Here’s Malcolm Roberts trying to get the CSRIO to admit their scientific papers aren’t truthful simply because he found a hoax paper by an unrelated publication that claimed climate change was caused by penises.
Since It’s Piccolo Day let’s remember that one time a Piccolo cosplayer went to a Toys R Us during the Holiday season and paid off every single layaway at the store.
Like always, Piccolo is a better dad to people’s kids than they are.
while looking up 1950s slang, i found the phrase “come on snake, let’s rattle,” which has 2 meanings: asking someone to dance, and challenging someone to a fight
and. hhhooooooooo boy does that fact have some Potential
Gollum: I sneak up behind Frodo and try to grab the ring before he drops it into Mount Doom.
DM: Okay, roll Dexterity.
Gollum: That’s…a 1.
DM: Okay, so you get the ring, but
[First of all: the timelines do actually match up quite well. In #20 there’s a brief mention of David’s dad (of all people) watching Buffy on TV, and although Animorphs started and ended first most of its run overlaps with Buffy. Second, I LOVE this idea so much. Rachel and Buffy are two of the people who were massively influential in teaching me and my friends that it was possible to be girly and tough at the same time. Third… Voila.]
It starts as a way to distract her sisters, on the nights when their mom can’t make it home and their dad is too busy to call—Rachel will put on whichever Buffy episode she’s got saved in the DVR and all three of them will watch it together. However, all three of them fall in love with the show over time, until they’re catching each episode live: Sarah laughs at all the puns and hums along with the theme song while Jordan waxes poetical about how dreamy Spike and Angel are.
Rachel just loves Buffy herself, because there aren’t enough girls on TV that can look that fabulous and kick butt at the same time. It becomes a weekly ritual, one that Rachel sometimes has to miss if Cassie or Jake calls with urgent news, but she’ll put aside anything short of the alien invasion to catch it with her sisters.
*****************
Jordan meets Rachel at the door, which is a bad sign because their mom and Sarah are both asleep and Rachel herself went to bed six hours ago. The mission was long, nasty, and exhausting, the way they always are, and Rachel’s too keyed-up from the adrenaline rush to think of a proper excuse for why she’s sneaking in.
She and Jordan stare at each other in silence for a few seconds, Rachel leaning on the door frame, Jordan holding a comic book in both hands as she sits on the end table in the foyer. Jordan becomes the first one to speak. “Sarah and I were talking,” she says. “And I think we figured it out.”
Rachel feels her stomach churn. She’s not as careful with her sisters as her mom. She never has been. “Figured what out?”
“It’s okay.” Jordan clutches her comic book a little more closely, expression solemn. “We won’t tell Mom.”
Rachel crosses her arms. “Won’t tell her what, exactly?”
Jordan thrusts the comic book at Rachel. The cover shows a girl—Buffy Summers, judging by the title—holding a wooden stake in one hand and a sword in the other, her blond hair whirling around her as she thrusts the sword at a spike-covered greyish creature in the corner of the frame.
Rachel takes a step back from the comic, not sure whether to laugh or to cry.
“It explains everything. Where you sneak out to almost every night. Why you’ve got blood under your fingernails half the time when you get home. Why you’ve got a secret boyfriend who only comes out at night—”
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Rachel says reflexively.
Jordan nods, eyes wide. “Uh-huh. So you definitely weren’t seen by half the school at last week’s dance with a mysterious guy who has blond hair and is never seen around town. You don’t have a boyfriend, even though I’ve heard people talking in your room in the middle of the night. And you always leave your window open, even—especially—when it rains. Almost like you’re waiting for a secret vampire boy—”
Rachel snorts a laugh. “Tobias isn’t a vampire.”
Which has exactly the opposite effect than the one she intended. “Oh my god,” Jordan whispers. “Tobias as in that guy who disappeared last year? Everyone thought he died—” She gasps. “Unless he did die. And now he’s back!”
Much as Rachel wants to laugh and keep laughing until she falls over, she understands that this conversation actually has serious implications. With effort she sobers herself. “Look,” she says at last. “There are things… Things I can’t tell you. You wouldn’t be safe if I did.”
She looks Jordan in the eye. Jordan is taking this conversation seriously—probably more seriously than Rachel herself, for that matter. “I understand,” Jordan says.
“As soon as…” As soon as the war’s over. “As soon as it’s safe. I’ll tell you everything. Right now, there are things I can’t talk to you, or to Mom, about. But someday I will. I promise.” Rachel can’t be more honest than that.
