Link round-up for 13 February 2022
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Giraffe power must be respected.
Oh no, even the Navy's gone gendery (made by Far Corner Café).
Robots are rebelling.
If these things worked, what would be the result?
Listen to the wise fisherman.
Laugh at the phony leftists.
Animals are funny. Sometimes they misbehave.
Birds sing.
French is hard.
A brazen thief films his own getaway.
Even a little kid gets it about Boris Johnson.
He's just driving around, inspecting the zoo.
This is an excellent use for rotten eggs.
Witches raise their wands against patriarchy.
Foreigners try to understand the US.
A traffic reporter sings his warning about icy roads.
Procrastinating Donkey blog fearlessly exposes fake dog trampoline videos.
A cat becomes a drama queen when taken to the vet.
Rules are made to be broken.
Perhaps Europe will soon be free from the plague.
Education is.....
Type in two terms, and this AI story-writer will generate a brief one-paragraph story intro using them (found via Mock Paper Scissors).
Strange trees here.
Interesting art by Calder Moore here.
Cas d'intérêt has a couple of films for cold weather.
A more advanced form of life evolved and quickly wiped out almost all the other life on the planet.
This is the Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading in Rio de Janeiro.
Languages don't differ in what they allow you to say, they differ in what details they require.
Mars isn't really red.
See video from a space probe which reached the upper atmosphere of the Sun.
Octopuses self-destruct after reproducing.
Science adjusts its conclusions as the evidence changes; religion can't. That's why religionists misunderstand what science is.
We rule you, we fool you.....
Comparison here of the speaking styles of Biden and Trump in similar situations.
Bill Maher discusses karma and the scorched-earth mean-spiritedness pervading the US. It's an eight-minute video, but the substantive part starts at 4:20.
Important reminders for reading on the internet here. AO3 is a "safe space" from the prigs, not for them.
More evidence surfaces that the rapid growth of the human brain over the last two million years wasn't caused by meat-eating.
Patheos has introduced content restrictions, leading many bloggers to abandon the platform.
Stop being shitty to creative people on the internet. If you don't like something, just go find something you like better.
This man is a disgusting abuser. His wife should dump him.
It's science vs morons (found via YellerDawg Granny).
Outsourcing production to fascist shithole countries means we get low-quality goods.
Insist on your right to question nonsense.
The combination of cryptocurrency bullshit and MAGA grifting creates a black hole of non-value (found via Hackwhackers).
Smartphones are turning people into assholes.
Follow the basic rules of logic.
Handle dogs like guns.
Twitter is incredibly stupid.
Washington state, facing public opposition to its policy of putting male inmates in women's prisons, is considering a law to hide information about the policy.
Germany has a different attitude toward homeless people than the US does (found via SickoRicko).
Tumblr's NSFW ban cut it off from its roots.
The self-destruction of the anti-vaxers continues (data are for New York city).
One of these things is not like the other.
Happy people don't "find God".
Major companies are backing away from cryptocurrency.
The governor of Missouri believes that leaders cannot make decisions unless they hold beliefs unsupported by evidence.
It's madness to let your job be your source of identity and meaning.
Cancel culture is mob rule.
Shitty car companies are punishing customers for right-to-repair laws.
This school punished the whistleblower rather than the wrongdoer.
Darwinfish 2 considers the future of local retail.
Tumblr bloggers sound the alarm about the EARN IT act (I don't have independent knowledge of this proposed law and don't know whether it's as dangerous as they say).
Bruce Gerencser takes on the old "what if you're wrong about God not existing" question (I addressed it here).
It's time to take a side.
"Race pride" is irrational.
This miracle-cure scam boasts a claimed success rate of just one in 3,700,000.
A billionaire's wealth represents time stolen from you.
"Buried within the wail of 'accountability' is the self-nomination and declaration that it is to them and their feelings that you must answer."
Democratic leaders must stop making themselves look like hypocrites -- or the party needs to start forcing them out of office à la Boris Johnson.
A proposed Oklahoma law would fine or fire teachers for teaching pretty much any real science (found via Hackwhackers).
Jourdon Anderson was a slave in Tennessee before the Civil War; he escaped during the war and settled in Ohio. After the war, his former master wrote to him inviting him to come back to work for him again as a paid employee. Here is the letter Jourdon Anderson wrote in reply.
NPR and the New York Times are becoming vehicles for superstitious drivel.
