pjwestin
@pjwestin@lemmy.world
- Comment on Trump wants the NFL to change its name so that soccer is the only sport called football: ‘We have to come up with another name for the NFL stuff’ 6 days ago:
- Comment on *confused flatfish noises* 1 week ago:
My old biology teacher used to say, “evolution only works as well as it needs to.” Rabbits digestive systems are so inefficient they have to eat their own shit just to get enough nutrients. Hyena clitoris are so large they sometimes suffocate their offspring during birth. You’re mouth is full of vestigial molars that will likely require surgery in your lifetime. None of those things matter, as long as your genes are successfully being passed down effectively
Panda’s have a digestive system that’s not well suited to their diet, and they’ve adapted to that mostly through behavioral changes. Since they don’t have kind of stomachs that efficiently digest plant matter (like a cow’s four-chamber stomach), they’re constantly hunting for different types of bamboo to get the nutrients they need. They eat young bamboo shoots of one species in the spring, then migrate to higher elevations to get the shoots of another. Both shoots lack calcium, so they migrate again in late summer to get more mature plants calcium-rich leaves.
One weird physical adaptation they’ve developed is in their pregnancies. They mate in the springtime, but fetuses require lots of calcium to develop, so females embryos basically get, “paused,” neither developing or dying, until later in the season when they have more calcium in their diet.
Anyway, I guess my point is that evolution did fix the pandas digestive system to work with plants. It’s just that, like most of evolution’s fixes, it’s a solution that’s barely held together by duct tape and hope, and it could fall apart at any minute.
- Comment on *confused flatfish noises* 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, but Pandas aren’t herbivores, they’re vegetarians. They’re too slow and clumsy to actually hunt prey, so the only thing they can catch is bamboo (which is the fastest growing plant, so I guess that’s something…sort of…). Anyway, the point is, Pandas as a species are from a family of predators, and they would absolutely eat meat if you gave it to them.
- Comment on *confused flatfish noises* 2 weeks ago:
Birds? No. Though, even on the side they do often have a tilt toward frontal in a lot of predatory birds. It could be argued…
Birds of prey absolutely have their eyes positioned on the front of their heads. It’s most obvious in owls, since they have the largest eyes and wider faces, but all of them have front-facing eyes for binocular vision.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
The Late Mr. Kent. One of the best episodes of the series. He finds evidence that a death row inmate is innocent, gets, “assassinated,” by the real killer (which also destroys the evidence), and has to find a new way to clear the man/catch the real killer while also seeing how the people close to him deal with his, “death.” And, boy, that ending.
- Comment on International Shitpost Wednesday! 1 month ago:
Chicken or bird?
- Comment on What is in for the antivax in a government? 2 months ago:
RFK is a true believer; he actually thinks, against all evidence and logic, that vaccines are bad for your health. Trump does not give a shit about vaccines, but he offered RFK the CDC position because A) RFK was running a third-party candidacy in 2024 that could have cost him several swing states and B) anti-vaxers are a large part of the Trump coalition, but he was losing their trust after promoting the covid vaccine. Most congressional Republicans are just going along with this out if cowardice.
So, tl:dr: ending vaccines is what RFK (stupidly) believes in, Trump put him in power to return a favor/appease a portion of his base, and every other Republican is too chicken-shit to do anything about it.
- Comment on And they even get a seizure when you take their ipads away 3 months ago:
Sees someone articulating the problem of streaming platforms elevating low quality or toxic media in children’s feeds.
You, a genius: “This is bad parenting.”
- Comment on And they even get a seizure when you take their ipads away 3 months ago:
Yeah, I was a teen in the early 2000s too. Most people still consumed most of their media through live TV. Anyway, you’re right, I should build a home server and start burning my own torrented DVDs. That’s the only reasonable solution to, “apps suggest crappy shows to my kid,” and it’s definitely the thing a parent of a toddler has the time to do.
- Comment on And they even get a seizure when you take their ipads away 3 months ago:
Yeah, thanks, I’m not looking for notes.
- Comment on And they even get a seizure when you take their ipads away 3 months ago:
Accept they didn’t. They mostly watched live TV.
- Comment on And they even get a seizure when you take their ipads away 3 months ago:
Paw Patrol is empty calories. It doesn’t teach emotional regulation like Daniel Tiger, or shapes and colors like Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, or numbers, letters, and problem solving like Sesame Street. It’s not harmful like Cocomelon, and I’ve accepted that my son loves it, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.
Curating what your child consumes, both dietary and cultural, is the basic requirement raising a child.
Yeah, I curate what my child consumes, thanks, I just don’t have the time or energy to create a bespoke tablet of torrented kids shows to present him, or track down a circa-2002 portable DVD player and start a new physical media collection. If you’ve got that kind of free time, great, but I’ve just got to use the apps I’ve got, accept that he’s going want to watch some shows that I find worthless, and make sure he doesn’t consume anything active harmful.
- Comment on And they even get a seizure when you take their ipads away 3 months ago:
I don’t give him a tablet, he only watches at home on TV (or a phone on very long car trips). I don’t know a toddler parent that has the time to download a curated media library for their kids, and even if you do have the time, things like that fall apart eventually. My wife and I managed to avoid most crap TV until we wound up in a hotel room with two dead phones and a fussy toddler, and that’s when we finally caved and put on Nick Jr. For a while, we managed to convince him that Paw Patrol was only available in hotels, but eventually he saw the thumbnail for it when we were trying to show him Dora the Explorer, and that beautiful lie finally died.