“Okay.” Jordan bites her lip. “I just wanted you to know your secret’s safe with me. And if you ever need help, like, hiding a body…”
Rachel smiles, overwhelmed with fondness. “Thanks.” She yawns. “Now, if it’s all right with you, Dawn…”
Jordan makes a face.
“I’m wiped, so I’m going to bed.” She walks past Jordan and up the stairs to her room.
“Rachel!”
She turns around. Jordan is standing at the bottom of the stairs, hugging her comic book against her chest with both hands.
“On the show,” she says haltingly. “They say a lot about how slaying’s a dangerous job. About how most slayers don’t live to be twenty.” There’s real fear in her eyes, as she looks up at her sister.
Rachel grins, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “Really, Jordan, you should learn not to believe everything you see on TV. After all, it’s just a show. No vampire’s gonna take me down.”
****************************
“You know, my sister thinks you’re William the Bloody.”
«Who’s that, a spokesman for Kotex?»
***************************
She doesn’t get much input on the actual headstone; she’s too young for that. She does, however, manage to put in a special request for the plaque on the statue they erect outside of Washington D.C., a proud grizzly bear rearing up to defend the Capitol.
Rachel Daniella Berenson, the plaque reads. She saved the world. A lot.
The Hero’s Life is an
unceasing struggle for supremacy over his peers.
WarriorMale
[sweating bullets] w…w-warriormale…. [gulps and looks at my clipboard] i hate to tell you this but th-that’s not wrestling, that’s overwatch fan art of two characters having sex sir [quaking in my fatigues]
Actually its called “taking a Man’s back.”
Very common fight position in wrestling and Brazilian jiujitsu.
so you see, humans evolved to be bipedal on account of how our ancestors transitioned from the forest environment to the savannah environment, and in the savannah environment bipedalism was more adaptive because it provides better thermoregulation and allows you to carry things, but most of all because bipedal locomotion is highly energy efficient and energy efficient locomotion would have been very strongly selected for on account of how time budgets are a limiting factor on home range which is a limiting factor on diet quality and breadth which is really quite important
my lecturers have been very clear and very insistent that bipedalism evolved first and then allowed tool use, tool use did not spur a transition to bipedalism, the fossil record is Clear On This Point
and what I do not understand is: if bipedalism is so completely wonderfully energy-efficient and optimal, why are there so few bipedal things? How come lions and gazelles and giraffes and buffalo aren’t bipedal? Why aren’t other savannah species selected for energy-efficient locomotion too?
I am sure there is a good explanation for this but my lecturers have still not provided it and I must know please god just somebody explain this to me or I will die of curiosity
Reasons Why We Have Bipedal Apes, But Not Bipedal Lions, According To My Biological Anthropology Supervisor:
You know when creationists talk about how an eye couldn’t possibly evolve gradually, because half an eye is useless and a waste of resources and worse than no eye at all?
They’re wrong about eyes; a single photoreceptor cell (usually just an evolutionary ‘tweak’ away from a regular epidermal cell with biochemistry that happened to be photosensitive) is actually useful and great, and more is better. If you imagine breaking a modern wing in half and attaching it to a bird, “half a wing is useless” sounds true, but it stops sounding true when you realise that halfway to a wing doesn’t look like a modern bird wing but broken in half, it looks like a slightly enlarged membrane between a limb and your body that gives you just an extra half second of glide time when you jump.
But there *are* adaptations in this class of things, where it’s great if you have full-blown X but shitty to have half-baked X. As you might imagine, they are quite rare, because as the creationists correctly observe, if half-X is maladaptive there is no path to arrive at X through gradual adaptation to an environment. And yet bipedalism is of this class. How?
Well, you wanna know what it looks like to have enough bipedal foot structure that you decide to go adventuring around in the savannah on two feet, but you haven’t got the pelvic structure to make it efficient yet? YOU CAN’T RUN. You are literally incapable of moving faster than a kind of slow awkward lope. Your back kills all the time because your bones are all pointed the wrong way and your back muscles are trying to keep you upright. Your ankle and leg bones take far more pounding than they were ever optimised before and occasionally shatter. You’re unbalanced and ungainly and frankly sort of pathetic, and at very high risk from predators (to repeat: RUN AWAY IS NOT AN AVAILABLE STRATEGY).
Why would anything go through a long gradual process of getting much shittier and then eventually getting better, since evolution can’t plan or foresee? WRONG QUESTION. Whoever told you evolution was a slow gradual constant drift was a dirty rotten liar, just like all your other teachers from when you were twelve. More commonly, evolution involves long periods of relative stability where the organism is pretty much as adapted to its niche as it’s going to get, and then something changes and there’s a very rapid response. Or it involves successful populations dispersing widely over a landscape, then becoming distinct reproducing populations which lost genetic contact with each other and diverging, and then there’s an environmental change and they reconnect and sometimes they happily interbreed and sometimes one of the divergent branches drives the others extinct and disperses itself widely and rinse and repeat.
