And some of those same scientists later organized a mass slaughter of thousands of platypuses in order to determine if the stories about them were true. Science, bitches!

Fun uranium facts: during WWII, one method that the Manhattan Project used to refine uranium (i.e. separate U235 from natural uranium which is mostly non-fissile U238) relied on magnetism. A charged particle moving through a magnetic field experiences a force perpendicular to the direction of motion, which makes it follow a slightly curved path instead of a straight line. This force is the same for both U235 and U238 but since U235 weighs slightly less, its path is slightly more curved. By charging particles of natural uranium and shooting them through a powerful magnetic field, separate collectors can be set up to gather the U235 particles.

Creating the magnetic field required powerful electromagnets. Normally these would have used copper wire but copper was a valuable strategic metal needed for much of the other military hardware the US was producing, so the Manhattan Project “checked out” the United States’ reserves of silver to build the magnets. For good measure, the electricity for the magnets came mostly from the hydroelectric dams built as part of the Tennessee Valley Authority projects of the 1930s (this is mainly why the Manhattan Project’s uranium processing facilities were located in Oak Ridge). These dams were originally meant to power the production of aluminum, but the US had plenty of other sources for that.

Deporting all the non-citizens would send us into a literal death spiral thanks to the fact that they pick all the vegetables, cut all the meat, and cook all the food in restaurants. For bonus points we would starve to death behind our unkept lawns, but at least we’d have plenty to drink from the water pouring through our leaking roofs.

Now now, the poor man got a nick on his ear that healed within days and left no scar. He was lucky to survive an injury that gruesome.

How does he propose to “MAKE HOUSING AFFORDABLE AGAIN”? By interfering with the free market lol?

Fun fact: at his mother’s deathbed, Stalin reportedly told her that he had “become something like the Tsar”. Perfectly accurate FWIW.

I don’t know why he can’t say Russia. It’s the obvious truth, his swallowers - sorry, his followers - would lap it up no matter what, and it’s no more or less insane than anything else he says.

It’s literally on the other side of the planet.

Lol and there’s just no way to get information about something happening on the other side of the planet. Why, it takes our square-riggers six months to sail from there to here!

Quest Diagnostics.

Impersonate a masque

Macaque?

I used to hang with some behavioral psychology grad students (the type that follow the practices of B.F. Skinner and operant conditioning) who were researching the effects of various drugs on pigeons. We were drinking in their lab one time and there were about thirty white pitchers sitting on a table; eventually I noticed that they all had little white, twitching tails sticking out of them - each one contained a pigeon face-down waiting to be put into the testing chamber. I asked them how they managed to get the pigeons into the pitchers and keep them there and they just laughed. They took me into the cage room and showed me how they just opened the cage door and held up a pitcher and the bird would fly like a rocket straight into it. Sometimes they went in so hard they would knock themselves unconscious.

There are some obvious ethical issues with animal experimentation, but as a certified druggie myself their lives didn’t seem all that bad.

Love that shit, just wish it weren’t so expensive. It basically costs as much as wine, although TBF it has the same alcohol content. My favorite was the framboise (raspberry) until I tried the peche (peach).

I’ve been feeding my local crows roasted peanuts for a couple of years now. Selfish fuckers refuse to murder my enemies. Won’t even shit on their cars.

Hellman’s is fine.

I was raised with Miracle Whip and then discovered real mayonnaise as an adult. I introduced my parents to it and they love it now, but they have put the Miracle Whip into the memory hole and insist that we always had real mayonnaise. They also insist we never had liver when “liver night” was a weekly thing for my entire childhood. Miracle Whip is terrible but at least it’s not liver.

I have a similar beef with bagel places. I love bagels and I love cream cheese … but I do not need a 3/4" thick hockey puck of fucking cream cheese on my bagel.

In Paleoanthropology these days, you will not find an article about a hominid fossil discovery that doesn’t include some variant of the phrase “forcing Anthropologists to rethink their assumptions”. This all derives from the “Lucy” find that truly did force Anthropologists to rethink their assumptions. Before Lucy, it was assumed that the two most unique aspects of humans - our big brains and our bipedal locomotion - evolved together, but the fact that the 3.9 myo Lucy (since revised to 3.3 myo) was fully bipedal despite having a chimpanzee-sized brain threw this assumption out the window. The career successes of her discoverers and analysts prompted everyone else who finds a bit of thigh bone to make similar claims of significance, despite the fact that no other discovery has had any real earth-shattering significance like that.

No fraud but just massive overstating of importance.

I’m a retired programmer and the only time I faced a situation where a PhD (or Master’s) would have made any difference was when I worked for a company that was involved with defense contractors. In this situation we had a pay scale where the hourly rate at which we were billable to the client was based on our degree, something like $110/hr for a bachelor’s, $140/hr for a Master’s and $185/hr for a PhD. The fun part was that it didn’t matter at all what field the advanced degree was in, so if I’d finished my Anthropology PhD way back when it would have meant I was billable at a much higher rate and correspondingly worth a much higher salary to my employer, despite its complete irrelevance to the actual tasks I faced.

We had a number of absolutely useless employees with PhDs who nevertheless brought in a lot more revenue than I did. It turned out later that some of the PhDs were made up - they had just put it on their resumes and nobody ever checks that shit. FWIW we also had a bunch of retired Air Force colonels on staff and nobody expected them to even show up to work on a regular basis. The corruption in that sector of the economy is just massive.

Not the song I mean, but thanks for the ear worm.

A couple of good books on the subject:

How the Earth Turned Green (most relevant)
Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds