I can show you what you truly fear

Us Against the Galaxy

Two drawing two days in a row? What is this madness? 

I have discovered the wonders of glow tools in Audodesk Sketchbook (mobile version) and now I’m obsessed, so what better subjects than Jyn and Cassian to test them out on?

The anaesthetic machine!

A - Flow meter; measures and controls the flow of oxygen (L/min) to the breathing circuit B - Vaporizer; converts volatile anaesthetic liquid to a vapour/gaseous state and controls the amount allowed to diffuse into the circuit C - Common or fresh gas outlet; where fresh oxygen, anaesthetic gas, and other gases enter the breathing circuit D - Pressure gauge; reads the pressure of the breathing circuit, normally should read less than 30 mmH2O E - Flush valve; allows high pressured O2 to bypass the flowmeter and vaporizer and is often used to pressure check the system or flush the circuit at the end of a procedure. Must NEVER be used if the patient is still connected (barotrauma!) F - Pop-off valve; a safety feature where excess gas is vented into the scavenging system, with the pressure at which it pops being completely adjustable. It also allows Intermittent Positive Pressure Ventilation (IPPV) when closed G - CO2 absorber canister; filled with either barium hydroxide or soda lime absorber, absorbs exhaled CO2 H - Scavenger system; ensures no contamination of the internal environment by the exhaled anaesthetic or any waste gases. Usually directed externally. I - The connecting hose between the common gas outlet and inspiratory chamber of the CO2 canister in a rebreathing circuit (i.e. expired gases are circled through the CO2 absorber canister and back into the inspiratory limb combined with the fresh gas from the outlet) J - Attachment for the rebreathing/reservoir bag; used as a volume reservoir that is 4-5 times the patients normal tidal volume.

I’ve added a second picture showing a correctly set up rebreathing circuit using a circle circuit which uses unidirectional valves and separate inspiratory and expiratory limbs. This particular system has the O2 gas running from an external cylinder via piping through the walls.

100 Warrior Cats Challenge

30: DARKSTRIPE

this blog ain’t dead yet !

Russian Clan Icons

Right to left, 1st row: ThunderClan, ShadowClan, WindClan

2nd row: RiverClan, SkyClan, StarClan

3rd row: Tribe of Rushing Water, BloodClan, kittypet

Tag yourself!

Epigenetic changes are chemical modifications that turn our genes off or on. In a new study from Uppsala University, researchers show that tea consumption in women leads to epigenetic changes in genes that are known to interact with cancer and estrogen metabolism. The results are published in the journal Human Molecular Genetics.

It is well known that our environment and lifestyle factors, such as food choices, smoking and exposure to chemicals, can lead to epigenetic changes. In the current study, researchers from Uppsala University in collaboration with research groups around Europe, investigated if coffee and tea consumption may lead to epigenetic changes. Previous studies have suggested that both coffee and tea play an important role in modulating disease-risk in humans by suppressing tumour progression, decreasing inflammation and influencing estrogen metabolism, mechanisms that may be mediated by epigenetic changes.

The results show that there are epigenetic changes in women consuming tea, but not in men. Interestingly, many of these epigenetic changes were found in genes involved in cancer and estrogen metabolism. ”Previous studies have shown that tea consumption reduces estrogen levels which highlights a potential difference between the biological response to tea in men and women. Women also drink higher amounts of tea compared to men, which increases our power to find association in women”, says Weronica Ek, researcher at the Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, who led the study. The study did not find any epigenetic changes in individuals drinking coffee.

“Tea and coffee consumption in relation to DNA methylation in four European cohorts” by Weronica E. Ek, Elmar W. Tobi, Muhammad Ahsan, Erik Lampa, Erica Ponzi, Soterios A. Kyrtopoulos, Panagiotis Georgiadis, L.H Lumey, Bastiaan T. Heijmans, Maria Botsivali, Ingvar A. Bergdahl, Torgny Karlsson, Mathias Rask-Andersen, Domenico Palli, Erik Ingelsson, Åsa K. Hedman, Lena M. Nilsson, Paolo Vineis, Lars Lind, James M. Flanagan, Åsa Johansson on behalf of the Epigenome-Wide Association study Consortium in Human Molecular Genetics. Published online May 23 2017 doi:10.1093/hmg/ddx194

Active Tropical Ocean Blog 🌞🌊

tattooist_ida

Proposed Regulation of Service Dogs in Canada - Feedback Due 30 June 2017

Angela Gilbert, “We Interrupt Our Regular Program For….”. Chianti’s Blog (3 May 2017). [Emphasis added by me.]

