꧁ Ɍꚶᗫꗛ ꞆዛɌᕔᙁᗫꚶĬԸ ꧂

❁ ᪥ Ꞇዛꗛ ዛꗞᗹᗹĬꞆ ᙏꗛᙏꗛꕷ ᪥ ❁

✧✥❀✥✧✥❀✧

❀✥❀✥✧✥❀

✥✧✥❀✥✧✥

✥❀✥✧✥❀✥

✥❀✥✧✥❀✥

𝑹𝒖𝒅𝒆 𝑻𝒉𝒓𝒂𝒏𝒅𝒖𝒊𝒍 𝑴𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒔 & 𝑮𝑰𝑭𝑺

𓇊𓆸𓇣᪥𓇗᪥𓇣𓆸𓇊

Reblog In 5 seconds for good luck

​this worked last night lets go for round two

I really need some good luck rn

𝖣𝗋𝗂𝗏𝖾 𝖬𝖾 𝖢𝗋𝖺𝗓𝗒 ~ 𝖢𝗅𝖺𝗋𝗂𝗌𝗌𝖾 𝖫𝖺 𝖱𝗎𝖾

dior goodjohn masterlist

requested from a mutual!

Heres the thing you gotta understand about statistics. 

“Increases your chances by 80%” does not mean “there is now an 80% chance”. 

If your chances were previously 10%, your chances are now 18%, not 90%. 

if your chances were roughly 1%, they’re now just slightly less than 2%. 

thats how that works. 

Wow I don’t understand math at all

‘if you have a baby after 35, the chance of deformities goes up by 100%’ is a line I hear alot.

It goes up from .5% to 1%

I think my brain just stopped working

100% is just another way of saying twice more likely. So 100% more basically means multiply the number you do have by 2.

Imagine how many woman are scared to have kids because of that statistic

This is why I took stats instead of calc. Because I don’t build engineer bridges in my everyday life but I sure do read studies that affect how I might live my life if I misinterpret them.

I’m terrible at numbers and math but I knew this and I really take it for granted. The average person definitely assumes, quite understandably, that “600% INCREASE!!!” must always mean a whole lot even if it literally only means that one of something is now six of something. Politicians probably take a shitload of advantage of this confusion.

just remember that increased BY and increased TO are very different things.

Oh god I didn’t even think about that whole other layer of confusion. Yeah if you’ve got 100 people and one of them is sick, that’s 1% of them who are sick, so if it “increased BY 100%” then that means now two people are sick. If it’s “increased TO 100%” then all 100 people are sick.

Reblogging again for that last addition.

Alligator Body Language and You, or: How To Know When An Alligator On Social Media is Being Stressed for Views

Alligators are wild animals. Despite the idiotic claims of animal abusers like Jay Brewer, they cannot be domesticated, which means they are always going to react on the same natural instincts they've had for millions of years. Habituated, yes. Tamed, yes. Trained, definitely. Crocodilians can form bonds with people- they're social and quite intelligent. They can solve problems, use tools, and they're actually quite playful. Alligators are also really good at communicating how they're feeling, but to somebody who doesn't spend much time around them, their body language can be a bit mystifying. And it doesn't help when social media influencers are saying shit like this:

That is not what a happy gator looks like.

That's a terrified, furious gator who isn't attacking because the ogre handling her has her in a chokehold. She's doing everything she can to express her displeasure, and he's lying about it because he knows his audience doesn't even know how to think critically about what he's doing. He knows that because his audience doesn't know anything about these animals, he can get away with it. This I think is why I hate him so much- he deliberately miseducates his audience. He knows what he's doing is factually inaccurate, he just doesn't care because attention means more to him than anything else in the world.

Let's change that! Here are two really important lessons for understanding alligator body language on social media.

