I just watched that video of the white cabbage larva with the smaller larvae exiting its body. Jeez, it’s still alive after THAT? Life’s rich pageant, I guess.

Join some Whatsapp group that piques your interest and meet with them IRL. I wouldn’t have thought that drinking beer and shooting the shit with total strangers could be so much fun, but here we are.

Geez, that reminds me of a former colleague that, when asked for “the numbers,” would just send screenshots of tables in the ERP system instead of exporting them to a spreadsheet. What’s even worse, usually a lot of values were plain wrong, on one occasion more than half of them.

And let’s not forget politics. When you’re golf buddies with the right politicians, winning those extremely lucrative public tenders will become a cakewalk.

Some people are in for a rude awakening if they think that the slight nuisance of “being shown targeted ads” is the biggest issue with dragnet data collection.

That, and internet in the late 90s started to get really fast. Some blokes sat in their rooms for days on end, downloading music or movies, as there were no laws against it yet. Or at least they were not enforced. In other words, those were the days when average Joe could still be one step ahead of The Man. You know, before he turned against us with a vengeance, everywhere, 24/7.

Strange, just for the last few days, I’ve been thinking just what a big cultural turning point 2005 seemed to be. From then on, everything started to circle the drain, and I put the blame on globalization and the advent of large-scale social media. Which might have left an imprint on product design and fashion.
And, as I wrote earlier in a different thread, the shift from 1994 to 1995 was the biggest one I’ve witnessed, and it was very visible in public spaces. Audible as well: It went from Metallica and ZZ Top as supermarket background music (imagine this!) to “Easy Listening” or whatever.

Disinfotainment at its best.

he Beak Too Big For He Gotdamn Head

We have explosive

So kind of like Werner Herzog then, who once stated that he never, ever dreams. But he keeps having visions with his eyes wide open, in broad daylight, all the time. He describes them in his terrific book “Of Walking in Ice.”

In my last company, everybody could easily obtain “manager” status… because that was just the title for everyone who was salaried. Which didn’t necessarily mean more money. In fact, usually not. It certainly meant more overtime… a lot more.

It’s all just scare tactics, they’ll say.
Also, that feeling of power.
Ah, the entire collection of S. Harris’ Global Warming cartoons, though lumped together with other environmental topics, is worth linking.

In Swiss German, slippers are called “finches”, so there’s that.

Sidney Harris taught me otherwise.
EDIT: I just saw he turned 91 yesterday. Happy Birthday, Mr. Harris!

Thanks for this. I could watch this channel all day long.

Ever seen DMSO solidify upon cooling? I wouldn’t even call it vitrification, it obviously has macroscopically large crystalline domains. It would be like putting rocks in your veins. I mean it kind of works fine for single cells because the failures* can be treated as a statistic, but anything on the scale of organs will become damaged just too badly.

* See e.g. what happens to frozen sperm cells: “chromatin disruption through protamine translocations, DNA fragmentation, and lesions to genes involved in fertilization capability and embryonic development […] are known consequences of the cryopreservation process.”

It can burn diamond at 720 °C, what do you think it’ll do to soft tissue over the course of an entire lifetime. Things helping aerobic life survive are
a) partially consisting of partially oxidized polymers in the form of carbohydrates (remember, the only thing that cannot burn is what has already been burned);
b) oxygen’s peculiar, natural triplet state which greatly slows down its kinetics compared e.g. to its horrible relative, ozone.

Midnight Oil made a song about it, “Power and the Passion.”

Found the mathematician that contributes to Urban Dictionary in this free time.