@a-cuddly-dragon / a-cuddly-dragon.tumblr.com
TIL that there's an '80s movie where they portrayed Smilodon by sticking actual fake teeth onto actual live lions.
So I learnt about this as part of a paleontology lecture talking about how it became accepted that saber teeth don't hinder the animals ability to eat
Citation - those people who stuck some on real lions which were able to eat without problems once they got used to them
A strange alien doctor stands near the unconscious body of Padme Amidala. “It appears she has lost the will to live.” A older man with a limp hobbles closer with the aid of a cane. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” says Dr. Gregory House.
-Keeps Padme on life support despite DNR, somehow this ends in him getting punched by Obi-Wan
-Immediately starts putting her on every treatment known to man
-Walks over to Wilson’s office, which is the only part of the entire ship that just looks the same as it does in the show
-Homoerotically complains about how stupid Jedi are, then makes a bet with Wilson on whether Obi Wan is gay or the father of Padme’s twins (Wilson wants House to believe people can be faithful)
-Padme almost dies again. Turns out the treatment’s not working
-“if the dark side nearly killed her, maybe it can save her”
-House uses force lightning to restart Padme’s heart
-Gets brought into Cuddy’s office and told off for using an experimental treatment, and the power of the dark side, in her hospital
-House is taken off the case and foreman is put in charge of the case
-Padme is unexpectedly doing better, but Cuddy refuses to tell House or else he’ll be using the dark side to save all his patients
-House watches on as Wilson tries seducing a relieved Obi Wan while he paces in the lobby. Doesn’t seem to work
-House interrogates Obi Wan about his relationship with Padme, insinuates it’s Obi Wans Fault. Gets in a struggle and once theyre seperated it’s revealed he ripped out some beard hair
-Padme is getting released from the hospital but crashes again with obvious signs of infection. Everyone blames the dark side of the force
-is put in intensive care again, everyone thinks she’s going to die, House is brooding.
-House meets Bail Organa and talks to him, Bail mentions how he was so worried about her the last time she was in a hospital, and this seems much more hopeless
-“what time she was in the hospital?”
-House marches in as they’re about to pull the plug, rolling Padme’s unconcious body over to point at dark spot on the back of her neck
-Foreman looks disapointed, “it’s a bruise house, her husband nearly snapped her neck.”
-“Our princess’ boyfriend here failed to mentioned she was scratched by a Nexu on Genosis years ago. Nexu claws are known as a vicious poison.”
-“it would have killed her years ago”
-“unless a small chunk of claw stuck in her back, working into the muscles near the nape of her neck for years. The little prince of Darkness chokes her, pressure and muscles spasming lets it work into a blood vessel. It’s why the force lightning only was a bandaid, it vaporized what was in her bloodstream but broke up the rest of the claw and let it enter in her bloodstream. Start her on dialysis, she’ll be fine by tomorrow afternoon.”
-Next day Padme’s wheeled out of the hospital with her two children, bittersweetness. House watches from balcony before going back to his office
-Wilson enters with his shirt unbuttoned and a few bruises on his neck, declaring, “the Jedi is gay. I win.”
-House holds up a paternity test, “he’s bisexual, it’s a draw”
I’m HOWLING this is the funniest thing I’ve ever read
A Bird in the Hand
Monster Researcher Eclair (and Andie) study the Steppes clan Centaurs and Mountain Harpies.
EHEEHEHEHEHHEEHEHE
Eclair's constant wide eyed enthusiasm is SO dang endearing.
Ive said this before but swear the biggest skill to learn as an adult is how to resist high-pressure sales tactics. You do NOT have to answer questions with anything other than "Sorry I'm not interested." No matter how nice they are or no matter how many follow up questions they ask or even how agitated they get when you stand your ground. Just keep saying I'm not interested. Don't answer their questions. Don't give them an opening to try to push back on your reasons. Be a fucking brick wall of I'm not interested.