Lesson 1: Alligators Don't Smile (in fact, most animals don't)

So what's going on in this video? Jay Brewer is aggressively choking his white alligator Coconut while scrubbing algae off of her with a toothbrush. And make no mistake, he is digging into the creature's throat while she is visibly distressed. He claims she's happy- but she's not. He is willfully misrepresenting what this animal is feeling. That's a problem, because people... well, we actually kind of suck at reading other species' body language. The reason for this is that we tend to overlay our own responses on their physical cues, and that's a problem. For example, let's look at an animal with a really similar face to ours, the chimpanzee. Check out Ama's toothy grin!

Wait, no. That's not a happy smile. That's a threat display. When a chimpanzee "smiles," it's either terrified and doing a fear grimace, or it's showing you its teeth because it intends on using them in your face.

How about a dog? Look at my smiling, happy puppy!

Oh wait no, this is a picture of Ryder when he was super overwhelmed by noise and people during a holiday party. He'd hopped up in my sister's lap to get away from stuff that was happening on the floor and was panting quite heavily. See the tension in the corners of his mouth and his eyes? A lot of the time when a dog "smiles," the smile isn't happy. It's stress! Why Animals Do The Thing has a nice writeup about that, but the point is, our body language is not the same as other species. And for reptiles, body language is wildly different.

For instance, look at these two alligators. Pretty cute, right? Look at 'em, they're posing for a Christmas card or something! How do you think they're feeling?

Well, I'll tell you how the normal one is feeling. He's annoyed! Why is he annoyed? Because the albino just rolled up, pushed another gator off the platform, and is trying to push this guy, too. I know this because I actually saw it happen. It was pretty funny, not gonna lie. He's not gaping all the way, but he was hissing- you can actually see him getting annoyed in the sequence I took right before this shot. Look at him in this first shot here- he's just relaxing, and you can see he isn't gaping even a little bit.

By the end, he's expressing displeasure, but not enough to actually do anything about it. He's annoyed, but he's comfy and that's where one of the best basking areas is, so he'll put up with it.

Reptiles open their mouths wide for a lot of reasons, but never because they are actively enjoying a sensation. Unless they're eating. No reptile smiles- they can't. They don't even have moveable lips. If a reptile is gaping, it's doing so because:

There is another reason that a captive crocodilian might be gaping, and that's because it's doing so on command. Some places have their gators trained to gape on cue, like St. Augustine Alligator Farm and other good zoos. They have the animals do this in presentations that are genuinely educational. They ask the animals to open their mouths so that they can show off their teeth and demonstrate how their tongues seal off the back of their mouth. They'll also do it as part of routine healthcare, because looking at their teeth is important.

In this case, the animals aren't gaping because they're stressed, they're gaping because they know they're gonna get a piece of chicken or fish if they do it. And what's more, they're doing it on cue. They have a specific command or signal that tells them to open wide. It's not an instinctive response to a situation. It's trained. If the animal provides the behavior after a cue, the situation is much less likely to be negatively impactful.

It's also important to remember that there's a difference between a partially open mouth and a gape! As discussed above, alligators will often have their mouths a little bit open just to maintain temperature homeostasis. It helps them stay comfy, temperature-wise. These guys are all doing thermoregulatory open-mouthed behavior- that slight open and relaxed body posture is a dead giveaway. (That and it's the hottest spot in the enclosure.)

Lesson 2: A Happy Gator Is A Chill Gator

So if alligators don't smile or have facial expressions other than the :V that typically signifies distress, how else can you tell how they're feeling? One way is stillness. See, alligators subscribe to the philosophy of if it sucks... hit da bricks.

Basically, if they hate it, they'll leave. Unless, y'know, somebody has their meaty claws digging into their throat or is otherwise restraining them. (Restraint isn't always bad, btw. Sometimes the animal is going through a medical thing or needs to be restrained for their safety- which a responsible educator will explain.)

Let's look at a very similar scenario, in which a captive alligator is getting his back scrubbed.

As you can see, it's quite different. First, he's not being restrained at all. Second, look at how relaxed he is! He's just chilling there vibing! He could simply get up and leave if he wanted to, because he's not being held. Towards the end of the video, as he lifts his head, you can see that his respiratory rate is very even as his throat flutters a bit. I'm not sure what this facility is, so I can't comment on care/general ethics, but like. In this specific case, this is an alligator enjoying being scrubbed! And you can tell because he's not doing anything. A happy gator is content to be doing what they're doing.