- Comment on And they even get a seizure when you take their ipads away 3 months ago:
Holy shit, I did not know you could do that. That is going to be life changing.
- Comment on And they even get a seizure when you take their ipads away 3 months ago:
App suggestions make it so hard to keep kids away from slop. I started out only letting my toddler watch PBS Kids programs and a few other educational programs, but then your kids start seeing suggestions for all sorts of shlock, and they want to see the show with the superhero kitties is (it’s called Super Kitties and it is garbage). God help you if you try to watch something on YouTube; every suggested video is either low-quality home movies of people playing with toys (which is like crack to toddlers or weird shit like this that absolutely shouldn’t be on YouTube Kids but often is anyway.
- Comment on Intelligent Design 3 months ago:
Rabbits’ digestive systems are so inefficient they have to eat their own shit to get enough nutrients.
- Comment on Superfan Ben Stiller Has A Star Trek Pitch, Says It’s Important For Franchise To Return To Big Screen 3 months ago:
I love many Star Trek movies, but the big screen is not important to the franchise, and it’s best work has always been on the small screen.
- Comment on Tried naming the states from memory as a European 3 months ago:
I world have labeled you guys, “Frasier.”
- Comment on Tried naming the states from memory as a European 3 months ago:
Yeah, seriously. At least call us, “Revolutionary War Reenactors,” or, “Cold NYC.” I’d even take, “Southern Quebec.” But lumping us in with Montana and the Dakotas? That’s some bullshit.
- Comment on How Coldplay actually sounds 4 months ago:
That’s certainly how I feel about Parachutes. Solid little album, even if it’s not reinventing the wheel. I feel more mixed about A Rush of Blood to the Head. Some of their best tracks are on that album (The Scientist may be their best song), but a lot of it is forgettable, and Clocks just sucks, don’t know how that became a big single. I thought X&Y was pretty meh, and then I stopped listening.
- Comment on How Coldplay actually sounds 4 months ago:
I don’t know, maybe? When I was in high school the girls were all listening to emo. Once pop-punk went out of style (pretty much the minute Sk8ter Boi was released), most of the girls I knew pivoted towards Death Cab for Cutie or Dashboard Confessional. I was having a sad-boy period and other sad-boys I knew got me into Radiohead, Interpol, Coldplay (again, those first two albums), the Shins, and the Strokes.
- Comment on How Coldplay actually sounds 4 months ago:
I got the impression they were more of what bro-dudes listened to when they were sad rather than what sad-boys were listening to, but only exposure to them was Chasing Cars. I got the impression they were closer to The All-American Rejects than, say, The Shins or Interpol or any of the other shit I was listening to when I was my most insufferable teenage self.
- Comment on How Coldplay actually sounds 4 months ago:
20 years ago they were what teenage sad-boys were listening to when they got bored of Radiohead and The Postal Service (and I mean that in the nicest way possible). Then after X&Y they kinda became electronic/synthpop for the clinically depressed.
- Comment on How Coldplay actually sounds 4 months ago:
Cut Coldplay some slack, this was the funniest thing that’s happened in a while. Plus, Parachutes is…fine…A Rush of Blood to the Head has a couple of good tracks. Everything after that is pretty trash, but those first two albums were good to mid.
- Comment on Why democrats under Biden administration didn't release Epstein files? 4 months ago:
First, Bill Clinton is almost certainly all over them, and older Democrats still think of the Clintons as the epitome of Democratic success. Some of the old guard is still trying to push focus away from the Epstien files. Just two days ago, Nancy Pelosi was calling the Epstien files a distraction, which is a bat-shit crazy thing to say about evidence that could prove that your opponent was involved in a pedophile ring.
Second, Epstien probably has some sort of ties to the intelligence community. I don’t know that I believe all these stories about him being a secret Mossad asset, but I think its very possible that the someone in the CIA was using him. Alex Acosta, who prosecuted Epstien in 2008, claimed that he was told to back off because he, “belonged to intelligence,” and they’re clearly withholding a lot of information, there’s definitely something they don’t want people to know. Anyway, since 9/11, the Democrats and Republicans have had basically the same position on the intelligence community (essentially, abject deference), so if the CIA says that it would be a national security risk to release the files, the Democrats aren’t going to release the files.
- Comment on We really don't want to talk about our problems 5 months ago:
Then again, have you seen reality?
- Comment on Yes, this is what people did back then 5 months ago:
I mean, I feel like that one has some cascading effects that really fucked things up for pretty much everyone on the planet, so if you ever find yourself hurled back in time, you might consider it.
- Comment on Yes, this is what people did back then 5 months ago:
None of you said, “prevent 9/11.” For shame.
- Comment on If you have used this you are immune to all disease. 5 months ago:
OK, so it sounds like they died out in the 70s?
- Comment on If you have used this you are immune to all disease. 5 months ago:
I’m pushing 40 and I’ve only ever seen these in movies. I feel like they haven’t been in use since the 60s.