My absolute hottest take is that, from a culturally relative perspective, no food is bad. None of it. It's an expression of culture, art, history, ecology, material conditions, subjective taste. It's all inedible pap to somebody and the taste of childhood for someone else. Americans be eating cheesed burger. Pea wet is as good as gravy in Wigan. The French eat snails and the Inuit eat seal, the Germans eat sauerkraut and the Russians drink kvass, the Inca ate cavy and the Romans ate flamingo. People around the world have been eagerly awaiting their serving of simple bread or thin porridge or fermented milk product or pickled whatever-the-fuck since we learned to cook food over fire. We all love the slop we grew up eating. Food is a reflection of millennia of culture and loving human artistic expression. Attempting to extrapolate largely harmless online food banter into actual serious comparative rankings or half-baked critical analyses of cultures based on how much you subjectively don't like what they eat is a miserable way to live. Live a little. Peace and love on the only planet with food.
This is a post of critical support for bland English cuisine and unhinged Brazilian pizzas and everything else I don't understand. Turning food, something literally every person on earth enjoys, into a moral or cultural judgement is, well, if it's not full-blown reactionary and parochial... then it's at least kind of nasty, huh?
"Based on data gleaned from the nearly 10 million military dependents it insures, the U.S. Department of Defense has repeatedly called the evidence supporting ABA “weak,” noting there is no research to determine whether the small number of participants who show improvement — 15% — do so because of treatment or simply because a child has matured. After a year of the therapy, the department reported to Congress in 2019, 76% of 16,000 participating autistic children saw no change, and 9% worsened."
Okay before we get anyone on here saying "water is wet", here are some other bullet points about the article.
Honestly, this whole article is a gem. Remember, while "water is wet" studies seem trivial, we need them in order to get our side of the story taken seriously. Research with credible data that backs up what we've been saying is important!
TL; DR?
Huge study with lots of input from autistic people tells us ABA sucks!
Thank you for this addition. A better encouragement for this article than I managed!
Those studies with massive data pools are especially telling, since the common refrain is that “real” ABA is effective, and the ineffective treatments are due to a lack of training. A pool that big with results that shitty indicates that either a) ABA is ineffective regardless of how it’s practiced or, b) “real” ABA is so rarely practiced that it, not the “bad” ABA, is the outlier.
Like, okay, let’s take that at face value: let’s agree that all good outcomes from ABA are when it’s done right, and all bad outcomes are when it’s done wrong. That would still means that over 80% of ABA is being done wrong. Your chances of getting an ABA therapist who does it “right” are very, very low: far worse than random chance.
Imagine if this was applied to literally anything else. “This pacemaker always works, unless it’s manufactured incorrectly; it just so happens that only 15% are made correctly.” That would be nuts! That would never get past the FDA! At that point, it’s more accurate to say it never works unless it’s manufactured incorrectly.
the fact that walls get dusty is ridiculous. you're vertical. act like it.
lying in bed for an hour and a half after waking up should not pass time in my opinion
It’s honestly shocking how fast cis women will jump to reject something that benefits them just because it also benefits trans people.
Like, the checkboxes that ask what organs you have without asking your gender? Fantastic for trans folks because they can tell the doctor what anatomy to be concerned about without misgendering themselves. Also fantastic for cis women who’ve had surgeries like hysterectomies who would probably rather not have the doctor blame every medical issue on something uterus related. Maybe I want insurance to cover my Pap smears but also maybe a lot of cis women who don’t even have uteruses would like the hospital to just give them the treatment they need without completely pointless pregnancy tests.
No one is afraid of the word woman. We just think accuracy would benefit everyone here.