Why Should I Listen To You?

Now, you should ask yourself, why should you listen to me? Why should you trust me, who does not own an alligator, versus Jay Brewer, who owns several?

Well, first off, there's no profit for me in telling you that what you're seeing on social media is in fact not what you're being told you're seeing. I'm not getting paid to do this. That's the thing with people who make social media content. The big names aren't doing it just for fun. They're doing it for money. Whether that's profit through partnerships or sponsorships, or getting more people to visit their facilities, or ad revenue, you can't ignore the factor of money. And this is NOT a bad thing, because it allows educators to do what they're passionate about! People deserve to be paid for the work that they do!

But the problem starts when you chase the algorithm instead of actually educating. A "smiling" alligator gets the views, and if people don't know enough to know better, it keeps getting the views. People love unconventional animal stories and they want those animals to be happy- but the inability to even know where to start with critically evaluating these posts really hinders the ability to spread real information. Like, this post will probably get a couple hundred notes, but that video of Coconut being scrubbed had almost 400,000 likes when I took that screenshot. Think about how many eyeballs that's reached by now. What I'm saying here is that it's just... really important to think critically about who you're getting your information from. What do dissenters say in the comments? What do other professionals say? You won't find a single herpetologist that has anything good to say about Prehistoric Pets, I can tell you that right now.

Another reason you can trust me is that my sources are not "just trust me bro," or "years of experience pretending my pet shop where animals come to die is a real zoo." Instead, here are my primary sources for my information on alligator behavior:

Thank you for reading! Here's a very happy wild alligator from Sanibel for your trouble.

A good writeup on crocodilian body language, with sources. @kaijutegu knows her shit and is my go-to resource for reptilian behavior questions.

(Cis/trans)women aren’t the only ones that can get breast cancer, either.

Please boost this version 👆

official boob post

boob inspection time!

𝖣𝖺𝗍𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝖢𝗅𝖺𝗋𝗂𝗌𝗌𝖾 𝖫𝖺 𝖱𝗎𝖾 𝖧𝖾𝖺𝖽𝖼𝖺𝗇𝗇𝗈𝗇𝗌

clarisse la rue ✘ fem!demigod!reader (daughter of artemis)

word count: 1.6k+

author’s note: ahhh, thank u for the request, i really like the outcome of this and i only hope you’d do the same! i specified the godly parent bcs anon didn’t specify!

requested from anonymous!

𝖡𝖾𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝖠𝗉𝗈𝗅𝗅𝗈’𝗌 𝖣𝖺𝗎𝗀𝗁𝗍𝖾𝗋 + 𝖯𝗅𝖺𝗍𝗈𝗇𝗂𝖼!𝖢𝗅𝖺𝗋𝗂𝗌𝗌𝖾 𝖫𝖺 𝖱𝗎𝖾

clarisse la rue ✘ fem!demigod!reader (daughter of apollo)

word count: 584

author’s note: tbh i kinda struggled with this but pls tell me what you think of it. i also didn’t know if anon wanted platonically so i just went off what i think is implied in this ask! sorry to the anon if you wanted this to be romantically.

requested from anonymous!

I GOT A FUCKING RAISE THE POTATO WORKED WTF

This potato works. Every. Fucking. Time.

Then bring me luck

the day after I posted this last time I was notified that I was selected for a really cool mentorship gig and got an unrelated glowing review at work

This thread omg

Family doesn’t have to be blood related.

Sometimes family is a righteously angry little girl, her supportive brother, a random stranger with a thirst for chaos and justice, two foreign grandmas, and The Rest Of The Plane.

yasss this makes me happy like nothing else lol

moodboard // “that mf time of the month”

Me 😁

Since I'm currently at Rouen, I feel like it's the right opportunity to share you those,

When le Comte saved Jean from the stake, the 30th May 1431 at Rouen,

Don't repost, only reblog

Summertime Gigolas splish splosh 😊

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