I’ve found a new thing I don’t like.
Body bags… that are flesh coloured.
drferox reblogged
Listen, if you haven’t been told before, let me be the first one to tell you:
If you are working in a vet clinic alone, all by yourself, you lock the damn door.
This is especially important if you’re young and female but should apply to everybody.
It does not matter if you’re just about to open and another staff member will be there ‘soon’. It does not matter if you are expecting a client any minute now. It does not matter if it is the middle of the day because the vet is on a house call.
You are sitting, by yourself, in a building full of cash and drugs. You lock the damn door.
You can sit yourself down somewhere that you can see the door and be selective about who you let in, but otherwise you lock the damn door.
You do not want to find yourself in a FNAF situation trying to avoid the person with ill intent who walked in looking for drugs while you were out the back, or hanging up washing. You don’t want to look up after feeding a cat to realise somebody followed you in when they saw only one car in the car park.
Just lock the door.
Nothing major happened this time, just a new nurse (kids these days) that had left the front door unlocked while cleaning out back one morning, on her own for half an hour. The other nurse had called in sick.
The place looked deserted until I found her out back and had a quick talk about safety.
Because my workplace has been burgled at least 3 times that I know of. And I know of two incidents where a thief just followed a staff member in through the back door. Once to steal unattended purses and car keys. Once to get into the pharmacy, grab handfuls of stuff and walk out again.
So if you’re alone, you lock the door.
Listen, if you haven’t been told before, let me be the first one to tell you:
If you are working in a vet clinic alone, all by yourself, you lock the damn door.
This is especially important if you’re young and female but should apply to everybody.
It does not matter if you’re just about to open and another staff member will be there ‘soon’. It does not matter if you are expecting a client any minute now. It does not matter if it is the middle of the day because the vet is on a house call.
You are sitting, by yourself, in a building full of cash and drugs. You lock the damn door.
You can sit yourself down somewhere that you can see the door and be selective about who you let in, but otherwise you lock the damn door.
You do not want to find yourself in a FNAF situation trying to avoid the person with ill intent who walked in looking for drugs while you were out the back, or hanging up washing. You don’t want to look up after feeding a cat to realise somebody followed you in when they saw only one car in the car park.
Just lock the door.
the council will decide your fate (being kissed passionately)
(we had a chat about Vet!Halsin, who walks around with little birds under his hair and can carry a mastiff like it's nothing)
Other benefits aside, do you know how useful it would be if someone actually had ‘Speak With Animals’ and could explain to that Labrador that he does, in fact, most definitely, need to stop eating socks if he wants to live.
I’ve been working at this one job, just this one clinic, a fairly long while now. 12 years, in fact. It means I’m basically part of the furniture at this point, I’ve seen a lot of changes, and I’ve seen a lot of staff come and go.
You know what else is about 12 years? The lifespan of larger or less fortunate pets.
Over the last couple of months I’ve guided a fair few patients to the end of their life, some becoming very frequent visitors as we tried to get their condition under control. I have euthanised these old, beloved dogs that I first met as bouncy little puppies.
It is a peculiar privilege to have been there from cradle to grave for these patients, to have been a recurring encounter on the entirety of these pets’ lives. It’s a sad event, obviously, but there is something beautiful in knowing how deeply loved these animals have been, and for such a long time.
Pigeon attempts to court falcon
For all those in the notes - peregrine falcons hunt by dive-bombing their prey; this falcon however is currently stationary and cannot dive-bomb much of anything. In this moment, the pigeon is safe. The falcon however may not recover from the embarrassment.
I can't tell if that's a giant pigeon or a tiny falcon
Tiny falcon
The Bard: “I roll to seduce the dragon”
one of the best academic paper titles
for those who don't speak academia: "according to our MRI machine, dead fish can recognise human emotions. this suggests we probably should look at the results of our MRI machine a bit more carefully"
I hope everyone realises how incredibly important this dead fish study is. This was SO fucking important.
