This makes physics a lot more approachable for people who know nothing, but then completely confuses people with only a little knowledge.

My favorite example of this is the use of “stress” and “strain”. In common language they’re synonyms, but in Physics they’re definitely not.

“Do Ruby Begonia ring a bell?” Even more obscurely, this Flip Wilson routine was referencing an old Amos & Andy routine where they would say something like “Do the name Ruby Begonia strike a familiar note?”

FWIW I used to hang out with behavioral psychology grad students, who were in the Skinnerian tradition of operant conditioning research. They mostly worked with pigeons, and to transport the birds they used juice pitchers with a few air holes cut into the bottom. I asked them once how they got the birds into the pitchers and they laughed and showed me: they would just open the bird’s cage and hold the pitcher up and the birds would dive head-first into the pitcher, sometimes knocking themselves out in the process.

As part of the research protocol, the birds were kept on a diet that included about 80% of their normal caloric intake; the rest of their food was provided by the reinforcements of the experiments themselves (this was done to maximize the reinforcement effect of the rewards). So those birds were way the fuck into those experiments. To add to that, these students were all behavioral pharmacologists, so in addition to getting food reinforcement the birds were also getting drugs like cocaine and heroin.

BTW a lot of people confuse the operant conditioning research with the people who put animals into cages and shock them. This is definitely not what BF Skinner was all about. In fact he wrote books on the subject of how punishment is a bad thing for all animals (including humans and pigeons).

I would have said “wasn’t Pavlov the guy who had a dog named Ruby Begonia?” and even the prof wouldn’t have known what the fuck I was talking about.

One under-appreciated aspect of leaf design is that in addition to being able to spread out and absorb sunlight, they also need to be of a shape such that in a strong wind they tend to curl up on themselves and provide a minimum of wind resistance. Otherwise their collective sail effect would tend to uproot the tree. Fortunately, there are lots of beautiful ways to solve these related problems.

My oil heater makes gurgling noises so that acoustic energy is lost. It would also just heat up the room eventually, but I usually have a window open in winter so a tiny bit is lost that way.

little plastic flags that clip on to your window or door frame

I don’t mean to be all nationalistic, but I’m not talking about little clipped-on plastic flags. I’m talking full-on, massive Old Glories.

Excuse me? We’re still the best at mounting flags in the backs of pickup trucks.

The real significance of the term “tragedy of the commons” was that it was part of a campaign of PR bullshit used to justify Enclosure, where wealthy elites seized common land as their private property, land that had in fact been used and managed effectively as a public resource for centuries prior.

TBF the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was immediately preceded by far larger slaughters of humanity using more conventional methods, a fact which somewhat minimizes their significance. I’m referring mainly to the Holocaust and the Japanese genocide in China, but even the US firebombing of Tokyo in early 1945 exceeded the death tolls of the atomic bombings.

Lol “a” war crime.

I was recently given a monster and holy shit people drink that, by choice?

Even more amazing is that people paint the Monster logo (the three claw marks) on their fucking cars. Imagine getting your sense of self-worth from your overpriced energy taurine drink of choice.

FYI they make mango chili Peeps.

The new animated series on Netflix is great, very much in the spirit of the original comics. I didn’t like the live action thing at all and couldn’t get very far into it.

Netflix has a new animated Asterix series which is really good, modernized (as far as the puns are concerned – e.g. one of the Romans is named “Fastandfurius”) but still very much in the spirit of the original. The live-action series is nowhere near as good.

may be completed with Hydrogen for more energy release

Uh, that understates things a little bit. Hydrogen bombs (which utilize fission for triggering the fusion reaction) are generally a few orders of magnitude more powerful than fission bombs. The opposite is more accurate: fusion bombs that use spent Uranium as a tamper roughly double their yield.

And only in USSR!

We’re school bus drivers lol. We work four hours a day.

Heavy metal is good for you.

Eh, the Moebius stuff was great but a lot of the material just pandered to adolescent boys.

I walked into my break room at work a couple of years ago and overheard some of my female coworkers complaining about the formula shortage. I asked if they’d ever thought about breastfeeding and they looked at me like I’d just grown a second head. I get that some women here and there might need a supplement for this, but the idea that feeding babies canned formula should be the norm is completely insane.