The ‘O’ in opossum stands for ‘fuck’

perfect bot interaction on twitter

Unpopular opinion: Only long term viable/optimal solution for pronoun identification discourse is to eventually shift culture to a model where we use they/them for every stranger until they introduce themselves (if they choose to), or until we are otherwise made aware of their pronouns.

This would include cis people, it would include "obviously" cis people, it would include people who seem to be clearly presenting in a gendered way. It would piss a lot of people off on both sides of the gender fence at first and would take sustained cultural influence for decades to pull off but I really do feel like it's the only solution that works for everyone in the end.

I like how this works as a twist on those little rituals in cultures with a t-v distinction. You know, when you first meet you call each other "you" (the plural pronoun) and after some time when you get familiar enough they tell you "please, call me 'thou'" (letting you use the singular pronoun), and maybe you take a drink together, and afterwards everyone can tell how close you are based on pronoun usage...

#this shift is already occurring in some demographics (supportive but confused middle-aged cis parents of transgender people)

Guesstimation game: no googling!

How far away is the moon?

my answer

my answer

my answer

I saw some mentions of rabies going around again and have no clue what's set it off this time, but given recent scientific developments I want to revisit the idea of curing symptomatic rabies.

First things first: there is still no practical way to do this. The famous Milwaukee Protocol fails far more frequently than it succeeds, and even the successes are not making it out in anything like a normal state. It's been argued that it should no longer be considered a valid treatment [1] due to these issues; any continued use is because there's literally nothing else on the table.

However. There are now two separate studies showing it's possible to cure rabies in mice after the onset of symptoms. The lengths you have to go to in order to pull this off are drastic, to put it mildly, and couldn't really be adapted to humans even if you wanted to. But proof of concept is now on the board.

long post under the cut, warnings for animal experimentation and animal death. full bibliography at the end and first mention of each source links to paper.

LISTEN I understand that Miles is obsessed with joining the military because he was born into a military caste, he's constantly hearing about his parents' military exploits, and also everyone told him he couldn't, but he's incapable of following orders because as soon as someone tells him to do something he's like "what if I did something better though". He has absolutely no respect for the chain of command and is mostly loyal to the emperor because they're kind of bros. This kid does not belong in the military. Even spec ops is pushing it. Take the L before you get court martialed for real, buddy. Nepotism can only save you so many times.

Miles keeps internally going "ugh nobody knows about all the cool shit I did so they think I have my position due to nepotism". Miles you have your HEAD due to nepotism. I have lost track of the military crimes you've committed.

Okay so, got here from a book on animal behavior but: Vulcan stand-up comedy as a competitive activity.

Because most Vulcans don't actually pretend they don't have emotions, it's all about self-regulation, right? And good comedy usually hinges on manipulating the relationship between our faculties of recognition and surprise in various ways, you can get pretty scientific with it.

So Vulcans go to the comedy act, and the idea is the comedian is trying to make you crack up, and the audience is trying to not even crack a smile, and if you do laugh, you lose. Like all in good fun, but Vulcans are both really competitive and really aware of how dangerous that urge can be to a society, so this could actually be classified as highly orthodox Surakian practice.

So of course the comedian has to actually be funny, or there's no challenge and the game is boring.

Which means the really good Vulcan comedians (most of whom tend to extremely dry delivery of their bits) are going to go around playing to packed houses, which mostly sit staring stonily back at them, with occasional breaks when someone loses it and reacts.

And after a show you'll have Vulcans walking out discussing with great approval how very humorous that was, with varying degrees of muted smugness or chagrin depending on if they won or lost.

I bet there are human comedians whose grandest fantasy is being good enough to do a set in Vulcana Regatta and have people going around bragging about not laughing at them.

"My agent was very concerned, wanted to make sure that I knew that no one was going to be laughing at my jokes."

"'Yes, I know' I said. 'I'm used to that.'"

Hi! This is a rickroll. Please visit youtube dot com, type "never gonna give you up" in the search bar, then click on the first video that comes up. Thank you for your consideration.

i have not booped half of you as well as i would have liked, and i have booped half of you half as well as you deserve.

Tumblr user John Rawls famously suggested the following thought experiment:

Suppose you were hit by a bus one day and got isekaied into the body of a random society member. How screwed would you be?

Wenhao Xu, Faraz A. Burni, and Srinivasa R. Raghavan. Reversibly Sticking Metals and Graphite to Hydrogels and Tissues. ACS Central Science, https://doi.org/10.1021/acscentsci.3c01593

Submitter comment: This paper is wonderful, and a pretty accessible read. The premise sounds like a half-assed science fair project: what happens when you stick electrodes on food in your kitchen and run a DC current through it? Turns out you get an unexpectedly strong and often reversible adhesion between the soft food and the hard electrode that even works underwater. Even the authors are like “how the hell was this not discovered two centuries ago”

Also, in the materials section:

United States House of Representatives Apportioned based on alligator population

Amish urbanists complaining about horse-centric infrastructure

Just stumbled upon this homophobic ad from a Christian Church on Facebook and the way it unintentionally slayed—