I'm looking back at random things I was taught as a kid by various adults and media and. did nobody bother to factcheck anything? was that just not an option or
Could you please name one?
swallowed chewing gum takes years to digest, blue veins are blue bc deoxygenated blood is blue, fossil fuels are made from dinosaurs, feeding bread to birds is fine, mice like cheese, carrots are good for your eyes, cleopatra was a sultry seductress, bulls can see the color red, corsets were uncomfortable and caused deformities, glass is a slow-moving liquid which is why old window panes are uneven at the bottom, tomato juice gets rid of skunk smells, young einstein failed math class, eating before swimming increases your risk of cramps and drowning, cracking your knuckles causes arthritis, iron maidens were used as torture devices, the earth's core is molten rock, and basically anything at all whatsoever to do with the myth of thanksgiving
they said name ONE-
bats are blind, diamonds are made of coal, the dark side of the moon is dark, the sun is yellow, lightning doesn't strike twice, columbus landed in the u.s., medieval europeans believed the world was flat, piranhas eat human flesh, goldfish have no long-term memory, porcupines can shoot their quills, people often swallow spiders in their sleep, wolves howl at the moon, humans only have 5 senses, sore muscles are caused by a buildup in lactic acid, and rust causes tetanus!
actually imma just leave this here
“As a chemical engineering Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh who uses a power wheelchair, I figured it wouldn’t be long before I met one of these bots in a frustrating face-off on a narrow sidewalk. What I didn’t realize was how dangerous, and dehumanizing, that scenario might be.
The robot was sitting motionless on the curb cut on the other side of Forbes Avenue. It wasn’t crossing with the rest of the pedestrians, and when I reached the curb, it didn’t move as the walk signal was ending. I found myself sitting in the street as the traffic light turned green, blocked by a non-sentient being incapable of understanding the consequences of its actions.”
-Emily Ackerman
[ID: three screenshots. The first is a perspective article by CityLab. It’s headline reads “My fight with a sidewalk robot.” The paragraph below reads “A life threatening encounter with AI technology convinced me that the needs of people with disabilities need to be engineered into our autonomous future.” Below the paragraph is a picture of a small rectangular sidewalk robot moving along a sidewalk.
The second screenshot is a tweeted picture by an unknown user of six sidewalk robots going down the side of the street, with a car trying to pull between two of them. There are two replies below it, the first reply is by Adrian Lopez @PaladinZilch and reads “Wow. Imagine being in a wheelchair and seeing that.” The second reply is by I [flaming heart emoji] You @IAm444x and reads “oh god the tech bros made car traffic for sidewalks [crying emoji].”
The third screenshot is a reply tweet by Will Jackson @geologywill that reads “A few weeks ago… it took 5 minutes for their sensors to figure out how to get out of the standoff… Enjoyed every second of it.” Below is a picture of three sidewalk robots caught in a circle at an outdoor bus stop, presumably stuck in their circle. End ID.]
@a-square-6-28-496 here's a reblog with image IDs
a little obsessed with the story of how giacomo casanova was sharing a gondola with this random guy who suddenly started having a seizure, and casanova had some medical training so he stabilized the guy until the guy’s physician could be called. and then the physician bled the guy and put mercury ointment on him, which caused everything to get worse to the point that a priest was called to administer the guy’s last rites, but then casanova stepped in and washed off the mercury ointment despite the doctor yelling at him not to. and the guy recovered and turned out to be super rich and powerful and in gratitude bankrolled casanova’s debauchery for years until casanova got himself sentenced to five years in jail for blasphemy. also at one point he got shot through the hand in a duel and doctors wanted to amputate it but he said no it’ll be fine and it Was
so what i’m saying is a medical procedural show where the main character is giacomo casanova and he doesn’t want to be solving these medical mysteries but goddamn if he isn’t the only fucker in this room who knows how to not kill the patient. so i guess my date with this prussian chick will just have to wait
this pitch would have absolutely killed at the bbc between 1991 and 2005 btw
This is the most satisfying story I've read in a long time
there have been 774664 studies on basic income and the results of every single one have been “wow! we gave people money and literally everything improved! crime rates are down! the actual sky is bluer! my (the researcher’s) wife decided not to leave me after all!” but these have all been short studies, just a couple years. i think what’s really missing from the field is a proper long form study, with a broader, bolder demographic, to really get us those numbers we need. a truly diverse study pool like, say, everyone. forever
What are some chronic illnesses that can only occur in a fantasy setting?
Hold on i need to ask my friend Claudia, who is a college student and edits wikipedia something real quick...
THIS IS MY FRIEND CLAUDIA
