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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Bigger/faster the bullet the easier it was for water to stop.

    For bullets that’s probably true because of their light weight, but heavy shells from the big naval guns of battleships (12" to 18" caliber) actually carried a long way through water and sometimes hit and damaged target ships below the waterline. The Japanese in particular actually designed some of their shells to maximize their underwater performance.


  • It doesn’t matter how you run because ALLIGATORS WON’T CHASE YOU.

    I used to live in Florida on the edge of a big lake where my landlord had carved out a lagoon that mama gators used to hatch their broods, so there would often be between 50 and 100 little alligators chilling out in my backyard sunning themselves. For fun I would try to sneak up on one of them and poke it on the head just to watch it and all the others scatter into the lagoon. Everybody I told about this thought I was absolutely batshit crazy, but I knew that at the time there had been something like 5 alligator attacks on humans in Florida since the 1940s, always on little children playing in water (I was obviously a little child mentally but physically I was a 200-pound adult man). So I knew I wasn’t risking life or limb doing this. For the record, my sneaking up technique was to stand stock still and only move a step or two towards the gator whenever the wind blew; it seems that the gators just took me for a swaying branch and ignored me.

    What made me stop doing this was one day I happened to look down at what I thought was a big log and realized that it was actually the mama gator, about 12’ long from tip to tail and probably 2’ in diameter at her midsection. I was fairly confident that she wouldn’t attack me on land either - but not that confident.







  • a lot of research and medical progress comes from america, financed by medically bankrupt americans

    The real beneficial research is financed by taxpayers. The medically bankrupt finance the obscene profits of health care corporations and pharmaceutical companies, who do not spend much at all on primary research. The “research” they invest in is how to productize and market drugs.


  • I just gave it a listen today on my bike ride. It’s pretty good - not what I expected but not surprising, either. I’d characterize it as Kate Bush meets Dead Can Dance meets early ‘70s King Crimson, and since I like all three of those acts I like Gibbons’ album as well. I was surprised to see that it’s her first solo album.




  • Based on fossil records we’ve estimated that homo sapiens sapiens emerged about 200k-300k years ago.

    All of the estimates of when modern humans “emerged” (originally called the “Out of Africa” or “Mitochondrial Eve” hypothesis) are/were based on population analyses of samples of modern DNA (mitochondrial or otherwise) and are/were presented as being in opposition to conclusions based on the fossil record. The original such estimate was 100,000 years ago subsequently revised to 200,000 years ago (both in the mid-1980s) and since then these estimates have been all over the place, ranging from 50,000 years ago to 500,000 years ago. The fossil record shows no significant changes even within this wide time range: bipedality appears in the fossil record for our lineage around 5 million years ago, while our brains enlarged from chimpanzee size to modern human size between 2 million and 1 million years ago.