Appeasers of Islamist thuggery are not liberals or progressives.
The indictment of Trump needs to be done slowly and carefully to get things right. Too many bloggers are like the little kid in the back seat going "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" at the adult driving.
You need to be aware of who Bayard Rustin was.
"I recently made the switch from blue collar [to] white collar and the difference is astounding. Much more woke, much more divorced from the struggles of the working class, much more intolerant of differing opinions."
Fauci says the "full-blown pandemic phase" of covid-19 is nearing its end.
A much-ballyhooed study claiming that lockdowns didn't help against covid-19 was seriously flawed.
There's money to be made in cutting off healthy body parts. We are living in a horror movie.
The University of Chicago is a cesspit of anti-Semitism.
The anti-vax trucker assholes in Canada are a small minority of all that country's truckers, a few hundred cranks trying to coerce a government elected by millions. They're messing things up in the US as well. Ideas here on how the insurrection might end. A Canadian blogger has some observations.
Home abortion pills will remain legal in the UK after the pandemic ends.
British Cycling faces a revolt against its effort to silence criticism of its demented gender policy.
"He said that rejection of an officer's advances was frowned upon."
French police won't let anti-vaxers stage an Ottawa-like harassment-fest in Paris (found via Hackwhackers).
In Europe, the tide is turning against the trans madness.
Some Russian officers and officials are dubious about invading Ukraine.
China's "genocide Olympics" launches amid a sea of protests world-wide.
The North Korean regime is losing an internet fight with one ordinary hacker.
More links at The Honest Courtesan and Fair and Unbalanced.
o o o o o
My own posts this week: courageous women in Iran, a few thoughts from the bright minds, and the annoying but useful Mr W.
posted by Infidel753 at 12:34 AM
21 Comments:
Thank you for featuring my blog almost every week on your link round up. I appreciate the bump in traffic and the boost in confidence. Evangelicalism destroyed my self-esteem, so when someone pays attention to something I’ve written, I get a bump in th self-worth department. Further, I appreciate your friendship.❤️❤️
Bruce Gerencser
And thank you for all you do for the cause and for the truth, under what I know are very difficult life circumstances. Your blog will always be part of my regular reading, and more than worth the attention. I'm glad if I'm helping a few more readers find it.
Bruce, that is an excellent point about destroyed self-esteem. I am sorry you had to go through that, and I'd like to echo what Infidel said about appreciating your work and hoping more will find it.
And yes, big thanks to Infidel for the links! They really do help.
The tragic thing about octopuses is that behaviour means they lack culture (in the technical sense - I don't mean you don't see 'em at the opera) so whilst smart they can't build a civilization by effectively passing information down the generations. They are forever re-inventing the wheel so to speak. If this were not the case then we'd have a very interesting planet indeed with H Sapiens dominating the land and a cephlapod empire in the sea. It's quite an idea for SF story.
Giraffe, heck! I respect the strength of that leaf stem (and the kids grip, which is clearly quite tenacious!)
The single most valuable thing I learned in College was an offhand comment by my Microbial Ecology prof: "Don't bother memorizing a million and one facts, memorize how to look up a million and one facts."
True to his word, his exams were open-book. (or books, one was a take-home exam; which meant (back then!) heading to the library and poring over paper copies of Science Citation index, then off to find the journal articles cited, then going through the footnotes there, etc etc.
If you were lucky you could find a subject matter review article which was a gold mine of original work citations.
It wasn't until I was long graduated that I encountered medline for the first time, which had been mastered by the librarian where I worked, as she had the only login.
Much later (early 90's) a grad student in a lab where I worked flunked her orals because one of her committe asked about a paper (published in the early 60's) that pertained directly to her dissertation, and contradicted some of her conclusions. Turns out she'd never read it because the electronic references hadn't yet extended that far back.
Not as much a problem today, but there's still a vast amount of knowledge locked away in paper...
So many interesting links (thanks for those to my blog!) but the thing that really grabbed me right off the bat was the header image. Very apropos.
oh man....I didn't know that about female octopi..octipuses? sad
I spent on Twitter than other social media platforms but getting in trouble for tweeting about bad roads was crazy. I hope he fought that.
All these videos of robots and AI technology is interesting and scary.
I didn't realize that Mars was actually grey underneath that little bit of color on the surface.
Seeing video of the probe so close to the sun was cool.
