucial information

[parkchanwoohoo]

[riacte]

do you see this shit my liege

[yokowan]

dealing with code written by scientists who are bad at programming? obnoxious at worst. generally simple enough that you're better off rewriting most of it.

dealing with code written by scientists who are good at programming? absolutely terrifying. you are presented with a hundred thousand lines of python code written by someone who has no formal training and whose first programming experience was teaching themselves fortran 77 on an old mainframe computer. not a single good practice convention is followed. unreadable syntax tricks you've never seen before are used to save like two or three lines here and there. there are absolutely arcane performance optimizations that have never been seen outside of like one paper published in the 90s and make the program like 5% faster. there's also freshman CS student level optimizations that they completely missed. there is basically no documentation. you are left to learn how it works with the source code and a dozen examples which have maybe three or four comments between them. good luck. may god save your soul.

[general-goods]

The problem with science code is that the intersection between people who are good at code and people who understand what the fuck is happening is pretty small. So even if you’re god’s gift to CS I hope you’re really good at differential equations and linear algebra too because that’s what the code is doing, and without knowing that you can’t easily optimize the computation. You can always refactor stuff and move it around to make more sense tho!

[typewriter-worries]

The New York Times did a piece titled 100 Small Acts of Love and these are some of my favorites 💕

[nights-at-the-opera]

[scribefindegil]

Soapmaking books are so funny. "100% Pure and Wholesome Natural ingredients!" you mean lye? "Make beautiful soaps from herbs, essential oils and natural botanicals!" and lye. "Soothing recipes that won't irritate your skin!" okay listen I understand that some people really do have sensitivities and also that if you do things properly nothing harmful is left once the soap has cured but again. Can we acknowledge that one of the main ingredients. Is lye.

[scribefindegil]

head in my hands. this post is about the hypocrisy of Wellness Speak. I know how soap works.

[kaijuno]

My dad has bees. Today, I went to his house and he showed me all the honey he had gotten from the hives. He took the lid off a 5-gallon bucket full of honey and on top of the honey there were 3 little bees, struggling. They were covered in sticky honey and drowning. I asked him if we could help them and he said he was sure they wouldn't survive. Casualties of honey collection I suppose.

I asked him again if we could at least get them out and kill them quickly, after all he was the one who taught me to put a suffering animal (or bug) out of its misery. He finally conceded and scooped the bees out of the bucket. He put them in an empty Chobani yogurt container and put the plastic container outside.

Because he had disrupted the hive with the earlier honey collection, there were bees flying all over outside.

We put the 3 little bees in the container on a bench and left them to their fate. My dad called me out a little while later to show me what was happening. These three little bees were surrounded by all their sisters (all of the bees are females) and they were cleaning the sticky nearly dead bees, helping them to get all of the honey off of their bodies. We came back a short time later and there was only one little bee left in the container. She was still being tended to by her sisters.

When it was time for me to leave, we checked one last time and all three of the bees had been cleaned off enough to fly away and the container was empty.

Those three little bees lived because they were surrounded by family and friends who would not give up on them, family and friends who refused to let them drown in their own stickiness and resolved to help until the last little bee could be set free.

Bee Sisters. Bee Peers. Bee Teammates.

We could all learn a thing or two from these bees.

Bee kind always.

[roach-works]

also: the bees aren't strong enough to pull the drowning ones out, and the humans aren't delicate enough to clean them off afterwards. helping takes a lot of forms.

[play-now-my-lord]

Reminded by flag discourse about my proposal for a new Massachusetts state flag. The looming black triangle represents the creeping dread one experiences in Massachusetts, the white represents the horrible weather, the blue represents microplastics, and the slogan represents I saw it on a pack of cigs and thought it sounded sick

[dogpuppy]

[sealsdaily]

Today's Seal Is: Bird Observation Hour

[cutecipher]

you think its cute but they're about to suck them up with their nose

[oldwayout]

My anthro professor has three forbidden words for his essays: problematic, interesting, and large. Point being they’re all filler words, he wants you to just skip straight to why it’s interesting or why it’s problematic. But anyway, any time I disagree with him in class I say to him “mm, interesting, but largely problematic.”

[teruterusky]

[dorothylarouge]

[kedreeva]

From the Riverbanks Zoo and Garden facebook

We once had a discussion here on tumblr about carrying dinosaurs, at least raptors/other dromaeosaurs/small therapods. I advised carrying them facing backward, with the legs controlled, rather than forward with the legs tucked under the chest (where they can get leverage and the bird can struggle forward out of your grasp instead of struggling back into it more). Pleased as punch to see a bunch of professionals carrying some quite large birds around safely!

[nogendermoretrees]

OK but it looks like they were being carried to flamingo yoga class.

[woodsdyke]

after i saw the shrek post i went to the swarovski website to see if they had anything else insane and i laughed so hard at this swarovski crystal minecraft pig that i feel sick

[so-much-for-subtlety]

[moniquill]

Babben too smol for this world! Go back in your crevice with your siblings and wait for mama!