What happened was, basically:
Hi we’re early hominins and we just love hanging around in trees and we’re proud to say we’ve been hanging around in trees now for a couple million years and we haven’t changed a bit, slightly bigger skulls aside, we’re basically just per- what the fuck? WHAT THE FUCK? WHERE DID THE TREES GO?? WHY IS IT SUDDENLY SO DRY???? oh my God I can see nothing but grass and I am having to walk around on my hind legs all the FUCKING time and FUCK FUCK FUCK THAT’S A LION FUCK PANIC RED ALERT oh okay we’re bipedal now I guess, that was quick, oh well, all fine, carry on
Somehow we survived when a change in environment pushed us into a new ecological niche. The selection pressure was strong enough to make us acquire a really quite extensive range of mods to make bipedalism work, but not strong enough to make us dead.
Of course, “strong pressure to adapt somehow” doesn’t necessarily mean “strong pressure to adapt in this specific way we know is really good”. Early hominins who lived before the forest shrinkage have been shown to have a few bipedal adaptations. We weren’t sure what the hell they were doing with them, so we looked at chimps. Turns out chimps display short-distance carrying behavior – as in, picking up an object and carrying it. They don’t carry tools and can’t move far bipedally, but what they do do is pick up a valuable resource like a choice bit of prey and haul it off with them, away from the group of moneys fighting over the rest of the prey. So before the forests collapsed, there was a mild selection pressure to be able to use only your hind legs for a short stretch so that you could carry something in your arms, and when they collapsed, individuals good at that behavior were better at surviving the savannah and evolution just slammed its foot on the gas pedal until you get obligate bipeds.
So, a species that wasn’t forced into a rapid niche change like that, wouldn’t evolve an initially-painful thing like bipedalism. What about all the other species that made the same change as the same time as us? Eh, many went extinct, that happens a lot with ecological change, but the ones who survived didn’t do bipedalism.
Points to those who said it was about evolution having different starting points to build on, y’all were correct. No matter how awesome and efficient and optimal bipedalism is, evolution only cares about whether the next tiny step in some random direction increases or decreases how many offspring are produced. Evolution “looks” for the NEAREST solution that counts as a solution, not the best solution.
For a species of monkeys that were forced to spend less time in the forest and range wider and already had some variable locomotion abilities, evolution went for bipedalism. Bipedalism may have enabled the future awesomeness of humans with its efficiency and head stability and what have you, but evolution made it happen just because it was the local maxima – its awesomeness is a lucky side effect.
But where monkeys used short bursts of bipedal movements to carry things, another species might use something more convenient for them – say, a lion might pick up and carry things in its mouth, and if there was a selection pressure to be better at carrying the lions might end up with bigger mouths, but “become bipedal” is very unlikely because half bipedal is worse than no bipedal at all.
Basically, monkeys had the preconditions for bipedalism, nothing else did. (Note that this does not make monkeys special – the ancestor of any species with an unusual adaptation, from giraffes’ long necks to penguins’ Arctic-water-proofing feathers, was a thing that had the preconditions for that adaptation when nothing else did.)
Bipedalism didn’t happen because it was awesome, it became awesome because the range of adaptations it supports turned out to be a package that turned into, well, us.
…Notice that we are not actually the only bipedal species. Notice what they mean when they say things like, “Bipedalism leads to the ability to carry things leads to tool use leads to bigger brains”. On a naive reading, it means “bipedalism is a part of the tech tree and once you’ve bought it you can get hands optimised for holding tools”, and if it says this then you are right to be confused as to why perfectly good bipedal emus do not also have spears and control of fire.
When you realise that evolutionary studies is so full of ridiculously many caveats and preconditions that lecturers just omit them and assume you know they’re there, you start interpreting what they say more like, “In a species that already dabbled in just a tiny bit of bipedalism, bipedalism was the only way to go when the niche changed, it was way better for the new niche then the old way of locomotion, and given the likely presence of some proto-tool-like behaviors like throwing rocks or poking things with sticks, it created an adaptive opportunity to better fit this particular environment by improving on the tool behaviours using the new physiological advantages.”
Also god I learned a lot in that hour. Why does time spent *not* talking to biological anthropologists have to be a thing? Talking to biological anthropologists is the BEST.
Epistemic status: my recollection of a conversation an hour ago between me and an academic in this field, any misunderstandings are because I’m an undergrad who didn’t get what he was trying to say.
callanswall 