I still don’t understand
So basically, in the psych and social science fields, researchers would (I don't know if they still do this, I've been out of science for awhile) sling around MRIs like microbiolosts sling around metagenomic analyses. MRIs can measure a lot but people would use them to measure 'activity' in the brain which is like... it's basically the machine doing a fuckload of statistics on brain images of your blood vessels while you do or think about stuff. So you throw a dude in the machine and take a scan, then give him a piece of chocolate cake and throw him back in and the pleasure centres light up. Bam! Eating chocolate makes you happy, proven with MRI! Simple!
These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"
There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:
- Dead salmon can recognise human facial expressions. OR
- Everyone else's results are garbage also, none of you have data for any of this junk.
I cannot overstate just how many papers were completely fucking destroyed by this experiment. Entire careers of particularly lazy scientists were built on these sorts of experiments. A decent chunk of modern experimental neuropsychology was resting on it. Which shows that science is like everything else -- the best advances are motivated by spite.
Look, I know I’m supposed to drink more water in a day. And I know I just haven’t been doing it. But I’m actually going to make a decent attempt at it this year.
Part of the challenge with ‘just drinking more water’ is a collection of relatively minor but still frustrating hurdles to work around:
- Water sometimes tastes bad
- If it’s the wrong temperature, it’s bad
- If it’s out of the wrong cup, like a plastic one or certain mugs at work, I Do Not Want it
- It’s repetitive and boring
So I’d normally end up drinking soft drink of some sort.
Instead, and it’s been working so far, I am trying to trick my brain into farming more dopamine out of drinking water.
First, a water bottle that I think is funny:
It also helps that it’s well insulated.
Second, flavoured ice blocks using fruit, herbs or juice, and I make 5 different ones for the week:
The combinations I like are:
- Mint and lime
- Mint, lime and raspberry
- Strawberry and raspberry
- Lemon and strawberry
- Combining any of the above
Third, I let a small enthusiastic toddler select my colourful ice block for the day, which she is super happy to do. And super insistent on doing now, which both makes me happy and now I can’t possibly let her down by failing to drink the water.
And it’s actually been working for a couple of weeks now. So I’ll see how long the momentum lasts.
drferox reblogged
You've heard of Elf on a Shelf, now see a Coelophysid on a Therizinosaurid! Rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it?
Behold the rare Theri-tree-nosaurus and the Procomp-star-nathus.
Slowly but surely catching up on the Xmas gifts I couldn't send on time vfihvbfh. These are some of the dinos that my friends Adam (the "Compy") and Ryo (the "Theri") play on PoT.
I can't remember Adam's tumblr oh god at least they saw it on Discord dsfhvbf. @corpus-chorus hi sorry this is so late plz enjoy the fluffy turkey with claws.
drferox reblogged
I’m getting established with a new primary care doctor now that I’ve moved, and they overbooked a little so the only room available was a kid’s room. And. Well.
I need you all to know that I had to discuss getting a pap smear with this thing staring at me. Thankfully I did not actually NEED one today...
Someone mentioned the website where you can buy these, and don't worry, they get worse!
Quick, children! Hop on the back of the gecko we are stoning to death! Finish 'im off!
This bear has been through the horrors. It may have also caused some of them.
We have surgically modified this tog to be entirely flat on top, so that the table can be easily attached. Doesn't that make you feel better, children?
drferox reblogged
I sincerely wish that whoever came up with the name ‘Carflexin’ wakes up one morning to discover that all of their teeth have turned into spiders. 🙂
‘Carflexin’ is a brand name of a drug which sounds an awful lot like the active ingredient for an unrelated drug, so much so that it sometimes gets misfiled in the pharmacy. Can you guess which one it is?
Although whoever named Redivom deserves an award.
I sincerely wish that whoever came up with the name ‘Carflexin’ wakes up one morning to discover that all of their teeth have turned into spiders. 🙂
‘Carflexin’ is a brand name of a drug which sounds an awful lot like the active ingredient for an unrelated drug, so much so that it sometimes gets misfiled in the pharmacy. Can you guess which one it is?
“Cats don’t get presents because they don’t have hands. Only toes.”
- my darling child