Green knives

…and she’s gone 

Another victim of the Void.

I love her facial expression right before she slips through lol. she just pauses and is like “welp, here I go, goodbye world”

I woke my bf up by cackling for WAY too long over this

@artofnatiq your cat

“Goodbye, friends.”

IT’S TOTALLY DIFFERENT DAD

GOOODDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDUHHHHHHHH

the saga continues

the thrilling conclusion:

EDIT: I AM AN AIRHEAD AND FORGOT TO CREDIT @pixiepunch FOR INSPIRING THE THIRD INSTALLMENT. I MAY HAVE BEEN A FEW DRINKS IN WHEN I POSTED. 

FUCK YES. thank you for this. You are a gift.

This is Amazing!! Cannot stress it enough!!

Maximoff twin powers… COMBINE! I’m sure Pietro is moving much, much slower than usual so Wanda doesn’t fall off, haha.

Precious baby children, must protect.

So I was told that Human Planet had a segment about pigeons in the Cities episode that I might be interested in and I was honestly so underwhelmed. I haven’t finished the episode so maybe there’s more pigeon stuff but I feel like all I saw was more Birds Of Prey Are The Only Cool And Acceptable Birds and pigeons are Trespassers In Our Urban World Who Shit On Everything And Are Useless On Top Of It. Which isn’t true and I’m so tired of this being framed as some horrible burden that humanity must face. Pigeons are the victims here, not us. 

Hate of pigeons didn’t start until the 20th Century. Before that was about 9,900 years of loving them. The rock pigeon was domesticated 10,000 years ago and not only that, we took them freaking everywhere. Pigeons were the first domesticated bird and they were an all-around animal even though they were later bred into more specialised varieties. They were small but had a high feed conversion rate, in other words it didn’t cost a whole lot of money or space to keep and they provided a steady and reliable source of protein as eggs or meat. They home, so you could take them with you and then release them from wherever you were and they’d pretty reliably make their way back. Pigeons are actually among the fastest flyers and they can home over some incredible distances (what fantastic navigators!). They were an incredibly important line of communication for multiple civilisations in human history. You know the first ever Olympics? Pigeons were delivering that news around the Known World at the time. Also, their ability to breed any time of year regardless of temperature or photoperiod? That was us, we did that to them, back when people who couldn’t afford fancier animals could keep a pair or two for meat/eggs. 

Rooftop pigeon keeping isn’t new, it’s been around for centuries and is/was important to a whole variety of cultures. Pigeons live with us in cities because we put them there, we made them into city birds. I get that there are problems with bird droppings and there’s implications for too-large flocks. By all means those are things we should look to control, but you don’t need to hate pigeons with every fibre of your being. You don’t need to despise them or brush them off as stupid (they have been intelligence tested extensively as laboratory animals because guess what other setting they’re pretty well-adapted to? LABORATORIES!) because they aren’t stupid. They’re soft intelligent creatures and I don’t have time to list everything I love about pigeons again. You don’t need to aggressively fight them or have a deep desire to kill them at all. It’s so unnecessary, especially if you realise that the majority of reasons pigeons are so ubiquitous is a direct result of human interference.

We haven’t always hated pigeons though, Darwin’s pigeon chapter in The Origin of Species took so much of the spotlight that publishers at the time wanted him to make the book ONLY about pigeons and to hell with the rest because Victorian’s were obsessed with pigeons (as much as I would enjoy a book solely on pigeons, it’s probably best that he didn’t listen).  My point is, for millenia, we loved pigeons. We loved them so much we took them everywhere with us and shaped them into a bird very well adapted for living alongside us.

It’s only been very recently that we decided we hated them, that we decided to blame them for ruining our cities. The language we use to describe pigeons is pretty awful. But it wasn’t always, and I wish we remembered that. I wish we would stop blaming them for being what we made them, what they are, and spent more time actually tackling the problems our cities face.  

I just have a lot of feelings about how complex and multidimensional hating pigeons actually is

ALL OF THIS

And also pigeon poop was a very valuable fertilizer before we had other options, people would hire guards to stop thieves from stealing their flock’s poop.