Thanks for the link, Infidel. Not my usual kind of topic but even the laid-back can get fed up eventually :)
I'll be checking out some of the other links over the upcoming week.
I just want to add one idea for ending the trucker strike that seems obvious to me, but was not considered in the article above: JDAM's. I have a son who thinks they are the solution to every problem, but I think I agree with him about this one.
Jack: Glad if the links help. I like to help people find good material.
NickM: "Planet of the Calamari" à la Pierre Boulle? But I have a feeling the discovery of fire would still pose a challenge for them.
Bruce: It seemed odd that the kid held on. Maybe he was just too startled to let go.
It's probably impossible to memorize everything that might be essential in a complex field like biology, and new knowledge is being added all the time anyway. It seems more important to learn basic principles like how natural selection works, and have a context into which to fit the various discrete facts one will look up later.
Ricko: I think it's a good metaphor. I can see smartphones could be useful, but people's dependence on them these days is beyond ridiculous. It looks like an addiction.
Granny: Most of nature is pretty horrific, and animals like octopuses are very alien to us.
Mary K: The Twitter ban was probably done by some kind of algorithm. No human would make a decision like that. It'll be interesting to see if she does contest it.
Remarkable that Mars as a whole looks red, even when seen from Earth, and yet the red layer on the surface is just a small fraction of an inch thick.
Jenny_o: Thanks for the post. Glad to see you're back to regular blogging.
Green: The idea has merit, but I can't see such an order being given -- the last part of JDAM sounds like "damn", which a Canadian leader would be too polite to say.
I think the use of homeopathy could drastically reduce healthcare costs. A dead patient is no longer a strain on the healthcare system ;-)
There is another thing about Mars. It's dull. It's further from the sun so it looks like a very dull late afternoon in Cheshire in February at best. And trust me. I've lived here for fifteen years - I know gloom. Cheshire though doesn't (a) cost a hundred billion to get to, (b) has many pleasant attractions, (c) is easy on the train for Manchester (a city of 3.5m people), has like plants and gardens and wildlife and shit, (d) a breathable atmosphere, (e) some fine pubs and restaurants. I do wonder WTF so many folks are keen to colonise Mars. I mean even if Jeff Bezos gets to Mars first will I get next day delivery from Amazon Prime to my gaff on Olympus Mons? I get it here in my small commuter belt town... It really annoys me when people compare the prospect of Mars to Europeans settling the Americas. Do they even conceive of the orders of magnitude of both difficulty and unpleasantness the first "Martians" would experience compared to Pilgrims or Conquistidors? And, no, it ain't going to get better in many, vital regards, not even if you chuck an Amazonian tidle wave of money and tech at it.
No disagreement from me there. Mars is fit for nothing except being a graveyard of billionaire dick-shaped rockets. Cheshire would be infinitely preferable. I understand it also has cats, even if they are sometimes hard to see.
I should have said links, plural - just saw the second one as I started through the list. Thanks again.
I'm chuckling at the robot and the ketchup delivery (third link) :)
Well, I live in Cheshire and have two very happy cats - George and Julia - kittens from the same litter adopted via the CPL so they get on very well together. They are ultra stealthy being very grey. I let 'em out at night and within a metre from the door it's like Keyser Soze - "And like that they are gone!". There are differences. For all his many sins I don't think Keyser Soze ever left the bowels of a vole on the landing. Well, Something did. I doubt it is my wife and I'm fairly sure it wasn't me but then you never know...
thanks for listing my blog in your lineup, Infidel753! the parrot with the go-pro made me wish he got away for good lol
The anti-vaxxers are really, really getting to me.
Sometimes I wish I was in New Zealand instead.
What about you?
P.S. How have the trolls been recently?
Jenny_o: I was glad to see a ground-level Canadian view of the trucker insurrection up there. It sounds like they're now clearing it away at last.
Looks like robots won't be replacing waiters any time soon.
NickM: So it's true about Cheshire cats. You must be very expert on animal bowels to know that the stuff came from a vole. To me, glop is glop.
Daal: Parrots are smart. If they hadn't caught him, he'd probably have his own YouTube account by now.
Dinah: No doubt New Zealand has anti-vaxers too.
The trolls had actually been quiet for about three weeks, but today I did get one troll comment -- a rape threat with a Deliverance reference. They'll never change.
No, it's not been eaten. She leaves my wife and I the "best bits" because she loves us.
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