Anyone who understands batteries want to tell me if this will eventually explode or something?

But what was really interesting, and took me much longer to figure out, was that the hawk always attacked when the car queue was long enough to provide cover all the way to the small tree, and that only happened after someone had pressed the pedestrian crossing button. As soon as the sound signal was activated, the raptor would fly from somewhere into the small tree, wait for the cars to line up, and then strike.

That meant that the hawk understood the connection between the sound and the eventual car queue length. The bird also had to have a good mental map of the place, because when the car queue reached its tree, the raptor could no longer see the place where its prey was and had to get there by memory.

It was an immature bird. Cooper’s hawks rarely nest in cities in our area but are common winter visitors. So the bird I was watching was almost certainly a migrant, having moved to the city just a few weeks earlier. And it had already figured out how to use traffic signals and patterns. To me it seemed very impressive.

Emphasis mine. That’s wild!

Don’t forget it’s never too late to start masking.

That reminds me, I keep forgetting to post this sticker I saw on a lamp post a few weeks ago:

It has the number of steps it does so that the pressure from the button holding your pants closed is evenly distributed over the fabric (and thread), so that nothing tears or rips. When sewing through cloth more points of attachment is generally better. You might be able to staple a button on without damaging the fabric over time, but it’s probably a lot less comfortable to wear than one sewn on.

Just attached a button to my pants yesterday, after the factory sewn button gave up.

o7

Hm, I guess this is esoteric in the sense that most people aren’t interested in it?

Some clothes are made with what’s called ‘slub cotton’, which is cloth made from cotton thread that has irregular lumps jutting out of it. It gives the final woven fabric an interesting look, almost like static. If it’s done with bright or contrasting colors it can give a really interesting pop to the final item.

Yeah, I would expect a printer I paid 6k for to not have malware!

That’s possible, but they aren’t really typical office printers either, it’s for specialized art printing. Again it’s definitely bad, this just isn’t typical office equipment.

Also it’s for a UV printer, not an inkjet or laser printer, with the cheapest option on their website being $1900 and the average being around $6000. So, not a regular printer you would buy off the shelf. It’s still bad of course, but only so many people even could be impacted by it.

the statistic showing that the number of disabled adult middle aged “refugees” is double-digit higher that the same number for Danes

You know refugees aren’t a random sample of the population, right? Why tf wouldn’t there be more refugees from war zones, gang violence, etc with disabilities compared to some random Eestern European country with a population that for the most part deals with none of that? What brain trust managed to convince you that the only way to be a refugee is to like, win an Olympic sprint or something?

I find it so incredibly frustrating that even articles specifically about LGBTQ+ victims of Nazi persecution frequently fail to acknowledge that they were kept in prison after Nazi Germany fell, because gay sex was a crime and they were just considered criminals rather than victims.

This plus being forced to watch a video of a woman giving birth for us. Also that birth control methods in general, including condoms, aren’t very reliable. Well, guess what happens when you tell teenagers a condom might not even make a difference in preventing pregnancy…

Absolutely nothing about consent either, so the nastiest shit was said about a teenager who got pregnant from statutory rape (7+ year age difference). LGBT? Absolutely nothing. I think someone might have said something in one of my classes asking if we were going to cover it, and the (gym coach) teacher making loud disgusted noises while laughing and saying no.

Christ, the 90s and 00s were not great in a lot of ways.

You’re right, it is better, and the Flintstones comic was already really good! I went into it knowing a lot of the historical details of the time, but it was a fantastic and emotionally moving representation of it. 10/10.

Just checked out a digital copy from the library 👍

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

-John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

The more things change the more they stay the same.

It comes across like you feel we can’t protect gay/minority children from being exploited by huge corporations online because it would be homophobic to protect gay kids from psychological manipulation.

This is some weird ass fanfic you are writing about me for asking how the researchers came to their conclusions about LGBT ads, specifically, being judged to be inappropriate. I’m not engaging with this anymore.

You’re classifying all of these as malicious by virtue of being ads, which the researchers obviously didn’t. Take that up with them.

I question the idea that the reason these were classified as inappropriate was because of sexual pop ups. If that was the case than many innocuous sites with crappy ad practices would have also made it onto the list.

Knowing that queer people exist and that you could be queer isn’t “sexual advertisement,” by the way. Which is why I wanted to know more about how the researchers came to the conclusion that these particular ads were inappropriate.

Absolutely true! If the quiz contents were inappropriate in some way beyond like… acknowledging LGBT people and depression exists, I would like to hear about that part.

It fucking rules, I’m not kidding! It’s so worth a read. I need to see if the Snagglepuss comic they put out in the same style is also good.