#LovePigeonsAgain2016

Late night, reblogging, so bear with me here… Thank you for posting much of my thoughts over the past year and a half! I am known by many as “that guy who keeps the raptors”. Yes this is true, I do keep and handle raptors for educational purposes, but what many fail to realize is, I am fascinated with pigeons. My interest with birds began with the obvious, the raptors, corvids, and parrots. Then I discovered pigeons. These wonderful little birds with big attitudes and the incredible ability to thrive among people.  The organization I work with got its first pigeon a little over a year ago. She was a rescue with nowhere else to go. I was quickly drawn to her character and attitude about life. We rarely handled her, but we did spend time with her. She grew attached to our volunteers very quickly because their were no other birds she could socialize with in our facility. 

We never intended to train her for educational programs. It was a job reserved for our raptors. It was our pigeon who decided she would be a part of what we were doing. One day, when we entered her enclosure to change water and food, she decided to fly to my hand and perch like our raptors do. 

No training, no treats, just the reward of being with us. 

What we hadn’t noticed for the couple months prior was her watching us. This brilliant little bird had been watching us every day as we trained and worked with our raptors. Finally she decided she didn’t want to be left out any longer. She made her place on our hands.

This occurred several times before we finally put her on a glove and brought her into the public. Needless to say, she was right at home. She fluffed up and preened the entire evening while people gawked and asked us why we had a pigeon on one glove and a hawk on another. 

Since then, we’ve added 5 more rescued pigeons to our growing flock. And our pigeon (Tybalt) has become a mainstay ambassador for our programs. Each of our pigeons are incredibly fun to watch and interact with. Pigeons simply don’t get enough love. They are marvelous creatures incredibly suited to life alongside people both physically and mentally. 

Raptors my have been my introduction into birds, but pigeons opened my eyes to a new appreciation for them and the fascinating world of bird cognition.

NOT ONLY are pigeons very amazing, worth our respect, and INTERESTING (did you read any of that stuff above?), but they are beautiful too! Look how lovely:

Photo by .jocelyn.

They have a complex and fascinating social structure, both within a flock and with other individuals:

Photo by Ingrid Taylar

AND THEY ARE JUST SUPER CUTE, HONESTLY:

Photo by Musical Photo Man

Not chickens, but I feel compelled to spread this gospel.

hmmm. this is making me rethink my new york pigeon hate

and, AND, haven’t you ever wondered why city pigeons come in a magnificent rainbow of unusual colors?

Most wild animals all look alike within a species, with TINY, RARE individual variations in terms of rare color morphs, unusually big or small animals, different facial markings and other subtleties. But there is no evolutionary benefit to having species where everyone looks slightly different, and in fact, it’s beneficial for species to be similar and consistent, with a distinctive aesthetic. Especially if you’re trying to blend into the environment - a black wolf is all very well, but it looks positively silly in the summer tundra, where its grey/brown/brindley cousins blend in. A white deer has a great aesthetic - and a very short lifespan in the forest. Distinctive Protagonist looks are rare in the wild, simply because natural selection usually comes down heavily on them.

To humans, most wild animals are visually indistinguishable from each other.

As a result, most wild animals are like

“Oh it’s obvious - you can tell the twins apart because Kara has a big nose.”

Wild animals usually have a pretty consistent aesthetic within their species. It’s important to them!

SO WHAT IS GOING ON WITH PIGEONS?

Look, in one small picture you’ve got a red color morph in the center, several melanistic dark morphs, a few solid black birds, a few variations on the wildtype wing pattern, a PIEBALD, a piebald copper color morph…

Like, there are LAYERS UPON LAYERS of pigeon diversity in most flocks you see. Pure white ones with black wingtips. Solid brown ones with pink iridescent patches. Pale pinkish pigeons.

WHY IS THAT? When other wild animals consider “being slightly fluffier than my brother” to be dangerously distinctive in most circumstances? BECAUSE CITY PIGEONS AREN’T TRULY WILD.

MANY OF THEM (POSSIBLY MOST OR ALL) ARE FERAL MIXES.

THEY WERE ONCE BELOVED PETS, SPECIAL MESSENGERS, EXQUISITE SHOW-WINNERS, AND PRIZED LIVESTOCK.

THEIR PRETTY COLORS WERE DELIBERATELY INTRODUCED BY HUMANS.

AND NOW THEIR HUMANS DON’T LOVE THEM ANY MORE.

See, pigeon fanciers bred (and still breed!) a huge array of pigeons. And the resulting swarms of released/discarded/escaped/phased out “fancy” pigeons stayed around humans. What else were they going to do? They interbred with wildtype pigeons.

Lots of the pigeons you see in public are feral. They’re not wild animals. They’re citizen animals. They’re genetically engineered. And now that’s what “city” pigeons are.

These “wild” horses are all different colors because they’re actually feral. Mustangs in the American West are the descendants of imported European horses - they’re an invasive domestic species that colonized an ecological niche, but they are domestic animals. Their distinctive patterns were deliberately bred by humans. A few generations of running around on the prairie isn’t going to erase that and turn them back into wildtypes. If you catch an adult mustang and train it for a short period, you can ride it and have it do tricks and make it love you. It’s a domestic animal. You can’t really do that with an adult zebra.

No matter how many generations these dogs stay on the street and interbreed with one another, they won’t turn back into wolves. They can’t. They’re deliberately genetically engineered. If you catch one (even after generations of rough living, even as an adult) you can make it stare at your face, care about your body language, and love you.

City pigeons? Well, you don’t have to like them, but they’re in the same boat. They’re tamed animals, bred on purpose, living in a human community. Their very bodies are marked with their former ownership and allegiance; they cannot really return to what they once were; if you caught one, you could make it love you (in a limited pigeon-y way.) They have gone to “the wild,” but not very far from us, and they’d be happy to come back.

So next time you see a flock of city pigeons, spare a moment to note their diversity. The wing patterns. The pied, mottled and brindled. The color types.

All of it was once meant to please you.

Very happy to see this post again.

I now want a pet pigeon.

Here is a list of pigeon friendly rescues:

http://www.pigeonrescue.org/resources/some-pigeon-dove-friendly-rescues-in-the-us/

oooh what’s the maroon-y one up there with the yellow band?

It’s an Archangel.

Breathtakingly gorgeous! There are just no words for copper or gold black wings!

But they are a SUPER flighty, very “Don’t touch me.” breed.

I guess my question is how do you decide if the animal is struggling? Like the two legged dogs- if they can get around and seem to be happy/well adjusted, why wouldn’t you allow it to continue living? Like, when does it go from “this animal doesn’t have a good quality of life” to “I don’t think an animal with this condition could have a good quality of life so I’m just going to put it down”?

Dogs want to please humans. When they are attempting to please a human it’s difficult to know whether the dog is truly comfortable or whether it just wants your approval. This is one of the reason why the general public is so woeful at assessing whether a pet is in pain or not.

A dog can be in screaming pain when you touch its leg, but many people wont believe it’s actually in pain if it’s still eating.

I look at the video and pictures of two legged ‘bipedal’ dogs like above and think “This dog is never really relaxed. It always looks worried.” I look at the curvature of its spine, and angles of its hips and knees and think “No way is that comfortable or healthy long term for the dog” and dread the thought of one of her cruciate ligaments tearing. Dogs will always try to do what they need to do, and in the case of congenital deformities they don’t necessarily know any other way, but that doesn’t mean it’s ‘good’.

In Faith’s case in particular, I feel like the dog was kept for the humans to pat themselves on the back, especially with the TV appearances and book deals.

What I want to know is why didn’t anybody give this dog in particular a pair of wheels? Support to actually move and behave as much as a dog normally does instead of encouraging her to walk on her hind legs? Was it because walking on hind legs made it look more ‘human’ and we anthropomorphized it’s basic drive to survive as a ‘miracle’ and ‘inspiring’, and giving the dog a wheelchair was going to ruin the story?

You can certainly keep animals that have physical impairments, if you can appropriately manage their care needs, and not helping a dog because it will struggle to function anyway and calling that ‘inspirational’.

The quality of life an animal can achieve will depend on its circumstances. Different families will be able to manage different levels of at home care. There are certain animals that I wouldn’t recommend limb amputation for due to size or other commodities, for example, and in some cases a patient is treated at home because it’s 5kg and easy for the owner to carry/manage whereas the same condition in a larger patient must be managed in hospital.

If I was presented with a two legged puppy I would be trying to talk owners out of encouraging it to walk bipedally like Faith, which is hard to do when the media has been so glowing about it. I would be trying to talk them into either appropriate wheels or prosthetics, even though this isn’t as glamorous or inspiring but it allows more normal function for the dog, or euthanasia.

In cases like this it is my professional opinion that you either care for them to the best of your ability, you put their interests above your narrative, or you don’t do it at all.